For years, some have been saying that the real problem holding back the music industry from embracing digital distribution hasn't been the record labels so much as the record stores. In fact, in the Rolling Stone article about the suicide of the recording industry, one of the key stumbling blocks was that the music retailers threatened the record labels if they embraced digital distribution such as Napster. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that music retailers are spitting mad over Prince's plans to give away his latest album. Prince has actually been on the cutting edge of new music business and distribution models for many years, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. What's interesting, is that he's actually linking two troubled industries: recording and newspapers in a way that helps both. His latest CD will be available for free with a newspaper in the UK -- and the newspaper is thrilled because it's going to seriously increase circulation for that week. This is a perfectly reasonable idea: it adds value to the newspaper and makes it a more worthwhile purchase, while at the same time getting Prince a lot of attention and many more people hearing his latest works (which opens up many more opportunities for him to make more money through concerts, back catalog, merchandise, appearances, sponsorships, etc.).

However, the music retailers are freaking out that someone else might distribute music instead of them. Apparently they haven't been paying much attention to all that online distribution of music that goes on these days and the fact that the business model of the traditional record shop is pretty much dead and buried. Instead, they blame Prince for actually getting more fans to hear his music. "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," claimed one. Another said: "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores." Of course, that's the funniest one, since it's pretty clear that Prince has already realized he's better off without the record stores. Then there's the head of HMV: "I think it would be absolutely nuts. I can't believe the music industry would do it to itself. I simply can't believe it would happen; it would be absolute madness." Basically, what you're reading here is an industry in complete and total denial over the fact that their service (delivering plastic discs to willing buyers) is a business model that's increasingly obsolete.

Fantastic Lad writes "The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child. 'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients. The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fantastic Lad writes "The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child. 'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients. The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, Microsoft went on the offensive in playing up its patent portfolio in an attempt to scare other companies into agreeing to licensing deals. This showed a complete flip-flop from Bill Gates' own words from the early '90s about how innovation is stifled by patents. It seemed to only underscore the idea that patents are used not to encourage innovation, but to protect legacy business models against innovation. Now, Microsoft's deputy general counsel is trying to spin the patent story in a nice, fuzzy way to make us think that patents are all about sharing. This guy came to Microsoft after 20 years at IBM, the company that famously threatened employees at a young Sun by saying: "We have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

Anyway, his claim is that patents are fantastic because they let multiple companies share in the wealth. As he says: "We used to define competitive advantage as 'I've got and you don't.' Or 'You've got it, but I got better.' Well, today it's 'You got it and I got it, but I make money when you use it.'" That would be nice, if true, but it ignores reality. The reality is that those patents aren't for unique or novel ideas, but for broad and obvious ones, and when you bundle all of those ideas into a patent thicket it makes any additional innovation prohibitively expensive. It's not, as he says "you got it and I got it, but I make money when you use it," but, rather, "you may have figured out what consumers want, but you still owe me and 17 other patent holders money every time you use it, even if you figured it out entirely outside of our patents -- and now the product is too expensive for any consumers to want to buy anyway." That's not quite as pithy, I'll admit, but it's a lot more accurate.

Cory Doctorow: Disney park superfan Ricky Brigante (he of the Inside the Magic podcast) won a slot in the Disney Dream Job Experience contest, and got the incredible opportunity to work at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion for a day. Seriously, I would kill for this.

He produced a great write-up of the experience, with links to video, pics, and a long narrative describing his experience.

He also has this link to a site specializing in photos of top-s33kr1t piccies of the backstage mechanisms at Disneyland. Control-room porn at its finest!

Disneyland's Haunted Mansion Cast Members occasionally have a chance to perform what are called magical moments. These are moments in which the guest experience is enhanced by Cast Members performing in ways that are not regularly seen. The ghost dog walking is one such magical moment. Inside the Mansion, there are two others, both taking place in the changing portrait hallway.

The first was a pair of feather dusters that Mansion Cast Members use up and down the portrait hallway, dusting the walls, portraits, and most importantly, the chains and bat stanchions along the sides of the room.

This proved to be one of the most fun moments of the entire weekend. Guests regularly rest their hands on the stanchions or run their hands along the metal chains. Allison told me that her favorite bit is to walk up to the guests and give them a sinister look, making it clear that you want them to stop touching the chains and stanchions. I took her recommendation and once they got the message, I would quickly dust whatever areas they had touched. I got a lot of laughs with this routine.

Link (Thanks, Ricky!)

See also: Video tryouts for a job at Disney's Haunted Mansion

Cory Doctorow: Japan leads the world on bad-ass novelty business-cards, so it's no surprise that they've got access to CO2 lasers that print your contact details on peanut shells.

Taberu Me cards are created using Arigatou’s high-grade CO2 laser engraver nicknamed “Shiawase-kun,” which can etch up to 700 characters per second on hard organic materials like beans, nuts, rice and pasta and which has been optimized to print clean-looking logos, names and telephone numbers on the irregular surfaces of peanut shells.

Link

See also:
Business-card punch-out cutlery
Business card that sprouts
Business-card converts to set of lockpicks
Cutlery made out of potato starch
Cutlery with wrenches on the end
Anti-terror cutlery for airline security theater
Moo Cards: Stunning kid-sized custom biz-cards with Flickr pix

A few months back we wrote about a private investigation firm in the UK that had a separate "computer hacking" division called "Hackers Are Us." It seemed like the sort of thing that you wouldn't necessarily want to name a company that clearly was breaking computer fraud laws -- but no one ever said criminals were smart. A court has now convicted the two guys who set up the service... and it turns out that both were actually on the police force at the time (though one was on leave for depression). Yes, "Hackers Are Us," a private investigation firm that would illegally install keyloggers on anyone's computer was run by two moonlighting cops. For future reference, though, if you're setting up a business to do illegal stuff, it's probably not a good idea to advertise it in your name. It may help for marketing purposes, initially, but sooner or later it seems likely to come back to bite you.

David Pescovitz:
These giant olde timey letters painted on shop shutters in the East End of London are reportedly the work of a graffiti artist named Eine. (The layout seen here is mine.) Flickr user Dave Gorman collected them all. Link (via Juxtapoz)

mrspin writes "Media streaming boxes such as the AppleTV, XBox 360, PS3, and products from Netgear do a varying job of bridging the gap between the PC and television as well as, in some cases, delivering Internet content directly into the living room. But all are closed systems. The result of which is that users are left trying to hack these devices against the wishes of manufacturers or have to make-do with whatever official features are implemented. Bucking this trend, Neuros is taking a wholly different approach, and has open-sourced the firmware for its Neuros OSD media center, meaning that anybody is free to write add-ons that extend the device's functionality. This week the company announced that thanks to the open-source community, the device now lets users browse, search and view the entire YouTube catalog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The free wifi from the Apple store reaches across the street into Peets. So you get excellent coverage here and it's free and fast. Thanks Apple.

Roger Strickland has a bare-bones phone to Twittergram system working. I just called his service on my Blackberry, recorded a Twittergram, and it was posted through the web service.

Yehi!!

The number to call is 888-281-3613. Don't talk too long (remember the 200K limit). Hang up when you're done.

Awesome!!

Others are working in this area as well, but Roger was the first to break through with working functionality.

I'll be leaving a voice TwitterGram from my iPhone, with any luck, in less than an hour.

This is coooooool.

A new survey from the Pew Internet Project says that one third of US teenagers online have been "cyberbullied". The kids say they've experienced at least one of the following: "having a private e-mail, IM or text messaging forwarded or posted where others could see it, the victim of an aggressive email, IM or text message, having a rumour spread about them online or having an embarrassing photograph posted online without permission." Without wishing to downplay these incidents, which can certainly be very damaging, they don't seem particularly different than the sort of bullying kids are subject to in school or elsewhere in the physical world. While there seems to be this desire to look at cyberbullying differently than offline bullying, the implication seems to be that technology is to blame, rather than the bullies. When permanent markers became widely available, allowing bullies to scrawl insults on their victims' metal lockers with some permanence, where they singled out for scorn or special legislative treatment? Probably not. The point here is that bullying is a problem, no matter where it takes place, or what tools bullies use. Rather than focusing on cyberbullying, the focus should be on combating all forms of bullying, online or off.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember how cool it was the first time you used MapQuest or Google Maps or Google Earth? You'll feel like it's the first time again, when you use interactive dragging of routes on Google Maps. Some of the folks from the development team have even whipped up a handy video to explain the concept."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Pescovitz: My pal Jess Hemerly attended the US Air Guitar San Francisco Regional Championship. The winner, seen here, was Rick Stinkfinger. Check the SF Jukebox for Jess's videos of the rawk extravaganza. From Jess's post:

Beer was thrown, rock fists raised high in the air, and bad contestants ridiculed. Congratulations to Rick Stinkfinger who will represent the Bay Area at the US Air Guitar Championships in New York City. He will compete against the other regional champs as well as last year's SF winner, Hot "Lixx" Hoolihan.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Air guitar t-shirt Link

Pictures from the line of people waiting to get their iPhones.

Rex Hammock is waiting for his in Tennessee.

An anonymous reader writes "Rumors said the release wouldn't be until late Q4 but an August ship date is now promised for AMD's quad-core chips. They're only releasing up to 2.0 GHz processors at first, with the top speed devices coming out later in the year. 'AMD's Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls native quad-core, and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete. Intel's second-generation quad-core server processors, Harpertown a server member of Intel's Penryn family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The patent imbroglio between Verizon and Vonage may prove to slowdown the advance of consumer VoIP, but for companies involved in the space, the real problem is basic economics. Since the cost of a phone call is rapidly dropping to zero, a voice pure play like Vonage has its work cut out for it if it wants to make money. While Vonage's poor stock market performance has been a reflection of its woes, there have been rumors of troubles at #2 player SunRocket. Word now is that the company has canned a large number of its employees, including some top executives. It's hard to know how a company in SunRocket's position can turn things around, given how they're positioned in the industry, particularly as the broadband operators are doing a good job of getting customers to sign up for voice services.