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Good Morning Silicon Valley has been following the desperate efforts of various music recording industry groups to crack down on illegal music distribution. Groups such as the British Phonographic Industry are calling on Internet Service Providers to monitor their users online activities and punish or report those who share music illegally.

This week, the ISP’s shot back. MISPELL, the Multinational Internet Service Provider Education and Legislation League, issued the following press release:

Industry Groups around the world have been lobbying for legislation that will require ISPs to monitor our users’ activities and ban users who are found to share music files in violation of copyright laws. Our question is, why us? It would make just as much sense to require PC manufacturers to monitor their customers and punish those who steal music. Maybe they could make the violating computer melt into a useless smelly gray blob. That would be pretty good punishment, right?

Why not force hard disk manufacturers to detect suspicious music piracy-related disk activity and then send all the data to the authorities? What is music piracy if not the movement of data from one disk drive to another? Then again, disk drive companies would be correct in their assertion that data cannot be written to a disk without first being held in memory somewhere.

Memory chip vendors should add algorithms that sense illegal music distribution patterns in the silicon, then they should send the user’s biographical information directly to the BPI and the RIAA and display “Don’t copy that floppy” on the user’s screen.

Speaking of the screen, without a screen, it would be nearly impossible to pirate music. The bad guys have to be able to see what they’re doing in order to cripple the poor music recording industry by distributing music on P2P networks. Maybe display and peripheral device manufacturers need to speed up the artificial intelligence components in their devices so they can stop music piracy.

And how did the chip manufacturers come out of this smelling like a rose? Hello! You can’t be an Internet music thief without a computer and there is no computer without a processor. Intel and AMD really need to add some low-level music piracy detection machine code right into the chip. But wait! My Intel Core Duo is about as useful as an 8-track tape if I don’t have any electricity.

Utility companies must massage the power they distribute into a music piracy-detecting pattern in order to save the worldwide music recording industry from the crippling scourge of Internet crooks.

Not so fast there, young fella. Electricity doesn’t just get up and walk across the wires on its own. You’ve got to have some kind of fuel to burn to make heat to boil water to turn turbines to make electricity. What is the most common fuel used to make electricity? Coal. The coal industry has built itself on the theft of other people’s music. They should be ashamed of themselves! How can they sleep at night? We call on coal mining companies to start making “smart coal” that can burn in such a way as to make the electricity that it ultimately generates incapable of supporting intellectual theft. It would be nice, too, if they could alter its molecular structure so it doesn’t release carbon dioxide and speed up global warming, but that is a secondary concern to the music recording industry.

Roger Clemens tried to come out firing brush-back pitches to the House Committee on Oversight, Government Reform, Nannies and Seven Year-Old Hypodermic Syringes Stored in Beer Cans. Unfortunately he didn’t have his good stuff and got shelled for a grand-slam with nobody out in the first inning. My favorite moment was his plea of, “I’m guilty only of being too nice.” That’s chin music all right. Except it’s a coming from a violin under the Rocket’s chin.

Quite a few news outlets are making a big deal of the tense exchange between Clemens and Committee Chairman Henry Waxman at the conclusion of the hearing. I’ll replay it here for those who might have missed it.

You can fool some of the people some of the time and you can give the rest checks for $600. Forget “rebates”, let’s just be honest and call it good-old-fashioned street money for buying votes this coming November. The Chinese government will send some flowers to thank us for stimulating their economy.

Why does the Super Bowl halftime show always feature an old band playing songs that were hits 20 years ago?

(Disclosure: I worked for Yahoo! on the FIFAWorldcup.com project in 2006).

First of all, get rid of all the gossip/tabloid fluff (i.e. the Terry Semel Hollywood slant). The lead on the Yahoo! home page right now is a chicken-wing recipe for the Super Bowl, followed closely by a list of videos from American Idol alumni.  Hey Jerry, this country is at war and in a recession! Leave the crap to the “old media” and Perez Hilton and show us some of the innovation that made Yahoo! what it is. Stop trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Respect your audience and imagine that they secretly strive to be more than donut-eating couch potatoes.

Have you seen the new Photoshop web site? Who is directing these people, Ed Wood? It’s so obvious that these people are small-time actors and not really web designers, radiologists, etc. You can tell that the way “Adobe Photoshop” stumbles out of their mouths, like they’ve never said those words before. Plus, why are they all hunched forward with their arms akimbo? And why is it that only one person talks for the teams of two? Why not split their lines and have them really look like a team? I’ll admit I haven’t “watched their stories”, so I’m only reacting to the intro videos. However, there’s nothing in the intros that would make me want to watch further.

This is the banner from HireNet systems.

You’ve seen “Coding Horror“? How about Typography Horror?

Nothing says “The future of Internet Recruiting” quite like that New Yorker “Upper West Side” typeface. Very 1920′s.

How can you tell that someone is a xenophobe? If they begin a column with the words, “I’m no xenophobe,”  that’s a pretty good sign. The lawyer Michael Smerconish thinks he can preempt his critics. Smerconish has written an incredibly uninformed, offensive column about immigration in a recent Philadelphia Inquirer (“What we lose now that newcomers don’t assimilate“)
This is the letter to the editor that I sent to the Inquirer in response (they didn’t publish it):

Dear Myron Smearcornish,

I read your column “What we lose now that newcomers don’t assimilate”
and I couldn’t agree more! I mean, look at that guy Alberto Gonzalez.
He goes and becomes Attorney General of the United States of America
and he still won’t assimilate! I called him Al once and he got all
matador on me. It drives me nuts! How am I supposed to know if I’m
being indicted when the lousy Federal subpoenas arrive written in
Spanish?

And that Senator from Florida, what’s his name? Melquiades Rafael
Martinez. He’s the King of NOT ASSIMILATING. He won’t even change his
name to Melvin! Or Merv, for that matter.

These Gonzalezes and Martinezes are illegally pouring over the border,
taking top spots in the Republican Party, then hogging up all the top
spots in the Most Popular Surnames in the Census…where will it end?
Just last week I was in a restaurant eating some broccoli that was
picked by an illegal immigrant who, as you say, is not a legitimate, moving part of
the economy, and I noticed a spot on my spoon. Imagine how furious I
was that the illegal immigrant dishwasher, who is also not a
legitimate moving part of the economy, couldn’t do his job right! The
guy probably lives in a shack with 27 of his illegal, illegitimate
non-moving parts of the economy relatives. Why can’t they just
assimilate and live in a nice 14-bedroom McMansion with a five-car
garage, like the ones you and I live in out on the Main Line? I just don’t get
these people, Mickey S’morecrohnsitch!

I think it’s important to look at history for some perspective. Those
Hispanic names, I learned from Wikipedia, are actually from Spain! Who
would have guessed? They’re European names. And get this, Mordechai
Smarmoconiferish, the Queen of Spain was the one who sent Christopher
Columbus over here in 1492! Those Hispanics have been illegally
sneaking into our country for over 500 years! It all started with that
Columbus guy. He just would not assimilate. I guess I can’t blame him.
Iroquois is a pretty difficult language to learn, unless of course you
have an Haudenosaunee nanny teaching you from the cradle.

You have taught me an important lesson, Milton Snarlcrayfish.
Assimilation is the responsibility of each and every one of us. I was
in the silly habit of stopping in every morning at a little Italian
bakery in my neighborhood for a loaf of bread. But after reading your column, I got in my SUV and drove to Sam’s Club to buy a case of Wonder Bread, just like
my grandmother did. That’s what real assimilated Americans do.

Sincerely,

Chris Hiester

“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon”

-George W. Bush, our illegitimate, unelected fraud of a President, who now declares endless war on knowledge

Citing the persistent failure of his “No Child Left Behind” act to inculcate knowledge into the minds of American schoolchildren, the President has concluded that that the program could easily be tweaked to erase dangerous facts from the minds of evildoers. The President has decided to seize top Iranian scientists via extraordinary rendition and enroll them in American public schools to eradicate their “knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

The President also stated that the USA will declare war on Denmark, another nation where scientists have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon (never mind that they don’t have the resources or any interest in doing so).

I, for one, am relieved that North Korea and Pakistan(our ally, despite being an undemocratic dictatorship), while having actual functioning nuclear weapons, have somehow miraculously passed Bush’s new “knowledge” test.

The auto industry is a nauseating enigma. Decades roll by and the experience of buying a car in this country is still as abominable as ever. The newest rub I’ve discovered is that many sales people use fake names. I’ve visited five dealerships within the last week. All five salespeople I’ve met have one-syllable surnames that consist of four letters and are common, easy-to-remember English words. Here are the surnames: Bell, Ball, Blue, Lane, Rush. What are the odds?

I’ve seen the Saturn commercials. Perhaps they are different, but Saturn does not make a car that I’m interested in buying.

A few years ago I visited a  “no-haggle” place called CarSense. Indeed there was no haggling, but there were two televisions blasting Fox News and a magazine rack featuring Soldier of Fortune, American Spectator and their ilk. Look, if you own a car dealership and you’re a right-wing lunatic, that’s fine by me. But please don’t subject me to all that noise. After 25 minutes of Sean Hannity, the appraiser came back and gave me the most insulting, back-stabbing, $5000 below KBB value offer for my trade-in. I donned a courtesy gas mask and crawled to the exit. I think I was bleeding out of my ears.

Last week I visited a Mazda dealership to look at a 2006 Mazda 5. The salesman showed me the car, then we went into the showroom where he offered to “look at some numbers” with me.  The first number I asked to look at was the price. He appeared to be taken by surprise. He went into a back room and emerged with a sheet of paper. He asked for my name, address and phone number. He disappeared again. When he returned, I again asked the price. He said he had to talk to his manager. The manager was in  a booth about ten feet away. I overheard their conversation:

Salesman: “He wants a quote.”

Manager: “Where does he live?” (Thought: they’re geo-profiling me?)

Salesman: “Philly.” (NOTE: The dealership is in Philly also).

The salesman then went away again. He appeared with a “quote sheet” with lots of numbers on it. I scanned it and still wasn’t sure what the price was.  Mind you, this was a used car, so there wasn’t the issue of ordering options and packages like you would with a new car.  Anyway the car had smelled like it was smoked in for two years and I could feel that the alignment was off (tire slapping sound), so I reciprocated their vagueness with my own wishy-washy reason for leaving and promptly fled.

My first car was a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel that got 60mpg. Today the highest mileage car in the USA is the Toyota Prius at 48mpg. In terms of fuel economy, the auto industry has regressed.  There have been a lot of jokes about what would happen if Microsoft were a car company; the jokes center on the idea of computers “crashing” and suggest that cars are more reliable than computers. However, if car companies were running Microsoft, we would probably be carrying around 17-pound laptops with Intel 286 processors and bragging about how we have a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM and a “huge” 40 megabyte hard-drive. The auto industry stinks on ice. They are absolutely blind to the responsibility they have to create a product that can be fueled sustainably.

One improvement is in vehicle financing. You can apply for a loan at Capital One’s web site and get a response in 30-seconds. If you’re approved, you get a FedEx the next day with a blank check that you can use to pay for your new car. But here’s the catch. The check is only good at a franchise dealer. Go back to the beginning of this article and review the consistent, persistent putrefaction that is the auto dealership customer experience.

I still have to somehow buy a minivan to haul my kids around in. I hope when they grow up they’ll be able to laugh at this story. I hope they’ll have truly sustainable transportation options. Ethanol, Biodiesel and Hydrogen Fuel Cells are not sustainable options. We need to snap out of those delusions. I’m afraid that my kids will only see improvements if climate changes cause catastrophes that cannot be denied. I’m guessing the best they’ll be able to do 30 years from now is find a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel that runs.