I have a solution to illegal downloading.

See, the problem with DVDs is they’re just too small. 4gb or so, once you image the disc. This means that at an average downloading speed of 100kb/s, it’s just a few hours before you can have downloaded the image and burned the image to your own DVDR. Include uploading to keep your ratios cool, and it’s about a day in total, most of which is unattended and non-labour-intensive.

So you need to plan ahead; so what? You just download more movies and games than you could ever watch or play and you’ve done your planning ahead until you inevitably watch and play more than you thought you could. (I am, of course, speaking hypothetically; I don’t actually do any of these things.)

The disc’s capacity is too small. What you need is a disc whose content is more in the range of 20-30gb. Couple that with the glacier-like expansion of bandwidth in the US, and Bob’s your uncle.

Then, when bandwidth catches up, you simply release a disc with ten times as much content. Make the sound so crystal clear, make the picture so very high-definition that the human eye can no longer tell the difference for any practical purpose. The beautiful thing is you, the content-producing company, get to make two kinds of money: people won’t pirate the full discs of your film because it’s prohibitively bandwidth-intensive, and because of your clever planned obsolescence, everyone will have to buy their content all over again.

This is, of course, much better than viable alternatives, like allowing your customers to download films at a reasonable price and burn them to disc as they choose, because instead of costing next to nothing (you could, after all, get your customers to use their own bandwidth for this, as they already do that), it costs billions in switch-over costs. Which is good, because if there wasn’t some pointless change-over in disc types and the associated format wars that come with them, what in the world would I blog about?

Here’s a though for all you people who like to say, “I CAN’T IMAGINE THIS SORT OF MUSIC YOU ENJOY WILL BE AROUND IN A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS HUUUUURRRRRR!”

Have considered how full of hubris that is? How arrogant? How completely self-centred and full of pride? To jump from I do not like this music … to … this music is not of a sort to have any lasting significance? Do you not see the only connection between those two thoughts is… you? Are you really going to set yourself up as the arbiter of what will and will not stand your vaunted test of time?

Have you also considered that the test of time is no test of greatness? It’s only a test of its supposed worth at the time, that many copies were made and thus endure. Or it’s a fluke. Maybe that piece of music from near the beginning of time was a piece of crap; you don’t know.

All you can say is that on average a more popular piece of music is copied more times and is more likely to pass into history intact.

Which leads me to this: you’re not only the arbiter of what will survive by virtue of your own taste, but what will survive from a historical standpoint is what’s popular. Can you see how you’re full of shit?

Assertion: If only the most competent people in an organisation are promoted, they will inevitably rise to positions where they are incompetent, and say there.

Assertion: If only the most incompetent people are promoted, so as to limit the damage they can do, they will inevitably be incompetent, period.

Conclusion: Management is always incompetent.