And long may it prosper

George Lucas gets murdered, R Kelly wants to pee on you. Long live Youtube!

Give us what we want!

I read on Wikipedia that Youtube is the 10th most popular site on the internet and it's easy to see why. What I don't understand is why the folks running the business there don't make it easy to download video off their site. Or maybe they already offer such a service.

Anyway here's my thinking: they could charge visitors a nominal fee (perhaps a cent or even less) per download, and remit 50% of each sale to the submitters of the material.

Copyrighted material could also be downloaded at prices set by the copyright owners, but everything, original or copyrighted would still be free for view straight off Youtube, staying true to the free broadcast ideal.

They could even set up download auctions for extremely popular material, with a cap set on bid prices (say 3c). It would be fun, all the videos would still be available free on Youtube, users would submit better quality material because there was a real financial incentive, copyright owners would make money, submitters would make money. We might even see the emergence of a community of Youtube millionaires. A new culture could be born right there.

Best of all, users would get what they want: straightforward video dls from Youtube.com.

Quarryville horror

What a really sad story this is - a milk truck driver walks into a Pennsylvania school and shoots 11 pre-teen schoolchildren, killing five little girls and leaving four others in critical condition. So many children's lives brutally cut short, so many families shattered forever.

Did you ever wonder what role the news media plays in things like this, and even in the proliferation of global terrorism? The way terrorist bombings and shootings like these get sensationalised, it seems to encourage even greater crimes. The Quarryville murderer might have watched coverage of the other school shootings last week and realized how easy it would be to make an evil fantasy come true. And so he went ahead to forge the latest link in this particular chain of violence. And the media got another sensational story on which to feed.

Short, interesting op. ed. about gun violence in the US here.