Rants + Raves
As the great warrior-poet Madonna once said, music makes the people come together. Unless, that is, you're a certain reader in Charlottesville, Virginia. He sniffed at our stories on how acts like Beck and Barenaked Ladies are reinventing the way music is made and sold. "While the technology and media of music distribution may change," he wrote, "there will always be a role for breathless hype." We'd be more crestfallen if our breathless hype of three years ago – "Rip. Mix. Burn: The Fall of the Music Industry" – hadn't actually panned out. You were easier on our dissection of what's wrong at Sony, though one reader wondered if we didn't overestimate the importance of the PlayStation 3: "What percentage of Sony is games? 9.7 percent. Does that SOUND LIKE THE CORE OF THEIR BUSINESS?!?!?" Dude, caps-locked incredulity does not make for reasoned discourse. And Sony is the one pinning its future on PS3, not us. A final note, to the reader who expressed improper desires regarding the Kokoro fembot: No.
Remixed Response
Beck is the ultimate marketing tool ("The Infinite Album," issue 14.09). He puts on a guise of this hipster, artsy, creative, self-absorbed musician who wants his fans to truly inhale and exhale his music through every medium available. Beck gets fans to think they're participating in the creative process through interactive media, but then he takes their remixes and sells them as a separate album, like Guerolito. He succeeds where the record companies fail: He is able to profit from fans' enjoyment of his album in a way the music industry could never dream of.
John Rohrer
Scituate, Massachusetts
Guero may have "represented a new way to think about the album," but I wouldn't know; only half the tracks are available on the Rhapsody music service. If Beck is going to shut out those of us who now "lease" music through such services, he's going to alienate a growing segment of consumers. I haven't bought a CD in two years. With the exception of a few holdout artists, I get all the music I want delivered to my desktop, and I can download it to my (non-iPod) MP3 player or stream it wirelessly to any stereo in my home. I can even view album art and videos. This is music 2.0 – the true new way to think about the album. I invite Beck to join the revolution as soon as he's ready.
Ron Padzensky
Deerfield, Illinois
Repackaging songs will allow amateur and professional musicians to reuse tracks in a variety of ways. I have been thinking about this from a drummer's perspective: I would like to be able to hit Play at a small venue and fill in the drum parts to famous songs myself – a form of drumming karaoke.
Allan Chase
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Beck is part of the problem, not the solution. I don't have the time or inclination to remix someone's record or to manipulate a video. I buy CDs because I want to listen to good music made by professionals – and that's it. I don't want to sift through millions of MPEGs on the Web.
Plex Barnhart
Spring Hill, Tennessee
Phone and Games
Though he masterfully details the facts, Frank Rose misses what Sony really stands to gain with the PS3 ("Can the PS3 Save Sony?" issue 14.09). Just look at the company's new Walkman line of phones: exceptional functionality with increasing adoption curve potential. The real money will be in the integration of these phones and the PS3, trumping both Microsoft and Apple! It's all about the bundle, baby!
Peter Spier
Pittsford, New York
Life After Death
Great article on using electricity to pull people out of comas ("Back from the Dead," issue 14.09). I'm a trauma surgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, where we see a huge number of these patients. The NIH funding for this is minuscule, and the research is pitiful considering that head injuries are a leading cause of accidental death in people under 40. Thanks for bringing this interesting therapy to light. We really have nothing that works well except a helmet.
Jim Mankin
Phoenix, Arizona
I'm in my 41st year of recovering from a 96-day coma. If my regaining consciousness had been the result of medical intervention, I would have brought suit against everyone involved for messing with a process that they had no knowledge of or respect for.
Candice Ivey's problems of impaired short-term memory, lack of stamina, and difficulty with impulse control, which makes it hard to keep friends, are glossed over in a single sentence. These problems are big and may well increase in number and severity over time.
Everyone involved in this therapy should be required to learn about comas and to attend groups run by survivors. Consciousness isn't in the body when the body is unconscious. Does electrical stimulation bring back consciousness, or does it simply awaken the body?
Just knowing how to perform a process doesn't give us the right to do it. There must be ethical checks.
Lew Stickford
Tucson, Arizona
Jalopies of the Apocalypse
At the rate we're going, in 20 years there won't be enough oil flowing from countries that hate us to power our world, never mind the flying cars Paul Moller says we'll be driving in 2026 (Start, Ping, issue 14.09). Self-guided cars will be fantastic – for those who can still afford gasoline at $50 a gallon. Maybe highways in 2026 will have a few Mad Max-style contraptions and carts pulled by donkeys.
Jonathan MacDonald
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Spletter
I know that spam + blog = splog ("Spam + Blogs = Trouble," issue 14.09). But where does the blog come in? Most times when I hit these pages in a search, they are just that, Web pages. So why aren't they called spages, as in spam + Web page?
Curtis Campbell
Taylors, South Carolina
Brew Publishing
In Britain, free beer has always been around: There is a flourishing home-brew industry, and people have become quite good at reverse-engineering beer so it tastes like somebody else's (Posts, Lessig, issue 14.09). The legality of this may be questionable, but since no individual home brewer has the remotest chance of competing with a commercial brewery of any size, no one seems to care much. I also suspect that Free Beer won't catch on in Britain for another reason – it's probably actually a lager, a drink eschewed as completely beyond the pale by hardened beer drinkers (of which there are many).
__Dan Bradley
Leeds, England __
Peer Factors
"Get Wiki With It" (Start, issue 14.09) is right to call our attention to the exciting experiments in online reviewing. However, you should have explained why the current peer-review system works as it does.
First, peer review is anonymous. Colleagues can criticize each other's work without damaging their relationships. And a junior scientist can criticize the work of a senior scientist without fear of retribution.
Second, peer review is often blind. Reviewers don't know whose paper they are reading – it could be a PhD student or a Nobel Prize winner. This forces them to review every paper with the care they would give to one written by a Nobel laureate.
Third, peer review is secret. The ideas in rejected papers are not disclosed to the public, so authors have time to revise their papers without fear of being scooped. (Of course, reviewers are expected not to steal ideas from the papers they're assessing.)
Nonanonymous, nonblind, nonsecret reviewing systems may have a place, but they cannot, should not, and will not completely replace the current system.
__Marc Levoy
Palo Alto, California __
Border Patrol
The picture of a helicopter towing a torpedo over a heavily populated area certainly caught my eye, but not for the discovery of underground fissures (Start, "Fissure-Guided Missile," issue 14.09). What got my attention was the potential for this tool in the fight against criminal immigration tactics, like finding secret tunnels under our borders. I hope someone in government can connect the dots and utilize this technology in a way that probably wasn't originally intended.
Jamie Walker
Kirkland, Washington
Representin' for Equality
I'm one of the "few ladies" you mentioned in your article about nerdcore (Play, "Me So Nerdy," issue 14.09). You ignored all of the females in this scene so you could discuss people like HAM-STAR – a rapping hamster. You looked only at what these people had in the way of "nerd cred," and I guess being women makes us not nerdy enough to warrant inclusion.
Kristin Ritchie (MC ROUTER)
Fort Worth, Texas
DIY Rant + Rave
Regarding your page on mix-and-match companies (Start, "Build a Web 2.0 Startup!" issue 14.09), I'm glad to see the [new connection to Wired News / patent coverage / plastic page]. Will it help your [Web site / image / carbon emissions]? For a [hip-cat tech-culture / sick / wired] magazine, your site has always [clonked / jammed / sucked] when I've surfed over. The best thing in the Beck issue (besides [Beck / Victor De Leon / phantom ringing]) was the [Millennium Falcon Transformer / Star Wars Lego morph / spreadsheet art]! I'm going to [open source my business / give myself electricity jolts / build a robot] just to keep pace with you guys.
David Van Horn
Kansas City, Missouri
