41–50 of 56 posts
I'd reinvent money, by making it vanish completely. It causes so much damage to people and the planet.
The music industry. Some of the practices and licensing processes date back to before recorded music existed. Publishing, mechanical, and performance rights, as well as royalty organizations like ASCAP/BMI/etc., are all more than a little strange in a world with the Internet. And, I don't think I even need to explain why the major labels should go to hell.
Don't worry too much about it, this will take care of itself soon enough. Give them enough rope and I'm sure they'll find a creative way to use it.
But, yes, the worst pieces of the puzzle are busy destroying themselves as we speak, and better solutions are bound to spring up.
ESPECIALLY in the developing world, so that people in countries like, say, Kenya can have access to education, microbanking and the mobile startup ecosystem on their phones and leapfrog our asses.
In the same vein, the OLPC project is a clusterfuck and is a prime example of never missing an opportunity to screw up. Someone needs to turn it into a project that is viable and actually gets laptops and modern education software into the hands of kids everywhere.
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ok then, how would you do it differently? :)
As a hovercraft, of course. If we'd started the history of transportation by floating instead of rolling, I think we can all agree humanity would be a much better place right now.
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Don't worry too much about it, this will take care of itself soon enough. Give them enough rope and I'm sure they'll find a creative way to use it.
True to some degree. But, the magical thinking behind things like ASCAP/BMI isn't going to go away any time soon, despite the fact that the metrics by which those royalties are disbursed become less and less accurate every day and as the old music supply chains die. The entirety of the industry is bizarre from a modern perspective, not just the record labels and consumer music supply chain. But, yes, the worst pieces…
The reason why books are not yet as much subject to copying as music and movies is because they're still distributed in a format that makes it reasonably hard to copy them. It actually takes some effort.
As soon as books become available widely in electronic formats (not just the select few that you can get for your kindle today, Amazon claims to have 300,000 titles available but there are substantially more books than that) and without DRM the publishers will be right up there on the barricades.
I don't think there has ever been a technology as disruptive to established businesses in terms of jobs and dollars as the internet has been to the media corporations.
Some guys here in Delft reinvented the umbrella, making it wind-proof. It's actually pretty cool: http://www.senzumbrellas.com/
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It's called a bicycle No, it's called elimination of zoning laws.
This seems to be a problem with the suburbs. If you want to live within walking distance to the grocery store, move to somewhere within walking distance of the grocery store. I can walk to three (different chains), and take the L to one more. (I still take my bike, though, much easier!)
Human travel. You know those moving walkways (Trav O lators?) that they have in airports to speed up travelers? I'd place those everywhere. Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes. Living in LA and need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there. The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scene…
(They're some kind of walk-escalators that stretch all around towns, cross towns, cross land. Which you move onto the slower one, escalate your speed for the next strip, jump over to the next strip, etc. )