The music industry, particularly the on-line music industry, has some real challenges ahead of it. People are still prone to pirate music rather than purchase it even when it's only 99 cents.

My belief has been that much of music piracy has to do with convenience. But in a poll last week on WinCustomize.com that asked whether people would be buying music on-line the results were not reassuring.

Over 1,200 people responded on WinCustomize and 42% of people responded that they would continue to just download it for free (pirate it). What's worse, the demographics of WinCustomize are pretty much the music industry's best case scenario - average age is around 30 years old on WinCustomize and they tend to purchase software.

Yet on music, given equal convenience, they'll still pirate it.

Here's the results of the poll.

1,233 respondents

Back in 1998.

Liberal bias in the media is pretty established at this point. Established in the sense that any reasonable person who has put any significant effort into looking into the issue will have come to that conclusion. The main deniers of such bias come, naturally, from liberals. Debating whether there is liberal media bias, for me, is like debating evolution vs. creationism. I'm not going to waste my time debating whether evolution is a fact or not and I'm not going to debate whether liberal media bias is a fact or not. I'll leave that to others who have more time on their hands.

For one thing, the problem with proving liberal media bias is the reliance on statistics on what is covered. There is no quick way to do it. Just as Creationists can pop up a dozen websites "proving" he bible's accuracy, liberals can pop up websites that argue there is no liberal bias or more amusingly, websites that show a conservative in the media.  I happen to believe that most liberals can be convinced of a liberal bias. But to do that, some basic ground rules have to be provided:

1) It's liberal media bias. Not Democratic Party bias. The media is just as likely to fry a Democrat as a Republican. Though I suspect that they relish frying the Republican and the threshold of what gets reported may be a bit different.

2) Liberal bias has to do with social values. Not political ones. Those values specifically revolve around social justice, racism, affirmative action, abortion rights, gun control, the military, gay rights.

3) And the clincher: Liberal bias is unintentional. It is not a conspiracy. It is largely unconscious. It is the result of liberals believing that they are not liberal (or not very). That their views are mainstream. In fact, not only are their views mainstream but they honestly believe that conservative views are fringe. Held by only a tiny percentage of right wing extremists whose views don't warrant coverage because so few people hold those views in their mind.

Here's a clue though for liberals: Most conservatives don't believe the government should be involved in social justice, solving "racism", promoting affirmative action, providing federal rules on abortion (let alone by a court), providing gun control or making special laws for different lifestyles. And about half the population feels this way. Not a tiny "fringe". HALF.

It is item #3 that Bernard Goldberg's new book, "Arrogance - Rescuing America from the Media Elite" deals with. Rather than argue that liberal bias is the result of liberals trying to force their agenda down our throats, it is the result of liberals thinking that their agenda is already shared by the majority of people. With one exception: The New York Times which has spent a great deal of effort these past 3 years forcing its politically correct agenda down our throats.

Liberals in the media tend to think that people who think that assault rifles should be legal are just a bunch of NRA crazies. In fact, a large percentage of Americans, myself included (and I don't even own a gun), believe that.  My writings on my blog here would probably be considered to be "far right" by the liberal media even though my opinions and values are not just shared by a large percentage of Americans but that I am actually to the left of a sizeable percentage because I'm pro-choice, pro gay civil unions, and favor a progressive tax code.

Liberals tend to simply see their views as being more civilized, more sophisticated, more thought out. Conservatives, by contrast, are a bunch of barbarous red necks with Confederate flags on their pickups waiting to lynch some poor African American -- at best. At worst, conservatives are a fringe of fascist rich people who got there by stepping on the hopes and dreams of everyone else.

What humane person can possibly be against affirmative action? Only racists are against that think liberals unconsciously.  Being against gay marriage is just simple bigotry by religious zealots. Pro-Lifers are a bunch of hypocritical nuts.  People who favor the war on Iraq are just stooges of right wing propaganda (particularly Fox News no doubt).  Liberals are "progressives" (think the media would use "progressive" or "visionary" for conservatives? I somehow doubt it). Conservatives are described as "far right", "right wing extremsists", "fascist", "right wing nut", and worse depending on whether it's on camera or off camera.

And what happens is that liberals tend to think that only a tiny fringe element of society believes what conservatives believe. So why give coverage to something only a few people believe? After all, everyone they know has the same opinions they do. They may not even know a single person who doesn't have the same opinions on these issues. So they conclude (wrongly) that those who hold conservative values are actually on the fringes of society. Either greedy rich bastards or uneducated red necks in the sticks who probably can't ready anyway so why bother writing about their point of view anyway?

Michael Moore actually has put this view quite succinctly. He truly believes that most Americans have the liberal views he does. That Republicans are supported by a confederacy of fringe groups that band together. But each fringe group is made up of only a tiny number of largely ignorant hate-filled zealots who are statistically irrelevant.

As a result, when deciding what to cover on TV or in the news, it comes down to focusing on things that they believe the majority of their readers or viewers think worth hearing about. And since they think their viewers hold the same beliefs they do, they pick the things they're interested in covering and exclude the things they think are unworthy.

And that is what I think is the basis of the liberal media bias in America.

There was a glitch in last night's BootSkin that caused the program not to run on some systems on a fresh install (worked fine if you had a previous version on).  So we've corrected that problem.

We also now have a Boot screen (BootSkins) section up.

BootSkin is a program that safely changes the boot screen of Windows XP and later with one of your creation or made by others.

Alpha 2 now has the ability to package up a boot screen into a self contained .bootskin file that can then be uploaded to other sites. We'll be working with skin sites to create sections for this shortly.

It is really easy to create your own boot screens. In the BootSkin directory (\program files\stardock\wincustomize\bootskin) there are sub directories that that contain a .bmp and a simple .ini file that describes the file. Realistically just change the bitmaps and off you go. For now, you have to make them as 16 color (that's 4bit) .BMP files since that's all Windows supports at boot presently. We plan to update BootSkin before release to support true color boot screens as well.

It's freeware so have fun.

What is it with the continental Europeans and their hatred of Israel? In a recent European poll, 59% of Europeans responded that they think Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. Israel. Not Iran. Not Iraq. Not North Korea. Heck, not even the United States.

I've talked via email with people from Europe (western Europe mainly) who just can't understand why Americans have such a "blind spot" to the "obvious" threat Israel poses.  What threat? Threat to whom? The threat Israeli children pose to bombs? Their bodies interfering with the trajectory of nails in a suicide bomber's murder device? That threat?

I am pro-Israel. I'm not Jewish. I just have a healthy respect for people who work hard and succeed. Israel is a winner. They win by working hard and doing things intelligently. I have little patience for people who make excuses for failure. I consider myself to be pretty representative of American attitudes, particularly on this issue. We Americans have little tolerance for losers. Or at least losers who lost due to incompetence.

And the various "nations" (for lack of a better term) that surround Israel just strike me as real sad sacks. Grasping at any boogeyman to blame for their own ineptitude they focus on Israel . Israel is the only democracy in that part of the world. What's Jordan's excuse? Or Egypt? Egypt gets billions in economic aid from the United States and still can't seem to get their act together. Oh, I'm sure someone will again email me blaming the United States for all the ills of the middle east. It never fails. But that's again why Israel makes them all look so pathetic. Here's a country with no oil, no real natural resources, fairly crummy land and yet manages to have a stable democracy with a great deal of freedoms for their citizens.

Instead of the Arabs blaming Israel for their problems maybe...just maybe they should look inward. Maybe writing off half their population (women) might just possibly put them at a competitive advantage with the rest of the world. Maybe if they unshackled the potential of their people they might not stay at the bottom of the world's food chain.

Israel, being a democracy, makes use of its full potential. The people work hard. They have shown immense toleration towards atrocities that specifically target the helpless. And in a terrible part of the world they have succeed in creating a successful nation that could, if it chose to, conquer its neighbors. It seems pretty clear from here that Israel just wants to go about its own business, preferably without having its children shredded by some psychotic Islamic terrorist.

But do the Europeans relate to that? No, they seem to feel sympathy towards the Palestinians. The people who never seem to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity (to quote George Will). How can you feel sympathy for people who intentionally target women and children? If Israeli's had the mindset of these Islamic fascists, there'd be no Palestinians left.  I have little sympathy for the Palestinians. And over the years as I've learned more on the situation the less sympathy I have for them. I can think of a half dozen other peoples who deserve their own independent state more than the Palestinians.

It gets increasingly difficult not conclude that a lot of European attitudes towards Israel stem from flagrant anti-Semitism. After all, this is the continent that routinely discriminated against them for hundreds of years culminating in the extermination of 6 million of them in a period of 5 years. An extermination, I might add, that wouldn't have been possible without a wide spread level of cooperation through-out continental Europe (i.e. don't just blame the Germans).  I just can't think of any other way to reconcile how Europe can consider a country that's smaller than some counties in the United States being the single biggest threat in the world.

In fact, ironically, one is stuck between two possible conclusions: Either there's a serious anti-Semitism problem in continental Europe or those smart continentals aren't nearly as smart about geography and politics as they claim to be.

A lot of my friends are from Europe (in fact, most of the words I type each day go to friends or coworkers in Europe). I know that they're intelligent decent people. I know a lot of you who read this website are from Europe. So maybe you can explain to me what the heck is going on over there.

Related Article:
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/031109043901.3lierfo5

Manufacturing jobs going over to China? Republicans fault. IT jobs going to India? Republicans. Acid rain? Republicans. Warm weather in November? Republicans.

In fact, all bad things, if you listen to some people, are the fault of Republicans. You see, they have a deep dark secret: They favor businesses. And as hard as this is believe, given how enlightened we're supposed to be these days, they actually think capitalism is good. Isn't that amazing? Capitalism good!

Let's take the charge that Republican policies are causing jobs to go overseas. What "policies" would that be? Would it be the granting of China permanent most favored trade status? Because that was Clinton? And now that the deed is done, what can the United States do?

Well, we could:

(a) Give corporations tax breaks and subsidies to help them "compete" despite having higher labor costs.  But Democrats would be quick to call that "Corporate Welfare". So we can't do that.

Or how about

( We smack some good old fashioned tarrifs on imports. Oh wait...can't do that, it violates the WTO agreement. As someone else (from Europe, land of massive subsidies for domestic companies and farmers) pointed out, the US is already in trouble for that. The steel tariff is not only against the WTO rules, it harms all kinds of other businesses.

Or how about..

(c) Break the union stranglehold. If you look at what manufacturing jobs have been lost, you'll find that it's most concentrated in jobs that had strong unions. Way to go union bosses! By making sure that assembly line workers gets $25+ per hour (when you factor in benefits) for putting in a bolt on a car, you've artificially inflated the temporary value of that labor.

The problem isn't that these were once "good paying jobs", it's that many of these jobs should never have been that good paying. They were artificially inflated largely thanks to union strikes. They raised salary expectations beyond what they should have been.

Calor's article talks about the IT industry. Once again, same story. The dot-com bubble gave a temporary and unrealistic expectation of what PHP coders, database administrators, web masters/designers, SQL developers should be making. $150,000 to write PHP that you learned over a course of 9 months in a class? That wasn't going to last. And it didn't. But salaries in those areas haven't returned to earth fast enough and so it's been easier for some companies to farm it out to India.

Not that companies are blameless mind you. The people making these farming out decisions tend to have an incomplete picture. In terms of IT, they don't make a distinction between the guy who can be brought up to speed in 6 months and the guru that's taken 10 years to get where he is in knowledge. To these managers (pity we can't farm those jobs out) all "technical" people are the same.

The same is somewhat true of manufacturing jobs. Some of the jobs going overseas are ones that really would be better off staying here in terms of good business. But such decisions tend to be very brute-force in nature. All or nothing.

But I don't see, either way, how the Republicans can be blamed for this.  As bitter a pill it is to swallow, if someone can do your $20 per hour job for a nickel an hour, you might be...just maybe...being over compensated a bit.  American workers don't need to bring their salaries down to a nickel an hour to be competitive. The infrastructure of the United States is worth a lot per hour. American productivity is the highest in the world by a long shot.  But it's generally not high enough, even factoring in infrastructure, to make up a 100X cost difference.

There are no realistic government policies that will enable American workers to be more competitive. There are certainly policies the US should target on China (I think giving China most favored trade status and helping them get into the WTO -- sins of Clinton and Bush was a mistake). But in general, the only ones who can make American workers more competitive are American workers.  Just something they should think about the next time a textile union is thinking of going on strike because they want free optical insurance.

I wrote a quick article today about how you can make some desktop fun for friends and family.  Step 0 should be: Download DesktopX, it's free to download.

Then start making those desktop goodies. This article shows how one can take a photo and turn it into something on the desktop (in this case, an Internet Explorer). Happy skinning!

With DesktopX 2.0 out, I've been having a lot of fun playing around making all kinds of silly things. There's really nothing quite like DesktopX out there in the sense that it makes creating things very very easy.

Let me show you something I sent to my mom today to illustrate my point. We got a cute picture of the 3 year old sleeping on the floor. My mom really likes the picture. But rather than just emailing her a picture of him (which I also did), I decided to put something together that she could have on her desktop.

Here's how I did it:

Step 1: I loaded up the photo in Corel Photopaint. Using the "magic wand" tool I selected just Ryan.

Step 2: So now I have just Ryan there selected. I just save this (with the mask) as a .PNG file.

Step 3: So I go over to the DesktopX system tray item and choose "New Object". Which creates the ugly generic blue object. I then clicked Change on the default image.

Step 4: I picked my Ryan PNG file.

Step 5: He's too big right now. It shows all my little errors in my selection too. So I change the size down to be much smaller. I also clicked on the shadow tab and gave him a shadow.

Final result. Notice how well DesktopX scaled the image. It smoothed it out and it requires no extra CPU to do that (except for a few micro seconds when you hit the apply button of course).

I also assigned it later to open up Internet Explorer when you double click on it (so that at least it did something besides sit there).

Yea, I know, this kind of thing is useless in most ways but it's pretty darn neat and fun. I'm going to make a photo album for the grandmas where each month a different picture of our kids shows up. That will only take a few minutes to do too.

Because I'm using DesktopX 2 Pro, I can export these objects as stand-alone programs so they don't even have to have anything else installed. We plan to let DesktopX 2.01 users of the registered version (the $20 one) be able to export as EXEs too but they'd require DesktopX to be installed on the machine. A subtle but important difference.

So there's my fun with DesktopX for the day.