The big thing that keeps me from going streaming-only on Netflix is the selection. Of the 178 movies currently in my queue, only 68 are available to stream. Licensing, I know. There's a good piece on the recent purge here, calling Netflix out on some of their spin, which included worrisome language about Netflix becoming an "expert programmer". As in, "rather than let you see whatever you want, we'll decide what you want to see." Ugh.

Here's what I don't get: Netflix already makes their vast DVD collection available to me via the postal service. They have a particular copy of the movie, and they mail it to me. Nobody else can watch that copy because I have it. They haven't copied the DVD to allow multiple people to watch it at once, so no foul there. So why not just do exactly that, without the technicality of shipping it to me? It seems, from my layperson perspective, like the Cablevision and Aereo decisions are a great precedent:

Aereo's technology is designed to take advantage of a landmark 2008 ruling by the Second Circuit, based in New York. It held that a "remote DVR" service designed by Cablevision was legal because it kept a separate copy of a program for each user who recorded it. Reasoning that the same principle should apply to broadcast television, Aereo built a television streaming service with thousands of tiny antennas. Aereo claims that because it assigns each active user an individual antenna, and stores separate copies of recorded programs, it isn't infringing copyright holders' public performance rights.

What if Netflix, instead of mailing me the DVD, stuck it in a DVD player I was renting from them, and streamed it to me? Seems pretty comparable. From there, it just seems silly to do it with plastic discs, so you digitize the disc and throw away the original (so they still just have the one copy that can only be watched by one subscriber at a time). And instead of me renting an actual physical DVD player that lives at Netflix, I rent a virtual player that lives on the Netflix server farm (or is an Amazon EC2 instance). So I fire up the Netflix app, look through my queue for all the movies that are currently available (at least one copy not currently being watched), and select it. Netflix moves that copy from the pool to my virtual player, and starts streaming it to me. Nobody else can watch that copy while I'm watching it. When I'm done (or if I stop it for some length of time), that copy goes back to the pool so somebody else can watch it.

Just like the DVD service, but without the postal lag, and without the plastic discs (well, Netflix still buys the DVDs to produce the pool of legit copies, but no plastic discs are mailed to subscribers).

Update: Oh, bummer, a couple years ago Zediva tried this and was sued out of existence. Netflix has deeper pockets, and the Aereo decision is recent (but Zediva decision is much more directly applicable), but still, given they probably don't want to torpedo their existing streaming deals, and given their language around "expert programming", I will not be holding my breath for Netflix to pick this battle. (thanks to Mark for the link)

So, keep that postal plastic coming!

WWDC sold out in two minutes, but it didn't really sell out because there were all kinds of problems and Apple is still distributing tickets and trying to make it right. If nothing else, it seems like they should make it a true lottery, rather than making it a lottery masquerading as a race. So let folks sign up in a 24-hour window, and then draw lots to see who can buy tickets. It'd be better than what happened this year, but not at all satisfying. Assuming WWDC stays the same, and demand stays the same (or grows), I wonder if there's a way to make it more fun, fair, or interesting (or all of the above).

I originally thought that five bad lotteries might be better than one bad lottery, so maybe you'd divvy up the 5,000 tickets like so:

• 2,000 (or 1,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have never been before.
• 1,000 (or 2,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have been before.
• 1,000 tickets auctioned off to the highest bidders.
• 500 tickets for the first people to solve 500 different puzzles, or some other game/challenge. Or maybe mined via some Bitcoin-style approach. Or maybe you earn chances in a lottery by dedicating processing power to folding proteins, or curing cancer, something like that.
• 500 tickets to Apple invitees.

It felt decent when I first posted, but then I mowed the lawn and the more I mowed the stupider it felt. Maybe the approach above lets you tweak the distribution of old hands and newcomers and folks with deep pockets and clever people, but you probably get something like that mix just leaving it to chance. And the 1,500 tickets going to auction and to the puzzle solvers just feel too much like giving them to people that have extra time and/or money.

By the time I was done mowing I was back to a lottery, but with a twist: instead of each person getting one chance in this lottery (since you need an active developer account to play), I like the idea of being able to earn extra chances in the lottery. Some ideas below. Obviously you'd use or not use some (or all) of these (and change the weights) depending on how you wanted to tweak the audience composition.

• Having an active developer account: 10 chances.
• Having no apps in the app store: 10 chances (if you want to bring in more newcomers)
• Having at least one app in the app store : 10 chances (if you don't want complete newcomers)
• One chance per $X in sales.
• One chance per consecutive year with an active developer account.
• Entering the lottery and losing: keep your existing chances, plus get 10 more for next year.
• Entering the lottery and winning: pay half your chances in addition to ticket price.
• Chances handed out by Apple for, I dunno, evangelism? Advancing the cause? Doing something cool? Writing a great app that makes use of new APIs? Building an app with great accessibility? Running a conference? Giving a good talk at a conference?

This last one, that Apple can give out chances throughout the year for cool things, I'm liking. It just seems fun. "Achievement unlocked" kind of thing. Heck, part of me really likes the idea of hiding all the tickets in a big online game, but I also recently read the wonderful Ready Player One, so that's probably what that's all about.

Finally, while this is fun to think about, I can't imagine anything like this would ever actually happen. Overcomplicated, and therefore almost certainly less fair than a true lottery. So, to end on a practical note, the true lottery approach:

1. First 24-hour window: accept lottery entrants.
2. Second 24-hour window: winners notified and can buy tickets.
3. Repeat 1-2 with remaining tickets, setting aside any for winners that show up in the server logs but didn't consummate the purchase so support can follow up.

Put a true "tickets remaining" live counter on the website. Make an official WWDC app so you can get push notifications of the windows, lottery wins, etc. Perhaps make the app a requirement for entry.

I didn't align the second stencil quite right, but I'm still pretty psyched with how this came out:

I took this great Iron Giant design by Kyle Wayne Benson, made a stencil out of it, and then followed this bleaching guide to transfer the design to my rucksack.

Lots of backlash against the Kickstarters Zach Braff and Veronica Mars. The screediest of these seems to be Kickstarter Abuse by Dylan Gadino, which I disagree with in every possible way, but especially the ugly and condescending tone. Here's how he treats Braff:

To be clear, Braff secured money for the project, but he would have had to make sacrifices -- you know, the way we all do every day in every aspect of our lives. So, instead of accepting this financing deal and creating the movie like an adult, he's decided to beg us for money. His other options included not making the movie or liquidating $2 million of his assets -- that is, if he doesn't have the much sitting in an account -- so he can pay his friends to make the movie, which is what he's now doing with the donations some of you gave him.

To put it another way, Braff's life was already great: He's rich, famous and gets to put his penis inside a model's vagina. But his life could be even better if only he could make another movie -- better still, if he can do it exactly the way he wants with the exact people he wants in the exact location he wants using the exact equipment he wants and with your money to pay for it. I'm not saying Braff's wealth excludes him from pursuing more wealth and happiness, but isn't it obvious he should be using his own money to do so?

And the fans? Desperate and deluded:

If you've already given to projects of these types and you still think it was a good decision, by all means, keep doing it. If you're so desperate to feel part of something that you believe the rich have your interests -- and not their own -- at heart, commit to it. But don't delude yourself into thinking you're actually part of something special; you're helping the rich get richer. There's nothing special about that.

Class act. Not even worth refuting.

Ken Levine is much more reasonable. I can relate to his Sundance analogy; that the big players will crowd out the true indies. But there's limited space and time at Sundance, while Kickstarter can scale. True, there may be issues around discoverability, but when you are a relative unknown discoverability is always an issue. As for backers having limited funds to go around, backers will back what excites them, whether it's on the scale of The Avengers or El Mariachi.

Since then, Kickstarter has chimed in, Who is Kickstarter For? Noteworthy:

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

Also worth noting that the traditional model failed to get us a Veronica Mars movie, despite the avowed desires and efforts of the creators. Now there's going to be a Veronica Mars movie. And there's a bunch more money kicking around Kickstarter for smaller projects. Win-win.

I thought I'd reboot this site. These days, with Instapaper being central to how I read articles on the web, I am increasingly grateful any time I am able to just get the words and the pictures and nothing more, so that's what I'm going for with the new look (or lack thereof) here.

Not sure what the content will be like going forward. Right now I post ephemera to Twitter, and might bring that back under this umbrella, although I know I don't want this to just be a linkblog. I dunno, we'll see!

Just a quick note, I jammed a finger on my throwing hand awhile back and have needed to tape it to another finger to play Ultimate, and no tape could deal with the sweat for more than an hour or so. Tried a couple brands of athletic tape, gaffer’s tape, and that emergency silicone tape that bonds to itself. Enter Leukotape. Totally awesome. Stayed in place for a full tourney day, was still sticking aggressively when I peeled it off at the end of play.

I somehow stumbled onto How Not to Make a Hang Drum, which is a hilarious mini-documentary of a failed DIY project (although I can’t really call it “failed” since it produced such a fun little movie). Here’s part 2.

Anyway, from here it was down the rabbithole (again) of various Hang-style drums:

• The Original Propane Tank Hank Drum on YouTube, by Dennis Havlena.
• His Hank Drum instructions and his impressive DIY instrument repository.
• Same idea, the TuneTank, and a smaller version made from an 11 lb. tank.
• Then there’s the Zen Tambour (YouTube) made by Exotic Vessels.
• … or these by Milltone Drums.
• Not big enough? There are Whale Drums by Jim Doble, who does pieces for Playgrounds and Children’s Museums.