Big Wheel

Gotta love that outfit! Why do I want to pay Amazon $16 for a new copy of the Sonny Clark Quartets when I can get a used one from MM for $53? Espescially when MM also has it brand-new for $13.83. I'll bet that the $53.17 price for a "used--like new" copy is a glitch in their pricing software. It's 1 cent below the highest-price "used--like new," and generally they (and several of the others) try to be the cheapest by 1 cent. This is why I'd like to learn more about the systems that Amazon sellers use to interact with Amazon. My hunch in this case is that Moviemars undercut what was (at the time they posted the item) the only other used seller, but then probably simply didn't update its price once other sellers entered the marketplace offering the item for much less. From an economic perspective this seems like an inefficiency that hurts everybody (except newer/nimbler sellers) in the aggregate, so I'm curious whether Amazon is making things harder than they have to be for sellers or whether some sellers just have suboptimal systems interacting with Amazon's APIs.

I have a friend who works with an independent shop and it's as simple as it's easier to keep track of items if you have things only being sold from one place. If the item was in the store and on Amazon at the same time, you're going to disappoint some people online too frequently when you have to inform them the item is no longer available. And some of those people reach the conclusion that the store is trying to sell what they don't have and don't come back. Thus when they have something that they feel the local market isn't going to snap up, online it goes, and that's the only way to buy it. You'd think that modern IT would help eliminate this problem. There has to be an inventory system somewhere that can take this kind of purchase info from disparate sources and updates your databases nearly in real time. That way as soon as you ring up that CD, your system is telling Amazon to pull your listing from the store. I guess this must be too expensive for the little guy, though, so they end up wasting time dealing with all this crap manually.

Never heard of this stuff before you mentioned it! Horrors! I actually like Akvavit - I acquired a taste for it from my cousins, who had picked up a bunch of bottles of Aalborg when they lived in Copenhagen and gave me what was left of the last one when they moved to a different house. I currently have a nice bottle of OP Andersson from Sweden sitting in the freezer - much more balanced and less of a rye bread taste compared to the Aalborg.

I'm guessing you haven't sampled the delights of the Budweiser Chelada, then. You've tried lutefisk, I'm sure you can handle it. PS: my reaction to the chelada was exactly like this guy's: http://www.chow.com/stories/11552

The blocking is not by genre, it's usually by label because Youtube only blocks what a label has filed a complaint about. If EMI hasn't registered its songs in Youtube's "block this" database, then none of those songs will be detected and blocked.

Maybe the idea is to stimulate demand by selling the box sets at budget prices? (The supposed reasoning being, sure, nobody's buying individual discs at $16.98 these days, but maybe you'll buy a 7-disc set for under $40, netting the label money they wouldn't have made otherwise.) One can only hope...

To correct myself real quick: the video in the trial wasn't even on Youtube, according to the Washington Post story. It was uploaded onto Google Video. Google Video has changed so much since the Youtube acquisition that I don't even know how to evaluate the claims in the story (right now, Google Video doesn't appear to support comments or display how many times a video was viewed).

It was one of the most viewed in Italy, so I'd not say 'virtually nothing', and the news stories didn't report the percentage of flaggings and we don't have the complete sentence neither, that will be published in a month, so we are talking about 'virtually nothing'. "Most entertaining" by user votes, not most viewed. (Actually, it doesn't look like there is a "most entertaining" category - there's "most discussed," "top rated," "top favorited," "most viewed" - which look like lists of 100 videos in each of YT's 14 categories for every different country.) That's 14*4*100 = 5600 videos per country, every single day. I just reset my country in Youtube to Italy and clicked through the current "most viewed" list. This video is currently the 97th most viewed in Italy, and it already has 3000 views despite being up only 24 hours. The other video took 2 months just to get to 5500 views.

False. That's usually true, but not in 100% of cases. The dog might have gotten a smaller-than-usual dose of toxin (for example, if a toad had been hanging out in a water bowl or something hours before).

Don't disagree with you, but it will always be hard to know how many people would be necessary to make a "good faith" effort. I also don't know how many people actually did flag the video. If none did, then YouTube would have no reason to investigate. If many people did, then I would be more sympathetic to the court's ruling. I have heard that it can be notoriously difficult if you are a "little fish" to get YouTube to take copyright violations seriously and that should change too. Exactly. We're talking about a video with 5000 views; that's virtually nothing. The news stories tell us that people complained in the comments - but comments are not flaggings. As for copyright stuff, it's often hard to sort out the legitimate complaints in this area from the stupid ones. Many "little fish" can't get a major corporation's attention because they don't understand what they need to do to get a major corporation's attention, not because the corporation isn't listening. So you'll see people angry because they sent 5 complaining emails to an inbox that isn't anywhere close to the legal department, when all they had to do was call up their lawyer and have the lawyer contact the proper address, or even just fill out an online form that's been developed specifically to streamline copyright complaints.

I still think this is by far the best explanation for what happened. You have two dogs, one of whom has been conditioned (by either you or by experience) to stay away from toads. The other one has "never learned" and that's the one that displayed several classic symptoms of toad poisoning (including seizure). It looks like some dogs acquire a tolerance for toad poisoning over time, so it's possible that what in the past would have made the dog listless this time simply induced erratic behavior and a couple of minutes of convulsions.

Are you saying that Youtube should be automatically blocking some videos upon their upload? Youtube already does this for a lot of copyrighted material, to a pretty sophisticated degree. But that's relatively easy to do because "all" that is is comparing data in your database of copyrighted material with what's being uploaded. You can try to develop systems to flag potentially offensive videos automatically, but by doing so you're committing yourself to a game of cat and mouse. It's not easy to develop systems that reliably catch the bad stuff without having deleterious effects on the people with the good stuff; a signal of an "offensive" video is rarely as obvious as a ticking package. How do you analyze a video that has kids making fun of another autistic kid to know it's offensive? You can look at the tags, but there might not be any and they might be misleading. For instance, if you set up a rule that says "if the video contains a tag of 'Hitler,' require manual review", you're going to be inundated with hundreds of parodies of Downfall for every instance of actual neo-Nazi propaganda. And even if you manage to do this, the people uploading the bad stuff get better and better at getting around you. So Youtube appears to rely on crowdsourcing (flagging by users after the video is live) to determine what needs to be policed.

My guess: the one dog smelled an amphibian he'd had a previously nasty encounter with, the other didn't and was naive to that experience and so went after the toad. The rest can be fixed with a nice hit of Xanax.

Think about it this way. Of 20,000 Google employees, maybe - MAYBE - 2000 work on Youtube. ~1200 of these are engineers and have zero hands-on contact with the videos that are actually submitted. They only build the product. Most of the rest are in finance, product management, marketing, partnerships, etc. - also no contact with the enormous number of submitted videos. If I had to guess there are fewer than 100 people around the world doing Youtube community management and support. Say, 50 in the US, 30 in Europe, 20 in Asia/Australia. Tops. Of those 30 in Europe I doubt there are more than 3 focused on Italy and Italian videos. Their jobs entail way, way more than a daily perusing of the numerous automatically generated top lists on Youtube. They do things like fight spammers engaged in massive spam uploads, identify actual bugs, etc. The sheer scale of these products is so huge that it's easy to miss problems concerning a single video. Again, operating a product like Youtube means you have no choice but to prioritize relentlessly. Sure, a lot of people may have flagged this video - but there are probably millions of flaggings done every day on a site with at least 100 million videos on it. Given that the offending video had fewer than 100 views for every day it was up, it's quite likely that there were way more flaggings of other videos and this one sat on the bottom of the pile for awhile. (And forget about answering, or even reading, every email that comes in. And routinely reading through the comments on videos? Are you kidding?)

We're talking about South Florida here. The society would not have time for day jobs.

a RAID array? Still hard drives, but at least you get some security with the redundancy. If your DVD burner supports dual-layer burning, you get 8.5 GB per disc, which isn't terrible. Cloud storage? There's still some risk and getting the data up there could take forever, but chances are your data won't be lost entirely if something goes horribly awry in the datacenter. I'd think most providers build in redundancy. All of the above?

Agreed, but unfortunately that is likely much of the appeal to sellers. I once read through some of the documentation on Amazon Marketplace and I seem to remember that Amazon kicks back at least a chunk of that $2.99 to the seller to "cover shipping and handling costs." So a canny seller can mark down their goods knowing that the price they'll get for it is almost $2.99 more for every item. Does anyone know how bulk product uploads are done on Amazon by Marketplace sellers and what information a seller can download in bulk? I'm curious as to how "sticky" prices tend to be in the Marketplace and am wondering how easy it is for a Marketplace seller to get into a price war with other Marketplace sellers selling the same items.

I as well.

Ugh...if it's true that Jazzloft is just ordering from ESP when you order from them rather than keeping stuff in stock, that's really annoying. Because Spirits Rejoice was taken out of the sale early on ESP's site, I wonder if I'm going to get screwed out of the sale pricing.

Did you order directly from ESP or from the Jazzloft? I ordered from Jazzloft on 2/8 and still have no shipping confirmation. My concern is that I ordered a title they didn't actually have in stock (it was Spirits Rejoice, which had disappeared from ESP's sale the day before) and they failed to update their website (which they only do manually - it doesn't appear to be tied to any inventory system).

Argh...I can't believe I broke down and got the Montego Joe record (budget has been tight lately and been trying to buy only the essentials). The samples just sounded like too much fun to pass up.

Anyone want to weigh in on which of the sale discs they think are must-owns? I'm most likely getting the two Aylers, the NYAQ disc, and either the Paul Bley or the Lowell Davidson, but want to make sure I'm not missing anything exceptional.

From this description it sounds like the Cafe Bohemia jam's drummer who was in Europe in 1968 must have been Art Taylor, and the organist was of course Jimmy Smith. Anyone know who the alto player was? Was it Cannonball as the NYU page hints? Wayne, Cannon, Taylor, JOS, Pettiford - even though Wayne and Jimmy weren't fully formed stylistically in 1956, that must have been sick!

Cool to see the Ammons "Autumn Leaves" solo on there. The Sonny Stitt solo on that cut was one of the first transcriptions I did.

The support is only ending for version 6 and MS is already up to version 8. IE 6 is over 8 years old at this point.