What's happened to The Simple Dollar?

The Simple Dollar blog is offline, and its author is looking for a way to get back online.

I've been reading Trent's The Simple Dollar blog since mid-December. It's a very well-written, professional-looking blog that gets a lot of traffic, but I was surprised to learn that he only started it about a month before I started reading it.

Today, I noticed a lot of Google searches for "The Simple Dollar" were hitting my blog, all coming to my post about Robert Kiyosaki that linked to Trent's blog. I clicked on the link to re-read his post, only to get a "Forbidden" message from his webserver. I contacted Trent to see if the problem was a legal issue, perhaps a threat from Kiyosaki, but it turns out his entire blog has been taken offline by Dreamhost, his webhosting provider.

It seems that today The Simple Dollar--already in the top 2800 at Technorati--got prominent links from both digg.com and reddit.com. This generated so much traffic to the shared server hosting the blog that Dreamhost disabled the account and denied access to the blog. Not only have they denied web access, they've denied Trent FTP access. He does have a backup from a few days ago, but is currently looking for a way to get back online with a dedicated server.

You can read his own account of his predicament at Metafilter.

I've offered a few suggestions for possible webhosting providers, but he doesn't think he can afford a dedicated server right now. That's in part because, despite his huge traffic, his blog has grown in popularity so fast that he hadn't yet acquired any major advertisers. He's been the victim of his own too-rapid success.

Are there any advertisers out there who would be willing to help finance the blog's return on a dedicated server with sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic?

UPDATE (February 10, 2007): The Simple Dollar (or at least most of its content) is back!

Bill Maher makes fun of creationist museum

And Ken Ham is not amused:

Christian publisher Ken Ham said Maher showed up unannounced this week to videotape an interview with him at Ham's Creation Museum, which is just south of Cincinnati. The $25 million facility, due to open in the spring, tells visitors that the earth is just a few thousand years old and that Adam and Eve lived among the dinosaurs.

Ham said a camera crew arranged a Monday visit to the museum, but he was not told that it was connected with Maher, host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."

"They sneaked Bill Maher into the building while I was waiting for an interview," Ham wrote in a blog he maintains on the Web site of his publishing company, Answers in Genesis.

Maher visited the museum for a documentary he's been filming on religion, his publicist, Sarah Fuller, said Friday. She said he's traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe for the project.

"He's been all over the place," she said. Fuller said she wasn't familiar with how the interview with Ham was conducted.

Ham called Maher's visit an "elaborate deception." He said the film crew asked for a one-on-one interview with Ham after a tour of the museum. After the tour, crew members asked for permission to bring some camera equipment in through the back of the building. Ham wrote that the crew drove to the rear, then distracted an employee as Maher ducked into the building.

Ham said he was shocked, but agreed to the interview.

"Bill Maher did interview me; though respectful in one sense, most of his questions were just mocking attacks on God's word," Ham wrote in the blog on Wednesday.

Ham declined on Friday to comment further on Maher's visit.

But AiG's Mark Looy says "Ken is not upset."

Paszkiewicz has Matthew LaClair removed from his class

The latest news from Kearny High School, via Kevin Canessa at the Observer, is that David Paszkiewicz has removed what he sees as the source of his problems from his classroom by switching classes with another teacher. Now, Debbie Vartan teaches Paszkiewicz's class and vice versa. Principal Alfred Somma confirms that Paszkiewicz requested the switch.

Apparently the ban on classroom recordings wasn't enough--Paszkiewicz must realize that Matthew LaClair has more credibility than he does with the mainstream media, and his presence in the classroom was cramping his style.

Here's hoping that there's someone who was in Debbie Vartan's class who's got as much integrity and brains as Matthew LaClair, and who will keep the public informed of any further misrepresentations or Establishment clause violations in Paszkiewicz's classroom.

Warner Music: we'd rather go out of business than give customers what they want

After Steve Jobs said that he'd prefer to have the iTunes store sell DRM-free music, but is forced into DRM by the music labels, Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music said that his company will have nothing to do with DRM-free music:

"We advocate the continued use of DRM," Bronfman said, adding that music deserves the same anti-piracy protections as software, TV broadcasts, video games and other forms of intellectual property. "We will not abandon DRM nor services that are successfully implementing DRM for both content and consumers."

This quote appeared in an article reporting Warner's dismal results:

its fiscal first-quarter profit fell 74% because of fewer album releases and soft domestic and European sales. Its shares fell nearly 6%.

The New York-based recording company said net income for the period that ended Dec. 31 declined to $18 million, or 12 cents a share, from $69 million, or 46 cents, a year earlier. Revenue fell 11% to $928 million.

The competition at EMI, however, feels differently:

Music label EMI Group is in talks to release a large portion of its music catalog for Web sales without technological protections against piracy that are included in most music bought over the Internet now, sources said on Thursday.
...
One source familiar with the matter said that EMI was in talks to release a large amount of its music in an unprotected MP3 format to various online retailers.

EMI's plans apparently include talks with Shawn Fanning's SnoCap about releasing MP3-format music through MySpace.

Which company is more likely to still be in business under the same management ten years from now?

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The RIAA doesn't understand economics

The Recording Industry Association of America has a web page arguing that we're all getting a fantastic deal on compact discs because, if they had gone up in price along with the Consumer Price Index, they'd be over $33 each. As Ben Woods points out, by that same argument Texas Instruments calculators that cost $20 in the mid-1980s should have cost over $300.

In fact, the recording labels engaged in price fixing, by setting "minimum advertised pricing" on CD retailers, which caused prices to stop their downward trend in 1996--and causing a decline in sales as prices increased.

If you want to sell more CDs, lower the price.

(Via Techdirt.)

UPDATE (February 9, 2007): This post at kuro5hin from January 2003 on "RIAA vs. MP3 vs. Adam Smith" addresses compact disc pricing and demand.

UPDATE (February 10, 2007): And this post at Techdirt reports on a study that shows no measurable effect on CD sales from online downloads (as opposed to, say, CD prices).

Selling nothing for something

Long or Short Capital reports that:

[Conceptual] artist Jonathon Keats has digitally generated a span of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, portable enough to be carried on a cellphone. His silent ringtone… is expected to bring quiet to the lives of millions of cellphone users, as well as those close to them.

Given the duration of the ringtone, Keats should expect to get sued by the estate of John Cage for copyright infringement.

McCain proposes an unfunded mandate for ISPs

Declan McCullagh at News.com reports that Sen. John McCain is preparing to hold a press conference with John Walsh of America's Most Wanted and Miss America 2007 to announce a bill that will create a new mandate for Internet Service Providers to eavesdrop on all of their customers email and web traffic in search of child porn images. The act apparently requires ISPs to implement new technology to compare all images transmitted or received by their customers to a federal database of images (presumably via some one-way hash function, so that the database is not itself distributing child pornography), and to report any that are detected to John Walsh's National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that operates as a clearinghouse/proxy for federal and state law enforcement with Congressional mandate and federal funding.

The new bill is known as the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation Online or SAFE Act, and is not to be confused with the 2003 SAFE Act (Security and Freedom Ensured), the 1997 SAFE Act (Security and Freedom through Encryption), or the 1998 SAFE Act (Safety Advancement For Employees).

Happy 10th birthday, Shelby

Today is our dog Shelby's 10th birthday (that's 70 to you and me). She's a Queensland Heeler/Border Collie/Chow/who knows what.

Unmarried partnership benefits overturned in Michigan

As the result of a lawsuit in Michigan based on its 2004 constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that domestic partnership benefits in negotiated contracts with public employee's unions are null and void.

The 2004 amendment was written by Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, who wrote in a pamphlet at the time that:

Proposal 2 is Only about marriage. Marriage is a union between husband and wife. Proposal 2 will keep it that way. This is not about rights or benefits or how people choose to live their lives. This has to do with family, children and the way people are. It merely settles the question once and for all what marriage is-for families today and future generations.

The Alliance Defense Fund, which backed the similar constitutional amendment here in Arizona, has made similar statements.

Yet it was Patrick Gillen of the Thomas More Law Center who wrote the amendment for CfPM, and he was also behind the lawsuit that eliminated partnership benefits.

Clearly, these people cannot be trusted, and Arizona was wise to reject the similar constitutional amendment here.

UPDATE (May 14, 2008): The Michigan Supreme Court has upheld the denial of domestic partnership benefits as a result of their 2004 constitutional amendment.

UPDATE (November 16, 2008): Patrick Gillen was also lead counsel for the Dover Area School District in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which he defended the failed attempt to inject intelligent design into the public schools.