There is no disputing it, electronic waste is a massive problem. Every year hundreds of millions of electronic devices are replaced. But as electronics contain toxic chemicals and heavy metals like lead, they are extremely difficult and costly to dispose of.

Disposing of E-waste using Land fills or incineration simply results in the release of the toxics, which get into ground water and the atmosphere. Recycling is not the solution either, the toxic chemicals mean that recycling electronic waste is an extremely expensive and hazardous operation.

A lot of e-waste “recycling” companies are actually just resellers. They take the waste and sell it to 3rd world countries with lower wages and standards for worker protection. Where people get payed pitiful amounts to deal with the waste, getting poisoned in the proses.

The ironic thing here is that most of this “waste” is actually still perfectly usable. The only reason why it is even considered waste is marketers manipulating people into thinking they need the latest X, when in actuality there old one works perfectly fine.

The desktop computing industry is a prime example of this: People buy a computer, use it for a year or two. By this time computer hardware has evolved substantially and there original computer is starting to feel slow, so they upgrade.

For the vast majority of the population, computers are only used for browsing the internet and basic word processing, neither of these require much processing power at all. Modern computers are actually over powered to the point where they run idle 99% of the time. So where is the slowness coming from?

Its a fundamental software architecture problem with the way that Microsoft Windows is designed. The OS uses a large centralised database, otherwise known as the registry to store program settings. Program uninstallers never clean the registry properly, meaning that it gradually fills up with useless junk, causing the system to slow down.

Solving this problem is trivial: periodically re-install the OS. Unfortunately this solution is not known to most people, who assume the system is broken, thus they replace it.

So whats the solution to E-waste? Don’t upgrade systems for the sake of it.

This is part two of a two part series about free culture music, If you have not already read part 1, you can find it here.

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To conclude the short series about free culture music, Jono Bacon of Severed Fifth has kindly agreed to an interview, giving an insiders view of the movement.

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Q: Please tell us about yourself and how you first got involved with Free Culture music.

I started playing music about 18 years ago when I turned 12. Over the years I joined and set up various bands including T, Neuraxon and Seraphidian. I spent a lot of time writing and playing live with Seraphidian, but outside of Seraphidian I would write my own music and give it away online. This music varied hugely in style – I experimented with different styles of metal, acoustic, and even did a Prodigy-style track. I licensed all of it under a Creative Commons license, and people seemed to enjoy it.

Although this was all fun, it was limited to just me writing and recording music as and when I wanted to, and I never really did anything exciting with the music. Around the middle of 2008 I was writing a metal song one day and had the idea of putting together a full project to write and release some albums under the Creative Commons and Free Culture philosophy, and thus, Severed Fifth was born.

Q: Can you give us a high level overview of the Severed Fifth project.

Severed Fifth has two primary roles. First, it is a music project, and I want us to write awesome music, put on a stunning live performance, and achieve success as a musically interesting band who writes cool music. Secondly, I want Severed Fifth to be a pioneering example of how Free Culture can bring musicans and fans closer together, and unlock a huge range of opportunities for both. So in a nutshell, I will be happy if people love the music and love the freedoms they have to share, remix and otherwise enjoy the music.

Q: The name severed fifth is quite unusual, would you mind explaining its origins and meaning.

It’s funny, everyone has their own take on the name, and I love the fact that the name can be interpreted in so many different ways. Essentially, there is no specific definition of what ‘Severed Fifth’ means, and I am keen to leave it open to everyone to define their own meaning of Severed Fifth. When I came up with the name, the interpretation that kept hopping into my brain was the severing of the American fifth amendment which I think provides a visually and thematically interesting concept.

Q: In 2008 the project released it’s first album “denied by reign”, however it had only limited success. What lessons have you learned from the first album and what strategies do you have to improve the success of the second.

The major reason for the limited spread of the first album is that almost as soon as I released it I was re-locating to the United States, getting married, and I had just signed up to write a book for O’Reilly called The Art Of Community. While I was successful in writing and releasing a Free Culture album, I ran out of time to give the album some promotional justice. I then put the project on ice until I had completed these other things I needed to do and when I was settled in living in the USA.

The primary lesson I learned was that to do justice to Severed Fifth and to optimize it’s chances of success, I need to devote the time to it, and since I re-launched the project I have moved away from various other spare-time projects to give it the time it deserves.

Q: Unlike the traditional record industry, you are monetising the project through a `pay what you want’ scheme. Do you think this could be a viable business model for full-time artists.

This is definitely something of an experiment. I conceived Severed Fifth Fair Pay as a fair way to provide an opportunity for fans to financially support the project. People read the website, listen to the music, watch the videos, and participate on the forum. Fans are also taking Severed Fifth content and using it in their own music or videos, playing it in their cars, sharing it with their friends and otherwise enjoying the content. All of this requires money to invest and produce these things, and I am passionate about Severed Fifth fans having the opportunity to contribute to the project, but only paying (a) what they can afford and (b) what they feel is fair.

As such, everyone is welcome to use Severed Fifth Fair Pay to pay what they feel is fair and affordable, and if they decide to pay $1, that is awesome, if they decide to pay $50 that is awesome too. It is also awesome if they decide to pay nothing at all. Contributions to Severed Fifth go on to help power the Severed Fifth project and buy t-shirts and merchandise to reward awesome Severed Fifth Street Team members, to replace broken equipment in the studio, to invest in cool new products, to rent rehearsal space, put on live shows and tours and other elements that spread Severed Fifth further afield, putting Free Culture music in the hands of fans and setting a great example for the music industry.

Importantly: Severed Fifth will never expect any kind of payment for this content or service; we will always provide an awesome free service with lots of awesome content to rock out to. Severed Fifth Fair Pay just provides a means for fans to help contribute to covering the running costs.

Q: What is the `street team’.

I think there is a huge opportunity for us to build a global community of passionate Severed Fifth fans who can spread the word about the music and the Free Culture nature of the project. This is the Severed Fifth Street Team.

The idea was inspired by some other bands who build street teams, as well as the work done promoting the Ubuntu project through local user groups(LoCo Teams).

To kick this off we have a Street Team Forum where our Street Team is growing. We also have some online documentation explaining how to get involved, fun things to do as part of the Street Team and more.

Importantly, the Street Team is open to everyone and is going to be a critical component to help drive success with Severed Fifth, so if your readers are interested in helping, come and join the forum and get involved!

Q: Do you have any intentions to develop the project beyond a one man band.

Absolutely! In fact I recently started putting the full live band together and we just had Ben Gibbs join on drums and Jim Adams from Defiance join on guitar. We are still looking for a bassist, and then we will be a complete line up and ready to get out there and play some shows and do a tour.

Q: What are your thoughts about the future of Free Culture music, will it
become more widespread or remain relatively unknown, like Open Source Software.

I believe that Free Culture is the future, and I am so passionate about Severed Fifth becoming a great example of how it can really work. We still have a long road to travel, but I believe that those passionate about Free Culture can join us to help Severed Fifth be an example that other bands can follow too.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to say about Severed Fifth.

Mainly thanks for doing the interview with me, and I would just love to
encourage everyone to join the awesome Severed Fifth Community on our forums and help us make this thing rock!

Ever copied a friends CD, downloaded mainstream music for free or listened to music on YouTube? If the answer to any of these things was yes, you have technically broken the law. Yet nobody actually cares, nobody besides the record labels that is.

Music is simply a fundamental part of human culture, it invokes emotions, inspires ideas and binds communities. People naturally like to share the music that they enjoy. The record industry however wants none of this, they just want to monopolise the market and make as much money as they can.

The source of this opposition stems from the early days of recorded music, like all new technologies, recording music was an expensive and complicated business. Over time the production costs naturally dropped and technology evolved. Analogue tape made it possible for anyone duplicate music, but because duplicating analogue audio reduces its quality, it was not a major problem for the record industry.

Then the internet and digital music happened. Suddenly the cost of distributing music fell to almost zero and the mass-shearing of music began. Digital music is just data, data can be easily copied and duplicated with no loss of quality, removing the record labels as the soul source of music and slashing there profits.

In an attempt to regain some control, they came up with various DRM schemes, one even going as far as distributing a rootkit with there CD’s. But they still failed completely to prevent people from shearing music on the internet.

So, if the prevention of copying is impossible, what alternatives are there? The most obvious, is to join the trends. Give the music away without charge and allow distribution. An ever increasing number of bands is doing just that, bypassing the record industry and releasing there music free of charge on the internet.

Surely these are just bad bands that were not able to get a deal with a record label? Not necessarily, the record labels mainly interested in music that is widely appealing as it will make them the most money. A band may be good, but if there music is not widely appealing, the record industry is unlikely to be interested. Self-publishing and bypassing the record industry completely may be the only chance they have.

To support this movement, a number of community websites have sprang up, one of the most well known being Jamendo. These websites allow bands releasing free music to find an audience without needing the support of a record label, nor have a massive marketing budget.

The last question remaining is how a band releasing there music for free could actually make any money. The methods used are as wide and varied as music itself, but it boils down to three basic ideas:

• Require a payed licence for commercial use.
• Sell band merchandise.
• Run a “Pay what you want” scheme.

Although these options may seam impractical, in practice they are not actually too bad. In the traditional record industry, the label takes the vast majority of the profit, leaving only a small amount for the artists. In order to make a living under such a system you need to sell an extremely large number of albums. When you take control of monetising your work, you keep 100% of the profit, massively reducing the number of supporters required to make a living.

It remains to be seen exactly how much of an impact free culture music has in the long run. Ether it could become the standard model for music production. Alternately it could gain a substantial following, yet remain unknown to the masses, like the free software movement.

My next blog post will continue to investigate Free Culture Music by interviewing an in insider, Jono Bacon of the Severed Fifth project.

Invincibility, the ability to take on any problem and solve it with ease, a goal of many but a reality for few. It is widely bereaved to be impossible with many people trying, failing then giving up and falling back to mediocrity.

Regardless of what these people believe, it is possible. Invincibility is not a single action, nor the accumulation of knowledge, or a natural ability that only some have. It is a sequence of events, repetitive failures and learning from them.

Here are 6 things which will help you to achieve the goal of Invincibility:

1. Be self-educating

   It is no mistake to think that the path to invincibility lies in knowledge and ones ability to apply it. Traditionally the only way to obtain said knowledge was through the education system. You can learn much from formal education, but there is one thing that it does not teach you: how to teach yourself.

   The world is constantly changing, in order to adapt to whatever problem gets thrown your way you must be able to learn. Ether you can spend your whole life in education, never getting anything worthwhile done. Or you can learn to teach yourself.

   When you are self-educating, you can pick up the knowledge required to solve a problem while you are solving it. This means that you can always stay up to date with the latest developments with no additional work.

2. Be obsessive

   Knowledge is great, but without the experience to put it into practice, it is worthless. Experience does not come from the class room, it comes from practice, applying your existing knowledge in creative ways to solve problems.

   Ultimately the only way to achieve this is to obsess, devote all of your time to one thing and one thing only. Don’t just practice your passions, live them. As quickly as you can, find ways to apply your knowledge to real world situations, not just made up classroom scenarios. Offer to do volunteer work for people, start a community around your passion or do some freelancing.

3. Never give up

   On the path to invincibility you will fail, a lot. Don’t let this failure get you down, every time you fail you learn something. Although they are worth little on there own, cumulatively these lessons add up to a massive improvement in your ability.

   After each failure you will feel down and may want to give up, don’t. The only difference between the successful people and failures in this world is persistence. Behind every successful person you will find a long road of failures. Where the unsuccessful give up at some point on this path, the successes push through it.

4. Don’t be afraid to break the rules

   Rules are put in place to keep people constrained to mediocrity, to keep people “in there place”. No body has ever changed the world by following the rules, you have to break them.

   As you develop, you will discover that rules are actually a lot less fixed than they first appear. How do you work around them? I leave that problem as an exercise for the reader, it’s a lot easier than you may think.

5. Use “down time” wisely

   The number one excuse people give when they fail is that they did not have enough time. The typical day includes a lot of short blocs of “down time” such as waiting in a queues, commuting or waiting for that email.

   If put to use, these small blocks of time quickly add up and things start getting done. How can you actually use this time? For one thing, modern mobile phones are basically just portable computers and can be used for work, or just reading articles on the net.

   Failing that, you always have access to a scratch pad that no one can take away, your mind. Insted of just doing nothing, plan something in your mind, then write it down when you next have access to a computer.

6. Get rid of your TV

   Passive entertainment like TV is of no use to anyone and prevents you from completing worthwhile work. TV is designed to be addictive, if you sit down to watch one program, you will suddenly realise that the last 5 hours have just vanished.

   If you get rid of your TV, you will suddenly have a massive amount of time available, which you can put to good use doing work that matters.

In the current times, almost every advert and marketing campaign includes the word “new”. Marketers seam to think that if they just stick the word `new’ somewhere, all of there problems will be solved, this is not the case.

In reality, very few of these products actually are new in any way shape or form. They are just re-brandings or clones of existing products. As practically every product is clamming to be new, the word has completely lost its impact. If everything claims to be new, nothing is.

For marketing to be effective, it needs to be unique and the product needs to be worthwhile. Just copying another product and slapping the word `new’ on it will not work any more.