Here's an interesting article about porn as a technical innovator, which is something I've been fascinated by for years—no, I don't mean porn, which seems to confuse almost everything I actually enjoy about sex with simple hydraulics. What I find interesting is that every innovation that Hollywood and the record labels decried as the end of the world was actually embraced by and made mainstream by porn. Video cassettes took movies, dirty and otherwise, out of crappy theaters and into our homes; DVDs improved the audio and video quality of the product, while mainstreaming owning the product; and the Internet made art films (and "art" films) as available in Sioux City and San Francisco. I certainly wouldn't bet against the adult entertainment industry's success at streaming video into the home. Wanna bet that Hollywood ends up with a distribution model more like Vivid's than Blockbuster's?I remember talking to a computer software retailer once and he told me that the average computer customer shunned any program that took more than five minutes of fiddling to master—unless the payoff was porn. Then, the upper limit was more like 20 minutes. Wonder if that's true with the other great apes?
