Let's watch: ColdFusion videos

Today we'll just watch a bunch of videos.

The Strange Story of the Mp3 Player (begins at 1:50)
Portable music players were invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer and the way it distributes music without the internet was basically transmitting over the telephone-net at terminal vending machines in bars and music stores and such. It went bankrupt though.
Saehan made MPMan in 1998. RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia in 1998 over its MP3 player but lost, and this very publicized case made MP3 players popular. iPod, 2001, made it super popular.
Kramer got acknowledged as original inventor of iPod by Apple for some legal reasons.

Energy, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and of the modern society.

The collapse of Western Roman Empire is a very classic topic among scholars of history, politics, economy, etc. Joseph Tainter had a theory, based on complexity and energy management. 

If you have time, you can watch this lecture by Joseph, it's a fun and somber talk about the collapse of Western Roman Empire from his perspective. I also read the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, which elaborates his theory of social collapse with more examples than just the Western Roman Empire, including the Mayan Empire and Chacoan civilization.

The Collapse of Western Roman Empire

In the early days of Western Roman Empire/Roman Republic, it conquered a lot of new lands. Each conquest was easy, and brought great loots. The Romans used the loot to increase their wealth and power and social complexity. 

Some complexities were voluntary: they wanted to enjoy life. Some complexities were forced on them: they needed it to keep their growing republic/empire in order. These complexities were mostly in the forms of bureaucracies and law codes.

Eventually, the conquests ground to a halt: its borders reached the Germanic, Persian, Briton, and so on, countries that were either too powerful to conquer or too poor and distant to worth conquering. Rome went from conquest mode to farming mode. This placed a great burden on the empire: the economy and culture used to run on conquests, but now it has to run on farming.