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Yeah, I was going to point out a story in today's New York Times about Holographic storage. It appears that they may be making some breakthroughs that will enable them to bring the technology to market.

Sounds like you could get hella storage for your mp3 player, if holographic disks are only 2-3cm in diameter. ;-)

Like ``Tomb Raider,'' ``Final Fantasy'' wallows in New Age mysticism, offering an infantile interpretation of the Gaia myth -- that the planet is a living thing with a soul of its own.

Wow, that is incredibly Final Fantasy, the past three games at least have been based on such an idea (a living planet). But I wouldn't expect a AP writer to have actually played the games and realize that's just a tie-in with the games...

Aki plays field agent for her mentor, Dr. Sid

WOOHOO! But I think they meant, Dr. Cid. Another game tie-in, a character named Cid appears in every Final Fantasy except the first one (at least, I don't remeber a Cid in the first one).

Then there's Gen. Hein (James Woods), who favors a military solution: the Zeus Cannon (no, really, that's what they call it)...

Another Final Fantasy game tie-in, I guess... the Zeus xxx usually appears as some form of powerful item.

Good to know they haven't forsaken their video game fans... Although in all seriousness, most Final Fantasy plots seem to be lacking.

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Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors
They may look kind of cool, but the cast of ``Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' will never work in this town again.
'Final Fantasy' Changes Performer Role

Plus the one mentioned earlier. I haven't seen this much hype in a long time. Then again, did anyone not expect the story to suck in this one? It was intended, from the very begining to be an experiment in computer graphics. Not an experiment in good film making. They don't need to have a good story for this one.
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Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors
They may look kind of cool, but the cast of ``Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' will never work in this town again.
'Final Fantasy' Changes Performer Role

Plus the one mentioned earlier. I haven't seen this much hype in a long time. Then again, did anyone not expect the story to suck in this one? It was intended, from the very begining to be an experiment in computer graphics. Not an experiment in good film making. They don't need to have a good story for this one.
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Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors
They may look kind of cool, but the cast of ``Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' will never work in this town again.
'Final Fantasy' Changes Performer Role

Plus the one mentioned earlier. I haven't seen this much hype in a long time. Then again, did anyone not expect the story to suck in this one? It was intended, from the very begining to be an experiment in computer graphics. Not an experiment in good film making. They don't need to have a good story for this one.
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At least according to the NY Times. (I haven't seen it yet.)

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.

The NY times had an interesting, somewhat related article on Sunday discussing the overall lack of quality of the stories of Science Fiction movies (quality referring to the depth of the characters, theme.. etc). I thought of this article when reading this interview. Dune as a whole, to me, is several rungs higher in depth as a science fiction epic. (right up there with Asimov's Foundation series). Its a real pity that scifi epics like Dune arent given the same budget as scifi soaps such as Star Wars(although the soaps are not bad, jsut not intellectually stimulating).

-its almost 4:30

They are proud of the fact that they made $830 million disappear into thin air. Amzingly some of the money magically reappeared in the bank accounts of some of the senior executives.

This is the ultimate job. Lose incredibly amounts of other people's money and still get rich in the process. Where do I send my resume to get this kind of job?

Obviously, if you go purely by the news, you'd expect China and Taiwan to be two armed camps, with China ready destroy Taiwan at a moment's notice. The reality is that there are two worlds at play here: the political realm, and the global capitalism realm.

Tensions are high in the politial world. There are those in Taiwan who wish to assert their political independence, and those in China who wish to quash those self-deterministic yearnings with brute force. This is the world you read about in the US, the Falun Gong crackdown, human rights abuses, Taiwan's request for Aegis cruisers and Patriot missiles, Taiwan's assertion for independence, and all the screaming and yelling between the ROC and the PRC

In the other realm, opposing the forces of identity politics are the forces of corporate capitalism. The practical and business-like Communist officials in China and enterprising business class in Taiwan have billions of US$ at stake to come together economically, all for the benefit of bringing cheap consumer and electronic products to the world. Instead of war, China has an overwhelming interest in attracting billions of $ of investment capital to build high tech industries, and Taiwanese corporations have billions of $ at stake in maintaining their cheap supply chain. Why do you think you can get your >gigahertz K7 and P4 motherboards so cheap? Cheap Chinese labor, outsourced by Taiwanese firms.

The "Truth" is the precarious balance, the razor's edge, in the conflict between these two forces. Currently, the forces of global capitalism is winning. The powers that Be on both sides of the Taiwan Straights seems to feel that it's in their mutual interest to get rich together, than to kill each other. And thank goodness for the current situation, because the lives of my family is at stake.

Businesspeople in Taiwan regularly commute to China the way Silicon Valley businesspeople commute to Austin, TX. New graduates from Taiwan engineering schools seek jobs in China. Average families have uncles and grandparents living in China while sisters and brothers are living in Taiwan. This is the reality for many, many people such as myself, whose families extend from the U.S., China, and Taiwan altogether.

But the truth is that many in Taiwan do have a legitimate wish for independence. Theirs is a valid, though for now a minority voice. Taiwan has a democratic system, so when this minority voice is heard, China, which does not understand such a system, gets overly riled up and starts rattling sabers. Eventually things settle down when the majority in Taiwan, who just wants to go about their business and try to recover from the current high-tech recession, starts to assert itself and try to calm things down.

Back in 1989, San Francisco and the Bay Area suffered a serious earthquake during the World Series. All the major news network found a SINGLE HOUSE on fire and setup their cameras in front of it. So if you watched the TV news from the East Coast, you thought the entire city of SF was on fire. This is the same thing here. We here in the U.S. is focusing on the fire and smoke, while in the background, the real story is how close the daily lives of millions of people are getting intertwined.

Here is a link that I dug up attempting to quantify Taiwanese capital investment in China. It's a bit old but if you google the subject "Taiwanese investment in China" you can quickly see how inmense the economic ties are.

Here is a NY Times article discussing the internal debate in Taiwan on the subject of independence / integration

The Taiwan / China / U.S. story is one of the most important and complicated issues to the world today. It's imperative that you listen to all aspects of this, not just to one single interested party. There are many, many stakeholders, and not all is what it appears to be.

Benbox

Ms. Lyon said the new ad sizes were instrumental in getting [five well-known] designers to agree to the effort. "Before, you couldn't do as much with this medium," she said. "It's hard to jump up and down about a banner."

...

In that ad, which was designed by the agency J. Walter Thompson, visitors to Yahoo's front page saw birds flying from the banner ad at the top to another ad on the right-hand side of the page. There, the birds started pecking at bird seed, revealing an image of a Ford Explorer. When users clicked on the Explorer, the Yahoo page shook as the sound of an engine started. The page finally faded to white, then gave way to a full-size photograph of the Explorer.

"Users liked it a lot," said Murray Gaylord, Yahoo's vice president for brand marketing, "They said 'As long as you don't do this to me every page, all day long, this was fun.'"

I once thought that Pohl & Kornbluth's The Man Who Sold Venus (aka The Space Merchants) was just satire. Sadly, there's more truth to it than I realized.

--

Here is a better link to the story (no reg needed):
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/07/03/science/03C LIM.html

Could it be your child ?

A little bit more balanced and well researched article for you with some quotes:

"Lots of girls in this business -- and guys, too -- are dysfunctional. The girls get here at 18 and aren't mature." - Who wants to date a woman who's had sex with 60 people in two months?" - "I am on the couch for ages"

wow, the GPL is being violated in China.. perhaps these are some bigger issues from China:

Outlaw group is mass killed
tibet situation, caused by China
see what a Chinese 'criminal' has done to deserve jail
Chinese government illegally harvests organs

obviously a lot of problems exist in China, anyone interested should visit human rights in china

Even the ending which everyone seems to hate so much is attributed to Kubrick.

Article about Kubrick's original ideas.

Good movies don't need explaining, and this movie needs a lot of it. The parent post saved me the hassle of my own post listing all the plot holes you could drive a truck through. More than one reviewer mentioned that this movie has all the "Artificial" but none of the "Intelligence" (e.g. see Ebert)

There is a very good NY times article that covers all the problems that Kubrick had with his original ideas - problems that Spielberg glossed over. Their were reasons why Kubrick wasn't able to get this project rolling, and all of them show up in this movie. Interesting ideas and a worthy goal, but the implementation falls short.

I was disappointed in the ending. The character of David's mother is not congruous from the character at the beginning with that of the "final day." I also felt like I was left with an "emotional vacuum" created by bringing back his mother the way they did. "Overworked" would be a another good description.

Good Sci-Fi is when you can watch the movie again to pick up all the nuances of a character. But as the parent post pointed out, this movie won't have any "replay" value. To put this on the level of "2001" like what Katz does is absurb.

I would recommend the movie because it is visually interesting, but I would wait for it to show up at the local "dollar theatre". But this movie should not be called a "classic."

Microsoft Breakup Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals

Judge Jackson had compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".

by Michael Jennings

(Thursday, June 28, 2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating system in one company and created a second business for everything else.

This decision of the Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the Court's decision [PDF format]).

The Court of Appeals found that Judge Jackson's 206-page Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct, was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)

Earlier, many people had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom. Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very well informed.

However, the penalty that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.

The story is very widely reported. For examples, see: ABC, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Seattle Times, CNet, The Industry Standard, Reuters, Guardian, Motley Fool, and MSNBC. The NY Times article requires that you register. Registration is free.

Silicon Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for a while longer..."

There were two parts to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity, and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.

The Court of Appeals wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality."

The Court of Appeals added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."

The ruling of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.

More links:

Open Secrets.org report on Microsoft soft money donations

Common Cause report on Microsoft political contributions

Antitrust Law and Economics Review

Older Articles:

Microsoft Unfazed by Threat of New Antitrust Suits (Thursday, June 21, 2001)

What, me worry? Microsoft's Ballmer stays cool, confident, composed. (PC World, June 17, 1998)

Michael Jennings
Futurepower®
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.

Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: jennings_michael @ hotmail.com (remove spaces)

Futurepower is a registered trademark.
Copyright 2001

I want a Hypo-Allergenic Cat!

Although the CNet article seems to treat it as a given ("But at least one federal appeals court panel has tried to fight worries about incomplete archives. In ruling that National Geographic violated a freelance magazine photographer's rights by including his images in a CD-ROM, the panel asked a lower court to order the magazine to pay him rather than pull the photos."), evidently the question of whether electronically-stored versions of entire publications are included or not is still in question ("National Geographic said today that it would soon file an appeal to the Supreme Court from a ruling by the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which said that a 30-disc CD-ROM set that reproduced every page of every issue of the magazine was a new work rather than a revision, even though each article appeared in its original context.")

The tender concern of the publishers for the freelance writers is oh, so precious:

"We're extremely disappointed in the ruling," Time, Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglio said. "The publishers lose because they have to delete articles; researchers, readers and historians lose because they won't have access to complete archives; and freelancers lose because their pieces won't appear in the archives."

Saying that Microsoft somehow needs Apple to keep the DoJ off their back is out of date. Clearly, Microsoft is no longer worried about the DoJ: bundling MSN messenger, adding smart tags so they can control content on the web, changing their licensing agreements to force users to upgrade, and bundling VoIP clients into XP. Having Apple around to show they don't have a monopoly isn't enough to stem their recent activity. They probably figure they can entrench their position pretty well until dubya gets replaced in office. No, I think it's more likely that as long as the Macintosh BU is making Microsoft money but not cannibalizing Windows sales, and Apple keeps "preferring" Internet Explorer, they'll keep writing software for it. But if Apple gets into selling an OS for x86, the gloves will come off.

First off, I think it is fairly difficult for someone to say that something is or is not art. Today's NYT's has an interesting article on that subject. However, I am not sure that saying that everything can be art, or that nothing is art really helps anyone.

I know that there are a number of people working on digital art projects in the academic realm as well as in the commercial field. (MIT's media lab is a neat place, prob not the artistic ammunition you need) (something is wrong with RISD's site, I suspect they could provide good academic support.)

The first thing to say to defend the belief that digital works can be art is to draw the analogy to the initial receptions of impressionism (a la Monet Pissaro) and abstract impressism (a la Pollack, Kandinsky). Then, you would probably want to talk about some more examples of "art" that use technology as a medium. From an artistic standpoint (and I am not in any ways an artist, or an anuthroity on what it takes to be one) it seems that one would need a vision and a desire to create something that has meaning. I know that performance art is about the execution/performance. So, digital art could include things like video games, which has been discussed on slashdot before.

Overall, I must say that to make the sweeping generalization that digital "things" can not be art is a bit shortsighted. The evolution of technology has always had an effect on the ability to create art (most modern artists do not need to "learn" alchemy in order to make paint...).

First off, I think it is fairly difficult for someone to say that something is or is not art. Today's NYT's has an interesting article on that subject. However, I am not sure that saying that everything can be art, or that nothing is art really helps anyone.

I know that there are a number of people working on digital art projects in the academic realm as well as in the commercial field. (MIT's media lab is a neat place, prob not the artistic ammunition you need) (something is wrong with RISD's site, I suspect they could provide good academic support.)

The first thing to say to defend the belief that digital works can be art is to draw the analogy to the initial receptions of impressionism (a la Monet Pissaro) and abstract impressism (a la Pollack, Kandinsky). Then, you would probably want to talk about some more examples of "art" that use technology as a medium. From an artistic standpoint (and I am not in any ways an artist, or an anuthroity on what it takes to be one) it seems that one would need a vision and a desire to create something that has meaning. I know that performance art is about the execution/performance. So, digital art could include things like video games, which has been discussed on slashdot before.

Overall, I must say that to make the sweeping generalization that digital "things" can not be art is a bit shortsighted. The evolution of technology has always had an effect on the ability to create art (most modern artists do not need to "learn" alchemy in order to make paint...).

This was an NYTimes article published last week.

Offers some insight... only 5% of fibre is in use, and it costs more to light fibre than lay them.

On top of all these problems all the farmers with railway tracks going through their land are suing because the fibre layed alongside the rails was unauthorised because the leases didn't include surface rights.

Compensation for the farmers has been cash and some of the fibre strands... so expect some new ISP's run by hillbillies, there's already a few about.

But the rest of the respondents are correct, the anglo-saxons are not much different from others: you only have to look at the mess the Chinese have made, or the emergent situation in India. When population pressure and wildlife habitat collide, wildlife always loses, because animals don't vote, now do they?

(New York City has about 4 million people alone not including Upstate)

4 million? Try more than 8.

Right here.

The main story in last Thursday's Circuits section in the NYTimes was all about this. The byline: "The restless desire to get away from it all has been replaced by an anxious desire to stay connected. And for an increasing number of Americans, that means turning the car into a fuel-injected, free-range workstation. " click here to read.

Anthropology in the News has links to a lot more news stories on these findings. The BBC story is very short, but noteworthy for including a little bit of information on the dating methods used in the Australian case.

Anthropology in the News updates a lot and doesn't keep stuff on its front page for very long, so for the sake of Slashdot's archives, I'm copying the links here.

• New Evidence in Extinction Whodunnit BBC (6/7/01)
• Humans Linked to Animal Extinction New York Times (6/7/01)
• Humans Linked to Animal Extinction Yahoo (6/7/01)
• Human Hunters Spelled Doom for Ice Age Behemoths Yahoo (6/7/01)
• Humans Blamed for Ancient Extinctions MSNBC (6/7/01)
• Planet Was Too Small for Man and Beasts, Study Finds Dallas Morning News (6/8/01)
• Humans Hunted Mammals to Extinction in North America Eureka Alert (6/7/01)

http://www10.nytimes.com/2001/06/13/technology/13L OHR.html

Of late, the NYTimes online has stopped posting "clickable" links along with their stories (i.e. no href tags). They simply include the URL in the text (like this: www.nytimes.com). As a side effect of Smart Tags, we will undoubtedly have the browser converting such strings into active links, much like many email clients do nowadays. If the browser on the vast majority of the population's computer's does this, it becomes effectively impossible to post a link which requires a copy and paste to activate.

Now, this might well be regarded as a good thing by many; but it removes the loophole that 2600 exploited to get around Judge Kaplan's ruling. Similarly, I'm sure the NYT does the "non-linking" only to protect their legal backside, not to annoy.

Here's hoping that if Smart Tags come to pass, we won't have some judge ruling that the 2600 page is now in violation of the law.

I'm reminded of a recent New York Times article about efforts to improve marital stability in the Bible Belt. I quote:

Besides Sara, now 17, Mark and Cathryn Hinderliter have a daughter, Greta, who is 3. The couple agree that their marriage is working. Still, they have problems, and Ms. Hinderliter has insisted on working them out in sessions with a marriage counselor, who is also an evangelical Christian.
''How do you do this right?'' she said. ''Well, basically, I think you just communicate until your knuckles bleed.''

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

You sure could have fooled me. I still see VHS movies come out new for $25--and that's not even mentioning the practice of "pricing for rental"--selling VHS tapes at $60-100 or more for the rental market for a couple of months before dropping their price for consumers. DVDs haven't been priced for rental so far, though some of the studios are making noises about it.

It's all in what you're willing to pay, I suppose. For me, $20 for a movie I really like is a worthwhile investment.
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The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects...

What is the Plastic.com POV? There isn't one, really. It isn't created BY a certain specialized community FOR a specialized community. It is a created by a conglomerate of differently-minded interests, lacking in a coherent POV, and it feels like it.

I think another demographic issue that's at work here is bandwidth. I bet Slashdot's readership is much more likely than Plastic's to have high-bandwidth access. Any site works better when users have fat pipes. So maybe Slashdot is the only site that's really thriving, but with the current bandwidth situation, it may be the one of the only ones that could.

Art At Home

This guy actually wrote in to the New York Times "I keep getting an alert that says: 'Warning: Your Internet connection is not optimized. Download Internet Boost 2001 now!' I don't know what causes this message, but how I can keep it from appearing?" What do you suppose he will make of XP's squiggly purple lines?

Subscribers who pay a monthly fee will be able to load any other digital audio files -- like the music of independent labels, their own recordings or other material -- onto their computers and share it with other Napster users. The fidelity will be just below the sound quality of compact discs and users who obtain files over Napster will be precluded from loading them onto their own discs or sending them outside its network.

So their participation in SDMI makes some sense - until you try to use the service of course. Oh well, I added them to my FC list months ago.

Interesting bit: the NY Times published an article today in which it referred to that OS as "GNU/Linux," as recommended by RMS/FSF (or is that GNU/RMS/FSF?). Interesting, worth a \back entry itself, I would guess.

The NY Times had a pretty good article about this recently too.

However, they are toning down the Christian elements to cater to today's readers.

"We'll need to be able to give emphatic assurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology."

Now I'm as Godless as the next guy, but I can't help but think that this would be slightly contrary to C. S. Lewis's original vision for his series. I think I can speak for everyone in wishing the publisher a painful eternity in the fires that burn but do not consume.

The NYT article is located here: article.

"Our guy" Martin Garbus is the main lawyer behind the initially-successful efforts of Margaret Mitchell's estate to suppress publication of the forthcoming novel by Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone! (The New York Times had a story on this just four days ago.) Garbus's side is trying to suppress Randall's soon-to-be-published parody of Gone with the Wind, as told from the perspective of a black slave on Tara. It's hard to imagine a more anti-First-Amendment stance to take. So what's the deal? Is it just that he's a lawyer, or does he have a principled view of the world that can include both of his positions in these two cases?

Sorry if someone's already pointed this out on Slashdot. I haven't seen it.

Here's the mandatory no-registration required link

Here is the instroduction from the book from NYTimes (registration req). The book is a good read, and addresses your point about The Jungle. If you read this you'll learn that breaking up the beef trust after the publication of the Jungle transformed meatpacking into a safer, better paying job (though safer is a relative term). Also even with the problems described in The Jungle, it was still a good paying high skilled job. However in the 1960s-70s the meatpacking industry reconsolidated into a few large players, broke the meatpacking unions, and reduced the required skill for doing the work. As a result meatpacking is now a low paying highly dangerous job taken by poor and desperate people in rural communities where the meatpacking plant is usually the largest employer.

Today's NYTimes is reporting high-temp superconductors being used in Detroit (high temp is a relative term). http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/29/science/29SUPE.h tml

Today's NYTimes is reporting high-temp superconductors being used in Detroit (high temp is a relative term). http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/29/science/29SUPE.h tml

And, there's even a non-registration version of the story to be found here.

Somehow I doubt Janeway'll order a pizza tonight, since it's the series finale, but maybe if she does a dream sequence, she can order lots of branded food.

And, there's even a non-registration version of the story to be found here.

Somehow I doubt Janeway'll order a pizza tonight, since it's the series finale, but maybe if she does a dream sequence, she can order lots of branded food.

Just this Sunday, the New York Times had a whole article booth-babe-culture, describing the same thing at auto races and trade shows, and never mentioning video games in particular. Some posters have said E3 babes with booths had fewer visitors (I wasn't there), but that seems to fly in the face of most trade show experiences. And according to the NYT article: "Competition for the job of trade-show hostess is so fierce that the agents who audition the young women and dispatch them to shows say that many would work for free just for the pleasure of all the attention." Read the whole thing here.

It seems like there's a lot of vitriol the Salon author got a chance to vent at geeks, with its shots of "white-trash sex fantasia", "mouth-breathing dudes", "disreputably grab-ass, twerpy", "underground... lost boys", and so forth. I'm not even sure I believe the anecdote about the anonymous gaming/gangbang session with a company-logoed prostitute... that just seems too perfectly disgusting, similar to that journalist a few years ago who fabricated a story about a "gangbang" at the Young Republicans convention in D.C.

To me, this article seems conceived in bad faith in a number of senses, and even misleading, in that it uses the experience of a trade show walkaround as shorthand for the products of a certain industry.

The issue, to me, is separating fantasy from reality, and encouraging mutual respect for each other. If we are raised to be afraid of our fantasies, then we may wish to express those fantasies as reality. There was an interesting article in the Times concerning divorce rates in the bible belt. This article states that divorce rates in Oklahoma run above the national average. Could this be caused by unrealistic expectations for marriage, or perhaps the Baptist men take the fanciful notion of a dutiful wife seriously?

Likewise we must respect each other. If we are raised to disrespect other people, or more specificaly the opposite sex, then naturally we will look at the objectified persons in the media and presume that they are nothing more that packages to be exploited. Likewise if we cannot be civil to the waitress who needs 30 more seconds to get our order, what hope to we have with the foldout in playboy?

It would be pretty to think that banning soft porn would solve whatever problems are bothering us. In fact, what may be bothering us is all the bother over the so-called soft porn.

Go read this New York Times Magazine article on the porn industry.

I read the Salon article. I don't have a clue where they found that "$5 billion a year" stat for porn, or why they got the wild idea that $5 billion counted "everything" associated with porn.

The porn industry is quite a bit larger than the hollywood movie industry -- it's certainly much more than twice $5 billion dollars if you count the total revenue from everything. (Real journalists are often as sloppy as the Slashdot toy journalists. Salon journalists are sometimes even sloppier than that. Imagine.)

The game industry will probably blow past the revenues of the hollywood movie industry soon, but they still have a long way to go before they're anywhere near the revenue of the porn industry.