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FCC's Chairman Powell Starts Blog
The Importance of writes "And he wants to hear from the tech community. 'I am looking forward to an open, transparent and meritocracy-based communication -- attributes that bloggers are famous for!' Powell said on his blog. But does he really get blogging? He says he 'need[s] to hear from the tech community as we transition to digital television.' Perhaps we could discuss the broadcast flag? If you want to leave some comments on his blog, I suggest you do it before Howard Stern mentions it on his radio show."
"Dad keeps calling me all the time. It's always 'Iraq' this and 'Iraq' that. He's so annoying sometimes. I swear. Ooo! On another note, I did get my belly button pierced this past weekend! It is soooo cute!"
Meh, I thought blogs would be personal, it's a lot about his company there instead :/
Who'd have thought the day would come when the government asks for a slashdotting!
"The GNAA are in full support of the broadcast flag."
"1) Remove the broadcast flag. 2) ??? 3) Profit."
"I wanted to post something on your blog about beowulf clusters, but couldn't think of anything."
"The FCC sucks."
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
If Chairman Powell has any acumen, he'll eventually need to have his emailed moderated so he can read acutal insight. But I did hear that he was invited to a Lemon Party!
..if you don't want a broadcast flag, DMCA, Patriot Act, etc etc etc.
If you want to leave some comments on his blog, I suggest you do it before Howard Stern mentions it on his radio show.
It would also probably be a good idea to do it before this gets mentioned on Slashdot.
Oh, wait...
it's already hit howard's forum
t =6353
/. really is, but howardstern.com (especially now the forums) is pegged almost 24/7
http://www.howardstern.com/boards/showthread.php?
i dunno how busy
howard et all are on vacation (for another week i think). when he gets back, i'm sure it will get mentioned. hopefully the rest of his fans can keep it civil (heh) on the fucktard's blog
vodka, straight up, thank you!
He is opening a blog? That is like opening the gates of hell in reverse...
Eric's got a song on his site about the FCC: The FCC Song
His "blog" is pretty interesting but right now talks more about digital TV than anything pertinent to the internet. Still a nice outreach, we'll see how often it gets updated...
In related FCC news, they just passed an order lessening the restrictions on the unlicensed 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz frequency bands.
The news release (pdf) says that this order removes roadblocks keeping deployment of next generation (longer range) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices.
There is also a statement from Chairman Powell himself (more pdf)
-Cary
Fairfax Underground : Where Fairfax County comes out to play
Unfortunately, expect Mr. Powell's blog to be spammed by every idealogue around. Already some pointless jabber about the FCC's "indecency" issues have popped up, some merely wrappers for political bashing. If only that was the worst that it will get..
Sample entry: Monday, 7/5/04: "Well, this morning my wife made *beep* for breakfast, except the *beep* burnt the *beep* toast!"
...
Tuesday, 7/6/04: "Had a meeting with *beep* who's skirt was a little higher then it should've been, showing off her *beep* and making me want to *beep* *beep* her all night long!"
Weds., 7/7/04: "Took the *beep* for a walk around the *beep*. Cashed a check at the store and purchased *beep*, *beep*, and *beep*. Thought the missus might like that!"
Calling that page a blog seems a bit far-fetched to me - it seems more like a news site. On news sites that I know of, people that write opinion pieces are called "columnists" or "contributors" normally. It's called an op-ed, not a blog entry.
Does anyone else question the way this is being termed? After all, if I contribute maybe 10 articles to a news site, does that make my work there constitute a blog?
I hope we abstain from posting messages such as "PLZZ DOOD WHY YOU INCREEZ SIZE FOR MEGACORPS?? YO HANDZ IN POXET OF COMPS YO NOOB!!!!" please. It's like the Mac-community's knowledge of Steve Jobs email, we all know his email adress but we must only use it when we are civil in fear of to not lose the chance of using it in the future.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
...Stop pandering to the centralised media producers. We are already doing them a big favor by granting them a monopoly over the airwaves, why should we grant them further control by denying us the freedom to exercise our fair use rights over digitally transmitted content, a freedom we have had since 1984?
While the idea of running a blog is interesting -- I'm facinated by the idea of alternate and potentially more efficient communication to policymakers -- I'm not sure that the blog format selected is appropriate. You're producing all comments dropped into a page, with no hierarchy, moderation or anything. It's like trying to suck down the contents of a firehose. The advantage of electronic forums is not only one-way communication with the forum owner, but also allowing other people interested in relevant issues to interact with each other and to share ideas and information.
There are a couple of format changes that I'd suggest.
First, threading is just plain going to be necessary for any forum of this size. It's not reasonable to expect people to track interleaved discussion -- and it's efficient to allow the public to correct errors in posts and to associate related information, instead of forcing readers to skim through many, many comments that comprise a series of interleaved discussions.
Second of all, moderation, or some similar system could be helpful. Slashcode is a popular codebase to allow moderation, but the structure only partly deals with moderation abusers -- those that attempt to moderate up viewpoints that they agree with, rather than those that they believe to be correct. Slashcode has a good deal of popularity mostly on forums with communities that generally agree with each other on overall issues. I don't believe that there are any forum moderation systems that try to identify "clusters" of posters that moderate each other up (perhaps this is a research project waiting to happen, if no companies are already working on such a thing). Instead of all posts being assigned a global scalar value representing "goodness", there'd be N identified clusters, and "goodness" from the point of view *of each of those clusters*. Doing so would be interesting, as it might be easier to find the "best arguments" for a particular side, and could deal better with more lobbying-oriented environments like this.
I'm not sure whether the "let's slap some viewpoints on a blog" idea is directly from Mike Powell or whether it originated with a staffer -- I find it exciting, and a good sign when it's coming from the FCC. Thanks again to whoever originated the idea, and to Mike Powell for trying it out.
May we never see th
Oy, vat a kidda!
am i the only one terrifeied by the phrase "chairman powell" ?
The airwaves could still belong to the people. AM/FM, ClearChannel, et al do not start stations, they buy them. Anyone who can prove that a channel is still free to use can and will quite easily get a license.
The problem is that some of the old independents started to use research and play to the lowest common denominator. And people actualy liked it, so more followed and soon the people that knew how to play this game best bought more stations. And more people tuned in. And more independents decided to cash in and sell to these compnaies. The people sold out.
If people didn't like that kind of radio, they wouldn't have tuned in in the first place and not created this market.
All the FCC has tried to do is _limit_ this practice with anti monopoly laws, their rules certainly didn't create it.
Sure, its an anti-mac troll, but it makes the excellent point that communicating with people like Mr. Powell shouldn't be something that can be taken away. I believe, now that this forum has been opened, he is obligated to read every comment and take each one seriously, without regard for personal insults such as "NOOB!".
It wasn't already? /me ducks
" Already some pointless jabber about the FCC's "indecency" issues have popped up"
Colin Powell Jr. strikes righht at the heart of a free society with his railings against free speech, and you deem it "pointless".
Maybe the real indecency in this world is that people are trading away freedoms of speech, fair use, and other assorted liberties that our forefathers took for granted simply because we want new and shiny TV's.
-Peace
So I'll just post my comment to Mr. Powell's blog here:
Dear Mr. Powell:
Like many Americans, I take great exception to your recent punishment of broadcasters like Howard Stern. I don't care for his show at all, but I'm rather more apalled at the idea of a bureaucracy deciding what anyone may or may not say on the air, than any of Mr. Stern's infantile, scatalogical utterances.
Your commission has vastly outlived its usefulness. Why don't you get a real job?
John Randolph,
Cupertino, California
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'd think someone as high-profile as the chairman of the FCC could, oh, maybe beg? maybe pay? to get the golf advertisment removed from the middle of his blog post. Oh, wait, this is the FCC here, no? Never mind. ;)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Mood=Censory. I got a new CD this weeked, all of the bad words hurt my ears! And no, not even I know what the broadcast flag is for! :P
I hate sigs.
Michael Powell has never met a monopoly he didn't like and never misses an opportunity to REGALate the incumbents.
People bitch about the FCC's "indecency" rulings because they are CRAP.
It's ok to have a human ripped to pieces under a bus and have her arm come off and shatter the windshield of a passing car (CSI this week) but a breast will get you fined.
It seams to me one is worse than the other.
this is just a move by the fcc to "relate to the public"
specifically the internet community, the ones who protest against the broadcast flag the most, think he's gonna listen to you? no.
Think he thinks you'll listen to him? yes.
Pretty much doing this to "make us understand and accept" the broadcast flag more than likely.
The first blog post is pretty much about the FCC itself, so he's prolly trying to get people to see the fcc as a buncha good guys who are trying to protect people from themselves and any questionable material that may make them question their corporate overlords and the government, and to ensure that we pay our dues to them as well.
I might sound paranoid, but just looking at the first post, it's gona be nothing but a propaganda blog to try to make those who read it go with what the fcc wants to do.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
You already have those rights. Turn the fucking TV or radio off, or, change the channel.
Please, don't encourage the government to "protect the children".
So here are some handy quotes for him to use.
"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
-Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."
-Joseph Goebbels - Nazi Minister of Propaganda
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
-Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Adding more unlicensed spectrum would potentially allow for more than three non-overlapping channels (1,6,11) in 802.11b/g. Having a few more ISM bands could be VERY useful.
For someone who will be moving on shortly after the next election. Should have tried this four years ago (although the suggestions would've still fallen on deaf ears).
Chairman Powell has done more to undermine democracy in the United States than any other Bush-appointee this term. Michael proves that "for sale to the highest bidder" is the motto of American government. He is the epitomy of corruption.
I guess you can attribute that perceived confusion to two reasons.:
Many terms lose their meaning over time, or take a new meaning altogether. This is most often seen in Corporate Marketing speak, and in Politics. Someone will use a catchy term to mean a new thing they are trying to push (for economic or political gain). Think about "user friendly" for instance, or "N-Tier" in the marketing of IT. In politics, linguistics is also used this way, as Chomsky and others pointed out. Terms lost meaning over time or come to mean something else.
Think about what "convergence" was about. When two things eventually become the same by merging features from both. For example, the IP protocol used to be a data only packet protocol. Voice used to be on switched circuits only. Now this is all converging with VoIP and such. The same could be underway in journalism and opinion columns with blogs being a merged form of what we now use for blogs and what op-eds are.
So, it may not be confusion after all. It could be evolution as well.
Just a thought.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
meritocracy-based communication -- attributes that bloggers are famous for!'
I accidentally read "mediocrity-based communication". Sounds about right for most blogs (with a few notable exceptions).
..but where in the hell is the blog?
This sig no verb.
Did you just call Powell God? Seriously? Well then, yes, you are a zealot.
If Chairman Powell is open to blogging, maybe he's open to the old Slashdot 10-Question interview? We've already had an FCC chief technologist, why not they guy who runs it all? He says he wants to hear from the tech community...
Powell is blogging on Karl Rove's orders. They think Dean got popular for blogging, so they're getting people to blog. Bush himself reportedly used to like email (where people don't expect grammar or spelling), until he was told that copies of the messages are recorded, but that won't be in the news, for fear of turning off the illiterate masses he prefers as his base. Powell's blog, like so many election year BushCo public actions, is a thin veil of mainstream to cover their radically alien culture, unrecognizable in its unfiltered form to well-adjusted Americans. And of course flies in the face of the spirit of the actual laws, policies, and actions on which they work overtime the other 99% of the time. With Powell, we're talking censorship, supression, and corporate media handouts. Don't get fooled by a (probably ghost-written) blog from the master of the mediacracy.
--
make install -not war
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/40341000/rm/_403 41727_song20_willcox_vi.ram
For those of you who don't have or want to install Real Media on your systems this is a BBC news clip that shows Colin Powell dressed up as the construction worker from the Village People performing a skit at the ASEAN meeting in Indonesia. Yes, there's nothing like dressing up as a gay icon in a nation threatened by radical Islamic fundamentalism and performing a song sung to the tune of another song that is about the joys of anonymous gay sex in public showers.
Michael is even more of a fuckup than his dad, I have to wonder if the only reason that Colin Powell has become such an ass-licker is to make sure that Michael doesn't get fired from his job at the FCC and end up having to move back in with mom and dad.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Slashdot has an alexa page rank of 1,270, while howardstern.com has a page rank of 5,889. And that only counts IE users...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
-----------------
Mr. Powell, welcome to blogging, and as one respondent noted, "Welcome to Hell".
I wanted to post my comments regarding FCC regulation, digital TV (and associated DRM measures), and indecency - if for nothing else than to establish my position with you and with the community on where I stand on these issues. If you note, they fall very much in line with what others have written here.
I am a "tech savvy" (actually, that is an understatement) citizen of this country. I am also a voter.
Regarding regulation, I understand that for the public airwaves, there must be some form of regulation, otherwise, in the end, the airwaves would be filled with nothing but static, as station after station stomped the commons with overlapping broadcasts. Whether it is TV or radio, the result would be the same; an unlistenable (or unwatchable) morass of grey static.
However, the current situation and regulations make it impossible for a truely free market to exist. Current licensing fees and regulations make it impossible to easily and cheaply set up low power FM radio stations (even in markets where such stations could be set up without interference). This has left commercial radio (like ClearChannel) the only choice in most markets, which isn't a choice at all. National Public Radio (NPR) also struggles with these regulations.
The situation with television is even worse. While startup costs have always been a limiting factor for small (independent) television stations, those costs
have dropped rapidly in recent years, allowing the possibility for someone to broadcast a TV station from their home. However, licensing costs, fees,
paperwork, and other FCC regulation issues have made it impossible for such services to become available.
In a way, cable TV was an attempt to get around this issue, and in some ways, it has succeeded. By confining the "airwaves" to a coax broadcast medium, and utilizing a different spectrum for broadcasting, many more channels could be delivered to the consumer's door. This availability of channels has spawned the concept of "niche" channels - it seems now if there is an interest, there is a channel (or two, or more) for it. The content for these channels is created by privately owned companies (and the networks) who sell through distribution channels to the cable broadcasters. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is what we have.
The internet is rapidly changing all of this. The internet was originally developed as a "network of ends", where everything connected to this network was "smart", but the network itself remained "stupid" - its only job to shuffle around the packets of information via openly developed and published protocols. Such a network is inherently robust by its nature and structure.
A network of "smart" endpoints means that anyone can become (in concept) a broadcaster. I, or anyone else, can for instance, build a server (serving web pages or anything else), and put it on the internet, and others can find it and read (and/or download) information off of it. It is a different way of distributing information: Instead of the "push" model of traditional broadcasting, the internet is based on the "pull" model, where those that want information must seek it out and request it from the servers. This model has proved itself to be very popular. Content "pushing" has been tried for the internet, but the popularity of such implementations bombed very quickly. The population of the internet has spoken, "pulled" content is what we want.
Consumers have long requested this model for television: Pay-Per-View programming is
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The people who run always-on are obsessed with the idea of 'blogs' just about as much as they are with money. Really quite stupid, and it's disappointing that people with so little sense could have much money. These are the people who caused the dot com bomb. There was a guy on there a while ago advising people not to buy google, because he wanted to, and everything he ever invested in lost tons of money...
Kind of entertaining, and it's not surprising they'd have Michael Powel on there.
But yeah, these people think everything they do is blogging or something.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The FCC tried to unilaterally ease ownership rules, meaning large media companies could get larger. This met with quite a bit of resistance, culminating in Trent Lot touting a MoveOn.org petition, if you can believe that. Powell came up with some idiotic justification like "Well, if the ACLU and the NRA oppose it, how can it be partisan?". Of course, it wasn't partisan, just bad. Bush Supported Powell, but the republican controlled congress attached a zero-funding measure to a huge spending bill, which would have been difficult for bush to veto.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Best. Username. Ever.
Similarly to how I view Microsoft's channel 9. It is interesting. I check it now and then, but it is largely propoganda.
Word to yo mutha: this isn't trolling. Trolling is when I tell you to suck a lemon and make disparaging comments about how your mother is a) fat b) ugly c) a democrat.
clifgriffin > blog
I have a late night radio show in a rural California county, and I play that song and Freedom of Speech, by Ice T, and also Message from our Sponsor sung by Jello Biafra off of the Terminal City Ricochet soundtrack CD.
Several other programmers play them as well.
We are doing what we can to fight through civil disobedience, the continued eroding of the freedoms in the United States.
Our program director has stated that the now former "safe harbor" still stands at our radio station, and we late nighters can play what ever the FUCK we want to.
At this point in history, my friends and I risk arrest and hefty fines for merely excersizing our now former freedom of speech.
What are YOU doing to stop this insane erosion of our personal rights?
Please consider taking some kind of personal action to help reverse this madness.
Any worse than Chairman Bush ???
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Basically, it's a place for people who still think that venture capital is relevant to creating new and important technology and investing in the 12th or 15th startup in a given niche capable of supporting a company or two still matters.
It's reasonable to hang out there if you are working for a VC... or someone trying to start a company that's looking for VC money that matches the latest buzzwords the VC herd is listening to. Or to put it differently, Always-on is designed for suits and suit-wannabes.
I still drop in there from time to time, more out of perverse curiosity than anything else.
I'm not sure if Powell is there because he thinks the way to get to the high-tech community is through a VC-oriented publication or he's there because he's simply out of touch. If he wants to run into real high-tech types instead of suits who might have had it once upon a time... he'd be here, say, by contacting slashdot and asking about doing an interview.
What annoys me is that if I'd had the energy to react immediately when I found out about this from the always-on mailing list, I didn't go after him (plenty of issues... broadcast flag, concentration of ownership... the Janet Jackson tit idiocy... the fact that the FCC still takes broadband over power line seriously) while I still could have gotten in one of the first posts...
Tech Public Policy stuff
You directed your comment theoretically at Powell. After a quick analysis I concluded it would not work, meaning it would score no points for your side, and utterly failed to present your opinion as that of a reasoning being.
It's an expression of an opinion.
Freely expressed, and worth every penny, BTW. I love how people who get huffy about expressing their opinion can't handle it when someone expresses an opposing opinion.
I dinged you for calling Stern infantile, and then making an infantile comment ("get a real job") yourself. Your comment was hypocritical and utterly useless, and I thanked you for not actually sending it to Powell's site.
You know, the sort of thing his bureacracy is trying to suppress.
Oooo! You're just the big brave freedom fighter, aren't you?
--- Ban humanity.
I'm as against the broadcast flag as the next slashdotter, but isn't it mandated by legislation? Are you really suggesting that a bureaucrat should have the ability to override the law by fiat?
Or am I confused on this one?
-Peter