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Cartoon Network CEO Resigns Over Aqua Teen Scare
DesertBlade writes "Jim Samples, CEO of Cartoon Network, has resigned over the bomb scare prompted by the Aqua Teen marketing campaign. Turner (CN's parent company) ended up paying over 2 million in restitution to the city of Boston, and a man with a thirteen year record at the company has lost his job. Though many people have been citing this as 'the ultimate successful advertising campaign', there have obviously been real consequences from the incident." By virtue of the consequences of the campaign, was this now officially a bad idea? Or is your opinion that this is all far too much knee-jerking? Have your say in the comments.
Sorry, but your post mentioned the buck at the top of the list and September 11th, and I can't help but draw any subtle lines between the head of the corp and the head of the state...
Anyways, I'm glad he took the fall for it, as he most likely has savings as opposed to the young guys who actually put up signs. Another sacrifice is made to the new State of paranoia.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Not only Boston overreacting, but now the network itself? Where are the people willing to stand up for sanity? It's truly a sad day...
That's a rather benign interpretation. Add a dash of cynicism, a sprinkling of conspiracy theroism and a few tinfoil hats as a garnish and you could easily conclude that the excessive terrorism threats are a way to scare populations into submitting to government control. I think High Chancellor Suttler said it best in the movie V for Vendetta:
"What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television. This message must resound throughout the entire Interlink. I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want every man woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos! I want everyone to remember why they need us!"
Everyone should see that movie, and then take a good, hard look around them.
I hate printers.
I posted a similar reply to a different post earlier, but the difference is in Boston a few of the the second round of the litebrites were put on critical infrastructure--including *underneath* both the BU and Longfellow bridges (the latter of which turned out to be something coincidentally reported and not related to ATHF) and more seriously at the bus stop at the Sullivan Square T station 20ft up on the the main pillar supporting the elevated I-93 right above it...an obvious target if you wanted to kill people stuck in traffic and cause major transportation disruption.
I'm reasonably sure NYPD would have freaked out if one was reported as an unknown electronic device on the (distinctly longer) GW or Brooklyn bridges. None in NYC were in subway stations or critical infra--the most concerning was on a highway onramp.
And, most importantly, LEDs are freaking scary! Boo!
Part of the problem is that the marketing company's lite-brite boxes were unprofessionally made. There are wires and batteries hanging out the side; it has that look and feel of "bombs" you see in movies (like the ones with the stupid "I'll let you know when I'm going to blow up" 7-segment LED display countdown)... and if bombs look like that in movies, then they *must* look like that in real life, right? If they had just made their little LED boxes to have the same size, shape, color, etc. of the other normal traffic signs/signals, that is do a professional job, then at worst people would have just thought that someone had hacked an existing sign (it's not like most people can precisely remember the exact number of signs/signals at every bridge, overpass, etc. they drive past on the way to work).
/.; I should perhaps have said average or typical middle schoolers).
Those signs totally look like some crap that some middle schoolers would throw together at the last minute for a "science" project (no offense intended to you middle schoolers out there who read
I for one find it highly disturbing that the things were in place for days before the were "discovered". If it had been a real bomb they would have gone off without anybody noticing.
evil is as evil does
As much as I hate Boston, they don't deserve full credit for the epic level of pork-barreling that went on with the bog Dig. That went through all sorts of state and Federal politics as well. It's also not fair to call them 'incompetent", most of them are very competent, very intelligent people who get a lot done... the problem is that their job isn't to responsibly run the city of Boston, it's to make themselves as wealthy as possible in the shortest amount of time, at taxpayer expense if at all possible. That said, you forgot to mention a couple of other events in Boston's "illustrious" history. First, there's Shay's Rebellion, a local uprising from my neck of the woods (Pittsfield-Amherst-Springfield area) that many historians cite as one of the major motives behind the U.S. Constitution (prior to that, the same function was served by the Articles of Confederacy); a bunch of Revolutionary War veterans and farmers armed themselves and captured an armory in an attempt to overthrow the government, before being slaughtered by mercenaries hired by the Boston plutocrats who were simultaneously collecting exorbitant rent and arbitrarily raising taxes in order to pay themselves higher salaries. They were, in effect, running half of the Commonwealth's area as an enormous sharecropping plantation, raping Western Massachusetts for all it was worth in order to keep Boston, where they all spent most of their time, well funded and to expand the industrial efforts that were beginning in the Central and Northeastern parts of the state (Worcester-Lowell). You also forgot to mention the Quabbin Reservoir: four small towns in the Swift River Valley were forcibly depopulated, the people who lived there paid a fraction of the value of their land and left to find new homes, and then the valley was flooded and a subterranean aqueduct nearly 25 miles long was dug just to bring water to the SECOND largest reservoir in the Commonwealth. The homes and livelihoods of the people living in the area were deemed to be worth less than providing Boston, which had long ago completely depleted its own natural resources, with more water to waste. Oh, and boy am I glad that my taxes mostly go to funding unnecessary local projects in Boston, despite that I don't spend any time there, I live closer to the capitals of two other states, and the towns around here are all starved for funding because well over half of all available state aid goes to just one Metropolitan area. People wonder why I get angry when I tell them I live in Massachusetts, and they ask "near Boston?"
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I think you might be too harsh on the bomb squad here. While i don't have an attribution, one of the articles in the middle of that day on cnn had a quote from a random citizen who said something like "Well, earlier I saw on TV a bomb squad guy holding it in his bare hands and just walking along with [the device] so I knew it couldn't be TOO bad ".
What the actual bomb squad guys thought / knew and what the managers and politicians decided to do with the information, those are different things.
That's the part about this that pisses me off the most. Okay, sure, the Lite-Brights are out of the ordinary (at least for being hung up about the city). I can even see how such a device could be seen as a threat to some self important official with a stick up his ass, and would not entirely blame them for doing something about it. The fact that they went completely over the top with this and started trying to prosecute people is not understandable. Why is it so hard for them to admit they were wrong? If they had just said "Oops, yeah, these things are pretty harmless. We apologize for the scare." there would be no problems and no media circus.
I don't quite remember where they were all placed but even if they were placed around an airport, I still personally think it's an overreaction simply on technical grounds. Given the size of the devices, they would have to be attached to a plane or be within several dozen feet to cause any noteworthy damage, even if they were pure C4. Since none of them were placed on airport grounds, they posed absolutely no threat to aircraft.
Q. Is it forseeable that pouring boiling water on a person will cause burns.
A. Yes
Q. Is it forseeable that pouring boiling water on a person will cause an earthquake in Uganda.
A. No.
Q. Is it forseeable that a lite-brite advertisement placed w/o permission will get taken down and a fine sent to the party who put it up w/o permission?
A. Yes
Q. Is it forseeable that a lite-brite advertisement placed w/o permission will cause an entire city to "duck and cover".
A. No
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Oh, given that they had already found two fake pipe bombs, which no one here on Slashdot seems to know about (http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.b g?articleid=180349), the paranoia of the Boston authorities seems more understandable. It's also a really good idea sometimes to give your staff practice treating a small emergency as a real one, so that when they have the real one they're familiar with the procedures.
I'd much rather the Boston police take it seriously, and be wrong, than take it casually and be wrong.
It only looks like an LED cartoon character if you're actually familiar with the character.
;)
I'd say it would be pretty familiar to anyone who'd ever played "space invaders" too. (ie pretty much anyone under 40.)
Otherwise it just looks like a panel of randomly placed LEDs.
If by "random" you mean "a clear image of something giving you the finger" I suppose so.
I believe the people who mistakenly thought it could be a bomb did so with the most earnest of intentions.
True but we don't really have much use for people who report things that aren't bombs. How many innocent cardboard boxes, guitar cases, gymbags, abandoned Dells, old speakers, and other nondescript "potentially suspicious looking" debris is lying around Boston? They could shut the city down for an entire decade with earnest intentions.
People should know better. When I see a plane flying low I still assume its landing, not attacking the city...
I can understand how this got out of hand but it'll happen again. Around here Telus is putting up pink flamingos all around the city as part of its latest campaign... they're hollow and in public places and they weren't there yesterday... could be a bomb in there.
Seriously if the 'terrorists' were planting bombs everyone they'd make them look like run of the mill every day items like transformer boxes... hmm... wait... i saw a transformer box on one of the support columns in my parkade... i don't remember that being there before... excuse me...
By that reasoning, any really good, well developed, high traffic position to place an add is a fantastic position to place an explosive device.
So the CN is responsible because there _could_ have been a bomb. This reminds me of the guy on the British subway who was gunned down because he _could_ have had a bomb, since his jacket was a little bulky, and he was running for the train. I'm believe both cases came about through fundamentally flawed reason and response, not to mention unreasonable levels of fear.
The reason this is all a HUGE problem, is that it sets a terrifying precedent for the way people think and act; Look over your shoulder all the time, and point the finger at anyone/thing that freaks you out. It can be summed up as, "Cry 'Wolf!' as often as possible.". This idea fundamentally opposes rational thought, and the very principles of "Innocent until proven guilty." are only a little further down this slippery slope.
This level of paranoia cannot be condoned as "reasonable" or "acceptable". It intrudes on the most basic principles of freedom and liberty. Or, to close with my favorite Ben Franklin quote:
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.