Just to be clear we, at Tech news Today have posted a counter-notice and YouTube requires our show to stay off YouTube for 10 days to give UMG the opportunity to decide whether to take us to court or not. We also did not submit this story to Slashdot.
I'll add a little perspective on the actual buyout. In 2003, Paul Allen decided he no longer wanted to play with TechTV and decided to sell it. At that time the network was in the red and was starting to stagnate in the number of homes it was in at around 40 million. They needed to improve programming and get into mor ehomes, but as an independent channel they couldn't get into more homes without leverage. So Paul wanted to get some money back and the execs wanted a partner that could help get them into more homes. To improve the programming they hired Greg Brannan, former Programming Director at E! Entertinment Television.
It took a year (and some) to finally find buyers. In that time, the programming began to get better ratings. The INternational arm of the channel was profitable. The Web arm of the company was breaking even and the TV arm of the company looked to get into the black within a year if all went well.
However, the sale privce of the company was still based on the prospectus issued by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures over a year ago. Fox, Universal, EchoStar, Sony and Comcast all expressed interest. At one point it was rumoured that Sony was a go and would buy the channel in order to take advantage of the control room's ability to launch other channels. However the deal did not get done and Comcast eventually won out. They got the network at a very afordable price.
Comcast handed the property to G4 for evaluation and eventual merger. G4's CEO brought a team of G4 execs to San Francisco to meet and discuss integration. Greg Brannan proposed several schedules that involved taking the best of TechTV and G4 and creating one network. The recommendation was to keep the TechTV brand because of its successes so far that G4 did not have.
On the web side of things we recommended keeping techtv.com and its 2 million plus monthly uniques. We would create show sites there for any G4 shows and integrate them into the TechTV.com infrastructure. Our engineers recommended keeping the co-lo and Sun servers as G4 only had two or so Windows boxes to run their site which had monthly uniques in the hundreds of thousands at the time.
G4 left with all our feedback and cam eback with the decision that they would offer 100 or so people of the around 300 at TechTV jobs in LA. The Screen Savers, X-Play and Unscerwed with Martin Sargent would continue as originally produced shows. A couple of acquired shows liek Invent This and Anime Unleashed would go on as well. However the schedule would remain largely G4 shows. The website would be G4TV.com and run out of LA and work off the existing servers plus some added capacity. The Web staff would be cut from around 40 people at TechTV to 17, including 4 or 5 existing G4 employees. Of the entire TechTV Web staff, one graphic designer from TechTV moved to LA. Overall around 80 TechTV staff took jobs at G4.
Within one month the Web traffic was cut in half. Within a few months, Unscrewed was canceled and many TechTV folks were laid off. Within 6 months G4 dropped TechTV from the name and changed The Screen Savers to Attack of The Show. The CEO of G4 eventually left the network and a new staff has taken over and tried to move the network to a more mainstream male audience, hence the star trek and man show.
It was not a happy time for TechTV staffers by any stretch, but some good TechTV folks still work at G4.
-Tom Merritt, former executive producer, techtv.com
Recent research points to the idea that emotions are essential to all decision-making. when part of the preformtal cortex responsible for processing emotions is damaged, patiens can become incapable of making decisions.
"Antonio Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making. Damasio presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. His research on patients with frontal lobe damage indicates that feelings normally accompany response options and operate as a biasing device to dictate choice. "
Steve Baker is a smart guy but he conveniently leaves out a crucial point. The retailers do want the rebates because they goose sales up if people think they are getting a 'deal.' But the rebate collection is almost always farmed out to a vendor. That vendor has a vested interest in making it as complicated as possible to get the rebate. The retailers are paying them a fee and they have to make good the rebates out of that fee. The fewer rebates they have to fulfill the more money they make. They can even still fulfill *most* of the rebates and make money as long as a nice hefty chunk never come through.
More than limiting to pay based on CD/DVD burning it avoids the whole problem here.
Music has gone from being open and free to anyone who can hear it (Leading to performance-based charging) to Becoming a product that you purchase and have unlimited rights to play (unless you're playing it in public for a large crowd) to A product that is as free and accessible as simply performing.
Until everyone wraps their head around the fact that you can't apply a product-based mentality to digital music nobody will get anywhwre.
What I like about this proposal is that it at least identifies performance as the issue. But trying to charge people based on the performance of their digital music is as ridiculous as tryiong to charge them for every time they play a record.
An entirely new system needs to be created. One that gives up on treating MP3's as products.
Take it for granted that any piece of music can be perfectly copied and distributed at freely. Now build your model on that. Don't try to change the behaviour with law, it won't work.
Perhaps charging at the point of distribution is the key. You give up on charging people for copies and only charge people who value getting it first. That's how Cable/Satellite makes money off of pay per view movies. I can wait and see/tivo the movie when it comes on HBO, but sometimes I pay to see it earlier.
In this model you have record companies who charge for people to download the song/album when it's released. They charge a suitable amount to recoup expenses and profit and then just give up on enforcing anything but normal performance rights after that.
He did an interview in the hotel room beforehand and talks about his attitude towards the charges and what he did. Then there's some video of him with the fed at Starbuck's that doesn't have any inofrmational value but is interesting from a documentary standpoint.
Seems like Lamo's willig to pay for his crime as long as he agrees that he's being accused of something he consciously did.
There's video on the page now of some of the cast of the show along with Lowell Cunningham (creator of the Men in Black comics) trying out the controller.
Another oddity in this review was that the things that went well with the platform usually only barely deserved mention. His evaluation model had Airport built-in, and the iBook pretty much is the ideal wireless notebook.
Actually his iBook model did not have airport built in. And there are plenty of good 'instant wake' PCs. I agree with your cirticisms of his critiques but I don't think he left out any positives. It was pretty balanced in my humble opinion.
Yeah I know what his point was but I just disagree. I think it's superior operation and security are much more important in inspiring consumer confidence than whether it's splash logo looks good.
I will concede that some enterprise manager's might judge the book by it's cover and that might keep it from being accepted but I thihnk the logo is a pretty small priority.
In fact there have been some pretty successful programs that had more ridiculous logos like spinning E's and talking paper clips.
Perhaps I am just dull but explain why a fire-breathing dragon is socially inappropriate. Is it racist? No. Is it sexist? No. Is it juvenile? Possibly but I don't think so. Are you saying that when button-down boring business types load it it will offend their chrome and cherrywood sensibilities and start the painful process of creative thinking?
It is obviously not too socially inappropiate. Although the Swiss Tax Office is widely known as a freewheeling socially inappropriate hotbed of frivolity.
I agree it's a temporary problem but I differ in how it will dissolve.
I think watching how Sony manages this deal will indicate somewhat reliably how the whole issue will play out in general. At Sony you have a microcsm of the the whole issue but it's contained within the corporate structure which will force the issue to get resolved much faster than in the public where governments and their ignorant (non-pejorative use there, just a fact) representatives slow things down while they try to understand what the hell is going on.
BOTH sides of the business are profitable and Sony will want to maximise them both, so you'll see them figure out how to deal with the localisation of media production into small hands and the ease of copying of digital media. They may do it stupidly but that's sort of what I expect from the public battle as well.
This difference points to a belief I've held for a long time. Cloning is nothing to worry about
The idea that genetics determines everything is simplistically appealing. It also ignores most of modern biological science. Genetics just doesn't work the way the average Fox News viewer thinks it does.
Here are my main tenets why you shouldn't fear cloning any more than any other form of reproductive assistance.
1. Proteomics (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteomics) Humans have about 30,000 genes but over 200,000 proteins encoded by those genes. Proteins are what carry out the life processes. Proteomics is extremely complicated and it's effects and actions change depending on the part of the body and the stage of life.
2. Complex Systems - Now that we've got over the genetic determination bias, we have to deal with the incredibly complex interactions of proteins. We're just beginning to understand proteomics, but it's likely that random or at least stochastic variation plays a large role in how the genes build you and me. Studies of complex systems indicate that small fluctuations can have big changes and big fluctuations can have small changes. This gives me the belief (not knowledge mind you, but belief) that cloning will end up with a very similar individual that still remains unique.
3. Tendency Away from Extremes. I've noticed over time that the things society in general gets all worked up about generally turn out to be much less of a problem or as extreme than was expected or feared. While this is not a proof of anything (look at Hitler who ended up the opposite) it general holds true. Killer bees did not wipe out Texas, and the Internet did not save the world, at least as fast as it was supposed to.
Cloning will have it's controversies but after the first few clones have grown up (and Raelians or not, people will be cloned) we'll realize that they're no more a threat or abomination than twins, and possibly less interesting.
The fear over cloning is another example of what happens when people take half-truths and try for the simple explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear we, at Tech news Today have posted a counter-notice and YouTube requires our show to stay off YouTube for 10 days to give UMG the opportunity to decide whether to take us to court or not. We also did not submit this story to Slashdot.
I'll add a little perspective on the actual buyout. In 2003, Paul Allen decided he no longer wanted to play with TechTV and decided to sell it. At that time the network was in the red and was starting to stagnate in the number of homes it was in at around 40 million. They needed to improve programming and get into mor ehomes, but as an independent channel they couldn't get into more homes without leverage. So Paul wanted to get some money back and the execs wanted a partner that could help get them into more homes. To improve the programming they hired Greg Brannan, former Programming Director at E! Entertinment Television.
It took a year (and some) to finally find buyers. In that time, the programming began to get better ratings. The INternational arm of the channel was profitable. The Web arm of the company was breaking even and the TV arm of the company looked to get into the black within a year if all went well.
However, the sale privce of the company was still based on the prospectus issued by Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures over a year ago. Fox, Universal, EchoStar, Sony and Comcast all expressed interest. At one point it was rumoured that Sony was a go and would buy the channel in order to take advantage of the control room's ability to launch other channels. However the deal did not get done and Comcast eventually won out. They got the network at a very afordable price.
Comcast handed the property to G4 for evaluation and eventual merger. G4's CEO brought a team of G4 execs to San Francisco to meet and discuss integration. Greg Brannan proposed several schedules that involved taking the best of TechTV and G4 and creating one network. The recommendation was to keep the TechTV brand because of its successes so far that G4 did not have.
On the web side of things we recommended keeping techtv.com and its 2 million plus monthly uniques. We would create show sites there for any G4 shows and integrate them into the TechTV.com infrastructure. Our engineers recommended keeping the co-lo and Sun servers as G4 only had two or so Windows boxes to run their site which had monthly uniques in the hundreds of thousands at the time.
G4 left with all our feedback and cam eback with the decision that they would offer 100 or so people of the around 300 at TechTV jobs in LA. The Screen Savers, X-Play and Unscerwed with Martin Sargent would continue as originally produced shows. A couple of acquired shows liek Invent This and Anime Unleashed would go on as well. However the schedule would remain largely G4 shows. The website would be G4TV.com and run out of LA and work off the existing servers plus some added capacity. The Web staff would be cut from around 40 people at TechTV to 17, including 4 or 5 existing G4 employees. Of the entire TechTV Web staff, one graphic designer from TechTV moved to LA. Overall around 80 TechTV staff took jobs at G4.
Within one month the Web traffic was cut in half. Within a few months, Unscrewed was canceled and many TechTV folks were laid off. Within 6 months G4 dropped TechTV from the name and changed The Screen Savers to Attack of The Show. The CEO of G4 eventually left the network and a new staff has taken over and tried to move the network to a more mainstream male audience, hence the star trek and man show.
It was not a happy time for TechTV staffers by any stretch, but some good TechTV folks still work at G4.
-Tom Merritt, former executive producer, techtv.com
Recent research points to the idea that emotions are essential to all decision-making. when part of the preformtal cortex responsible for processing emotions is damaged, patiens can become incapable of making decisions.
c is.html
"Antonio Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making. Damasio presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. His research on patients with frontal lobe damage indicates that feelings normally accompany response options and operate as a biasing device to dictate choice. "
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Emot.De
Steve Baker is a smart guy but he conveniently leaves out a crucial point. The retailers do want the rebates because they goose sales up if people think they are getting a 'deal.' But the rebate collection is almost always farmed out to a vendor. That vendor has a vested interest in making it as complicated as possible to get the rebate. The retailers are paying them a fee and they have to make good the rebates out of that fee. The fewer rebates they have to fulfill the more money they make. They can even still fulfill *most* of the rebates and make money as long as a nice hefty chunk never come through.
I mirrored it here.
I for one, will not miss their extremely bulky code. Yikes!
More than limiting to pay based on CD/DVD burning it avoids the whole problem here.
Music has gone from being open and free to anyone who can hear it (Leading to performance-based charging) to Becoming a product that you purchase and have unlimited rights to play (unless you're playing it in public for a large crowd) to A product that is as free and accessible as simply performing.
Until everyone wraps their head around the fact that you can't apply a product-based mentality to digital music nobody will get anywhwre.
What I like about this proposal is that it at least identifies performance as the issue. But trying to charge people based on the performance of their digital music is as ridiculous as tryiong to charge them for every time they play a record.
An entirely new system needs to be created. One that gives up on treating MP3's as products.
Take it for granted that any piece of music can be perfectly copied and distributed at freely. Now build your model on that. Don't try to change the behaviour with law, it won't work.
Perhaps charging at the point of distribution is the key. You give up on charging people for copies and only charge people who value getting it first. That's how Cable/Satellite makes money off of pay per view movies. I can wait and see/tivo the movie when it comes on HBO, but sometimes I pay to see it earlier.
In this model you have record companies who charge for people to download the song/album when it's released. They charge a suitable amount to recoup expenses and profit and then just give up on enforcing anything but normal performance rights after that.
TechTV has video of Lamo before his arrest
w .techtv.com/screensavers/story/0,24330,3520394,00. html
http://www.techtv.com/chkpt/240hp091003/http://ww
He did an interview in the hotel room beforehand and talks about his attitude towards the charges and what he did. Then there's some video of him with the fed at Starbuck's that doesn't have any inofrmational value but is interesting from a documentary standpoint.
Seems like Lamo's willig to pay for his crime as long as he agrees that he's being accused of something he consciously did.
There's video on the page now of some of the cast of the show along with Lowell Cunningham (creator of the Men in Black comics) trying out the controller.
"It stings," says Leo Laporte.
Windows Media Slayer Only.
Actually his iBook model did not have airport built in. And there are plenty of good 'instant wake' PCs. I agree with your cirticisms of his critiques but I don't think he left out any positives. It was pretty balanced in my humble opinion.
I will concede that some enterprise manager's might judge the book by it's cover and that might keep it from being accepted but I thihnk the logo is a pretty small priority.
In fact there have been some pretty successful programs that had more ridiculous logos like spinning E's and talking paper clips.
It is obviously not too socially inappropiate. Although the Swiss Tax Office is widely known as a freewheeling socially inappropriate hotbed of frivolity.
I agree it's a temporary problem but I differ in how it will dissolve.
I think watching how Sony manages this deal will indicate somewhat reliably how the whole issue will play out in general. At Sony you have a microcsm of the the whole issue but it's contained within the corporate structure which will force the issue to get resolved much faster than in the public where governments and their ignorant (non-pejorative use there, just a fact) representatives slow things down while they try to understand what the hell is going on.
BOTH sides of the business are profitable and Sony will want to maximise them both, so you'll see them figure out how to deal with the localisation of media production into small hands and the ease of copying of digital media. They may do it stupidly but that's sort of what I expect from the public battle as well.
This difference points to a belief I've held for a long time. Cloning is nothing to worry about
s have about 30,000 genes but over 200,000 proteins encoded by those genes. Proteins are what carry out the life processes. Proteomics is extremely complicated and it's effects and actions change depending on the part of the body and the stage of life.
The idea that genetics determines everything is simplistically appealing. It also ignores most of modern biological science. Genetics just doesn't work the way the average Fox News viewer thinks it does.
Here are my main tenets why you shouldn't fear cloning any more than any other form of reproductive assistance.
1. Proteomics (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteomics)
Human
2. Complex Systems - Now that we've got over the genetic determination bias, we have to deal with the incredibly complex interactions of proteins. We're just beginning to understand proteomics, but it's likely that random or at least stochastic variation plays a large role in how the genes build you and me. Studies of complex systems indicate that small fluctuations can have big changes and big fluctuations can have small changes. This gives me the belief (not knowledge mind you, but belief) that cloning will end up with a very similar individual that still remains unique.
3. Tendency Away from Extremes.
I've noticed over time that the things society in general gets all worked up about generally turn out to be much less of a problem or as extreme than was expected or feared. While this is not a proof of anything (look at Hitler who ended up the opposite) it general holds true. Killer bees did not wipe out Texas, and the Internet did not save the world, at least as fast as it was supposed to.
Cloning will have it's controversies but after the first few clones have grown up (and Raelians or not, people will be cloned) we'll realize that they're no more a threat or abomination than twins, and possibly less interesting.
The fear over cloning is another example of what happens when people take half-truths and try for the simple explanation.