It's the Public Utilities Commissions in 50 US states, sharpening their knives and getting ready to keep their power by finding new ways to apply new regulations to the net. --
First off, I have a Nikon CoolPix 950 and do semi-pro stuff, mostly as an adjunct to web development.
My firm does the website for the Philadelphia Eagles and this year I was invited to spend some time on the sideline during games. Now here's what you do. Open my image, then with a second browser window, open a pro's image.
Both of these images were taken in fairly good afternoon light. Both of them stop the action, at least 1/125sec. Both are web-resolution, I grant you. The pro's image was scanned directly from negative.
Differences? Well, notice how the pro's image has colors that are incredibly washed out. Notice how the pro's image has no depth of field.
Of course, his image is better than mine from a photographer's perspective; hell, I'm a hack. But what does that say about digital photography -- that with a basic understanding of it, a few months of practice, I can produce something that's at least compelling? Note, too that his gear was about $10,000 while mine was the $900 Nikon plus a $150 2x teleconverter. Howzat!
Furthermore, I wasn't the only digital photographer there. Another of the pros had a pro-quality Nikon digital with a 340 Meg IBM hard card.
And furthermore, with the compact flash reader, I could take all of my images and have them web-ready in about an hour. The pro? Well he required a special room in the stadium with another $3000 of equipment.
Lastly, one of the real joys of shooting with a high-res digicam like this is getting to see 1600x1200 shots on a big monitor. It is truly amazing; it takes your breath away in a way that film just doesn't. Go to www.catalystinternet.com/photos, bump your monitor up to full screen, and click on the files that start with "DSCN". Those are the raw files coming straight out of the Nikon CoolPix 950, no cropping, no color correction. (Warning: some of those images are 800K in size. If you only have a slow connection and are male and heterosexual you'll only want to look at DSCN1510.JPG.)
This is the fun of having a digital camera; suddenly photography is a wonder again. Suddenly you want to take tons of shots and look at them one-by-one.
With the 990 coming out any day now, a lot of the folks who want to always have the latest and greatest are going to be selling their 950s in the next few months. Watch the used market and pick up a camera that can do everything.
I don't think this is the case here. When I post on Slashdot, I'm giving permission to Slashdot to publish my post on Slashdot, in the particular forum where I submitted my post to, and nowhere else. Would it be alright if I took your Slashdot articles, bound them into a book, and sold them? I don't think so.
Slashdot. Where we hate intellectual property laws, but when someone takes ONE SENTENCE of our stuff, we scream bloody murder.
I wouldn't buy a MS product, but they have the right idea by putting mini versions of the MS apps right on the thing. It ticked me off thoroughly to learn that Palm's idea of sw add-ons was to push a mountain of shareware at you and say "good luck!" You mean I paid $400 for this Palm Vx and I can't put a simple database on it without schlepping another $24.95 to some nearly anonymous company in West Podunk? (And which West Podunk company should I deal with anyway?)
The next question will be: can I drop Office 2000 off a cliff and just use the mini-versions on "normal" PCs? Maybe then the bloat will settle.
Look, buddy, you might think 70 is way wangin' fast, but frankly we speed daemons are tired of your me-first attitude where you'll stay in that left lane as long as you please. That lane is for passing, not for feeling smug that you can self-righeously put some distance between you and the cell-phone user. It's called the passing lane, so once you've gotten around the blue hairs, get back in the right where you belong so we can get done with the business of doing what the lane is really there for. I know you like to think that your Accord goes as fast as anyone should go, but please, there are some of us out here with real European vehicles who are tired of waiting behind your commute appliance. If you want to go slow, find a school zone, that's what they're there for.
People don't use this enough. The personal toolbar folder accepts folders, so I've created six folders: Daily, Weekly, Occasional, Search, Portals, Clients/Hot.
Everything in those folders is one click and one move away from being activated. Because it's Netscape and not IE, the folders aren't automatically alphabetized, so your muscle memory can learn where everything is.
The Daily contains those things I visit, yes, DAILY. Inside the folders I use horizontal rules to create categories that make sense. This method can bookmark as many as 50 sites that I want to return to on a regular basis.
The rest of the bookmarks, then, becomes a place to stow stuff that I want to remember, but that I won't visit until there's call for it. And that makes sense for usability -- I'll go a step further to find a shopping folder, references folder, HTML and design folder.
The Wawa POS systems (along with PepBoys and a few other big 'uns) are made by SASI, who seemed very dedicated to the Microsoft way of life when I visited there a few years back. One of the big limitations they had back then was lack of two-headed support for dual displays. Ideally you'd want a really nice display for both the customer and the clerk.
Crowbarring all the custom needs of a POS system into a POS (different acronym) operating system is not my idea of fun. I feel sorry for those SASI people. A friend of mine worked there very briefly and he said that it was no picnic there...
(Who moderated *that* up?) Think of the body of manufacturers whose hardware will be automatically installed in hundreds upon thousands of locations with a single sale. It'll keep the vid card people, the bios people, etc. really motivated to keep in good stead with the community.
Personally, I don't think finding a job in IT is at all difficult. That is if you're not looking to do web-design. People like that are a dime a dozen because it's something you can learn by just sitting on your computer all day, picking up on little details of web design.
Harrumph. I'm looking for good web designers [in NW Philly suburbs? Email me], but the vast majority of designers sit around on their computer all day, thinking they are picking up on little details of web design, yet at the end of those days their designs look *very* average.
I've had about 5 people ask me to hire them, but the URLs they give me are FrontPage, Comic Sans, tables with borders, frames without rhyme or reason, etc. etc. These people are picking up HTML, but NOT DESIGN!
I'd rather hire someone out of art school with some understanding of color and typography. The HTML they might be able to pick up. At least they'll know whether what they do looks good or bad.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
...if you have a quality KVM switch? I have the Blackbox switch and it's been perfect so far; pricey, I'll grant you, but anyone who's running multiple servers should have the dough to yak up for one of these, I'll reckon. Plus, this way I can switch between one box running GUI and others running plain old shells, right at the keyboard, just by hitting ctrl followed by the number of the box I want.
BTW, this is a followup to the Ask Slashdot about KVM switches: disregard whatever it ways in there and just buy the Blackbox. A lot of people said the Linksys units were OK, but I had nothing but trouble. Replaced it with the Blackbox and it's all joy. Someone said the Blackbox is a re-badged Cybex (and we don't need no steenking badges), but I couldn't verify which one, so I just bought the Blackbox, and it's sweet.
I understand the importance of lean pages, but I think that Nielsen overemphasizes this too much--this design need will become less important as bandwidth increases.
One problem is that developers think that bandwidth will increase at the rate of Moore's Law, when it has generally taken about twice as long. In terms of consumer modems, these are rough numbers of bits/sec (please criticize my dates) of acceptance by about 25% of the population:
1982: 1200
1986: 2400
1991: 9600
1992: 14400
1996: 28800
1998: 50000 (nobody gets true 56k)
2000: still 50000 baud
If Moore's law were in effect, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, we'd all be at three times T1 speeds by now. And I haven't even gotten into the requirements for the backbones, or compression, or latency. And yes, I know 5% of the audience out there is at highly incredible cable speeds. Meanwhile, outlying areas are going to get nothing better than 144K DSL for years to come.
Here in the US of A, one can buy Guinness in cans or bottles. Since the topic has come up, I thought it would be important to mention that Guinness is the one brew that is better in the can than in the bottle. The can has a widget in the bottom that, to put it in geek terms, "builds the head dynamically". Pop the can, pour into an appropriate vessel, and you get [almost] the same head and cascade as a glass from the tap.
In between all the flaming, we never take the time to really tell CmdrTaco and the rest of the team how we feel about the site. It really is a fine work, and I feel like it has changed my life to be able to come here and get an update on the latest News for Nerds, as well as good discussion of all the stories. So hat's off to all of you.
And hat's off, too, to all the people who have taken the time to post insightful, interesting, informative or funny comments; the site is as much about you, because the net has enabled you to participate as much as the authors of the stories and the editors who select them.
Despite all the whining about the acquisitions, it sounds like CmdrTaco has done the truly noble and honorable thing and guarded the independence that makes the site what it is. I can't tell you how much I respect that, and thank you for doing the right thing, and understanding what the right thing was to do.
And that means that the next 10,000 stories will give us all as much reason to come here as the last 10,000 did.
Has anyone else noticed that the last 10 weeks or so have been pretty poor? Even the What Do You Think? bits have been poor. I have to wonder whether they're so busy with other projects that either they're slipping, or they're saving their "A" material for something more lucrative...
...the truth is, AC's have increasingly made Slashdot's Threads a laughingstock on the Web... many of you would be mortified to know how many people come onto Slashdot to laugh at the nightmare that is Threads.
...None of these [bio-ethicists, geneticists, programmers, brilliant geeks and nerds, educators would dream of posting on Threads, and if they did, Slashdot would have the best technology discussions on the planet.
First, my background, if that's important. In 1983 I started participating in messaging communities. In 1986 I started sysopping them. In 1990 I founded my own multi-line, multi-user, Unix-based BBS. In 1991 I net-enabled it, making it the first public-access internet site in Philly. In 1995 I went to work for an ISP. Last year I founded my own internet development firm to continue to feed my love of communications and technology.
OK. Some people don't like message-based electronic communities; a greater number just don't "get" them. Sometimes those people are not intelligent enough to want to involve themselves in the discussion, but more often there is just some stumbling block of mind-set or interest that prevents them from really engaging in the community.
*Those* are the sorts who will laugh at such communities, and they will laugh at them in accordance with how little they understand them. And simply because someone is a technologist, doesn't mean they'll be interested in the communities.
If there are better technology discussions on the planet, and they're online, don't hold back -- tell us where they are. Frankly, with the evolution of the moderation system, I feel pretty confident that I'm not missing out on important discussions, and that I'm able to skip over all the "crud". Laugh at Threads? I doubt anyone who likes this sort of community will laugh; it's about the best possible way to involve this number of people in online discussion.
To take that a step further, anyone who's reading this -- imagine what/. would be without the community aspects. At this point, as a power browser, I figure I can get most of the news that the site serves up (it is, after all, first found elsewhere, as/. doesn't produce original news content, only original opinion content). It's only the community that adds to the value. In most stories, the messages give us all additional facts, fresh views of the stories, and a community reaction to them. Without the discussion, some folks might be inclined to take ZDNet stories seriously, believe MS-funded benchmarks, etc.
Your reaction to peple dismissing the discussion is most unfortunate and to me, and this is just my opinion, it means that you don't really "get" the online community inherent in all these messages. You know, VA Linux cannot own/., Andover cannot own/., even CmdrTaco cannot own/. because/. is not a single entity -- it's made up of all of us. To a great degree, the extent that we care about it is the extent that we post. If we don't care, and we don't post,/. is nothing. To use a different analogy, CmdrTaco built the building, and found people to decorate the walls, but it's the people that visit it and the activity they engage in there that makes the building what it is.
On the same day, American Airlines announced that they will be removing several rows of coach seats to create more legroom for coach passengers. The changes are supposed to be in place by June.
So not only can you boycott Northwest, you can boycott in comfort.
I also started last August. The one piece of advice I have regards the above post's point. Have enough money so that not only can you cover hidden expenses, but that you can set up for quality rather than for saving money.
Every time I have bought something for the reason that it was cheap, I have regretted it. Got a $100 fax machine from CostCo: unreliable and I lose important faxes. Needed an el-cheapo desktop: wound up DOA and took longer than a quality system would take to be built and shipped. Cared about price in office space: wound up with an unresponsive landlord, no hot water and old carpeting.
(That said, the only cheap thing that I bought which I haven't regretted: the Bizfon 680 phone system, a really great little self-contained PBX for small business. It's awesome!)
Naw, man. I'm the biggest procrastinator in the world, my desk is a rats nest, and there's trash on the floor of my car. But my systems are racked up, everything is on a KVM switch and all wiring is labeled and tie-wrapped and routed.
The reason: well, you pick your battles, and the one battle I don't want to have is the one with the spaghetti in back of a table full of machines. Yesterday the power went out and I had the luxury to relax, knowing that every single system was on a UPS, because all that is planned out. Instead of worrying about getting a maverick box up and running after the outage, I could worry about more important battles.
I even bought a Brother P-Touch and labeled all the boxes with their addresses. The first day I'm on vacation and someone else has to yank one of these boxes, what if they get it wrong?
The anal ones are the people who buy the enclosure racks where all four sides are enclosed, for $500, instead of a cheap aluminum rack for $100 (or used for $50).
Now the next $100,000 question...
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 4
To stay a step ahead of the spooks: can one effectively FRAME someone by copying their writing style and influences?
Back in 1980, the FCC decided (after much pressure from -- of all people -- the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) that there were too many 10 watt stations out there on the noncommercial band. They ruled that these stations had to go to over 100 watts or time-share or simply perish.
(Do I support public broadcasting? Hell no; they have no interest in serving the community, as is supposed to be their charter...)
The FM band has so few frequencies and so much demand that almost no stations on the commercial part of it are not corporately owned. In the last two decades there has been an incredible change in how these stations are owned and operated. They have gone from business to big business. FCC changes in ownership rules allowed corporations to own more stations; the buying spree that followed had stations selling for much more than their worth, especially considering how broadband to the home, wireless 'net, and satellite broadcasting could make traditional radio stations into dinosaurs. All they do is transmit audio, fer chrissakes.
This in turn has led to a yet-greater reduction in the risk-taking that radio is likely to do. If it doesn't have a shot at a four share, it won't get on the air. While the rest of the society was diversifying from wanting 3-5 TV channels to wanting 50 to 200 and more, radio was in effect clamping down on diversity.
This in turn led to a large increase in pirate radio, the operators of which were ready to risk breaking federal law for the love of broadcasting and the love of serving the community through it.
Now that radio is on the edge of being irrelevant, the FCC is once again politically able to permit small broadcasters on the air. But the lesson, the moral of all this, is that government acts politically, not in the interests of the public; and even non-governmental organizations set up to serve the public act politically and work to preserve their own power.
I welcome the diversity of views, sounds, and ideas that will come about through this ruling. It's a little late now that the Internet has supplanted it.
Slashdot Mirror
To a similar point, why d'ya think I can't get through your "Ask Dr. Web" without experiencing a Netscape crash (4.7, Windows)?
--
It's the Public Utilities Commissions in 50 US states, sharpening their knives and getting ready to keep their power by finding new ways to apply new regulations to the net.
--
My firm does the website for the Philadelphia Eagles and this year I was invited to spend some time on the sideline during games. Now here's what you do. Open my image, then with a second browser window, open a pro's image.
Both of these images were taken in fairly good afternoon light. Both of them stop the action, at least 1/125sec. Both are web-resolution, I grant you. The pro's image was scanned directly from negative.
Differences? Well, notice how the pro's image has colors that are incredibly washed out. Notice how the pro's image has no depth of field.
Of course, his image is better than mine from a photographer's perspective; hell, I'm a hack. But what does that say about digital photography -- that with a basic understanding of it, a few months of practice, I can produce something that's at least compelling? Note, too that his gear was about $10,000 while mine was the $900 Nikon plus a $150 2x teleconverter. Howzat!
Furthermore, I wasn't the only digital photographer there. Another of the pros had a pro-quality Nikon digital with a 340 Meg IBM hard card.
And furthermore, with the compact flash reader, I could take all of my images and have them web-ready in about an hour. The pro? Well he required a special room in the stadium with another $3000 of equipment.
Lastly, one of the real joys of shooting with a high-res digicam like this is getting to see 1600x1200 shots on a big monitor. It is truly amazing; it takes your breath away in a way that film just doesn't. Go to www.catalystinternet.com/photos, bump your monitor up to full screen, and click on the files that start with "DSCN". Those are the raw files coming straight out of the Nikon CoolPix 950, no cropping, no color correction. (Warning: some of those images are 800K in size. If you only have a slow connection and are male and heterosexual you'll only want to look at DSCN1510.JPG.)
This is the fun of having a digital camera; suddenly photography is a wonder again. Suddenly you want to take tons of shots and look at them one-by-one.
With the 990 coming out any day now, a lot of the folks who want to always have the latest and greatest are going to be selling their 950s in the next few months. Watch the used market and pick up a camera that can do everything.
Slashdot. Where we hate intellectual property laws, but when someone takes ONE SENTENCE of our stuff, we scream bloody murder.
The next question will be: can I drop Office 2000 off a cliff and just use the mini-versions on "normal" PCs? Maybe then the bloat will settle.
- obviously tongue-in-cheek
Everything in those folders is one click and one move away from being activated. Because it's Netscape and not IE, the folders aren't automatically alphabetized, so your muscle memory can learn where everything is.
The Daily contains those things I visit, yes, DAILY. Inside the folders I use horizontal rules to create categories that make sense. This method can bookmark as many as 50 sites that I want to return to on a regular basis.
The rest of the bookmarks, then, becomes a place to stow stuff that I want to remember, but that I won't visit until there's call for it. And that makes sense for usability -- I'll go a step further to find a shopping folder, references folder, HTML and design folder.
Tell me more about this up2date; I must have missed it somewhere along the line.
Crowbarring all the custom needs of a POS system into a POS (different acronym) operating system is not my idea of fun. I feel sorry for those SASI people. A friend of mine worked there very briefly and he said that it was no picnic there...
(Who moderated *that* up?) Think of the body of manufacturers whose hardware will be automatically installed in hundreds upon thousands of locations with a single sale. It'll keep the vid card people, the bios people, etc. really motivated to keep in good stead with the community.
Harrumph. I'm looking for good web designers [in NW Philly suburbs? Email me], but the vast majority of designers sit around on their computer all day, thinking they are picking up on little details of web design, yet at the end of those days their designs look *very* average.
I've had about 5 people ask me to hire them, but the URLs they give me are FrontPage, Comic Sans, tables with borders, frames without rhyme or reason, etc. etc. These people are picking up HTML, but NOT DESIGN!
I'd rather hire someone out of art school with some understanding of color and typography. The HTML they might be able to pick up. At least they'll know whether what they do looks good or bad.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
BTW, this is a followup to the Ask Slashdot about KVM switches: disregard whatever it ways in there and just buy the Blackbox. A lot of people said the Linksys units were OK, but I had nothing but trouble. Replaced it with the Blackbox and it's all joy. Someone said the Blackbox is a re-badged Cybex (and we don't need no steenking badges), but I couldn't verify which one, so I just bought the Blackbox, and it's sweet.
One problem is that developers think that bandwidth will increase at the rate of Moore's Law, when it has generally taken about twice as long. In terms of consumer modems, these are rough numbers of bits/sec (please criticize my dates) of acceptance by about 25% of the population:
- 1982: 1200
- 1986: 2400
- 1991: 9600
- 1992: 14400
- 1996: 28800
- 1998: 50000 (nobody gets true 56k)
- 2000: still 50000 baud
If Moore's law were in effect, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, we'd all be at three times T1 speeds by now. And I haven't even gotten into the requirements for the backbones, or compression, or latency. And yes, I know 5% of the audience out there is at highly incredible cable speeds. Meanwhile, outlying areas are going to get nothing better than 144K DSL for years to come.Here in the US of A, one can buy Guinness in cans or bottles. Since the topic has come up, I thought it would be important to mention that Guinness is the one brew that is better in the can than in the bottle. The can has a widget in the bottom that, to put it in geek terms, "builds the head dynamically". Pop the can, pour into an appropriate vessel, and you get [almost] the same head and cascade as a glass from the tap.
And hat's off, too, to all the people who have taken the time to post insightful, interesting, informative or funny comments; the site is as much about you, because the net has enabled you to participate as much as the authors of the stories and the editors who select them.
Despite all the whining about the acquisitions, it sounds like CmdrTaco has done the truly noble and honorable thing and guarded the independence that makes the site what it is. I can't tell you how much I respect that, and thank you for doing the right thing, and understanding what the right thing was to do.
And that means that the next 10,000 stories will give us all as much reason to come here as the last 10,000 did.
Has anyone else noticed that the last 10 weeks or so have been pretty poor? Even the What Do You Think? bits have been poor. I have to wonder whether they're so busy with other projects that either they're slipping, or they're saving their "A" material for something more lucrative...
For her, that counts as a frag.
First, my background, if that's important. In 1983 I started participating in messaging communities. In 1986 I started sysopping them. In 1990 I founded my own multi-line, multi-user, Unix-based BBS. In 1991 I net-enabled it, making it the first public-access internet site in Philly. In 1995 I went to work for an ISP. Last year I founded my own internet development firm to continue to feed my love of communications and technology.
OK. Some people don't like message-based electronic communities; a greater number just don't "get" them. Sometimes those people are not intelligent enough to want to involve themselves in the discussion, but more often there is just some stumbling block of mind-set or interest that prevents them from really engaging in the community.
*Those* are the sorts who will laugh at such communities, and they will laugh at them in accordance with how little they understand them. And simply because someone is a technologist, doesn't mean they'll be interested in the communities.
If there are better technology discussions on the planet, and they're online, don't hold back -- tell us where they are. Frankly, with the evolution of the moderation system, I feel pretty confident that I'm not missing out on important discussions, and that I'm able to skip over all the "crud". Laugh at Threads? I doubt anyone who likes this sort of community will laugh; it's about the best possible way to involve this number of people in online discussion.
To take that a step further, anyone who's reading this -- imagine what /. would be without the community aspects. At this point, as a power browser, I figure I can get most of the news that the site serves up (it is, after all, first found elsewhere, as /. doesn't produce original news content, only original opinion content). It's only the community that adds to the value. In most stories, the messages give us all additional facts, fresh views of the stories, and a community reaction to them. Without the discussion, some folks might be inclined to take ZDNet stories seriously, believe MS-funded benchmarks, etc.
Your reaction to peple dismissing the discussion is most unfortunate and to me, and this is just my opinion, it means that you don't really "get" the online community inherent in all these messages. You know, VA Linux cannot own /., Andover cannot own /., even CmdrTaco cannot own /. because /. is not a single entity -- it's made up of all of us. To a great degree, the extent that we care about it is the extent that we post. If we don't care, and we don't post, /. is nothing. To use a different analogy, CmdrTaco built the building, and found people to decorate the walls, but it's the people that visit it and the activity they engage in there that makes the building what it is.
So not only can you boycott Northwest, you can boycott in comfort.
Every time I have bought something for the reason that it was cheap, I have regretted it. Got a $100 fax machine from CostCo: unreliable and I lose important faxes. Needed an el-cheapo desktop: wound up DOA and took longer than a quality system would take to be built and shipped. Cared about price in office space: wound up with an unresponsive landlord, no hot water and old carpeting.
(That said, the only cheap thing that I bought which I haven't regretted: the Bizfon 680 phone system , a really great little self-contained PBX for small business. It's awesome!)
The reason: well, you pick your battles, and the one battle I don't want to have is the one with the spaghetti in back of a table full of machines. Yesterday the power went out and I had the luxury to relax, knowing that every single system was on a UPS, because all that is planned out. Instead of worrying about getting a maverick box up and running after the outage, I could worry about more important battles.
I even bought a Brother P-Touch and labeled all the boxes with their addresses. The first day I'm on vacation and someone else has to yank one of these boxes, what if they get it wrong?
The anal ones are the people who buy the enclosure racks where all four sides are enclosed, for $500, instead of a cheap aluminum rack for $100 (or used for $50).
To stay a step ahead of the spooks: can one effectively FRAME someone by copying their writing style and influences?
(Do I support public broadcasting? Hell no; they have no interest in serving the community, as is supposed to be their charter...)
The FM band has so few frequencies and so much demand that almost no stations on the commercial part of it are not corporately owned. In the last two decades there has been an incredible change in how these stations are owned and operated. They have gone from business to big business. FCC changes in ownership rules allowed corporations to own more stations; the buying spree that followed had stations selling for much more than their worth, especially considering how broadband to the home, wireless 'net, and satellite broadcasting could make traditional radio stations into dinosaurs. All they do is transmit audio, fer chrissakes.
This in turn has led to a yet-greater reduction in the risk-taking that radio is likely to do. If it doesn't have a shot at a four share, it won't get on the air. While the rest of the society was diversifying from wanting 3-5 TV channels to wanting 50 to 200 and more, radio was in effect clamping down on diversity.
This in turn led to a large increase in pirate radio, the operators of which were ready to risk breaking federal law for the love of broadcasting and the love of serving the community through it.
Now that radio is on the edge of being irrelevant, the FCC is once again politically able to permit small broadcasters on the air. But the lesson, the moral of all this, is that government acts politically, not in the interests of the public; and even non-governmental organizations set up to serve the public act politically and work to preserve their own power.
I welcome the diversity of views, sounds, and ideas that will come about through this ruling. It's a little late now that the Internet has supplanted it.