MSNBC is not the parent company of NBC. GE owns NBC. MSNBC is a separate cable company which is owned 50% by NBC and 50% by Microsoft, whose managerial control has been passed over to NBC. This is the same arrangement as DreamWorks Interactive, which is 50% owned by DreamWorks and 50% by Microsoft.
I'll note one thing for sure. Microsoft's dismal failures to divest itself in the entertainment industry--by it's failure to turn MSNBC into anything other than NBC's dumping ground for older programs ("Time Again", anyone), and for training young newscasters--should be illustrative of the learning curve in store for AOL managers as they find themselves in charge of something they Just Don't Get.
Didn't they say the same thing about Sony?
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 5
I seem to remember when Sony purchased MCA/Universal a few years back and created Sony Pictures, that the exact same things were said about that merger: that Sony would own the entire supply chain in entertainment from artistic development to movie theater distribution. Of course there was no "internet" back then to speak of, so of course almost no-one here will remember that.
*Everyone* worried about Sony, and using virtually the same exact argument that Katz used: that by owning the entire supply chain, Sony would rule the world. Sony (and by extension "Japan Inc.") would completely dominate entertainment, and completely wipe out any American participation in what is the largest sector of our economy in California: entertainment.
So why isn't this a Sony world? Why isn't every movie we see, every television show we watch, every band we listen to a Sony branded title? Why aren't we watching movies in Sony theaters using Sony A/V equipment eating Sony branded popcorn and Sony branded cola, as the pundits of the time predicted?
Simple.
First, at the time, Sony only understood electronics. Sony's management didn't (and still) don't get entertainment--and for five years the Japanese board of directors attempted to micromanage Sony's entertainment devisions like they did Sony's electronics division. And they floundered. Eventually Sony so screwed up the entertainment divisions that they had to divest themselves of some of the entertainment assets, and re-hire the American corporate heads they originally canned during the merger. So while today Sony still owns Sony Pictures, creates a few television shows, and are present in a big way in the music industry, they do so in fairly independant divisions who compete with each other as much as they cooperate.
The second reason why Sony didn't wipe out other entertainment groups was because anti-trust laws and good business sense didn't permit Sony from locking out non-Sony product from the Sony pipeline, or from preventing non-Sony companies and individuals from purchasing Sony services and equipment. That is, a movie produced by Fox has just as much chance to get shown at a United theater as a movie produced by Sony, on largly the same terms. In order for a horizontal company (a company such as Sony with a large number of holdings in a large number of different industries) to survive, they cannot rely on only themselves as a customer. Otherwise, how successful do you think a Sony Playstation would be if only Sony employees could buy one?
I think Sony is an extremely instructive example as to the future of AOL/Time Warner. It's pretty clear to me that the AOL managers only understand the Internet--their success in doing other forms of content production has been poor at best. By and large most of the content AOL has produced for their service has been produced by others--since AOL went to a flat-rate price structure they have produced almost no original content. And what content AOL has tried to produce hasn't exactly been all that stunning in the first place--more like "feel good" content which played well to the press while AOL's users bypassed it to descend into sex-related chat rooms.
And anyone who has followed the Babylon 5 news groups knows that Time Warner is operated as a bunch of independant little fifedoms--very much the same way Sony now operates. So it's not like the different divisions within Time Warner cooperate towards taking over the world in the first place.
Me, I don't think the AOL/Time Warner merger spells bad news for anyone. Except perhaps for the AOL/Time Warner employees who will get laid off over the next five years as the whole conglomerate downsizes as the AOL managers learn the right way to do media.
Thing is, one of the biggest problems I had with Katz's article is this assumption (reflected in most of his articles) that the Internet is causing a fundamental shift in our society, or our morals, or in the way we view the world.
At best, the Internet is mearly illuminating those shifts, and not causing them.
This flaws in this article illustrate my point very well. For example with pornography, it's clear that there has been a shift in our views on what is and is not pornographic, and what is and is not acceptable for public viewing, since *long* before anyone figured out how to build an electronic calculator. The battle Katz seems to want to attribute to the Internet is a battle that has been going on for a very long time. All the Internet has managed to do is to illuminate one corner of the battle--and oddly enough, draw attention away from other areas such as print media or the debate as to if "art" is simply "rich man's pornography."
It's worth noting that the argument is old not because it's not worth having the debate in public, but because it's worth putting the whole debate in it's proper context. This is not an "Internet" issue, but a debate over what is and is not acceptable behavior for our society.
The United States loves to see itself as the cradle of liberty, but when it comes to sex, America mostly demonstrates its prudishness and hypocrisy. Sex is our national taboo.
Actually, the United States runs about in the middle of the world when it comes to sexual prudishness. Of course when we discuss sexual openness, we tend to look towards Italy (where just about every sexual fetish has it's own magazine at the local corner), and away from Saudi Arabia, where we find their "repression of women" less a sexual issue and more a human rights issue. Of course if Italy were to interpret our dress codes in the same way we interpret Islamic dress codes, they'd blame us for human rights violations because we don't allow our women to run topless on the beach instead of just calling us sexually repressed.
This has sent our many moral guardians into hyper-drive, invoking the safety of children as an excuse to beat back the sexual revolution made possible by the digital one.
Do you know why prostitution is illegal in most jurisdictions in the United States? It wasn't always that way, you know.
But back at the turn of the last century, a bunch of articles appeared which talked about the evils of "white slavery." The concern back then was that white women were being abducted and transported across the nation or across the world to serve as sexual slaves in brothels, and prostitution simply fed the world's hunger for white slave women. This of course appeared in the British press, and was picked up by other English-speaking nations rather quickly. So the drive to eliminate prostitution in order to save "our fair damsels" caused most of the english-speaking world to outlaw prostitution.
Nowadays we don't cry "in the name of our fair women and children", as since WWII, the women's movement has woken us up to the realization that women are not sexual toys and wives, but men's equals. So we now have turned towards "protecting the children" instead.
But this is old political hat, and anyone with any sense of history would know that we've been using "saving our children" as an excuse to pass legislation since before Romulus and Remus founded a nation amongst seven hills in central Italy.
But federal agencies like the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and private researchers like author Don Tapscott report that children are many times more likely to be abused by someone they know at home than as the result of sexual encounters online.
And this is news how?
I'm sorry, but the downfall of any democracy is that we tend to have lopsided enforcement of the laws depending on the "public outrage du joir." There is a history of this going back since pretty much the start of democracy. It's not supprising that there is lopsided enforcment against "on-line child pornography" to the point where laws have been passed (and since rejected) that outlaw photographs of young women who appear to be under 18 years of age. As soon as the outrage against child pornography on the net passes in another 5 years or so, we'll move on to something else, and the true child pedaphiles (all five of them) will be safe to troll AOL again.
But it's striking, in the hysteria over kids and sexual imagery online, that there is no reliable data about the number of victims.
Which is very common in this era of "hype-induced legislation." Very old news to anyone who follows this sort of stuff. What is more troubling is the fact that when data does arrive, it's ignored in favor of the public hype.
For example, there is very reliable data that shows that "three strikes" doesn't work. First, it causes criminals who find themselves on their third strike to "raise the stakes", so to speak, when it comes to their defense on the third strike. (As "three strikes" gives them little recourse but to go to jail for life, they have nothing to lose in putting on the most expensive defense they can.) This contributes to an already overburdened court system. Couple this with the fact that a lot of third strikes are going towards folks who do as little as steal a slice of pizza, and you have a law which Just Doesn't Work.
But with this data, does anyone do jack to solve the problem? No; "three strikes" is a very popular piece of legislation, even if it doesn't work.
I fear the same thing will happen with on-line pornography--no matter what sorts of evidence people discover about on-line sexual discussions and forums, it will be ignored in the name of "if we can just save one child, it will be worth it." (Ignoring of course that "it" == trashing the first amendment.)
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum dug up the ruins of Pompeii and were stunned to find artworks of all kinds...
Not even close. But thank you for playing.
Turns out anyone who has even bothered to spend a half-hour taking a lecture tour of their local museum knows better than this.
For example, ever wonder why there were so many nude Christs and nude angels being painted in the 14th and 15th century? Because it was a way to get around the church's edict forbidding pornography. By disguising these images as religious paintings, 15th century artists were able to get away with painting what was otherwise forbidden subjects. British Victorian prudishness was only interesting in that the British managed to invent a reason for prudishness which did not involve the Roman Catholic Church.
The biggest issue relating to sex and free speech is out how the two impulses can co-exist with one another in a country that doesn't seem sure if it wants either.
The best way to resolve these issues is an educated public who gets involved with the political process. Unfortunately, I rarely find either of these two qualities within a country mile of eachother.
And I find little evidence here of either as well.
Frankly I could go on for another 100K on the problems, nits and other serious problems with this little essay which negate both the thesis and the conclusions as nothing more than popular reactionism to popularized tripe, but what's the point? I'll just say that (a) it ain't just "us prudish Americans", (b) that pornography was not a "British Victorian invention", that (c) hype about saving our children is not just restricted to the 'net or to pornography, that (d) the 'net didn't invent the downfall of sexual prudishness but only placed a spotlight on an issue that is at least a century old, and (e) it ain't going to be solved by empty little position pieces which can't be bothered to research the issues involved.
Uhh, last time I checked, the government had to compensate private citizens for confiscation of property, such as land taken to build highways.
Turns out that this is not strictly true. While it is true that if a government agency asserts emenate domain, they have to compensate you for the property that was confiscated. But there are other ways you can lose property, such as during part of a criminal proceeding, and the government doesn't have to compensate you one thin dime.
Actually, this should concern/. readers a lot, given that a lot of the hype around "hackers" about a half-dozen years ago involved local municipalities who were confiscating people's home computers on flimsy evidence in order to put those computers to work in under-funded police stations. (Child pornography was the other excuse dujoir used by local police to add computer equipment to their property inventory from hapless folks, until child pornography became a public issue.)
The agents who raided Ramsey will probably not return the equipment they confiscated. And they probably will not compensate Ramsey for the equipment. That's because the government is protected against such claims: if the government weren't, then every jail-house "lawyer" would be flooding the legal system with lawsuits asking for the return of property that was confiscated when they were taken to jail.
I think folks have forgotten the time in (I believe) the late 70's or early 80's when seatbelt switches were installed in some American cars which would prevent you from turning over the engine until your seatbelt was closed.
The goal was also to save lives--after all, if you can't start your motor until you have a seatbelt on, then you're less likely to die in an auto accident. The problem was twofold--first, many people were circumventing the system by locking the seatbelt closed and sitting on the belt. Second, the system made people more easily carjacked.
I predict this mandatory system will last three years--and as soon as folks get really pissed off, and as soon as a dozen or so people die when someone's car navigation system malfunctions and decides 25MPH is the speedlimit on the A1 in moderate fog--the whole thing will be scrapped in favor of a warning buzzer.
My wife and I saw the movie Christmas afternoon after the reviews we read in the local paper, MrShowBiz.com, and elsewhere consistantly gave the movie excellent reviews.
It's a hell of a lot better than the commercials paint it out to be.
You're not missing anything; HTML and PowerPC assembly are two different languages. Hell, it would like me sniffing my nose at you because you couldn't code in Cobol or something else equivalently useless to you where you work...
While your point is a very good one, I'll note the reason why railroads are hampered the way they are is because of the anti-trust acts that were brought onto the railroads about a century ago.
My father used to work for the railroads, and the amount of regulatory wierdness that surrounds the railroads because of their actions a century ago is just absolutely bizarre. For example, as of a few years ago it was a federal capital crime (read: death penalty) to cause the derailment of a train in a way which caused the death of any passengers on that train. Needless to say many of these laws are not enforced.
Actually, it's only because we hear about them faster in the US that we know about these things. But I do remember several silly things going on in Europe, including the UK court system upholding (!!!) the patent on the alpha channel, dispite expert testimony from several experts in computer graphics who said that the technique was actually invented almost a decade before the application was made.
>> and rebooting the system >why would we want to reboot? Thats a winblows thing- rebooting for installing things.
Beats rebuilding the kernel and then rebooting, as is done with some Unix variants.
>>Rename the folders so that they make sense to my mother. >Maybe your mother needs to make sense of the existing names for herself, they make sense to me.
Quantuum mechanics, C++ and VLSI design makes sense to me, but that doesn't mean the entire world should be forced to learn QM, C++ or VLSI either.
>> Perhaps we shouldn't ask the question "what do we need to change about Linux to make it mainstream," >no, perhaps we need to ask "what do we need to teach people about linux to make it mainstream", if even mainstream is a good thing.
My mother is an architect who spends 12 hours a day building houses in California for folks of all income ranges, from the extremely rich to housing for folks on welfare. Are you suggesting that she should drop her job (losing a ton of money in the process) because you and I as computer programmers are too damned lazy to do our job?
I'm constantly amazed at the attitude of the software development industry: "I'm too lazy to make it easy to use, so I'm demanding that the rest of the world learn something that I only spent a few years of high school and college learning."
You know about end-users; they're the ones we insult as idiots while we extract money from their wallets. I'd like to think we shouldn't bite the hand that feeds us--but apparently, at least in the computer industry, that puts me in the (very small) minority...
I've thought about what it would take to take an OS like Linux mainstream so that even my mother can use it. Here's my list of things that would do the trick.
1) Simplified installation. Preferably you drop the CD into the computer, boot the computer, type in your name and the name of the computer, and the thing sets itself up. (Of course that requires a degree of plug-and-play which isn't currently supported in older hardware PC models.)
2) Standardized and simplified user interface. First, the interface must be totally standardized so that my mother doesn't get confused when one button is shown in grey and another is shown in black and white. Second, the interface must be totally transparent--that means totally eliminate things like "right-click" unless there is some standard graphical element that says "you can right click on me," or unless we adopt a convention such as "all icons are right clickable."
3) Restructure the file system so that adding device drivers, file system support, and other elements to the kernel is a matter of dragging and dropping a file to a special magic folder and rebooting the system. For example, we could create a/sys/fs folder which contains all of the file system drivers, or a/sys/video which contains video card drivers.
4) Rename the folders so that they make sense to my mother. For example, instead of/sys/fs, we could have/System/File System Extensions. Note that as the entire user interface is graphical, there is no need to shorten the file names to three-character shortcuts which are easier to type.
And so forth. I think you can see that I'm going in the direction of pulling in Macintosh-isms and Window-isms onto Linux in order to create a consumer ready system.
There's the problem, though: by pulling in all of these consumer-friendly features such as simplifying the boot process or restructuring the file system, Linux is no longer Linux. Further, I fear that in order to accomodate the user, you wind up having to weaken a number of things such as weaken security (my mother tends to forget her password--and frankly doesn't understand why she needs one in the first place).
Perhaps we shouldn't ask the question "what do we need to change about Linux to make it mainstream," as I think from the above that if we did that, we wouldn't have Linux anymore.
Instead, perhaps the question should be "if we were to design and build an open-source consumer level operating system from the ground up, what features should it have?"
Actually, according to their web site, they started the transition in the late 60's-early 70's. My point, however, was not that the USPS has been taking tax money, but that they would be taking tax money if the postal restructuring act hadn't taken place.
Too late; been there, done that. In fact, the USPS has already been privatized--while they still answer to the US Congress under Title 39, they are ran "for profit" with it's own CEO and board of trustees.
And that's why we pay $0.33 for a first-class mail stamp, boys and girls--because that's about what it costs on average to deliver that piece of mail to anywhere in the United States, including all those pesky little territories and to the US millitary men serving abroad. Last I checked, FedEx will also provide delivery of your letters--but for about one and a half orders of magnitude more.
By the way, folks, in an effort to reduce your tax bill (hah!) the US has spun the USPS off into a "public" company. That means that the USPS is expected to be run "for profit", even though congress ultimately controlls the USPS. (Think of the USPS as a corporation with our congresscritters on the board of directors.)
Amongst other things, that means the USPS is expected to charge for "free" information in order to cover the cost of duplication, packaging, and having a secretary drop it in the mail to you. And if they can figure out a way to make a profit, they will.
It's either that, or paying an extra penny or two in USPS subsidies.
The rules that govern the Internet is the same that has governed mail-order catalogs. The upshot is that the Supremes ruled a while ago that it is burdensom for a mail-order catalog who doesn't do business in a particular state to have to keep track of every state, county and municipal tax that is owned throughout the nation. They basically said that this undue burden is contrary to interstate commerce, which is one of the cornerstones of the US Constitution.
When a store does business in a particular state, however, the US Constitution's interstate commerce clause doesn't apply, and the store is on it's own--at least within the confines of that state.
The reason why the states have all decided they want to tax the Internet is because of all the predictions made by pundants that on-line commerce will represent about 3000000000% of our GDP within the next 15 minutes. (Or something like that--I can never keep track of the exagerations^H^H^H^H^H^Hpredictions.) And the states are upset because they think all that tax revenue that would have otherwise been spent at the local store is being spent on-line instead.
So as far as the states are concerned, interstate commerce be damned! they want their tax money.
I forsee a constitutional battle in the next 10 years. Ought to be interesting.
Re:This just "Open Sources" life...
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
Religion has always been irked by this. In the beginning, it was called sex. And organized religions put restrictions on it. Now it's called genetic manipulation and still organized religions are putting restrictions on it.
Not all religions have been irked by sex. Only the Judeo-Christian ones. Most religions have something to say about sex, but for the most part, it falls in the category of "if you don't want to piss him/her off, don't mess with his heart."
Most of the world's religions generally take a pragmatic view towards stuff like sex or genetics or computers or rocket science. Only here in the west are we inflicted by the twin boogy-men of a religious system full of conservative folks who fear the future, and a society who is too stupid or myopic to realize that there are other people in the world who see things differently.
Wake up and smell the Hinduism! (Or Buddhism, or Zen, or Taoism, etc.)
But some think genetic engineering is dangerous...
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 3
Except keep in mind that to the eyes of some folks, genetic engineering is extremely dangerous, destructive, and could cause the end of the world as we know it. Or have you forgotten Monstanto's terminator seeds?
Why people worry about genetic engineering in general is that it introduces a new organism (by tinkering an existing one, granted) which had not existed before. The worry is that someday we'll create an organism for which there is no viable preditor, and it'll get released into the biosphere and like Kudzo in the west, will wipe out whole species and clog large chunks of the biosphere. Or worse: given that many organisms share genetic material (that is, many organisms will cross-swap DNA strands), we'll create an organism which cross-swaps it's DNA with other species and create something truely horrible.
It's the latter that's got everyone up in arms over terminator seeds, by the way: they're afraid the gene switch that makes the resulting plants sterile will swap into otherwise viable crops, rendering whole third-world farms sterile. And that's a bitch because in the third world, they use the seeds gathered from last year's crop to grow next year's food.
Re:Life, COG? Better: Church of All Words
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
I'm not supprised at all about this; it seemed to be a matter of time. A large part of the problem is not in understanding how a cell works, but in building the tools that permit scientists to investigate how the cell works and in doing experiments.
It's like trying to figure out how a computer works and the only tool we have to use is a bulldozer. Most of us know how a computer works, but if the only way we could program a computer was by hitting it with the shovel of a bulldozer, we'd have a hell of a time experimenting with the computer...
Re:This v2-os.. no protection.
on
V2 OS
·
· Score: 2
Some of us more primitive types remember a time when the semicolon was used to separate the assembler mnemonics from the comments which described what the hell was going on. Further, some of us even remember things like defining assembler "subroutines" by writing in the comment fields where the subroutine 'officially' started and ended, and what parameters were expected.
Of course there are those who would argue that assembler is "self-documenting", just as C code is "self-documenting." Bull.
First off, let's get two things straight about the Chinese legal system. They didn't execute hackers in China because China is "scared" of hackers, nor is it because China is some "evil communist" country who routinely puts people to death because they don't embrase our democratic form of government.
The Chinese civic system of punishments stems from the Chinese Legalist school of thought, a philosophical system which was instrumental in setting up the dictatorship of Ch'in in 221B.C., and in unifying China around the same time.
The cornerstone of Chinese Legalism is the accumulation of the power necessary to rule what (and is) the largest country in the world, using stone-age tools. Legalism's aim of controlling such a large mass of humanity (at a time when Plato was extolling the virtues of a city-state whose size never exceeded about 5,000 people) was done through a system of rigerous and intensive set of laws backed by generous rewards and severe punishments. In short, Legalism extolled the virtue of setting up a system of well-defined laws that everyone could understand, and dealing out severe punishments to those who violated the law.
"Legalism", while not as fully embrased by the Chinese as Confusianism and Taoism, does make up one of the three pillars of Chinese civic philosophy. It's been around for a couple of thousand years, and is the reasoning why littering (i.e., dropping a wad of paper on the ground) is punishable by prison time, and why thieves are routinely put to death.
You also have to keep in mind that our more "humanist" approach to punishment has only evolved in the last hundred years or so. It wasn't all that long ago when we in the west were dropping thieves into a 50-foot pit onto a stone floor and leaving them to rot without food or water. (In fact, the Hollywood image of a castle dungeon is rather inaccurate--most dungeons were nothing more than stone pit 50 or more feet deep where prisoners were literally dropped. The ones who didn't die due to the force of impact with the stone floor died for a lack of water.)
The principle difference between the United States and Chinese philosophy are threefold: first, our stated goal in punishing a criminal is to rehabilitate--this stems from the Judeo-Christian need for redemption. The Chinese use punishment not to rehabilitate but to set a harsh example to others who would break the law.
Second, as we are trying to achieve redemption of the criminal, we set punishments which "fit" the crime--a modified form of "an eye for an eye" where we make habitual litterers pick up trash, and make thieves pay back their victim. In China, as their goal is to set an example, they create punishments which indicate to the public how unacceptable the crime is. Thus, putting first time litterers in jail, or putting thieves to death.
Third, as we are a common-law country, our laws evolve as we struggle to find a balance between maximizing freedom and creating stability. This is because in the United States, we are a country "of the people" where citizens are presumed to have entered into a "compact" to get along with each other. In China, Legalist philosphy has authority stemming from a central figure, so their ultimate goal is not to balance freedom with cooperation, but to create stability and peace. Thus, even if you execute the wrong person for theft, it's okay--he set an example for everyone else.
Chinese Legalism has been around a lot longer than Karl Marx. And it's been around a lot longer than computer hackers.
I think the operative word here is "becomes". My parents spent a couple of weeks in China, and from what they saw first hand, punishments for crimes in China for various crimes are routinely harsh and excessive. For example, while in the United States, littering may get you a $500 ticket, in China it'll get you a couple of years in prison. Theft is a capital crime in China, with the criminal often being executed before the end of the week. (In one case, a criminal stole some stuff on a Monday, was caught and sentenced to death Tuesday, and was executed on Friday while my parents were in China.)
Chinese criminal philosophy is not Western European criminal philosophy, by the way. In the United States, we consider the process of punishments a form of "rehabilitation" where the criminal is given a chance to pay for his crime. In China, the purpose of criminal punishment is not to rehabilitate the criminal, but to set a firm and final example to the rest of the population that crimes are simply not to be tolerated. This philosophy goes back a couple of thousand years, and is one of the cornerstone of Chinese civic philosophy (with Confusionism and Taoism being the other two).
Because of this, it is extremely safe to walk down a Chinese street at night. And it's one of the reasons why the Chinese think the rest of the world is crazy when we talk about Chinese "human rights" violations in their criminal system--their "Iron Fist" philosophy (that of defining > what is a legal transgression and carrying out extremely harsh punishments for them) has been around as long as Christianity and is as ingrained into the Chinese civic world view as the Ten Commandments are in ours.
In fact, the Chinese believe that our system of laws is wishy-washy and a violation of our human rights--because in the United States under our common law system, what is "legal" and what is "illegal" is very fuzzy and changes daily with each court rulling. And it's this fuzziness (and the U.S. government's ability to abuse it in order to harrass it's citizens) which causes the Chinese to think that it is our criminal system, and not theirs, that's crazy.
Most shopping sites that I'm aware of, and most software packages that allow you to add a shopping cart to your web site, don't store the credit card info in the cookie. They store a session identifier--either a UUID or some other unique key generated by their database engine. So it's impossible for someone to lift your credit card from your machine by simply reading your cookies: they'd also have to be able to get into the shopping vender's database and look up your credit card. At which point, they could get *everyone's* credit card.
The only way a cookie could be used to steal from your credit card is if they copy the cookie to another machine and hit a site such as 'Amazon.com' when you have 'one-button' shopping enabled.
I think this whole cookie scare is total nonesense--there are easier ways to steal credit cards than trying to reverse engineer site-specific database key identifiers out of a cookie file. Such as working as a waiter for a restaurant...
Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC is not the parent company of NBC. GE owns NBC. MSNBC is a separate cable company which is owned 50% by NBC and 50% by Microsoft, whose managerial control has been passed over to NBC. This is the same arrangement as DreamWorks Interactive, which is 50% owned by DreamWorks and 50% by Microsoft.
I'll note one thing for sure. Microsoft's dismal failures to divest itself in the entertainment industry--by it's failure to turn MSNBC into anything other than NBC's dumping ground for older programs ("Time Again", anyone), and for training young newscasters--should be illustrative of the learning curve in store for AOL managers as they find themselves in charge of something they Just Don't Get.
I seem to remember when Sony purchased MCA/Universal a few years back and created Sony Pictures, that the exact same things were said about that merger: that Sony would own the entire supply chain in entertainment from artistic development to movie theater distribution. Of course there was no "internet" back then to speak of, so of course almost no-one here will remember that.
*Everyone* worried about Sony, and using virtually the same exact argument that Katz used: that by owning the entire supply chain, Sony would rule the world. Sony (and by extension "Japan Inc.") would completely dominate entertainment, and completely wipe out any American participation in what is the largest sector of our economy in California: entertainment.
So why isn't this a Sony world? Why isn't every movie we see, every television show we watch, every band we listen to a Sony branded title? Why aren't we watching movies in Sony theaters using Sony A/V equipment eating Sony branded popcorn and Sony branded cola, as the pundits of the time predicted?
Simple.
First, at the time, Sony only understood electronics. Sony's management didn't (and still) don't get entertainment--and for five years the Japanese board of directors attempted to micromanage Sony's entertainment devisions like they did Sony's electronics division. And they floundered. Eventually Sony so screwed up the entertainment divisions that they had to divest themselves of some of the entertainment assets, and re-hire the American corporate heads they originally canned during the merger. So while today Sony still owns Sony Pictures, creates a few television shows, and are present in a big way in the music industry, they do so in fairly independant divisions who compete with each other as much as they cooperate.
The second reason why Sony didn't wipe out other entertainment groups was because anti-trust laws and good business sense didn't permit Sony from locking out non-Sony product from the Sony pipeline, or from preventing non-Sony companies and individuals from purchasing Sony services and equipment. That is, a movie produced by Fox has just as much chance to get shown at a United theater as a movie produced by Sony, on largly the same terms. In order for a horizontal company (a company such as Sony with a large number of holdings in a large number of different industries) to survive, they cannot rely on only themselves as a customer. Otherwise, how successful do you think a Sony Playstation would be if only Sony employees could buy one?
I think Sony is an extremely instructive example as to the future of AOL/Time Warner. It's pretty clear to me that the AOL managers only understand the Internet--their success in doing other forms of content production has been poor at best. By and large most of the content AOL has produced for their service has been produced by others--since AOL went to a flat-rate price structure they have produced almost no original content. And what content AOL has tried to produce hasn't exactly been all that stunning in the first place--more like "feel good" content which played well to the press while AOL's users bypassed it to descend into sex-related chat rooms.
And anyone who has followed the Babylon 5 news groups knows that Time Warner is operated as a bunch of independant little fifedoms--very much the same way Sony now operates. So it's not like the different divisions within Time Warner cooperate towards taking over the world in the first place.
Me, I don't think the AOL/Time Warner merger spells bad news for anyone. Except perhaps for the AOL/Time Warner employees who will get laid off over the next five years as the whole conglomerate downsizes as the AOL managers learn the right way to do media.
Thing is, one of the biggest problems I had with Katz's article is this assumption (reflected in most of his articles) that the Internet is causing a fundamental shift in our society, or our morals, or in the way we view the world.
At best, the Internet is mearly illuminating those shifts, and not causing them.
This flaws in this article illustrate my point very well. For example with pornography, it's clear that there has been a shift in our views on what is and is not pornographic, and what is and is not acceptable for public viewing, since *long* before anyone figured out how to build an electronic calculator. The battle Katz seems to want to attribute to the Internet is a battle that has been going on for a very long time. All the Internet has managed to do is to illuminate one corner of the battle--and oddly enough, draw attention away from other areas such as print media or the debate as to if "art" is simply "rich man's pornography."
It's worth noting that the argument is old not because it's not worth having the debate in public, but because it's worth putting the whole debate in it's proper context. This is not an "Internet" issue, but a debate over what is and is not acceptable behavior for our society.
The United States loves to see itself as the cradle of liberty, but when it comes to sex, America mostly demonstrates its prudishness and hypocrisy. Sex is our national taboo.
Actually, the United States runs about in the middle of the world when it comes to sexual prudishness. Of course when we discuss sexual openness, we tend to look towards Italy (where just about every sexual fetish has it's own magazine at the local corner), and away from Saudi Arabia, where we find their "repression of women" less a sexual issue and more a human rights issue. Of course if Italy were to interpret our dress codes in the same way we interpret Islamic dress codes, they'd blame us for human rights violations because we don't allow our women to run topless on the beach instead of just calling us sexually repressed.
This has sent our many moral guardians into hyper-drive, invoking the safety of children as an excuse to beat back the sexual revolution made possible by the digital one.
Do you know why prostitution is illegal in most jurisdictions in the United States? It wasn't always that way, you know.
But back at the turn of the last century, a bunch of articles appeared which talked about the evils of "white slavery." The concern back then was that white women were being abducted and transported across the nation or across the world to serve as sexual slaves in brothels, and prostitution simply fed the world's hunger for white slave women. This of course appeared in the British press, and was picked up by other English-speaking nations rather quickly. So the drive to eliminate prostitution in order to save "our fair damsels" caused most of the english-speaking world to outlaw prostitution.
Nowadays we don't cry "in the name of our fair women and children", as since WWII, the women's movement has woken us up to the realization that women are not sexual toys and wives, but men's equals. So we now have turned towards "protecting the children" instead.
But this is old political hat, and anyone with any sense of history would know that we've been using "saving our children" as an excuse to pass legislation since before Romulus and Remus founded a nation amongst seven hills in central Italy.
But federal agencies like the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and private researchers like author Don Tapscott report that children are many times more likely to be abused by someone they know at home than as the result of sexual encounters online.
And this is news how?
I'm sorry, but the downfall of any democracy is that we tend to have lopsided enforcement of the laws depending on the "public outrage du joir." There is a history of this going back since pretty much the start of democracy. It's not supprising that there is lopsided enforcment against "on-line child pornography" to the point where laws have been passed (and since rejected) that outlaw photographs of young women who appear to be under 18 years of age. As soon as the outrage against child pornography on the net passes in another 5 years or so, we'll move on to something else, and the true child pedaphiles (all five of them) will be safe to troll AOL again.
But it's striking, in the hysteria over kids and sexual imagery online, that there is no reliable data about the number of victims.
Which is very common in this era of "hype-induced legislation." Very old news to anyone who follows this sort of stuff. What is more troubling is the fact that when data does arrive, it's ignored in favor of the public hype.
For example, there is very reliable data that shows that "three strikes" doesn't work. First, it causes criminals who find themselves on their third strike to "raise the stakes", so to speak, when it comes to their defense on the third strike. (As "three strikes" gives them little recourse but to go to jail for life, they have nothing to lose in putting on the most expensive defense they can.) This contributes to an already overburdened court system. Couple this with the fact that a lot of third strikes are going towards folks who do as little as steal a slice of pizza, and you have a law which Just Doesn't Work.
But with this data, does anyone do jack to solve the problem? No; "three strikes" is a very popular piece of legislation, even if it doesn't work.
I fear the same thing will happen with on-line pornography--no matter what sorts of evidence people discover about on-line sexual discussions and forums, it will be ignored in the name of "if we can just save one child, it will be worth it." (Ignoring of course that "it" == trashing the first amendment.)
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum dug up the ruins of Pompeii and were stunned to find artworks of all kinds...
Not even close. But thank you for playing.
Turns out anyone who has even bothered to spend a half-hour taking a lecture tour of their local museum knows better than this.
For example, ever wonder why there were so many nude Christs and nude angels being painted in the 14th and 15th century? Because it was a way to get around the church's edict forbidding pornography. By disguising these images as religious paintings, 15th century artists were able to get away with painting what was otherwise forbidden subjects. British Victorian prudishness was only interesting in that the British managed to invent a reason for prudishness which did not involve the Roman Catholic Church.
The biggest issue relating to sex and free speech is out how the two impulses can co-exist with one another in a country that doesn't seem sure if it wants either.
The best way to resolve these issues is an educated public who gets involved with the political process. Unfortunately, I rarely find either of these two qualities within a country mile of eachother.
And I find little evidence here of either as well.
Frankly I could go on for another 100K on the problems, nits and other serious problems with this little essay which negate both the thesis and the conclusions as nothing more than popular reactionism to popularized tripe, but what's the point? I'll just say that (a) it ain't just "us prudish Americans", (b) that pornography was not a "British Victorian invention", that (c) hype about saving our children is not just restricted to the 'net or to pornography, that (d) the 'net didn't invent the downfall of sexual prudishness but only placed a spotlight on an issue that is at least a century old, and (e) it ain't going to be solved by empty little position pieces which can't be bothered to research the issues involved.
Uhh, last time I checked, the government had to compensate private citizens for confiscation of property, such as land taken to build highways.
/. readers a lot, given that a lot of the hype around "hackers" about a half-dozen years ago involved local municipalities who were confiscating people's home computers on flimsy evidence in order to put those computers to work in under-funded police stations. (Child pornography was the other excuse dujoir used by local police to add computer equipment to their property inventory from hapless folks, until child pornography became a public issue.)
Turns out that this is not strictly true. While it is true that if a government agency asserts emenate domain, they have to compensate you for the property that was confiscated. But there are other ways you can lose property, such as during part of a criminal proceeding, and the government doesn't have to compensate you one thin dime.
Actually, this should concern
The agents who raided Ramsey will probably not return the equipment they confiscated. And they probably will not compensate Ramsey for the equipment. That's because the government is protected against such claims: if the government weren't, then every jail-house "lawyer" would be flooding the legal system with lawsuits asking for the return of property that was confiscated when they were taken to jail.
It sucks. And it's not as pat as you think it is.
I think folks have forgotten the time in (I believe) the late 70's or early 80's when seatbelt switches were installed in some American cars which would prevent you from turning over the engine until your seatbelt was closed.
The goal was also to save lives--after all, if you can't start your motor until you have a seatbelt on, then you're less likely to die in an auto accident. The problem was twofold--first, many people were circumventing the system by locking the seatbelt closed and sitting on the belt. Second, the system made people more easily carjacked.
I predict this mandatory system will last three years--and as soon as folks get really pissed off, and as soon as a dozen or so people die when someone's car navigation system malfunctions and decides 25MPH is the speedlimit on the A1 in moderate fog--the whole thing will be scrapped in favor of a warning buzzer.
My wife and I saw the movie Christmas afternoon after the reviews we read in the local paper, MrShowBiz.com, and elsewhere consistantly gave the movie excellent reviews.
It's a hell of a lot better than the commercials paint it out to be.
You're not missing anything; HTML and PowerPC assembly are two different languages. Hell, it would like me sniffing my nose at you because you couldn't code in Cobol or something else equivalently useless to you where you work...
While your point is a very good one, I'll note the reason why railroads are hampered the way they are is because of the anti-trust acts that were brought onto the railroads about a century ago.
My father used to work for the railroads, and the amount of regulatory wierdness that surrounds the railroads because of their actions a century ago is just absolutely bizarre. For example, as of a few years ago it was a federal capital crime (read: death penalty) to cause the derailment of a train in a way which caused the death of any passengers on that train. Needless to say many of these laws are not enforced.
Actually, it's only because we hear about them faster in the US that we know about these things. But I do remember several silly things going on in Europe, including the UK court system upholding (!!!) the patent on the alpha channel, dispite expert testimony from several experts in computer graphics who said that the technique was actually invented almost a decade before the application was made.
>> and rebooting the system
>why would we want to reboot? Thats a winblows thing- rebooting for installing things.
Beats rebuilding the kernel and then rebooting, as is done with some Unix variants.
>>Rename the folders so that they make sense to my mother.
>Maybe your mother needs to make sense of the existing names for herself, they make sense to me.
Quantuum mechanics, C++ and VLSI design makes sense to me, but that doesn't mean the entire world should be forced to learn QM, C++ or VLSI either.
>> Perhaps we shouldn't ask the question "what do we need to change about Linux to make it mainstream,"
>no, perhaps we need to ask "what do we need to teach people about linux to make it mainstream", if even mainstream is a good thing.
My mother is an architect who spends 12 hours a day building houses in California for folks of all income ranges, from the extremely rich to housing for folks on welfare. Are you suggesting that she should drop her job (losing a ton of money in the process) because you and I as computer programmers are too damned lazy to do our job?
I'm constantly amazed at the attitude of the software development industry: "I'm too lazy to make it easy to use, so I'm demanding that the rest of the world learn something that I only spent a few years of high school and college learning."
A "folder" is a directory for end-users.
You know about end-users; they're the ones we insult as idiots while we extract money from their wallets. I'd like to think we shouldn't bite the hand that feeds us--but apparently, at least in the computer industry, that puts me in the (very small) minority...
I've thought about what it would take to take an OS like Linux mainstream so that even my mother can use it. Here's my list of things that would do the trick.
/sys/fs folder which contains all of the file system drivers, or a /sys/video which contains video card drivers.
/sys/fs, we could have /System/File System Extensions. Note that as the entire user interface is graphical, there is no need to shorten the file names to three-character shortcuts which are easier to type.
1) Simplified installation. Preferably you drop the CD into the computer, boot the computer, type in your name and the name of the computer, and the thing sets itself up. (Of course that requires a degree of plug-and-play which isn't currently supported in older hardware PC models.)
2) Standardized and simplified user interface. First, the interface must be totally standardized so that my mother doesn't get confused when one button is shown in grey and another is shown in black and white. Second, the interface must be totally transparent--that means totally eliminate things like "right-click" unless there is some standard graphical element that says "you can right click on me," or unless we adopt a convention such as "all icons are right clickable."
3) Restructure the file system so that adding device drivers, file system support, and other elements to the kernel is a matter of dragging and dropping a file to a special magic folder and rebooting the system. For example, we could create a
4) Rename the folders so that they make sense to my mother. For example, instead of
And so forth. I think you can see that I'm going in the direction of pulling in Macintosh-isms and Window-isms onto Linux in order to create a consumer ready system.
There's the problem, though: by pulling in all of these consumer-friendly features such as simplifying the boot process or restructuring the file system, Linux is no longer Linux. Further, I fear that in order to accomodate the user, you wind up having to weaken a number of things such as weaken security (my mother tends to forget her password--and frankly doesn't understand why she needs one in the first place).
Perhaps we shouldn't ask the question "what do we need to change about Linux to make it mainstream," as I think from the above that if we did that, we wouldn't have Linux anymore.
Instead, perhaps the question should be "if we were to design and build an open-source consumer level operating system from the ground up, what features should it have?"
Actually, according to their web site, they started the transition in the late 60's-early 70's. My point, however, was not that the USPS has been taking tax money, but that they would be taking tax money if the postal restructuring act hadn't taken place.
Too late; been there, done that. In fact, the USPS has already been privatized--while they still answer to the US Congress under Title 39, they are ran "for profit" with it's own CEO and board of trustees.
G
Read more here at http://www.usps.gov/history/history/his3.htm#REOR
And that's why we pay $0.33 for a first-class mail stamp, boys and girls--because that's about what it costs on average to deliver that piece of mail to anywhere in the United States, including all those pesky little territories and to the US millitary men serving abroad. Last I checked, FedEx will also provide delivery of your letters--but for about one and a half orders of magnitude more.
By the way, folks, in an effort to reduce your tax bill (hah!) the US has spun the USPS off into a "public" company. That means that the USPS is expected to be run "for profit", even though congress ultimately controlls the USPS. (Think of the USPS as a corporation with our congresscritters on the board of directors.)
Amongst other things, that means the USPS is expected to charge for "free" information in order to cover the cost of duplication, packaging, and having a secretary drop it in the mail to you. And if they can figure out a way to make a profit, they will.
It's either that, or paying an extra penny or two in USPS subsidies.
The rules that govern the Internet is the same that has governed mail-order catalogs. The upshot is that the Supremes ruled a while ago that it is burdensom for a mail-order catalog who doesn't do business in a particular state to have to keep track of every state, county and municipal tax that is owned throughout the nation. They basically said that this undue burden is contrary to interstate commerce, which is one of the cornerstones of the US Constitution.
When a store does business in a particular state, however, the US Constitution's interstate commerce clause doesn't apply, and the store is on it's own--at least within the confines of that state.
The reason why the states have all decided they want to tax the Internet is because of all the predictions made by pundants that on-line commerce will represent about 3000000000% of our GDP within the next 15 minutes. (Or something like that--I can never keep track of the exagerations^H^H^H^H^H^Hpredictions.) And the states are upset because they think all that tax revenue that would have otherwise been spent at the local store is being spent on-line instead.
So as far as the states are concerned, interstate commerce be damned! they want their tax money.
I forsee a constitutional battle in the next 10 years. Ought to be interesting.
Not all religions have been irked by sex. Only the Judeo-Christian ones. Most religions have something to say about sex, but for the most part, it falls in the category of "if you don't want to piss him/her off, don't mess with his heart."
Most of the world's religions generally take a pragmatic view towards stuff like sex or genetics or computers or rocket science. Only here in the west are we inflicted by the twin boogy-men of a religious system full of conservative folks who fear the future, and a society who is too stupid or myopic to realize that there are other people in the world who see things differently.
Wake up and smell the Hinduism! (Or Buddhism, or Zen, or Taoism, etc.)
Except keep in mind that to the eyes of some folks, genetic engineering is extremely dangerous, destructive, and could cause the end of the world as we know it. Or have you forgotten Monstanto's terminator seeds?
Why people worry about genetic engineering in general is that it introduces a new organism (by tinkering an existing one, granted) which had not existed before. The worry is that someday we'll create an organism for which there is no viable preditor, and it'll get released into the biosphere and like Kudzo in the west, will wipe out whole species and clog large chunks of the biosphere. Or worse: given that many organisms share genetic material (that is, many organisms will cross-swap DNA strands), we'll create an organism which cross-swaps it's DNA with other species and create something truely horrible.
It's the latter that's got everyone up in arms over terminator seeds, by the way: they're afraid the gene switch that makes the resulting plants sterile will swap into otherwise viable crops, rendering whole third-world farms sterile. And that's a bitch because in the third world, they use the seeds gathered from last year's crop to grow next year's food.
I see someone's overestimating COG and CAW...
I'm not supprised at all about this; it seemed to be a matter of time. A large part of the problem is not in understanding how a cell works, but in building the tools that permit scientists to investigate how the cell works and in doing experiments.
It's like trying to figure out how a computer works and the only tool we have to use is a bulldozer. Most of us know how a computer works, but if the only way we could program a computer was by hitting it with the shovel of a bulldozer, we'd have a hell of a time experimenting with the computer...
Some of us more primitive types remember a time when the semicolon was used to separate the assembler mnemonics from the comments which described what the hell was going on. Further, some of us even remember things like defining assembler "subroutines" by writing in the comment fields where the subroutine 'officially' started and ended, and what parameters were expected.
Of course there are those who would argue that assembler is "self-documenting", just as C code is "self-documenting." Bull.
First off, let's get two things straight about the Chinese legal system. They didn't execute hackers in China because China is "scared" of hackers, nor is it because China is some "evil communist" country who routinely puts people to death because they don't embrase our democratic form of government.
The Chinese civic system of punishments stems from the Chinese Legalist school of thought, a philosophical system which was instrumental in setting up the dictatorship of Ch'in in 221B.C., and in unifying China around the same time.
The cornerstone of Chinese Legalism is the accumulation of the power necessary to rule what (and is) the largest country in the world, using stone-age tools. Legalism's aim of controlling such a large mass of humanity (at a time when Plato was extolling the virtues of a city-state whose size never exceeded about 5,000 people) was done through a system of rigerous and intensive set of laws backed by generous rewards and severe punishments. In short, Legalism extolled the virtue of setting up a system of well-defined laws that everyone could understand, and dealing out severe punishments to those who violated the law.
"Legalism", while not as fully embrased by the Chinese as Confusianism and Taoism, does make up one of the three pillars of Chinese civic philosophy. It's been around for a couple of thousand years, and is the reasoning why littering (i.e., dropping a wad of paper on the ground) is punishable by prison time, and why thieves are routinely put to death.
You also have to keep in mind that our more "humanist" approach to punishment has only evolved in the last hundred years or so. It wasn't all that long ago when we in the west were dropping thieves into a 50-foot pit onto a stone floor and leaving them to rot without food or water. (In fact, the Hollywood image of a castle dungeon is rather inaccurate--most dungeons were nothing more than stone pit 50 or more feet deep where prisoners were literally dropped. The ones who didn't die due to the force of impact with the stone floor died for a lack of water.)
The principle difference between the United States and Chinese philosophy are threefold: first, our stated goal in punishing a criminal is to rehabilitate--this stems from the Judeo-Christian need for redemption. The Chinese use punishment not to rehabilitate but to set a harsh example to others who would break the law.
Second, as we are trying to achieve redemption of the criminal, we set punishments which "fit" the crime--a modified form of "an eye for an eye" where we make habitual litterers pick up trash, and make thieves pay back their victim. In China, as their goal is to set an example, they create punishments which indicate to the public how unacceptable the crime is. Thus, putting first time litterers in jail, or putting thieves to death.
Third, as we are a common-law country, our laws evolve as we struggle to find a balance between maximizing freedom and creating stability. This is because in the United States, we are a country "of the people" where citizens are presumed to have entered into a "compact" to get along with each other. In China, Legalist philosphy has authority stemming from a central figure, so their ultimate goal is not to balance freedom with cooperation, but to create stability and peace. Thus, even if you execute the wrong person for theft, it's okay--he set an example for everyone else.
Chinese Legalism has been around a lot longer than Karl Marx. And it's been around a lot longer than computer hackers.
"So now stealing becomes a capital offence?"
I think the operative word here is "becomes". My parents spent a couple of weeks in China, and from what they saw first hand, punishments for crimes in China for various crimes are routinely harsh and excessive. For example, while in the United States, littering may get you a $500 ticket, in China it'll get you a couple of years in prison. Theft is a capital crime in China, with the criminal often being executed before the end of the week. (In one case, a criminal stole some stuff on a Monday, was caught and sentenced to death Tuesday, and was executed on Friday while my parents were in China.)
Chinese criminal philosophy is not Western European criminal philosophy, by the way. In the United States, we consider the process of punishments a form of "rehabilitation" where the criminal is given a chance to pay for his crime. In China, the purpose of criminal punishment is not to rehabilitate the criminal, but to set a firm and final example to the rest of the population that crimes are simply not to be tolerated. This philosophy goes back a couple of thousand years, and is one of the cornerstone of Chinese civic philosophy (with Confusionism and Taoism being the other two).
Because of this, it is extremely safe to walk down a Chinese street at night. And it's one of the reasons why the Chinese think the rest of the world is crazy when we talk about Chinese "human rights" violations in their criminal system--their "Iron Fist" philosophy (that of defining > what is a legal transgression and carrying out extremely harsh punishments for them) has been around as long as Christianity and is as ingrained into the Chinese civic world view as the Ten Commandments are in ours.
In fact, the Chinese believe that our system of laws is wishy-washy and a violation of our human rights--because in the United States under our common law system, what is "legal" and what is "illegal" is very fuzzy and changes daily with each court rulling. And it's this fuzziness (and the U.S. government's ability to abuse it in order to harrass it's citizens) which causes the Chinese to think that it is our criminal system, and not theirs, that's crazy.
Most shopping sites that I'm aware of, and most software packages that allow you to add a shopping cart to your web site, don't store the credit card info in the cookie. They store a session identifier--either a UUID or some other unique key generated by their database engine. So it's impossible for someone to lift your credit card from your machine by simply reading your cookies: they'd also have to be able to get into the shopping vender's database and look up your credit card. At which point, they could get *everyone's* credit card.
The only way a cookie could be used to steal from your credit card is if they copy the cookie to another machine and hit a site such as 'Amazon.com' when you have 'one-button' shopping enabled.
I think this whole cookie scare is total nonesense--there are easier ways to steal credit cards than trying to reverse engineer site-specific database key identifiers out of a cookie file. Such as working as a waiter for a restaurant...