No, the companies did this to make it harder for consumers to figure out how much profits the gas cos are making on the gas (if you've followed the "San Diego Gas Price" huff of late).
What consumers tend to not know, consumers tend to not think about...
Soem states have warehousing taxes. Do UPS distribution centers count as warehouses?
Some states have tighter rules on commercial fuel usage than others. While not exactly a transactional tax, it does affect interstate trucking. And each state a truck regularly goes through generally needs a "license" from that state, lots of state-specific paperwork, etc., and they do have to stop at the commercial truck scales and sometimes pay weight taxes there. Then there are people from states w/o sales taxes, who don't pay sales taxes in neighboring states w/ sales taxes, etc. (used to see this a lot in Washington, Oregon people buying in WA and not paying sales tax. Of course, we saved enough to justify going to Portland for a weekend to not pay sales tax on our toys, also...)
Commercial truck taxes are generally higher because one loaded semi does some insane amount of road wear compared to cars per mile. So there is that sense of a "pay for what you get (or use)" tax for commercial trucks.
Hmm... No, as much as I'm not an anti-tax nut, that the politicos realize there is a transaction stream out there that they don't have their fingers in they get all hot under the collar.
It would be far easier to just wrap a tax onto the Shipping side of things, but then UPS, FedEx et al will get all hot and bothered.
Taxing the shipping of real goods makes sense (in the historical model). Taxing the trade of bits? The sales tax I pay at my local Wal-Mart is ostensibly to pay back the municipality for the services provided to that Wal-Mart. Perhaps it needs to be done that way.
Besides, even with our funky cable modems and xDSL, our bits are already being taxed. So we, the end-user, don't see the line-item on our bill, but it's figured into our cost...
Also, shipping is where the on-line co's wrap some of their profit margin, too. Not everyone will live at the distance from the retailer where it actually does cost $5.00 to send a memory SIMM. So they charge a flat price for shipping...
...add to the fact that it is common for computer players to ally with themselves to defeat the infidel humans (Civ, Civ2, SMAC, StarCraft). Of course, that keeps the humans from just doing the "sit by the fire until the storm out there blows over, then go see what is left to take". If there is a belligerent computer "race", why shouldn't it try to wipe out its fellow computer bretheren, too?
Yeah, it was a Washington (ST) rep, Jim McDermott (sp), who did it. He got in trouble by the House as well...
What license part do Cell phones operate under the US? I guess I'm of the "if you don't want people to hear it then encrypt it" routine. Security by obscurity, ala stupid laws like in the US for Cell phone conversations, are...well...stupid.
Does that then make it illegal to go around sniffing for and listening to old portable phone sets? Those aren't technically cell phones, which I thought the law specifically named as being "protected". Does it ban me using a parabolic mic to listen to otherwise "private" conversations from public areas (what is the fix for this, learn to code verbally in Navajo or Aramaic)?
I think a big one is who you go through for your ISP service. Depending on the area, the DSL provider, if it's not the local carrier, might have to install a second phone line (which you get to pay for) for the DSL connect, because rumor has it some Bells aren't playing nice and letting other DSL providers use the existing local line to the house.
So $x for ISP service, $y for DSL provider, $z for phone line (x2 if 'nother line needed). I was looking at it, but thinking it would probably end up costing me about twice as much as Cable modem via Cox @Home here in SD, for lower speeds (but currently less restrictive usage agreement). Plus there is (imho) heavy out-of-pocket hardware & install expense...
VMWare runs either on an NT host or Linux Host. Linux, NT, et al can be run as guest OSs from the host. Granted, you need (or are supposed to have...) a windows license for each Windows guest OS you run...
So in a sense, yes, NT could be *seen* as a core reuqirement, but it isn't.
Hah. You should go to California or the Pacific NW. Wanna log? Then you get to log a whole square. Clearcut logging is a winner.
At least as far as rain forest stuff goes, this is imho more futile worrying about this than worrying about animal (by)products if you're a strict vegan.
Do you check the boxes of new things you buy, to see if they were made in the US (in which case it's not likely that tropical wood was used to make the kraft, but clearcut wood from PNW, the South, etc.). But more often than not, what we buy wasn't packaged in the US, with US packaging. It was packaged with kraft made from other sources.
do you filter the chinese/asian restaurants you go to whether they use bamboo or wood chopsticks, because if they use wood ones it could be that they were made from wood in the Tsongas National Forest (big old growth temperate rainforest in Alaska), if not, then probably tropical woods? Etc...
So I bought a new wood front door there a couple of months ago. Yeah, it was made in Malaysia, with dougfir panels veneer on top of some sort of damn hard (and heavy) wood, probably tropical, but was it clearcut jungle wood? Was it plantation wood? I don't know.
Sure, I could have gotten a steel door, but the old door is only 77" tall. Steel doors only come 80" tall. Reframing the door was not an option, nor is really cutting a steel door. Nor was buying a good ol' American Oak Door for $1000.
Re:Word, Politics, Networking, and Buzzwords
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
Networking doesn't do you much if you are relocating pretty far away from where they are now.
Networking helps open doors or find other opportunities besides the wantads, placement agencies or Monster.com's. But someone still will want your resume/CV/portfolio and to talk to you before they just give you a job. Networking doesn't help much there now, does it?
...Bill Gates may be a salesman in the same vein as P.T. Barnum, but it's Steve Balmer who I would not want to play poker, bloody knuckles, or any other game with, not even if he was on my side...
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
As far as using the Root account for day-to-day work, most people w/o a clue who set up NT end up just using the Administrator account, because a) setting up user "profiles" is not so obvious to them, and b), it's a complete PITA having to log out completely one's current non-Administrator "session" to log in as Administrator to do system stuff, since there isn't in NT an equivalent either of SUDO (for GUI or CLI) or SU anyways (but if there is, I'd like to know. I'm not an NT-Clueless, and this issue bugs me almost daily...), so there isn't much of an incentive anyways to properly use user security principles, even for a ostensibly single-user machine...
Plus, how many NT systems come set up using NTFS vs. FAT for the NT partition(s), because what is the point of security in NT if the file system isn't secure more than in FAT?
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
...not any more. The BIFF5 format is easy enough to download. The OLE SDK stuff (with the OLE Document format, which Word & Excel docs are) is readily available, too.
That several companies offer conversion software for Word Docs should be clue enough.
At least for spreadsheets, is there much market other than Excel (so who cares)?
Hmm... i wonder how much Microsoft's current stuff is just trying to milk their current cash cow for what I think MS sees as their future.
Look at what Microsoft has been investing in: content and content providers (Northwave Communications, RoadRunner, WebMD, MSNBC, etc.).
And, why did MS want Intuit? Not to sell Quicken, but to get the banking connections that Intuit has fostered...
I think Microsoft is slowly morphing into a transaction-based shell of a company. Perhaps MS will still make software in the future, perhaps they won't. But they'll be making residuals wherever they leave their investment dollars...
Why make $190/copy of Office2K when you can make $0.001/transaction on a few (hundred) million or billion transactions a day with no effort?
...and I think I saw on Bloomberg's Monday morning that Qwest tendered, or was thinking about tendering, an offer for USWorst for $44BillUS. Their stock took a hit that day.
I've seen this done once before. When the Challenger exploded, MTV pulled all their "spaceman" ads. This wasn't censorship. NASA didn't force them to do it. NASA probably didn't even ask. MTV did this by itself. This wasn't some sort of political statement on the US space program. This was simple human decency. Even media companies are capable of this.
...yet, how many "challenger" jokes did you hear the next day at school or work, and how many times did you get to relive the experience each time the TV news had to "recap" the current situation:
'In case you've been living in a cave the last few months, the space shuttle "challenger" blew up last month'...
...or watch Joe Theismann's leg crumple like a weak chicken wing on 'Monday Night Football'?
Re:Does Jon understand the WB's motivations?
on
Bootlegging Buffy
·
· Score: 1
...hmm. WB really wanked on it.
Seen those "Homicide" or "NYPD: Blue" episodes where their story line happens to parallel something bad recently happening in society regarding cops and criminals and innocent bystanders (and the advertising mentions this linkage)?
Do you watch "Twister" whilst thinking about the recent tornados in Oklahoma City?
Censorship, in a broader context, I think is more like:
A small group of people decides what information is fit and unfit for the rest of the people to watch.
Sure, it happens as a consequence of the programming process. But market forces (i.e., "not enough people watch this show", which means, advertisers aren't getting enough bang for their ad bucks) are accepted forms of censorship, but most people don't think of them as censorship.
Parents censor their children.
People censor for themselves (I, for one, hope to never watch "Titanic").
Was Disney...er, ABC, right in broadcasting the "outing" episode of "Elaine"?
doesn't bother you? Then you should talk to some anti-gay person about that show.
Isn't "Professional Wrestling" a little more worrisome than an episode of a show that could *possibly* have been problem causing for one small subpopulation?
Do TV stations still show "Twister" even as the latest community gets sucked off the map in real life?
Re:To all those saying "don't watch it..."
on
Bootlegging Buffy
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm...
My wife helped deal with 300 burnt-to-a-crisp bodies at the KAL crash in Guam (she worked in the Morgue. No, she's not a mortician or pathologist, so the "it was her job" doesn't fit here at all. She was part of a "psychiatric team of counselors and support staff" the Navy brought there to help prevent the people working at the scene from, among others, developing PTSD... I'll leave it at that. If you want to find out a little about the behind-the-scenes of a plane crash, I can let you in on a little. Send me e-mail).
Should she, whenever we/she walk by a barbeque restaurant, be able to go in and demand that the rack o' ribs roasting on the spit in the front window be taken down because some people might find it offensive (she should have the right, yes, but she usually turns her eyes, and doesn't eat BBQ ribs anymore. I can't blame her...), and then when they don't, start proclaiming that these restaurant operators are cruel, insensitive, uncaring bastards for not thinking about what other people might feel about this suggestive display of violence towards other living beings (with the implied threat of a boycott or lawsuit to follow soon)?
Should TV be banned from showing in-close scenes from disasters to "protect" those scarred by previous scenes in the past? Should movies be allowed to show suggestive scenes (think of Luke's parents in Star Wars burning on the ground) such as smoldering corpses, whathaveyou?
No, someone at WB, probably the legal or PR department, decided that it could have had bad *financial* repurcussions if they aired it, although networks usually do this because advertisers (who TV stations REALLY care about, because they pay the bills, not you or I sitting on our duffs) threaten to pull advertising regarding episodes.
But the local WB station in Denver could have chosen to not run the episode. Wouldn't that have "protected" the people most likely to have been affected by watching it?
At least as far as the Internet getting into China, it is state-controlled info. Companies here in the US and elsewhere are making big bucks by developing the hardware and software that makes it possible for China to have such a very fine filter on Internet access...
The genie has been let out of the bottle, I hope, though, in the more liberal Western-style areas. When the commies learn that Free Markets can exist in China with state control replaced by Organized Crime (i.e., where companies have to pay for "protection", bribery, etc.), and realize that it's just the same thing they have now but with different buzzwords, then they'll do it. I think Hong Kong, et al. are just testing the waters on this. But most of China is pretty poor materially, and the powers that be are more interested on keeping them contained (ala the mars citizenry in "Total Recall") than anything else... Gotta keep those rural peasants rural...and...peasants.
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No, the companies did this to make it harder for consumers to figure out how much profits the gas cos are making on the gas (if you've followed the "San Diego Gas Price" huff of late).
What consumers tend to not know, consumers tend to not think about...
Uppity consumers are bad for business.
Re: UPS paying transactional taxes...
Soem states have warehousing taxes. Do UPS distribution centers count as warehouses?
Some states have tighter rules on commercial fuel usage than others. While not exactly a transactional tax, it does affect interstate trucking. And each state a truck regularly goes through generally needs a "license" from that state, lots of state-specific paperwork, etc., and they do have to stop at the commercial truck scales and sometimes pay weight taxes there.
Then there are people from states w/o sales taxes, who don't pay sales taxes in neighboring states w/ sales taxes, etc. (used to see this a lot in Washington, Oregon people buying in WA and not paying sales tax. Of course, we saved enough to justify going to Portland for a weekend to not pay sales tax on our toys, also...)
Commercial truck taxes are generally higher because one loaded semi does some insane amount of road wear compared to cars per mile. So there is that sense of a "pay for what you get (or use)" tax for commercial trucks.
Hmm... No, as much as I'm not an anti-tax nut, that the politicos realize there is a transaction stream out there that they don't have their fingers in they get all hot under the collar.
It would be far easier to just wrap a tax onto the Shipping side of things, but then UPS, FedEx et al will get all hot and bothered.
Taxing the shipping of real goods makes sense (in the historical model). Taxing the trade of bits? The sales tax I pay at my local Wal-Mart is ostensibly to pay back the municipality for the services provided to that Wal-Mart. Perhaps it needs to be done that way.
Besides, even with our funky cable modems and xDSL, our bits are already being taxed. So we, the end-user, don't see the line-item on our bill, but it's figured into our cost...
Also, shipping is where the on-line co's wrap some of their profit margin, too. Not everyone will live at the distance from the retailer where it actually does cost $5.00 to send a memory SIMM. So they charge a flat price for shipping...
...add to the fact that it is common for computer players to ally with themselves to defeat the infidel humans (Civ, Civ2, SMAC, StarCraft). Of course, that keeps the humans from just doing the "sit by the fire until the storm out there blows over, then go see what is left to take". If there is a belligerent computer "race", why shouldn't it try to wipe out its fellow computer bretheren, too?
Yeah, it was a Washington (ST) rep, Jim McDermott (sp), who did it. He got in trouble by the House as well...
What license part do Cell phones operate under the US? I guess I'm of the "if you don't want people to hear it then encrypt it" routine. Security by obscurity, ala stupid laws like in the US for Cell phone conversations, are...well...stupid.
Does that then make it illegal to go around sniffing for and listening to old portable phone sets? Those aren't technically cell phones, which I thought the law specifically named as being "protected". Does it ban me using a parabolic mic to listen to otherwise "private" conversations from public areas (what is the fix for this, learn to code verbally in Navajo or Aramaic)?
I think a big one is who you go through for your ISP service. Depending on the area, the DSL provider, if it's not the local carrier, might have to install a second phone line (which you get to pay for) for the DSL connect, because rumor has it some Bells aren't playing nice and letting other DSL providers use the existing local line to the house.
So $x for ISP service, $y for DSL provider, $z for phone line (x2 if 'nother line needed). I was looking at it, but thinking it would probably end up costing me about twice as much as Cable modem via Cox @Home here in SD, for lower speeds (but currently less restrictive usage agreement).
Plus there is (imho) heavy out-of-pocket hardware & install expense...
Hmm...
VMWare runs either on an NT host or Linux Host.
Linux, NT, et al can be run as guest OSs from the host. Granted, you need (or are supposed to have...) a windows license for each Windows guest OS you run...
So in a sense, yes, NT could be *seen* as a core reuqirement, but it isn't.
Hah. You should go to California or the Pacific NW. Wanna log? Then you get to log a whole square. Clearcut logging is a winner.
At least as far as rain forest stuff goes, this is imho more futile worrying about this than worrying about animal (by)products if you're a strict vegan.
Do you check the boxes of new things you buy, to see if they were made in the US (in which case it's not likely that tropical wood was used to make the kraft, but clearcut wood from PNW, the South, etc.). But more often than not, what we buy wasn't packaged in the US, with US packaging. It was packaged with kraft made from other sources.
do you filter the chinese/asian restaurants you go to whether they use bamboo or wood chopsticks, because if they use wood ones it could be that they were made from wood in the Tsongas National Forest (big old growth temperate rainforest in Alaska), if not, then probably tropical woods? Etc...
So I bought a new wood front door there a couple of months ago. Yeah, it was made in Malaysia, with dougfir panels veneer on top of some sort of damn hard (and heavy) wood, probably tropical, but was it clearcut jungle wood? Was it plantation wood? I don't know.
Sure, I could have gotten a steel door, but the old door is only 77" tall. Steel doors only come 80" tall. Reframing the door was not an option, nor is really cutting a steel door. Nor was buying a good ol' American Oak Door for $1000.
Networking doesn't do you much if you are relocating pretty far away from where they are now.
Networking helps open doors or find other opportunities besides the wantads, placement agencies or Monster.com's. But someone still will want your resume/CV/portfolio and to talk to you before they just give you a job. Networking doesn't help much there now, does it?
...Bill Gates may be a salesman in the same vein as P.T. Barnum, but it's Steve Balmer who I would not want to play poker, bloody knuckles, or any other game with, not even if he was on my side...
I guess it comes down to:
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
As far as using the Root account for day-to-day work, most people w/o a clue who set up NT end up just using the Administrator account, because a) setting up user "profiles" is not so obvious to them, and b), it's a complete PITA having to log out completely one's current non-Administrator "session" to log in as Administrator to do system stuff, since there isn't in NT an equivalent either of SUDO (for GUI or CLI) or SU anyways (but if there is, I'd like to know. I'm not an NT-Clueless, and this issue bugs me almost daily...), so there isn't much of an incentive anyways to properly use user security principles, even for a ostensibly single-user machine...
Plus, how many NT systems come set up using NTFS vs. FAT for the NT partition(s), because what is the point of security in NT if the file system isn't secure more than in FAT?
I guess it comes down to:
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
...not any more. The BIFF5 format is easy enough to download. The OLE SDK stuff (with the OLE Document format, which Word & Excel docs are) is readily available, too.
That several companies offer conversion software for Word Docs should be clue enough.
At least for spreadsheets, is there much market other than Excel (so who cares)?
Hmm... i wonder how much Microsoft's current stuff is just trying to milk their current cash cow for what I think MS sees as their future.
Look at what Microsoft has been investing in: content and content providers (Northwave Communications, RoadRunner, WebMD, MSNBC, etc.).
And, why did MS want Intuit? Not to sell Quicken, but to get the banking connections that Intuit has fostered...
I think Microsoft is slowly morphing into a transaction-based shell of a company. Perhaps MS will still make software in the future, perhaps they won't. But they'll be making residuals wherever they leave their investment dollars...
Why make $190/copy of Office2K when you can make $0.001/transaction on a few (hundred) million or billion transactions a day with no effort?
...and I think I saw on Bloomberg's Monday morning that Qwest tendered, or was thinking about tendering, an offer for USWorst for $44BillUS. Their stock took a hit that day.
OH, I don't know... WebTVs are still selling.
What if someone came up with a modem (POTS, Cable or xDSL) for PlayStations &/o N64? Wouldn't be much different, there, either.
why, when most of us Linux-i86 users can use VMWare to get what we need (except for Games) from Windows on our Linux boxes?
Oddly enough, this form of Windows running subservient to Linux, I can handle...
MSNBC reports enough "bad" news about MS only to maintain an air of credibility. They would probably not run a truly harsh piece on MS or NBC.
If you think that MSNBC is credible news, then...
Does anyone know if MSNBC ran a piece summarizing the judgement in the MSTemps case, and if so, how was it slanted?
Hmm... the Blockbuster video stores here in San Diego are renting DVDs...
Are Porn movies coming out on DVD yet? If so, then DVD will NOT die...
Hmm... BetaMax & MiniDisc are not exactly dead...
They might be in the consumer area, but aren't in the commercial area.
...yet, how many "challenger" jokes did you hear the next day at school or work, and how many times did you get to relive the experience each time the TV news had to "recap" the current situation:
'In case you've been living in a cave the last few months, the space shuttle "challenger" blew up last month'...
...or watch Joe Theismann's leg crumple like a weak chicken wing on 'Monday Night Football'?
...hmm. WB really wanked on it.
Seen those "Homicide" or "NYPD: Blue" episodes where their story line happens to parallel something bad recently happening in society regarding cops and criminals and innocent bystanders (and the advertising mentions this linkage)?
Do you watch "Twister" whilst thinking about the recent tornados in Oklahoma City?
Hmm...
Censorship, in a broader context, I think is more like:
A small group of people decides what information is fit and unfit for the rest of the people to watch.
Sure, it happens as a consequence of the programming process. But market forces (i.e., "not enough people watch this show", which means, advertisers aren't getting enough bang for their ad bucks) are accepted forms of censorship, but most people don't think of them as censorship.
Parents censor their children.
People censor for themselves (I, for one, hope to never watch "Titanic").
Was Disney...er, ABC, right in broadcasting the "outing" episode of "Elaine"?
doesn't bother you? Then you should talk to some anti-gay person about that show.
Isn't "Professional Wrestling" a little more worrisome than an episode of a show that could *possibly* have been problem causing for one small subpopulation?
Do TV stations still show "Twister" even as the latest community gets sucked off the map in real life?
Hmmm...
My wife helped deal with 300 burnt-to-a-crisp bodies at the KAL crash in Guam (she worked in the Morgue. No, she's not a mortician or pathologist, so the "it was her job" doesn't fit here at all. She was part of a "psychiatric team of counselors and support staff" the Navy brought there to help prevent the people working at the scene from, among others, developing PTSD... I'll leave it at that. If you want to find out a little about the behind-the-scenes of a plane crash, I can let you in on a little. Send me e-mail).
Should she, whenever we/she walk by a barbeque restaurant, be able to go in and demand that the rack o' ribs roasting on the spit in the front window be taken down because some people might find it offensive (she should have the right, yes, but she usually turns her eyes, and doesn't eat BBQ ribs anymore. I can't blame her...), and then when they don't, start proclaiming that these restaurant operators are cruel, insensitive, uncaring bastards for not thinking about what other people might feel about this suggestive display of violence towards other living beings (with the implied threat of a boycott or lawsuit to follow soon)?
Should TV be banned from showing in-close scenes from disasters to "protect" those scarred by previous scenes in the past? Should movies be allowed to show suggestive scenes (think of Luke's parents in Star Wars burning on the ground) such as smoldering corpses, whathaveyou?
No, someone at WB, probably the legal or PR department, decided that it could have had bad *financial* repurcussions if they aired it, although networks usually do this because advertisers (who TV stations REALLY care about, because they pay the bills, not you or I sitting on our duffs) threaten to pull advertising regarding episodes.
But the local WB station in Denver could have chosen to not run the episode. Wouldn't that have "protected" the people most likely to have been affected by watching it?
Katz is right...
...the Net...
At least as far as the Internet getting into China, it is state-controlled info. Companies here in the US and elsewhere are making big bucks by developing the hardware and software that makes it possible for China to have such a very fine filter on Internet access...
The genie has been let out of the bottle, I hope, though, in the more liberal Western-style areas. When the commies learn that Free Markets can exist in China with state control replaced by Organized Crime (i.e., where companies have to pay for "protection", bribery, etc.), and realize that it's just the same thing they have now but with different buzzwords, then they'll do it. I think Hong Kong, et al. are just testing the waters on this. But most of China is pretty poor materially, and the powers that be are more interested on keeping them contained (ala the mars citizenry in "Total Recall") than anything else... Gotta keep those rural peasants rural...and...peasants.