1) Force the telemarketers to notice when people ask not to be called any more, and have the telemarketer put their # on the DNC list on their behalf.
If a telemarketer calls you after failing to add you, revoke their citizenship and extradite them to Syria. If they're calling from overseas, bomb their home country back to the stone age. I am 100% serious about this.
2) Force businesses with whom you have an existing relationship to distinguish between real information calls (your card has been stolen, and so forth) and their own sales cold-calling.
Again, if they harass people, send their board of directors to Syria. Everyone loses one testicle immediately - the member of the board who provides the most useful information in tracking down other businesses that call and harass people during dinner gets to keep the second testicle, the rest of the board loses both.
I think you might be looking back in time through rose-tinted glasses.
The opposition to the war on college campuses is less *militant* than it was back in the 60s, but opposition to the war is more complete than it was even in 1972. So, yeah, no-one is blowing up draft boards, but there aren't any draft boards to blow up, as you say. However, there is actually less support for the war - perhaps you are editing out all the people at the pro-nixon rallies, but they were sizable.
Anyway, in 1972, the Vietnam War had been going on for, what, 12 years? Compared to the 5 years we've been in Iraq? Apples and Oranges.
Sooner or later the Indians are going to decide that they are not interested in putting in 10 hours of work on our behalf for every 1 hour we do for them - which is what these pay discrepancies amount to.
Until the 17th century - throughout most of recorded history - the economic centers of the world were in India and China, not in the West, which was a Hobbesian backwater even during the supposedly good periods.
A return to normalcy - where the most populous nations also control a majority of the world's economic might - throws all the cards in the air. The comprador leadership of China and India appear, for the moment, to be cooperating in placing the majority of their own population in a state of permanent serfdom in exchange for a cut of the take. Anyone who believes this to be a sustainable proposition must have been out of the room for the 20th century; and anyone who thinks that the Chinese and Indian elite really intend to play second fiddle to us westerners is a naif. If George Bush (who clearly understand this, to judge from his actions) is an idiot - how dumb does this make the class of prognosticators who don't seem to get this?
That said, if you're looking for a guaranteed route to a decent job, become a nurse. With moxie and gumption it is possible - and will remain possible - to make a good living by knowing how computers work, although the responsibilities, expectations and compensation can be expected to be in flux. It may not be *easy*, and it certainly isn't and won't be guaranteed.
Okay, firstly, this thing is never going to catch any terrorists. As a technology, it doesn't pass the laugh test. It was a joke when it was called Total Information Awareness, and it's a joke now.
This is not new, however - the military/intelligence apparatus in the US exists, in large part, to subsidize the development of high tech industry. Every marketing company in the country would *love* to have a tool developed that will aggragate and mine in the kind of data that this system treats. Furthermore, these firms can just trade data with eachother or get it from their clients, they don't need any kind of intrusive surveillance laws to get it.
Well, like hitler, *I* understand the value of state intervention in high technology.
Also, I have a thin little mustache (albeit not, precisely, a hitler mustache).
And I've been known to exclaim "Who now remembers the Armenians?" when discussing the PR conqequences of my planned acts of genocide - but I'm already past two things.
Because they do a damn good job of it, that's why.
The NSF and NIH are far from perfect, and as taxpayers (I'm a scientist, as well) we are entitled to many critical improvements in transparency, but they are vastly more efficient than equivalent systems in Europe (I don't know so much about asia) which are riddled with hidebound cronyism, or than private systems in the US which are extremely wasteful and seldom private anyway (see next paragraph). I really shouldn't need to defend DARPA on slashdot - maybe computers are not your thing though.
Anyhoo, the reason we have computers, container shipping, automation, tele-operation, intelligent drug design and genetic engineering is because the US Federal government payed the R&D costs. Sometimes they provided outright subsidies, but they also provided an initial customer base without which many of these technologies couldn't have been developed to the point that became viable as consumer-oriented enterprises. Personally, I think that the general public is entitled to some of that money back, once technologies developed at public expense become profitable, but this is penny-pinching on my part: the return on the investment in computer technology, for example, has been absolutely fabulous.
Now, a lot of this was done through the military system - but what the military *buys* seldom really has much to do with what the military really needs. DARPA, in particular, is in the business of providing a military cover for technology that is in fact being developed for the supposedly-ancillary civilian purposes. They also do research which really does have a military motivation: it's about 50:50.
If you're some kind of fanatic who believes in the infinite grace of market forces: 1) You are about as connected to reality as a creationist. and 2) You are proposing that we scrap the most powerful engine of technological and economic growth in human history because it doesn't groove with your ideological fantasy worldview. If you have a big bushy mustache, that's *two* things you have in common with Stalin.
Disclaimer: I'm a molecular biologist who studies bacterial evolution at a molecular level.
Disclaimer 2: I'm a lifelong democrat and don't care what the Republicans say at this point.
There are simply so many more important things that we could challenge the republicans on: Why are you all so fucking incompetent? Why are you even more crooked than the Democrats? Have you no shame? I could go on.
Funding for the sciences is something of an important question - and I'll acknowledge a link between acceptance of objective reality and support for scientific funding. But as a scientist I will happily say that federal support for my work is far lower on the list of priorities than clean and transparent government, sound economic and social policies, better/cleaner funding for general education, and a foreign policy based on something other than bellicosity and greed. If someone wants to challenge the republicans on their failure to deliver any of those things, I might listen.
But even so, these debates are sheer pablum - I'm sure all the Repubs favor clean government which is why they want no limitations on lobbyists. The odds of getting any of these people to seriously engage on real questions approach nil.
While we're discussing the vagaries of German law, isn't Nazi iconography (like, say, skulls and lightning bolts and everything else anyone in WH40K ever wears), illegal in Germany? I suppose there might be a "toy soldier" exception.
Disclaimers: 1) I'm opposed to the German laws in question. I believe that even Nazi's should have freedom of speech. To quote Chomsky: "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely those views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers." 2) I'm Jewish. 3) Nazis really knew how to dress - proof positive that fashion is evil. 4) I have space marines.
Ah, yeah, but isn't that of questionable legality? I'm pretty sure that if it were up to Blizzard, this wouldn't happen, and I'd bet that sooner or later they'll figure out a way to either put a stop to it or make sure that the profits all or mostly flow to them. Anyway, I'm aware of the practice but I mistyped - should have said "is anyone *legally* making money other than...".
I mean, we can have a discussion of whether people selling stolen credit card numbers on IRC should pay taxes on their income, but I think it's beside the point.
And if we return to feudalism, you'll just pay a portion of the crops you grow to your immediate liege, with no taxes for other economic activity at all - which is a somewhat more likely scenario than a flat tax becoming law, so we should carefully consider the legal ramifications of online farming.
On a real world note, if they are taking advantage of public resources or institutions to make a real-world profit, they should be required to pay towards the upkeep of those resources or institutions. I have no idea if anyone is making real-world money besides the companies selling subscription fees (I know people are supposed to be making real money in Second Life, but is this actually happening?), but if they are, they should, on principle, pay taxes on it.
Let's be perfectly clear - people buy high speed internet connections so that they can pirate stuff.
Now, that segment of the market is not who AT&T wants. AT&T *wants* to sell broadband to your Grandma who only uses it to buy stuff on e-bay, and while they're at it they'd love to charge Disney a big fat fee to be able to show high definition video clips to her grandkids.
But those are the customers broadband providers *wish* they had, not the cutomers they *actually* have, and if AT&T really prevents people from using BitTorrent, their customers will just switch over to DSL or some other competing technology - or someone will make proxies that are easy enough for the general public to use, that's another possibility.
AT&T/TW is an awful company with a terrible history of ignoring what people actually want, and of losing huge sums of shareholder money trying to force something else down people's throats. But piracy - not kiddie porn, they could get away with blocking that - is what drives broadband adoption, even among people who only pirate three things a month.
We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen.
For some reason that just struck me as hysterical. Seriously, I'm in physical pain here.
On a more serious note - in a society of vanishing scarcity, how much is stuff worth?
If a vacation on the moon *costs* 5 million space-dollars, then it is *worth* 5 million space dollars because in the outrageously wealthy society of the future, someone will pay that. You raise valid issues with building tube-shaped space colonies in the next century, however, I'll grant.
As for interstellar travel, I'll stick with exactly one magic wand: cold sleep (H2S or otherhow). Generally speaking, I think biology is the right area of attack anyway - the laws of physics do not brook any negotiation, but biology, if you keep at it long enough, can generally be brought around. Of course, if we really can build nanotech seedships that create a new earth from scratch, we'd do that instead - but that's a big magic wand.
In any case, I'd give odds well better than 50% that the cold sleep wand will work well enough that you can get several hundred suckers who would be willing to go for it, once the entire human population of >6 billion sees the adverts. You'd get that many people on the potential for celebtiry *alone*. Sending a bunch of frozen coffins through space still requires a fair amount of mass - but it's several orders of magnitude down on all your interstellar calculations, and if half of them wake up without severe brain damage, you're good to go.
Moving back to economics - our future government would pursue this plan *mainly* as a subsidy to high-tech industry. This is why we have NASA and the Pentagon now. The economists will assume that there will be enough useful spinoff technologies to justify the massive expense, the scientists and engineers will all want to make the damn thing work, the public will give all these people the benefit of the doubt (also will find arguments like Hawking's persuasive, religious though they may be), and sooner or later some insanely rich future government will plop down the umpteen quadrillion space dollars to build all the outrageous infrastructure the project would actually need, and do it.
Now, I'd anticipate a timeline on the order of 1,000 years for all this, which is *past* the horizon limit on meaningful speculation (i.e. a rudimentary study of history tells us we have no real clue what is going to happen) - but if I were writing hard science fiction for the year 3,500 my best guess would be that we were getting the first radio transmissions back from alpha colony at about that time.
As for the rest of the solar system - the real question is, could tubes in space be made self-sufficient, self-replicating and comfortable? No magic wands seem required, and if they can, I'd have to *expect* that some future society would want to put them up just to have more people around than earth could reasonably support. But you're right that the time scale for this endeavor is more likely millennia than centuries, but in any case past the limit where we can make more than a guess.
On FTL - I'm not a physicist, but I'd give about a 5% chance that FTL movement of anything other than quanta of information is even *possible*, and none of the proposed methods, in the 5% chance that they work at all (step 1 - build two pairs of mutually orbiting black holes, step 2 - ???, step 3 - profit!) are ever going to be feasible. If FTL is *feasible*, I will make this prediction - the means of achieving it will look so simple in hindsight that future generations will marvel at how dense we were.
On the stuff mentioned in that article - they didn't just carry Chavez' speeches split-screen, they also tried to avoid carrying them at all; eventually they were forced to do so by the government.
The national guard memo thing is not a remotely comparable circumstance: carrying information critical of a candidate, which later proves false != providing logistical support to a military coup against the elected government.
You're right that it would be hypocritical of Chavez to charge the people who tried to oust him, given that he tried to oust somebody. That seldom stops people - he's still showed restraint.
As for the rest of it, it's irrelevant or just proves my point - there was a military coup, it was claimed he resigned, and these TV stations tried to refuse to carry "pro-chavez" statements, like a speech in which he announces he hasn't resigned? If anything should get your broadcast license pulled, that would be it.
The guy doesn't *have* to be a saint. He can be a right bastard, supporting a military coup against him is still a crime - there are no serious questions about the legitimacy of his election or re-election.
Because the Carter Center, the European Union, Mercosur and the OAS all certified the election.
Some people in the opposition did try to announce a boycott - and there was a claim that the results were statistically irregular, but I don't know anyone serious who credits any of this.
It's all in the wikipedia article, not exactly hard to find.
Okay, I think that refusing to renew the license of this broadcaster was a bad move. BUT, under the legal theory that controls this sort of thing, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
Those broadcast licenses are *supposed* to be held in the public interest. This TV station supported a military coup against the democratically elected government.
That's a pretty unambiguous abuse of the public trust. Can you imagine what would happen to NBC's affiliate broadcast licenses if they supported a military coup against our government? If they weren't tried for treason and shot, they certainly wouldn't be allowed to keep broadcasting.
Which brings us to the subject of restraint - actually, Chavez has shown a remarkable degree of restraint so far against those who tried to overthrow him militarily. They haven't even filed charges against the military officers - the man that the coup tried to install as President was Chavez' opponent in following last Venezuelan election.
I seriously doubt that he's going to try and block Youtube.
I am a successful internet entrepeneur, wrongly imprisoned by my corrupt government. I have been recommended to you by friends who trust greatly in your honor and discretion in my troubled time.
I have US$ 65 million in hidden accounts which I need to remove from the country. If you will aid me in this I will split half of it with you, in recognition of your good will and generosity.
To make the transfer I will need your name, social security number, address, bank routing number, account number, personal identification number and passwords. With these, I can move the money into your bank accounts.
The above link should be added to the article as an update.
This rumor has been discredited repeatedly and is utterly sensationalist bollocks. Slashdot is doing an immense dis-service by spreading it (at least in the absence of the link posted in the response above.)
My guess would be that the RIAA is actually trying to *control* what radio stations play, since that annoying "law enforcement" stuff is getting in the way of payola.
A major record label can create a list of songs they want played, and offer special royalty-free licenses to broadcast them as a promotion. Independent artists, bands that the RIAA's members just doesn't feel like promoting for whatever commercial reason, etc., won't have the beureucratic infrastructure to *offer* such an arrangement, even if they wished to do so.
And, of course, if they don't like particular *stations*, for whatever reason, they can refuse to cut deals with them.
It's the same story as with internet radio - it's all about control.
Slashdot Mirror
That's-a-spicy pain-a-pill.
Seriously, mod parent up.
1) Force the telemarketers to notice when people ask not to be called any more, and have the telemarketer put their # on the DNC list on their behalf.
If a telemarketer calls you after failing to add you, revoke their citizenship and extradite them to Syria. If they're calling from overseas, bomb their home country back to the stone age. I am 100% serious about this.
2) Force businesses with whom you have an existing relationship to distinguish between real information calls (your card has been stolen, and so forth) and their own sales cold-calling.
Again, if they harass people, send their board of directors to Syria. Everyone loses one testicle immediately - the member of the board who provides the most useful information in tracking down other businesses that call and harass people during dinner gets to keep the second testicle, the rest of the board loses both.
I think you might be looking back in time through rose-tinted glasses.
The opposition to the war on college campuses is less *militant* than it was back in the 60s, but opposition to the war is more complete than it was even in 1972. So, yeah, no-one is blowing up draft boards, but there aren't any draft boards to blow up, as you say. However, there is actually less support for the war - perhaps you are editing out all the people at the pro-nixon rallies, but they were sizable.
Anyway, in 1972, the Vietnam War had been going on for, what, 12 years? Compared to the 5 years we've been in Iraq? Apples and Oranges.
Sooner or later the Indians are going to decide that they are not interested in putting in 10 hours of work on our behalf for every 1 hour we do for them - which is what these pay discrepancies amount to.
Until the 17th century - throughout most of recorded history - the economic centers of the world were in India and China, not in the West, which was a Hobbesian backwater even during the supposedly good periods.
A return to normalcy - where the most populous nations also control a majority of the world's economic might - throws all the cards in the air. The comprador leadership of China and India appear, for the moment, to be cooperating in placing the majority of their own population in a state of permanent serfdom in exchange for a cut of the take. Anyone who believes this to be a sustainable proposition must have been out of the room for the 20th century; and anyone who thinks that the Chinese and Indian elite really intend to play second fiddle to us westerners is a naif. If George Bush (who clearly understand this, to judge from his actions) is an idiot - how dumb does this make the class of prognosticators who don't seem to get this?
That said, if you're looking for a guaranteed route to a decent job, become a nurse. With moxie and gumption it is possible - and will remain possible - to make a good living by knowing how computers work, although the responsibilities, expectations and compensation can be expected to be in flux. It may not be *easy*, and it certainly isn't and won't be guaranteed.
Okay, firstly, this thing is never going to catch any terrorists. As a technology, it doesn't pass the laugh test. It was a joke when it was called Total Information Awareness, and it's a joke now.
This is not new, however - the military/intelligence apparatus in the US exists, in large part, to subsidize the development of high tech industry. Every marketing company in the country would *love* to have a tool developed that will aggragate and mine in the kind of data that this system treats. Furthermore, these firms can just trade data with eachother or get it from their clients, they don't need any kind of intrusive surveillance laws to get it.
Well, like hitler, *I* understand the value of state intervention in high technology.
Also, I have a thin little mustache (albeit not, precisely, a hitler mustache).
And I've been known to exclaim "Who now remembers the Armenians?" when discussing the PR conqequences of my planned acts of genocide - but I'm already past two things.
Godwin, godwin, or no?
Because they do a damn good job of it, that's why.
The NSF and NIH are far from perfect, and as taxpayers (I'm a scientist, as well) we are entitled to many critical improvements in transparency, but they are vastly more efficient than equivalent systems in Europe (I don't know so much about asia) which are riddled with hidebound cronyism, or than private systems in the US which are extremely wasteful and seldom private anyway (see next paragraph). I really shouldn't need to defend DARPA on slashdot - maybe computers are not your thing though.
Anyhoo, the reason we have computers, container shipping, automation, tele-operation, intelligent drug design and genetic engineering is because the US Federal government payed the R&D costs. Sometimes they provided outright subsidies, but they also provided an initial customer base without which many of these technologies couldn't have been developed to the point that became viable as consumer-oriented enterprises. Personally, I think that the general public is entitled to some of that money back, once technologies developed at public expense become profitable, but this is penny-pinching on my part: the return on the investment in computer technology, for example, has been absolutely fabulous.
Now, a lot of this was done through the military system - but what the military *buys* seldom really has much to do with what the military really needs. DARPA, in particular, is in the business of providing a military cover for technology that is in fact being developed for the supposedly-ancillary civilian purposes. They also do research which really does have a military motivation: it's about 50:50.
If you're some kind of fanatic who believes in the infinite grace of market forces:
1) You are about as connected to reality as a creationist.
and
2) You are proposing that we scrap the most powerful engine of technological and economic growth in human history because it doesn't groove with your ideological fantasy worldview. If you have a big bushy mustache, that's *two* things you have in common with Stalin.
Disclaimer: I'm a molecular biologist who studies bacterial evolution at a molecular level.
Disclaimer 2: I'm a lifelong democrat and don't care what the Republicans say at this point.
There are simply so many more important things that we could challenge the republicans on: Why are you all so fucking incompetent? Why are you even more crooked than the Democrats? Have you no shame? I could go on.
Funding for the sciences is something of an important question - and I'll acknowledge a link between acceptance of objective reality and support for scientific funding. But as a scientist I will happily say that federal support for my work is far lower on the list of priorities than clean and transparent government, sound economic and social policies, better/cleaner funding for general education, and a foreign policy based on something other than bellicosity and greed. If someone wants to challenge the republicans on their failure to deliver any of those things, I might listen.
But even so, these debates are sheer pablum - I'm sure all the Repubs favor clean government which is why they want no limitations on lobbyists. The odds of getting any of these people to seriously engage on real questions approach nil.
While we're discussing the vagaries of German law, isn't Nazi iconography (like, say, skulls and lightning bolts and everything else anyone in WH40K ever wears), illegal in Germany? I suppose there might be a "toy soldier" exception.
Disclaimers:
1) I'm opposed to the German laws in question. I believe that even Nazi's should have freedom of speech. To quote Chomsky: "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely those views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers."
2) I'm Jewish.
3) Nazis really knew how to dress - proof positive that fashion is evil.
4) I have space marines.
Ah, yeah, but isn't that of questionable legality? I'm pretty sure that if it were up to Blizzard, this wouldn't happen, and I'd bet that sooner or later they'll figure out a way to either put a stop to it or make sure that the profits all or mostly flow to them. Anyway, I'm aware of the practice but I mistyped - should have said "is anyone *legally* making money other than...".
I mean, we can have a discussion of whether people selling stolen credit card numbers on IRC should pay taxes on their income, but I think it's beside the point.
And if we return to feudalism, you'll just pay a portion of the crops you grow to your immediate liege, with no taxes for other economic activity at all - which is a somewhat more likely scenario than a flat tax becoming law, so we should carefully consider the legal ramifications of online farming.
On a real world note, if they are taking advantage of public resources or institutions to make a real-world profit, they should be required to pay towards the upkeep of those resources or institutions. I have no idea if anyone is making real-world money besides the companies selling subscription fees (I know people are supposed to be making real money in Second Life, but is this actually happening?), but if they are, they should, on principle, pay taxes on it.
Let's be perfectly clear - people buy high speed internet connections so that they can pirate stuff.
Now, that segment of the market is not who AT&T wants. AT&T *wants* to sell broadband to your Grandma who only uses it to buy stuff on e-bay, and while they're at it they'd love to charge Disney a big fat fee to be able to show high definition video clips to her grandkids.
But those are the customers broadband providers *wish* they had, not the cutomers they *actually* have, and if AT&T really prevents people from using BitTorrent, their customers will just switch over to DSL or some other competing technology - or someone will make proxies that are easy enough for the general public to use, that's another possibility.
AT&T/TW is an awful company with a terrible history of ignoring what people actually want, and of losing huge sums of shareholder money trying to force something else down people's throats. But piracy - not kiddie porn, they could get away with blocking that - is what drives broadband adoption, even among people who only pirate three things a month.
We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen.
For some reason that just struck me as hysterical. Seriously, I'm in physical pain here.
On a more serious note - in a society of vanishing scarcity, how much is stuff worth?
If a vacation on the moon *costs* 5 million space-dollars, then it is *worth* 5 million space dollars because in the outrageously wealthy society of the future, someone will pay that. You raise valid issues with building tube-shaped space colonies in the next century, however, I'll grant.
As for interstellar travel, I'll stick with exactly one magic wand: cold sleep (H2S or otherhow). Generally speaking, I think biology is the right area of attack anyway - the laws of physics do not brook any negotiation, but biology, if you keep at it long enough, can generally be brought around. Of course, if we really can build nanotech seedships that create a new earth from scratch, we'd do that instead - but that's a big magic wand.
In any case, I'd give odds well better than 50% that the cold sleep wand will work well enough that you can get several hundred suckers who would be willing to go for it, once the entire human population of >6 billion sees the adverts. You'd get that many people on the potential for celebtiry *alone*. Sending a bunch of frozen coffins through space still requires a fair amount of mass - but it's several orders of magnitude down on all your interstellar calculations, and if half of them wake up without severe brain damage, you're good to go.
Moving back to economics - our future government would pursue this plan *mainly* as a subsidy to high-tech industry. This is why we have NASA and the Pentagon now. The economists will assume that there will be enough useful spinoff technologies to justify the massive expense, the scientists and engineers will all want to make the damn thing work, the public will give all these people the benefit of the doubt (also will find arguments like Hawking's persuasive, religious though they may be), and sooner or later some insanely rich future government will plop down the umpteen quadrillion space dollars to build all the outrageous infrastructure the project would actually need, and do it.
Now, I'd anticipate a timeline on the order of 1,000 years for all this, which is *past* the horizon limit on meaningful speculation (i.e. a rudimentary study of history tells us we have no real clue what is going to happen) - but if I were writing hard science fiction for the year 3,500 my best guess would be that we were getting the first radio transmissions back from alpha colony at about that time.
As for the rest of the solar system - the real question is, could tubes in space be made self-sufficient, self-replicating and comfortable? No magic wands seem required, and if they can, I'd have to *expect* that some future society would want to put them up just to have more people around than earth could reasonably support. But you're right that the time scale for this endeavor is more likely millennia than centuries, but in any case past the limit where we can make more than a guess.
On FTL - I'm not a physicist, but I'd give about a 5% chance that FTL movement of anything other than quanta of information is even *possible*, and none of the proposed methods, in the 5% chance that they work at all (step 1 - build two pairs of mutually orbiting black holes, step 2 - ???, step 3 - profit!) are ever going to be feasible. If FTL is *feasible*, I will make this prediction - the means of achieving it will look so simple in hindsight that future generations will marvel at how dense we were.
I've had going on eight years to familiarize myself.
As has been pointed out, he hasn't done anything to interfere with satellite or cable transmissions.
Furthermore, he didn't yank their license mid-term, arrest them, etc. etc. etc.
*All* he did was refuse to renew their license. I don't think he should've done it, but he hasn't broken any laws here!
So at the moment all you have is paranoia.
Oops, you're right. Wrong article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCTV#Background
On the stuff mentioned in that article - they didn't just carry Chavez' speeches split-screen, they also tried to avoid carrying them at all; eventually they were forced to do so by the government.
The national guard memo thing is not a remotely comparable circumstance:
carrying information critical of a candidate, which later proves false != providing logistical support to a military coup against the elected government.
You're right that it would be hypocritical of Chavez to charge the people who tried to oust him, given that he tried to oust somebody. That seldom stops people - he's still showed restraint.
As for the rest of it, it's irrelevant or just proves my point - there was a military coup, it was claimed he resigned, and these TV stations tried to refuse to carry "pro-chavez" statements, like a speech in which he announces he hasn't resigned? If anything should get your broadcast license pulled, that would be it.
The guy doesn't *have* to be a saint. He can be a right bastard, supporting a military coup against him is still a crime - there are no serious questions about the legitimacy of his election or re-election.
Do you have any sources for that assertion?
Because the Carter Center, the European Union, Mercosur and the OAS all certified the election.
Some people in the opposition did try to announce a boycott - and there was a claim that the results were statistically irregular, but I don't know anyone serious who credits any of this.
It's all in the wikipedia article, not exactly hard to find.
Okay, I think that refusing to renew the license of this broadcaster was a bad move. BUT, under the legal theory that controls this sort of thing, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
i n_Venezuela#Events_leading_up_to_the_coup
Those broadcast licenses are *supposed* to be held in the public interest. This TV station supported a military coup against the democratically elected government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Attempted_coup_
That's a pretty unambiguous abuse of the public trust. Can you imagine what would happen to NBC's affiliate broadcast licenses if they supported a military coup against our government? If they weren't tried for treason and shot, they certainly wouldn't be allowed to keep broadcasting.
Which brings us to the subject of restraint - actually, Chavez has shown a remarkable degree of restraint so far against those who tried to overthrow him militarily. They haven't even filed charges against the military officers - the man that the coup tried to install as President was Chavez' opponent in following last Venezuelan election.
I seriously doubt that he's going to try and block Youtube.
I am a successful internet entrepeneur, wrongly imprisoned by my corrupt government. I have been recommended to you by friends who trust greatly in your honor and discretion in my troubled time.
I have US$ 65 million in hidden accounts which I need to remove from the country. If you will aid me in this I will split half of it with you, in recognition of your good will and generosity.
To make the transfer I will need your name, social security number, address, bank routing number, account number, personal identification number and passwords. With these, I can move the money into your bank accounts.
Thank you,
Robert Soloway
The above link should be added to the article as an update.
This rumor has been discredited repeatedly and is utterly sensationalist bollocks. Slashdot is doing an immense dis-service by spreading it (at least in the absence of the link posted in the response above.)
And I'm Jewish, so don't even start.
My guess would be that the RIAA is actually trying to *control* what radio stations play, since that annoying "law enforcement" stuff is getting in the way of payola.
A major record label can create a list of songs they want played, and offer special royalty-free licenses to broadcast them as a promotion. Independent artists, bands that the RIAA's members just doesn't feel like promoting for whatever commercial reason, etc., won't have the beureucratic infrastructure to *offer* such an arrangement, even if they wished to do so.
And, of course, if they don't like particular *stations*, for whatever reason, they can refuse to cut deals with them.
It's the same story as with internet radio - it's all about control.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
I'm trying to consoldiate my responses.
I'm attempting to consolidate my replies.