Only if you can roll out that wave of the future to absolutely EVERYONE, regardless of (especially) economic ability.
As citizens, we all have a right to an equal public education whether or not we choose to take it, and if everyone can't home-school or hit the Net, and that's what they need for their equal public education, you've excluded a class of people from a public service, regardless of how well it works for the best and brightest. Not only would that be morally wrong, it would also destroy this country even more than Corporate America has already.
I sincerely hope you read this, despite it having been posted a day late.
You left out one serious change effector:
Large gobs of people, especially when they make large gobs of noise and cast large gobs of votes.
See, the "large gobs of $$$" thing is one of the things we're supposed to get mad about, and throw the bastards out for. But it doesn't work when so many people (especially 18-35) give up on the process.
The other forms of protest are wonderful, but they can be repelled by force of law, unless more people like you continue to assert their right to vote, and continue to work for change within the process.
That's how Burma keeps its citizens down, BTW; by doing a buttload of horrible acts to ensure that they feel just like you do -- powerless. By comparison, it's a cakewalk for you to change your government; just continue to be as smart as you are, but be noisier.
Since it seems worthwhile to offer the perspective from which one posts:
I did well enough in public schools (despite having the aforementioned curse of being smart/neglected/'dealt' with) to win a commission to West Point, which I promptly lost in a year and a half due to an inability to keep my shoes shined, my closet dusted, or my belt buckle clean. I now do web development.
In Oregon, educational quality is of deepest concern to me and to many of my fellow citizens. Oregon has all the telltale signs: the funding inequality, the bad relationship with teachers unions, the axe falling on extra-curriculars, near-condemnable buildings, and all the other trimmings of your average American educational crisis.
I believe there's a break-even amount of funding that will keep schools at the status quo, and as long as Republicans control our Legislature, we will never get that amount; OTOH, my state has thrown money at the problems in all kinds of ways, and it hasn't solved much of anything, which would explain why our Republican Legislature is reluctant to fund our schools.
That is why I suggest a complete public audit for every educational system in our public schools, to at least determine 1) why our $ isn't solving as many problems as we'd like it to and 2) what else is in the way of youth getting quality educations.
I don't have any predispositions about what I think such an audit would find; I just want to know what they come up with.
Were I to walk into a school or a school board meeting myself and start asking hard questions, there are several good reasons why I don't think I'd get honest, satisfactory answers. But I believe in the scariness and intelligence of people who interrogate for a living, and know where to look. An audit would allow all of us to use the same people to set a baseline for the condition of our schools, with real empirical data, so that we'd have a basis in fact.
This would be a more valuable use of the Fed's money, I think. We can't really come together to find good solutions until we're on the same page with regard to how things are.
Australia, by most accounts, is what we Americans would call a "free" country, compared to, for example, Myanmar.
If a majority of Australians were sufficiently liberty-loving to get politically active when issues like this threaten them, you wouldn't see things there like mandatory client-side content filtering, or Tasmania's outright ban on homosexuality.
It's not the responsibility of/. to be the Australian Civil Liberties Union. It's especially not on Americans to protest and act out for Australians EVERY TIME an issue threatens their freedoms. It's on Australians to change their government to suit themselves, and they're lucky to have a government where they can do that much more easily than, say, Cuba. Australians also have as much moral support (and workaround expertise) as/. can muster, better late than never, and they should feel lucky for that, too.
So pointing out that Australians knew about this months ago doesn't say anything. If Australians were inclined to act like they had a pair when it came to defending their freedoms, this wouldn't have happened, regardless of when Americans or./ knew about it.
FWIW, this is most definitely NOT a good thing for Australia, because it's just a tiny step away from the law that would HAVE teeth and REALLY ruin your day.
Australians, what if the government wrote the client? What if it pinged your client to see if you were actually running it? What if they ran it server-side? Don't think that same wave of paranoia couldn't tweak the new law just so -- it happens more often than not here in the States.
No, it's best to nip these kinds of things in the bud AND act as often as called for. You're not prevented from doing both.
Like said jetson123, we've been taught that if you don't assert your patent rights FROM THE GET-GO, you forfeit them to the public domain.
And that's exactly what Unisys has done here; it could even be argued that they deliberately allowed LZW to become a standard by NOT burdening it with the ball-and-chain of patent enforcement and demand for royalties every step of the way.
Corporations have far too many privileges versus the common man as the law sits now, for us to allow Unisys to go back and "do over" an instance where they failed to execute within the law as it exists. Were it not for the size of the company, and the sheer amount of resources they could bring to bear, Unisys would have lost patent rights to LZW long ago. Thank God it expires soon anyway.
And even if you're not so conspiracy-minded as to think there aren't people whose passion is to sabotage the Open Source movement by sounding like rabid zealots, the idea of "don't swear at the company because it's a secretary that has to answer it" is a total non-starter. Dumb$#!+, that's exactly WHY they put a secretary there, and that's not our fault, either.
Roblimo, you're *THIS* close to inaugurating my Katz filter, which at this point doesn't even include Katz.
The Internet is too big, too important, for Congress not to want to regulate it just for the sake of regulating it, simply because most Congressmen have egos that are too big to comprehend something such as the Net existing without them having some kind of control over it.
Furthermore, Congressmen know almost nothing about the Net. Most of them are too old to think in terms of the Net, and even if they're not, they're not ever going to learn enough about it to avoid making stupid decisions about it.
Case in point: How many times do you think Fritz F$%#ing Hollings has pulled up a website? It doesn't matter if it's him, Orrin Hatch, or Ted Kennedy, the answer's still going to be the same - squat.
They're listening to lobbies that, by sheer signal-to-noise ratio, deemphasize the importance of cyberspace (such as the AARP, the NRA, and large business interests like agriculture and King Oil), and ultra-conservative constituents who are more worried about the potential of pornography to harm their children.
They specifically DO NOT listen to 18-35 year olds who may or may not be cyber-sympathetic because only about 9% of those people actually VOTE in the elections that get them their jobs.
And like your favorite upper management executive, knowing too much about any one thing obscures the "Big Picture" vision that made them such shining leaders in the first place, even when that one thing is to our society like factories were to their grandfathers'.
The only way anything's going to change is if people who know something (about how beautiful and important is the Net) actually hold politicians accountable at the ballot box, not only for sensible policy about the Net, but for more than a casual knowledge of the Net. And if there are no politicians who can meet that qualification, to BECOME ONE.
It frosts me neverending how many cake-eating artistes there are in my town who are my age and actually have sensible political insights, yet do nothing but bitch and complain. Meanwhile, I turn out for every election, vote my convictions (those of a free thinking 30-something who considers the Net extremely important and realizes that schools and transpo must be funded to function), and get my ASS handed to me every November 20th by all those semi-literate consumeroids someone mentioned a while back.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir (at least, I damn well better be), but picking out some half-dead Net tax bill sponsored by some half-dead redneck Senator and then bitching about it is such a supreme waste of time.
Instead, I recommend that each of us harasses and otherwise beats on ten of our young buddies until they show us their voter registration cards. Then we follow them to the polls in November (forcefully, if need be), and make sure they vote their convictions, whatever they may be. Until that starts happening a LOT, America is going to look less and less like we'd like it to. _______________________________________
It's difficult to crawl into the mindset of NASA circa 1969, but wouldn't re-entry burn do as good a job of cleaning bacteria from the outer wall of a spacecraft as would a quick plunging into the Indian?
Another point - to be worried about infection from space, we have to establish the existence of extraterrestrial life. We haven't done that yet.
That being said, I wouldn't worry about potential contamination of the ocean.
First of all, of course productivity has gone up since the advent of the computer; it's MANAGEMENT, SALESMANSHIP and BUSINESS ACUMEN that determine profitability, among other things, none of which have anything to do with computers, what OS one uses, etc.
If my computer spits out twice as many data widgets as it did yesterday, I am being mas productive. If my computer is twice as fast as it was yesterday, it stands to reason that I can meet that expectation of my productivity.
That's not to mention that the tasks are more complicated: There's not even a comparison between what I'm doing digitally now and what I was doing with a computer even 5 years ago.
Going back even further, I made $45 bucks a week picking strawberries when I was 10, and it made me enough money for two pairs of kid pants. Now I can buy 2 pairs of fat man pants for that same money, and it only takes me 3 hours to earn it! So not only is my work since the dawn of the information age much more complex (and therefore, one might argue, more valuable), it's more efficient. I'm working smarter, not harder, remember?
I'm having doubts about this guy Moody. Maybe someone can explain how this guy is even remotely credible, cause it's not his takes, or the Afrika Bambaataa beanie that's doing it for me.
And when it does, I can't help but giggle with anticipation over how stupid Katz (among others, esp. Roger Ebert) is going to feel when Avalos and Weiler(sp?) sue the living $#!+ out of Artisan and BWP for infringement of copyright and intellectual property theft.
These guys made the The Last Broadcast, an independent movie from last year upon which BWP is obviously prototyped. It is my hope that Artisan and the other copycats won't have enough left over to fund a Taurus with all the options, much less another "project" such as Blair Witch.
I also can't wait to read the article we all know Katz is going to post, shortly after the above comes to pass, on how America is doomed because so many people fell for the hype. Katz can turn on a dime when the prevailing wind of popular opinion shifts against him, and in this case, I'm looking forward to it.
I saw this movie last year...
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
·
· Score: 1
...when it was called The Last Broadcast.
An independent film that premiered in Portland, and other places, it was presented as a mockumentary just like BWP. LB was about three independent filmmakers who had a weekly show about the occult on public tv. They decide to do a show on location in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, in search of the Jersey Devil. As in BWP, they disappear, but their footage is found. The footage is played back to finish out the plot. They even had a website to flesh out the pieces of the "documentary", which was filmed entirely on handhelds. I won't give away the ending except to say it was interesting.
The movie reviewer at Salon (I forget her name) says that BWP was developed at about the same time as LB, and that there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the BWP guys thieved the idea from LB, but I don't believe her.
My disturbed friend says there's a movie even before that called the Cannibal Holocaust (three NYU film students, Amazon tribe, no one makes it out, footage found after the fact) that uses the same plot device. It's not new to BWP, and that should be mentioned.
I can generally stand Katz articles, but in this case, I've read too many other reviews of BWP that offer the same breathless hype (and also forget to mention the previous films that formed the prototype of BWP). To me, reviews like this prove that their authors are too focused on the mainstream, Blockbuster/Cineplex marketing hype to have any kind of street cred.
What makes a movie reviewer a movie reviewer is usually that they've seen thousands more films than you or me; I'd be willing to bet that Jon Katz could not pass that test, and until he can, his opinion of a movie isn't any more worthy of notoriety than is yours or mine.
How easy is it, then, for a private movie theatre owner to make admittance decisions of his/her own? From what I've read, the MPAA rating does not have force of law, so what then prevents a theatre owner from deciding to pack his/her own house with underage kids jonesing for a look at American Pie?
We know Blockbuster and the mega-theatres pander to the pro-censorship crowd because it's profitable to them. But it would also be profitable to let every high-school kid with $6.50 into your theatre to see American Pie, would it not? Simple supply and demand.
There's a reason why: Sustained community protest is hard to resist over time, and the religious right knows that. If they write enough letters to the right people, stand outside your theatre with pickets, get media exposure, and start scaring politicians, they'll win. So they do that, and they succeed at rates disproportionate to their actual numbers. The problem with that is that the movie theatre can't stay afloat if it doesn't cater to large numbers of people.
Nothing's gonna change until the people on the other side of the issue (kids or not) start taking up the fight themselves. Technology is one form of protest, but it's not as effective unless the word gets out. My buying a DVD player is not going to affect your range of choices until you know you can do it yourself -- the best way to make sure you know that is to tell you.
People who believe this is wrong need to get their message out, as well, and make it mainstream to think of the issue in those terms.
Looking at this another way, the Internet is its own compendium of significant documents, arranged in order of significance to each person according to their own circumstances.
What you and I think is significant may not matter to someone else, so maybe even Joe's first crappy, error-ridden homepage is significant, as long as it is significant to Joe, because it adds to the Internet's strongest aspect: its universality.
To me, the thing that separates the Internet from FidoNet circa 1987, or a roomful of wonks talking IPX over Lantastic peer LAN, is mostly the fact that there are a couple bajillion people using it.
Among other things, the Internet helps feed people. The Internet helps diseminate information to topple repressive governments. The Internet keeps sex predators safely wanking off at home, and out of our houses. That's all mainly because there are many people in each case using the Internet to affect each of those scenarios.
So just by joining the crowd, we've every one of us contributed to the Internet, either as audience or as publisher, and often as both. We all helped make this worldwide network as significant as it is. Ultimately, the Internet mostly consists of us and our toys, doing significant good, significant harm, and lesser variations thereof.
So when documents such as CatB, the first mental germination of the IP spec, or the Communications Decency Act are thought of as the significant documents that shaped the Internet, I don't think that's the whole story. In fact, we are.
Would that be ANY negative consequence of the development of the 'Net?
If so, I can think of one right off the top of my head (and I'm surprised it hasn't come up): the IP number shortage. This has a history (with items such as Mercedes-Benz pigging up a whole Class A that it won't give back because "eventually every car will have its own IP address.") You could tie in the death of Jon Postel (bless his soul), and its aftermath. The explosion of new InterNIC registrations, the new assigned Registrars, how the new 2 and 3LDs affect it (won't they need addresses, too?)...
Someone will probably beat me to it, but Ep. 2 needs someone who 1) can pull off looking like Jake Lloyd at 15, and 2) has no trouble with Anakin's inevitable seduction by the Dark Side.
So if DeCaprio's not the guy, he's probably on the short list of capable actors who meet both criteria.
My doubts about this rumor, if I gave it much thought, would focus on 1) DeCaprio's inevitable price tag and Lucas' willingness to pay it, and 2) DeCaprio avoiding wrecking himself on monster binges long enough to get through filming.
Of course, Carrie Fisher did alright in three movies whilst coked up pretty heavily (so I hear).
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you can roll out that wave of the future to absolutely EVERYONE, regardless of (especially) economic ability.
As citizens, we all have a right to an equal public education whether or not we choose to take it, and if everyone can't home-school or hit the Net, and that's what they need for their equal public education, you've excluded a class of people from a public service, regardless of how well it works for the best and brightest. Not only would that be morally wrong, it would also destroy this country even more than Corporate America has already.
You left out one serious change effector:
See, the "large gobs of $$$" thing is one of the things we're supposed to get mad about, and throw the bastards out for. But it doesn't work when so many people (especially 18-35) give up on the process.
The other forms of protest are wonderful, but they can be repelled by force of law, unless more people like you continue to assert their right to vote, and continue to work for change within the process.
That's how Burma keeps its citizens down, BTW; by doing a buttload of horrible acts to ensure that they feel just like you do -- powerless. By comparison, it's a cakewalk for you to change your government; just continue to be as smart as you are, but be noisier.
Since it seems worthwhile to offer the perspective from which one posts:
I did well enough in public schools (despite having the aforementioned curse of being smart/neglected/'dealt' with) to win a commission to West Point, which I promptly lost in a year and a half due to an inability to keep my shoes shined, my closet dusted, or my belt buckle clean. I now do web development.
In Oregon, educational quality is of deepest concern to me and to many of my fellow citizens. Oregon has all the telltale signs: the funding inequality, the bad relationship with teachers unions, the axe falling on extra-curriculars, near-condemnable buildings, and all the other trimmings of your average American educational crisis.
I believe there's a break-even amount of funding that will keep schools at the status quo, and as long as Republicans control our Legislature, we will never get that amount; OTOH, my state has thrown money at the problems in all kinds of ways, and it hasn't solved much of anything, which would explain why our Republican Legislature is reluctant to fund our schools.
That is why I suggest a complete public audit for every educational system in our public schools, to at least determine 1) why our $ isn't solving as many problems as we'd like it to and 2) what else is in the way of youth getting quality educations.
I don't have any predispositions about what I think such an audit would find; I just want to know what they come up with.
Were I to walk into a school or a school board meeting myself and start asking hard questions, there are several good reasons why I don't think I'd get honest, satisfactory answers. But I believe in the scariness and intelligence of people who interrogate for a living, and know where to look. An audit would allow all of us to use the same people to set a baseline for the condition of our schools, with real empirical data, so that we'd have a basis in fact.
This would be a more valuable use of the Fed's money, I think. We can't really come together to find good solutions until we're on the same page with regard to how things are.
Australia, by most accounts, is what we Americans would call a "free" country, compared to, for example, Myanmar.
/. to be the Australian Civil Liberties Union. It's especially not on Americans to protest and act out for Australians EVERY TIME an issue threatens their freedoms. It's on Australians to change their government to suit themselves, and they're lucky to have a government where they can do that much more easily than, say, Cuba. Australians also have as much moral support (and workaround expertise) as /. can muster, better late than never, and they should feel lucky for that, too.
./ knew about it.
If a majority of Australians were sufficiently liberty-loving to get politically active when issues like this threaten them, you wouldn't see things there like mandatory client-side content filtering, or Tasmania's outright ban on homosexuality.
It's not the responsibility of
So pointing out that Australians knew about this months ago doesn't say anything. If Australians were inclined to act like they had a pair when it came to defending their freedoms, this wouldn't have happened, regardless of when Americans or
FWIW, this is most definitely NOT a good thing for Australia, because it's just a tiny step away from the law that would HAVE teeth and REALLY ruin your day.
Australians, what if the government wrote the client? What if it pinged your client to see if you were actually running it? What if they ran it server-side? Don't think that same wave of paranoia couldn't tweak the new law just so -- it happens more often than not here in the States.
No, it's best to nip these kinds of things in the bud AND act as often as called for. You're not prevented from doing both.
Like said jetson123, we've been taught that if you don't assert your patent rights FROM THE GET-GO, you forfeit them to the public domain.
And that's exactly what Unisys has done here; it could even be argued that they deliberately allowed LZW to become a standard by NOT burdening it with the ball-and-chain of patent enforcement and demand for royalties every step of the way.
Corporations have far too many privileges versus the common man as the law sits now, for us to allow Unisys to go back and "do over" an instance where they failed to execute within the law as it exists. Were it not for the size of the company, and the sheer amount of resources they could bring to bear, Unisys would have lost patent rights to LZW long ago. Thank God it expires soon anyway.
And even if you're not so conspiracy-minded as to think there aren't people whose passion is to sabotage the Open Source movement by sounding like rabid zealots, the idea of "don't swear at the company because it's a secretary that has to answer it" is a total non-starter. Dumb$#!+, that's exactly WHY they put a secretary there, and that's not our fault, either.
Roblimo, you're *THIS* close to inaugurating my Katz filter, which at this point doesn't even include Katz.
This may be overly simplistic, but here goes:
To paraphrase an FCC spokesman:
The Internet is too big, too important, for Congress not to want to regulate it just for the sake of regulating it, simply because most Congressmen have egos that are too big to comprehend something such as the Net existing without them having some kind of control over it.
Furthermore, Congressmen know almost nothing about the Net. Most of them are too old to think in terms of the Net, and even if they're not, they're not ever going to learn enough about it to avoid making stupid decisions about it.
Case in point: How many times do you think Fritz F$%#ing Hollings has pulled up a website? It doesn't matter if it's him, Orrin Hatch, or Ted Kennedy, the answer's still going to be the same - squat.
They're listening to lobbies that, by sheer signal-to-noise ratio, deemphasize the importance of cyberspace (such as the AARP, the NRA, and large business interests like agriculture and King Oil), and ultra-conservative constituents who are more worried about the potential of pornography to harm their children.
They specifically DO NOT listen to 18-35 year olds who may or may not be cyber-sympathetic because only about 9% of those people actually VOTE in the elections that get them their jobs.
And like your favorite upper management executive, knowing too much about any one thing obscures the "Big Picture" vision that made them such shining leaders in the first place, even when that one thing is to our society like factories were to their grandfathers'.
The only way anything's going to change is if people who know something (about how beautiful and important is the Net) actually hold politicians accountable at the ballot box, not only for sensible policy about the Net, but for more than a casual knowledge of the Net. And if there are no politicians who can meet that qualification, to BECOME ONE.
It frosts me neverending how many cake-eating artistes there are in my town who are my age and actually have sensible political insights, yet do nothing but bitch and complain. Meanwhile, I turn out for every election, vote my convictions (those of a free thinking 30-something who considers the Net extremely important and realizes that schools and transpo must be funded to function), and get my ASS handed to me every November 20th by all those semi-literate consumeroids someone mentioned a while back.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir (at least, I damn well better be), but picking out some half-dead Net tax bill sponsored by some half-dead redneck Senator and then bitching about it is such a supreme waste of time.
Instead, I recommend that each of us harasses and otherwise beats on ten of our young buddies until they show us their voter registration cards. Then we follow them to the polls in November (forcefully, if need be), and make sure they vote their convictions, whatever they may be. Until that starts happening a LOT, America is going to look less and less like we'd like it to.
_______________________________________
It's difficult to crawl into the mindset of NASA circa 1969, but wouldn't re-entry burn do as good a job of cleaning bacteria from the outer wall of a spacecraft as would a quick plunging into the Indian?
Another point - to be worried about infection from space, we have to establish the existence of extraterrestrial life. We haven't done that yet.
That being said, I wouldn't worry about potential contamination of the ocean.
Moody = Ridiculous Outfits(Management_School(Katz));
First of all, of course productivity has gone up since the advent of the computer; it's MANAGEMENT, SALESMANSHIP and BUSINESS ACUMEN that determine profitability, among other things, none of which have anything to do with computers, what OS one uses, etc.
If my computer spits out twice as many data widgets as it did yesterday, I am being mas productive. If my computer is twice as fast as it was yesterday, it stands to reason that I can meet that expectation of my productivity.
That's not to mention that the tasks are more complicated: There's not even a comparison between what I'm doing digitally now and what I was doing with a computer even 5 years ago.
Going back even further, I made $45 bucks a week picking strawberries when I was 10, and it made me enough money for two pairs of kid pants. Now I can buy 2 pairs of fat man pants for that same money, and it only takes me 3 hours to earn it! So not only is my work since the dawn of the information age much more complex (and therefore, one might argue, more valuable), it's more efficient. I'm working smarter, not harder, remember?
I'm having doubts about this guy Moody. Maybe someone can explain how this guy is even remotely credible, cause it's not his takes, or the Afrika Bambaataa beanie that's doing it for me.
And when it does, I can't help but giggle with anticipation over how stupid Katz (among others, esp. Roger Ebert) is going to feel when Avalos and Weiler(sp?) sue the living $#!+ out of Artisan and BWP for infringement of copyright and intellectual property theft.
These guys made the The Last Broadcast, an independent movie from last year upon which BWP is obviously prototyped. It is my hope that Artisan and the other copycats won't have enough left over to fund a Taurus with all the options, much less another "project" such as Blair Witch.
I also can't wait to read the article we all know Katz is going to post, shortly after the above comes to pass, on how America is doomed because so many people fell for the hype. Katz can turn on a dime when the prevailing wind of popular opinion shifts against him, and in this case, I'm looking forward to it.
...when it was called The Last Broadcast.
An independent film that premiered in Portland, and other places, it was presented as a mockumentary just like BWP. LB was about three independent filmmakers who had a weekly show about the occult on public tv. They decide to do a show on location in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, in search of the Jersey Devil. As in BWP, they disappear, but their footage is found. The footage is played back to finish out the plot. They even had a website to flesh out the pieces of the "documentary", which was filmed entirely on handhelds. I won't give away the ending except to say it was interesting.
The movie reviewer at Salon (I forget her name) says that BWP was developed at about the same time as LB, and that there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the BWP guys thieved the idea from LB, but I don't believe her.
My disturbed friend says there's a movie even before that called the Cannibal Holocaust (three NYU film students, Amazon tribe, no one makes it out, footage found after the fact) that uses the same plot device. It's not new to BWP, and that should be mentioned.
I can generally stand Katz articles, but in this case, I've read too many other reviews of BWP that offer the same breathless hype (and also forget to mention the previous films that formed the prototype of BWP). To me, reviews like this prove that their authors are too focused on the mainstream, Blockbuster/Cineplex marketing hype to have any kind of street cred.
What makes a movie reviewer a movie reviewer is usually that they've seen thousands more films than you or me; I'd be willing to bet that Jon Katz could not pass that test, and until he can, his opinion of a movie isn't any more worthy of notoriety than is yours or mine.
How easy is it, then, for a private movie theatre owner to make admittance decisions of his/her own? From what I've read, the MPAA rating does not have force of law, so what then prevents a theatre owner from deciding to pack his/her own house with underage kids jonesing for a look at American Pie?
We know Blockbuster and the mega-theatres pander to the pro-censorship crowd because it's profitable to them. But it would also be profitable to let every high-school kid with $6.50 into your theatre to see American Pie, would it not? Simple supply and demand.
There's a reason why: Sustained community protest is hard to resist over time, and the religious right knows that. If they write enough letters to the right people, stand outside your theatre with pickets, get media exposure, and start scaring politicians, they'll win. So they do that, and they succeed at rates disproportionate to their actual numbers. The problem with that is that the movie theatre can't stay afloat if it doesn't cater to large numbers of people.
Nothing's gonna change until the people on the other side of the issue (kids or not) start taking up the fight themselves. Technology is one form of protest, but it's not as effective unless the word gets out. My buying a DVD player is not going to affect your range of choices until you know you can do it yourself -- the best way to make sure you know that is to tell you.
People who believe this is wrong need to get their message out, as well, and make it mainstream to think of the issue in those terms.
Looking at this another way, the Internet is its own compendium of significant documents, arranged in order of significance to each person according to their own circumstances.
What you and I think is significant may not matter to someone else, so maybe even Joe's first crappy, error-ridden homepage is significant, as long as it is significant to Joe, because it adds to the Internet's strongest aspect: its universality.
To me, the thing that separates the Internet from FidoNet circa 1987, or a roomful of wonks talking IPX over Lantastic peer LAN, is mostly the fact that there are a couple bajillion people using it.
Among other things, the Internet helps feed people. The Internet helps diseminate information to topple repressive governments. The Internet keeps sex predators safely wanking off at home, and out of our houses. That's all mainly because there are many people in each case using the Internet to affect each of those scenarios.
So just by joining the crowd, we've every one of us contributed to the Internet, either as audience or as publisher, and often as both. We all helped make this worldwide network as significant as it is. Ultimately, the Internet mostly consists of us and our toys, doing significant good, significant harm, and lesser variations thereof.
So when documents such as CatB, the first mental germination of the IP spec, or the Communications Decency Act are thought of as the significant documents that shaped the Internet, I don't think that's the whole story. In fact, we are.
Would that be ANY negative consequence of the development of the 'Net?
If so, I can think of one right off the top of my head (and I'm surprised it hasn't come up): the IP number shortage. This has a history (with items such as Mercedes-Benz pigging up a whole Class A that it won't give back because "eventually every car will have its own IP address.") You could tie in the death of Jon Postel (bless his soul), and its aftermath. The explosion of new InterNIC registrations, the new assigned Registrars, how the new 2 and 3LDs affect it (won't they need addresses, too?)...
Damn, maybe I'll go write my own paper...
Good Luck!
Someone will probably beat me to it, but Ep. 2 needs someone who 1) can pull off looking like Jake Lloyd at 15, and 2) has no trouble with Anakin's inevitable seduction by the Dark Side.
So if DeCaprio's not the guy, he's probably on the short list of capable actors who meet both criteria.
My doubts about this rumor, if I gave it much thought, would focus on 1) DeCaprio's inevitable price tag and Lucas' willingness to pay it, and 2) DeCaprio avoiding wrecking himself on monster binges long enough to get through filming.
Of course, Carrie Fisher did alright in three movies whilst coked up pretty heavily (so I hear).