Read the article - that's part of what Glennwald is asking. He's asking, why would a 22-year-old Private with access to high-security information get onto AIM and spill his guts about an issue that could get him thrown into jail for a long time with some guy that he's never met before? Something is funny about the whole notation.
He also qualifies both of those beliefs with quotes from Manning. From the quotes of Lamo's chat with Manning, it seems he believed that he actually was acting in the role of a whistleblower. He mentions his moral issues with what's going on:
Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. war in Iraq: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been detained for distributing "insurgent" literature which, when he had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a scholarly critique against PM Maliki":
Maliki: i had an interpreter read it for me... and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet... i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on... he didn't want to hear any of it... he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees... i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth... but that was a point where i was a *part* of something... i was actively involved in something that i was completely against...
And he was leaking it to WikiLeaks because he believed that was where it would do the most public good:
Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or china, and made bank?...it belongs in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the public domain - because another state would just take advantage of the information... try and get some edge - if its out in the open... it should be a public good.
In regards to his belief that Lamo was doing it for the attention:
On May 20 -- a month ago -- Poulsen, out of nowhere, despite Lamo's not having been in the news for years, wrote a long, detailed Wired article describing serious mental health problems Lamo was experiencing... Lamo called the police, who concluded that he was experiencing such acute psychiatric distress that they had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for three days. That 72-hour "involuntary psychiatric hold" was then extended by a court for six more days, after which he was released to his parents' home. Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed. In that article, Poulsen also summarized Lamo's extensive hacking history. Lamo told me that, while he was in the mental hospital, he called Poulsen to tell him what happened, and then told Poulsen he could write about it for a Wired article. So starved was Lamo for some media attention that he was willing to encourage Poulsen to write about his claimed psychiatric problems if it meant an article in Wired that mentioned his name.
It was just over two weeks after writing about Lamo's Asperger's, depression and hacking history that Poulsen, along with Kim Zetter, reported that PFC Manning had been detained, after, they said, he had "contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail." Lamo told me that Manning first emailed him on May 20 and, according to highly edited chat logs released by Wired, had his first online chat with Manning on May 21; in other words, Manning first contacted Lamo the very day that Poulsen's Wired article on Lamo's involuntary commitment appeared (the Wired article is time-stamped 5:46 p.m. on May 20).
Many of the bizarre aspects of this case, at least as conveyed by Lamo and Wired, are self-evident. Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they "could do serious damage to national security?" Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to "quickly" confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole
But the FCC's two Republican voices expressed strong opposition. Commissioner Meredith Baker raised concerns about the financial implications and future broadband deployment, charging that the vote would "subject the Internet and consumers to years of litigation and uncertainty."
"There are significant consequences to even initiating this proceeding," she said.
You are not even allowed to INQUIRE into whether or not the internet is broken. The free market exists in some sort of weird quantum universe that gets worse just by observing it! (Just like Comcast online speeds get worse just as soon as you try to open a web page!)
Commissioner Robert McDowell, the agency's other Republican, said a net 1.5 million jobs could be put at risk as a consequence of agency action.
The process "has already caused harm in the marketplace," he said.
Oh, that poor, poor marketplace. Being caused such harm by just asking if it's causing any harm. Has anyone ever posted a link to exactly where these 1.5 million jobs are coming from?
I think the Wii was an eye-opener in how games could be pushed on a "casual" audience, but I think that the Wii was also a culmination of a trend that was already long in coming. By the time the Wii had come out, we'd had a number of people who were spending half the day playing cheap Popcap games like Bejeweled, or we had people who spent all day playing Monopoly on Yahoo Games, or we were starting to see people playing Uno on XBox Live or the smaller games on Steam, or you could throw in the renewed popularity of 2d platformers on the already successful Nintendo DS, or how about free downloadable copies of Nethack?
As you mentioned, there were a lot of people concerned that gaming was getting too big for its britches, that the cost of creating games was getting out of control. I wouldn't attribute the saving of the industry directly to the Wii because even the hardcore gamers were starting to think about smaller games by that point. The Wii expanded the industry with its gimmicks, but if the Wii had never existed, you still would have seen a lot of those people get caught up in Farmville a few years later.
Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 1
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
If I got a degree in science, I could not take out a loan to set up a research lab. If I did, the strong possibility that I could research something and come up empty as I disprove my own hypotheses is very strong, so I could have no way to pay off those loans. You're basically stating that no one should ever become a scientist, because it's not a job that you can do unless someone else pays you to do it.
Buddy, you're telling people that they shouldn't take any interest in a career that they couldn't do through self-employment, while some of the greatest strengths of this country came from our technological advancements from teams of people getting together to work on things. As someone who loves America, I hope that we give out plenty of grants to put scientists to work developing the tools that will return us to being the technological superpower. Stating that it's un-American to want more jobs for scientists is a pipe dream that our country remains the best in the world if we just clap our hands and should "I believe in fairies!" over and over rather than investing the time and manpower to make it real, and I'm not sure if I consider your comment one of the most un-American things that I've ever read, or if it's just a bunch of ignorant, hyper-libertarian claptrap.
You speak like the modern age has had a fundamentally different attitude towards science.
From what I'm told (I didn't live during that time, so I don't have firsthand knowledge), we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development and considered it part of the greatness of our nation. Whether you consider it a problem with faith or with politics or with capitalism or education or whatever, I don't think you can say that about our relationship with science today.
It also doesn't help that we don't have a lot of hard science going on in business right now. Our current business environment emphasizes short-term growth over long-term growth, so scientific developments that don't lead to real gains within a few years are being somewhat ignored, so that the private sector is just as apathetic as the public sector, if not more.
Why have a definite article? Why have different ways to pronounce the same syllables as presented in different words? Why have silent letters? Why have emphasis marks on different syllables? Why capitalize certain words, like the cardinal directions? Languages aren't exactly developed by informed committee. The reason you have little quirks like this in Japanese is because, much like English, it's an amalgation of other languages that has developed over centuries rather than a "pure" development.
Alternatively, there are some places in Europe where teenagers are allowed a beer at the dinner table. The circumstancial evidence I've heard is that the young people in this country are much less prone to binge drinking, but don't quote me on that.
Besides, if you really wanted to ban something from use by minors that has a serious effect on their health, ban driving - car accidents are a major cause of death for people under 18. But we wouldn't do that because there are uses for it, of course. In the end, you can't protect the kids from everything.
Some of the replies are saying the basement is a fine place to put these things, I can appreciate that. I'm wondering if this is less a problem of basement and more a problem of sewer. I don't know about Dallas, but I live in Houston, and Houston has the most terrible sewers I've ever seen. Storm drains are located very far away from each other, and the amount of space underground for carrying water seems to be miniscule. Once a year or so, we get just a day's worth of heavy storms which result in flash flooding - which seems like it would have all just washed into the drains in any other major city I've ever been in. Maybe the greater issue here is whether or not those basements were properly protected by drainage to keep the waters out.
If the free to play model was so great, why does it always happen to the always-ran MMOs?
Is that a fault of the games themselves, or of the traditional pay-per-month MMO model? There's a lot of different games out there for people to play. For a game to demand that people pay money into every month for the privilege of not going off and playing Red Dead Redemption instead for a one-time price (or insert other recent popular title here), that game has to be not just good but great. Would you willingly pay $10-$15 a month to stay in a game that only got an 8.0 average on metacritic? Having also seen the moderate success of League of Legends, I'm thinking we might just be seeing a trend that what works for Everquest might not work for everyone.
What the fuck do you think is keeping people "down here" from keeping slaves? Laws? Bullshit. How about it's morally extremely disfuckingtasteful and something that is a stain on the history of our country?
Okay, slavery of blacks won't come back. How do you think some of those Southern states would treat people of Middle-Eastern descent in the current climate? Or homosexuals? Or perhaps even atheists?
To add to that, if Obama had run in 2004, he might have won. Bush's reputation was already declining, but the Dems ran John Kerry as their candidate - who was an incredibly milquetoast, establishment character that failed to attract any attention, and he did a terrible job of dealing with attacks on his war record. As terrible a candidate as Kerry was, he only lost the election by, I believe two states' worth of electoral votes. A better candidate could have won that race.
We don't excuse a schoolyard bully if he claims, "I was just having fun."
I don't know how long it's been since you've been in school, but we sure do, all the time. There's a huge difference in politics between bullying other students and bullying a teacher.
I'm always disappointed when I see people confusing "libertarianism" with "a desire for universal deregulation of businesses"
I imagine then that you must be very disappointed with the majority of people who call themselves libertarians.
Therefore, the power of the government to control the market must be strictly contained, so that the ability of corporations to achieve gains through government corruption is limited or non-existent.... Take away the government's power to take from one subset of society and give to another, and the ability of greedy corporations to protect their profits through government lobbying nearly disappears.
But that's exactly my point. Even in the magical world in which you took away the power of the federal government to favor one group or another, the state and local governments could still do it, and they tend to be at least as corrupt as the fed is. The capitalist society in which corporations don't have massive influence on government is a myth - you can work to minimize it, but it will still exist.
Under the system where everyone gets their news from newspapers, let's say I work for the Kentucky Farmpaper or something. The New York Times researches something important about government and prints an article about that. I consider it important and want it in my paper, so I call up the NYT, pay them a certain fee to use their reporting, and print their article in my paper. Under the system where everyone gets their news from the internet, the NYT goes and spends a great deal of money on researching a point of interest, and then everyone on the internet rewrites and summarizes the article to the point that you don't even need to go to the NYT site and kick them back a half-cent of advertising revenue for the ads on their site.
If you read the actual discussion text (the pdf is linked above), you'll note that's basically what's being discussed. The paper suggests that there might need to be a "hot news" regulation that allows news sources to control the articles that they personally fund and research for a certain period of time so that other sources can't simply rewrite their stories and post them.
We do have a BBC-near-equivalent called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS (television) and NPR (radio). Neither of these institutions is as large as the BBC - at least in comparison to scale between the two countries. Both, however, are generally well-received by the public if polling is to be believed.
It's being stated by a right-wing commentator. What makes you so sure it's a sane person?:V
Read the actual text of the discussion linked above and read the part about "hot news" regulation. The basic idea is that if a news agency investigates and reports on a unique subject, another organization should not be able to simply rewrite that article and report on it as their own without compensating the original source. It's not being proposed as an absolute, perpetual right to ownership of facts.
And that's why many of them are failing now. They are not reporting what the people want - honest assessments of government and issues. Many of the would be readers have simply stopped, because they are intelligent and can read past the biased trash that is spewed and don't want it anymore.
Yeah, and no one goes to shows anymore - they're too crowded.
I'm afraid the more tabloidy stuff and the more charged editorial stuff is what goes out because that's what makes money. I wonder what the ratings are for a show with generally neutral debate - Macneill/Lehrer, Meet the Press - as compared to O'Reilly, Olbermann, Beck. Punditry sells, in-depth analysis of facts with equal weighting to all sides is boring and heady.
The paper in question discussed expanding protection for "hot news" items. As in, if my newspaper did a lot of research, spent money on sending reporters out into the fields, and was the first in the world to discover that people have 4 fingers and 1 thumb on each hand, it would be detrimental to the business of the paper if other outlets simply reworded my article and sold it without having contributed to the research.
Although, how dare you suggest that people actually take advantage of the option to talk back to their government rather than just ranting about it on/.
The repeal of Glass-Stegall, the lowering of capital ratios needed to maintain leverage, the deliberate understaffing of the SEC as seen as an unnecessary vehicle, the maintenance of fed interest rates near zero during the last decade, these are all notions of deregulation. If we were standing back and letting the banks support their own ratings boards and believing that mortgage brokers could police themselves and would be natually trustworthy, how is that an argument against government intervention in those cases? I'm not sure what you mean by lots of "bad regulation"** - what we had was weak regulation that was powerless to stop any issues that could have potentially occurred.
Hell, you make Atlas Shrugged sound like an almost progressive book - it sounds like you're saying that the government should have been stronger than the corporations rather than the other way around. The idea that government should have no intervention in business whatsoever is a pipe dream, right up there with the idea that government should facilitate a society where everyone receives exactly equal pay and benefits. In a society where government stands back and allows profit-driven corporations to police themselves, then eventually you will have corruption as those corporations recognize the profit value in bribing and maintaining control of government, just as communist governments tend to become corrupt as officials recognize their special privileges. The "it was deregulation" rhetoric is a notion that government has a role to play in facilitating a free market, and that the extreme opposite of that is not a system in which the government goes completely hands-off - the extreme opposite is a government dictated by the whims of the corporations.
** "I don't give a damn about my bad regulation! You're living in the past, it's a new generation!" And now that will be stuck in my head all day.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article - that's part of what Glennwald is asking. He's asking, why would a 22-year-old Private with access to high-security information get onto AIM and spill his guts about an issue that could get him thrown into jail for a long time with some guy that he's never met before? Something is funny about the whole notation.
He also qualifies both of those beliefs with quotes from Manning. From the quotes of Lamo's chat with Manning, it seems he believed that he actually was acting in the role of a whistleblower. He mentions his moral issues with what's going on:
...it belongs in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the public domain - because another state would just take advantage of the information... try and get some edge - if its out in the open... it should be a public good.
Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. war in Iraq: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been detained for distributing "insurgent" literature which, when he had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a scholarly critique against PM Maliki":
Maliki: i had an interpreter read it for me... and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet... i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on... he didn't want to hear any of it... he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees... i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth... but that was a point where i was a *part* of something... i was actively involved in something that i was completely against...
And he was leaking it to WikiLeaks because he believed that was where it would do the most public good:
Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or china, and made bank?
In regards to his belief that Lamo was doing it for the attention:
On May 20 -- a month ago -- Poulsen, out of nowhere, despite Lamo's not having been in the news for years, wrote a long, detailed Wired article describing serious mental health problems Lamo was experiencing... Lamo called the police, who concluded that he was experiencing such acute psychiatric distress that they had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for three days. That 72-hour "involuntary psychiatric hold" was then extended by a court for six more days, after which he was released to his parents' home. Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed. In that article, Poulsen also summarized Lamo's extensive hacking history. Lamo told me that, while he was in the mental hospital, he called Poulsen to tell him what happened, and then told Poulsen he could write about it for a Wired article. So starved was Lamo for some media attention that he was willing to encourage Poulsen to write about his claimed psychiatric problems if it meant an article in Wired that mentioned his name.
It was just over two weeks after writing about Lamo's Asperger's, depression and hacking history that Poulsen, along with Kim Zetter, reported that PFC Manning had been detained, after, they said, he had "contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail." Lamo told me that Manning first emailed him on May 20 and, according to highly edited chat logs released by Wired, had his first online chat with Manning on May 21; in other words, Manning first contacted Lamo the very day that Poulsen's Wired article on Lamo's involuntary commitment appeared (the Wired article is time-stamped 5:46 p.m. on May 20).
Many of the bizarre aspects of this case, at least as conveyed by Lamo and Wired, are self-evident. Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they "could do serious damage to national security?" Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to "quickly" confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole
...then you're going to be mighty shocked at how many crazy people there are.
Oh, believe me - I AM shocked by how many crazy people there are.
From TFA:
But the FCC's two Republican voices expressed strong opposition. Commissioner Meredith Baker raised concerns about the financial implications and future broadband deployment, charging that the vote would "subject the Internet and consumers to years of litigation and uncertainty."
"There are significant consequences to even initiating this proceeding," she said.
You are not even allowed to INQUIRE into whether or not the internet is broken. The free market exists in some sort of weird quantum universe that gets worse just by observing it! (Just like Comcast online speeds get worse just as soon as you try to open a web page!)
Commissioner Robert McDowell, the agency's other Republican, said a net 1.5 million jobs could be put at risk as a consequence of agency action.
The process "has already caused harm in the marketplace," he said.
Oh, that poor, poor marketplace. Being caused such harm by just asking if it's causing any harm. Has anyone ever posted a link to exactly where these 1.5 million jobs are coming from?
I think the Wii was an eye-opener in how games could be pushed on a "casual" audience, but I think that the Wii was also a culmination of a trend that was already long in coming. By the time the Wii had come out, we'd had a number of people who were spending half the day playing cheap Popcap games like Bejeweled, or we had people who spent all day playing Monopoly on Yahoo Games, or we were starting to see people playing Uno on XBox Live or the smaller games on Steam, or you could throw in the renewed popularity of 2d platformers on the already successful Nintendo DS, or how about free downloadable copies of Nethack?
As you mentioned, there were a lot of people concerned that gaming was getting too big for its britches, that the cost of creating games was getting out of control. I wouldn't attribute the saving of the industry directly to the Wii because even the hardcore gamers were starting to think about smaller games by that point. The Wii expanded the industry with its gimmicks, but if the Wii had never existed, you still would have seen a lot of those people get caught up in Farmville a few years later.
Third base! :boggles:
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
If I got a degree in science, I could not take out a loan to set up a research lab. If I did, the strong possibility that I could research something and come up empty as I disprove my own hypotheses is very strong, so I could have no way to pay off those loans. You're basically stating that no one should ever become a scientist, because it's not a job that you can do unless someone else pays you to do it.
Buddy, you're telling people that they shouldn't take any interest in a career that they couldn't do through self-employment, while some of the greatest strengths of this country came from our technological advancements from teams of people getting together to work on things. As someone who loves America, I hope that we give out plenty of grants to put scientists to work developing the tools that will return us to being the technological superpower. Stating that it's un-American to want more jobs for scientists is a pipe dream that our country remains the best in the world if we just clap our hands and should "I believe in fairies!" over and over rather than investing the time and manpower to make it real, and I'm not sure if I consider your comment one of the most un-American things that I've ever read, or if it's just a bunch of ignorant, hyper-libertarian claptrap.
You speak like the modern age has had a fundamentally different attitude towards science.
From what I'm told (I didn't live during that time, so I don't have firsthand knowledge), we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development and considered it part of the greatness of our nation. Whether you consider it a problem with faith or with politics or with capitalism or education or whatever, I don't think you can say that about our relationship with science today.
It also doesn't help that we don't have a lot of hard science going on in business right now. Our current business environment emphasizes short-term growth over long-term growth, so scientific developments that don't lead to real gains within a few years are being somewhat ignored, so that the private sector is just as apathetic as the public sector, if not more.
No one actually reads the Constitution anyway. They just tell you what it says.
Why have a definite article? Why have different ways to pronounce the same syllables as presented in different words? Why have silent letters? Why have emphasis marks on different syllables? Why capitalize certain words, like the cardinal directions? Languages aren't exactly developed by informed committee. The reason you have little quirks like this in Japanese is because, much like English, it's an amalgation of other languages that has developed over centuries rather than a "pure" development.
...they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
/drumroll
That is to say, it's the closest thing that they have to the English language.
Alternatively, there are some places in Europe where teenagers are allowed a beer at the dinner table. The circumstancial evidence I've heard is that the young people in this country are much less prone to binge drinking, but don't quote me on that.
Besides, if you really wanted to ban something from use by minors that has a serious effect on their health, ban driving - car accidents are a major cause of death for people under 18. But we wouldn't do that because there are uses for it, of course. In the end, you can't protect the kids from everything.
Some of the replies are saying the basement is a fine place to put these things, I can appreciate that. I'm wondering if this is less a problem of basement and more a problem of sewer. I don't know about Dallas, but I live in Houston, and Houston has the most terrible sewers I've ever seen. Storm drains are located very far away from each other, and the amount of space underground for carrying water seems to be miniscule. Once a year or so, we get just a day's worth of heavy storms which result in flash flooding - which seems like it would have all just washed into the drains in any other major city I've ever been in. Maybe the greater issue here is whether or not those basements were properly protected by drainage to keep the waters out.
If the free to play model was so great, why does it always happen to the always-ran MMOs?
Is that a fault of the games themselves, or of the traditional pay-per-month MMO model? There's a lot of different games out there for people to play. For a game to demand that people pay money into every month for the privilege of not going off and playing Red Dead Redemption instead for a one-time price (or insert other recent popular title here), that game has to be not just good but great. Would you willingly pay $10-$15 a month to stay in a game that only got an 8.0 average on metacritic? Having also seen the moderate success of League of Legends, I'm thinking we might just be seeing a trend that what works for Everquest might not work for everyone.
What the fuck do you think is keeping people "down here" from keeping slaves? Laws? Bullshit. How about it's morally extremely disfuckingtasteful and something that is a stain on the history of our country?
Okay, slavery of blacks won't come back. How do you think some of those Southern states would treat people of Middle-Eastern descent in the current climate? Or homosexuals? Or perhaps even atheists?
To add to that, if Obama had run in 2004, he might have won. Bush's reputation was already declining, but the Dems ran John Kerry as their candidate - who was an incredibly milquetoast, establishment character that failed to attract any attention, and he did a terrible job of dealing with attacks on his war record. As terrible a candidate as Kerry was, he only lost the election by, I believe two states' worth of electoral votes. A better candidate could have won that race.
We don't excuse a schoolyard bully if he claims, "I was just having fun."
I don't know how long it's been since you've been in school, but we sure do, all the time. There's a huge difference in politics between bullying other students and bullying a teacher.
I'm always disappointed when I see people confusing "libertarianism" with "a desire for universal deregulation of businesses"
I imagine then that you must be very disappointed with the majority of people who call themselves libertarians.
Therefore, the power of the government to control the market must be strictly contained, so that the ability of corporations to achieve gains through government corruption is limited or non-existent.... Take away the government's power to take from one subset of society and give to another, and the ability of greedy corporations to protect their profits through government lobbying nearly disappears.
But that's exactly my point. Even in the magical world in which you took away the power of the federal government to favor one group or another, the state and local governments could still do it, and they tend to be at least as corrupt as the fed is. The capitalist society in which corporations don't have massive influence on government is a myth - you can work to minimize it, but it will still exist.
Under the system where everyone gets their news from newspapers, let's say I work for the Kentucky Farmpaper or something. The New York Times researches something important about government and prints an article about that. I consider it important and want it in my paper, so I call up the NYT, pay them a certain fee to use their reporting, and print their article in my paper. Under the system where everyone gets their news from the internet, the NYT goes and spends a great deal of money on researching a point of interest, and then everyone on the internet rewrites and summarizes the article to the point that you don't even need to go to the NYT site and kick them back a half-cent of advertising revenue for the ads on their site.
If you read the actual discussion text (the pdf is linked above), you'll note that's basically what's being discussed. The paper suggests that there might need to be a "hot news" regulation that allows news sources to control the articles that they personally fund and research for a certain period of time so that other sources can't simply rewrite their stories and post them.
We do have a BBC-near-equivalent called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS (television) and NPR (radio). Neither of these institutions is as large as the BBC - at least in comparison to scale between the two countries. Both, however, are generally well-received by the public if polling is to be believed.
It's being stated by a right-wing commentator. What makes you so sure it's a sane person? :V
Read the actual text of the discussion linked above and read the part about "hot news" regulation. The basic idea is that if a news agency investigates and reports on a unique subject, another organization should not be able to simply rewrite that article and report on it as their own without compensating the original source. It's not being proposed as an absolute, perpetual right to ownership of facts.
And that's why many of them are failing now. They are not reporting what the people want - honest assessments of government and issues. Many of the would be readers have simply stopped, because they are intelligent and can read past the biased trash that is spewed and don't want it anymore.
Yeah, and no one goes to shows anymore - they're too crowded.
I'm afraid the more tabloidy stuff and the more charged editorial stuff is what goes out because that's what makes money. I wonder what the ratings are for a show with generally neutral debate - Macneill/Lehrer, Meet the Press - as compared to O'Reilly, Olbermann, Beck. Punditry sells, in-depth analysis of facts with equal weighting to all sides is boring and heady.
The paper in question discussed expanding protection for "hot news" items. As in, if my newspaper did a lot of research, spent money on sending reporters out into the fields, and was the first in the world to discover that people have 4 fingers and 1 thumb on each hand, it would be detrimental to the business of the paper if other outlets simply reworded my article and sold it without having contributed to the research.
Although, how dare you suggest that people actually take advantage of the option to talk back to their government rather than just ranting about it on /.
The repeal of Glass-Stegall, the lowering of capital ratios needed to maintain leverage, the deliberate understaffing of the SEC as seen as an unnecessary vehicle, the maintenance of fed interest rates near zero during the last decade, these are all notions of deregulation. If we were standing back and letting the banks support their own ratings boards and believing that mortgage brokers could police themselves and would be natually trustworthy, how is that an argument against government intervention in those cases? I'm not sure what you mean by lots of "bad regulation"** - what we had was weak regulation that was powerless to stop any issues that could have potentially occurred.
Hell, you make Atlas Shrugged sound like an almost progressive book - it sounds like you're saying that the government should have been stronger than the corporations rather than the other way around. The idea that government should have no intervention in business whatsoever is a pipe dream, right up there with the idea that government should facilitate a society where everyone receives exactly equal pay and benefits. In a society where government stands back and allows profit-driven corporations to police themselves, then eventually you will have corruption as those corporations recognize the profit value in bribing and maintaining control of government, just as communist governments tend to become corrupt as officials recognize their special privileges. The "it was deregulation" rhetoric is a notion that government has a role to play in facilitating a free market, and that the extreme opposite of that is not a system in which the government goes completely hands-off - the extreme opposite is a government dictated by the whims of the corporations.
** "I don't give a damn about my bad regulation! You're living in the past, it's a new generation!" And now that will be stuck in my head all day.