Let's hope you are one of a LOT of people. But it's pretty hard to have much sympathy with the theory that "there are probably nice people there too" when you live near enough MS to see every day just how deleterious MS culture has been for the last ten years. It has virally infected the value systems, judgments and attitudes towards genuine creativity held by almost every 'nice-type' person who was associated with them....plus it has leached into the surrounding community (and, to a large degree, the whole country) a sense of free-floating greed and envy which just isn't very attractive.
Outside of this, of course, there are all the bad THINGS they've DONE. Rock on, DOJ! And...Give 'em PR hell,/.
Did JK actually READ the conclusions of law? If so (it seems a little doubtful), he should at least, as a writer, appreciate the care with which every effort was made to cover all legal bases. Especially vis-a-vis appeals and...the Supreme Court.
It's all very well for Mister Katz to feel his pen is mightier than the sword of M$, or that said sword hath grown tired or outdated or whatever. But if he were actually running a high-tech enterprise in the real world he would certainly have to deal with the present presence of M$. When you can afford to give every soul in the US a few hundred bucks - but you settle for shelling out whenever yr PR suffers instead - you remain (whatever scribes say) a very prominent power.
It's offensive that the utterly huge efforts mounted by Boies, Klein and others should be treated as if they were beside the point. Just check out what M$ has been up to in China, Europe, etc whilst JK was deciding their "irrelevance".
There *is* something to be said for the billions of hours of hard, hard work which has gone into revealing M$'s true face to those beyond the/. community. Certainly neither/. or Jon Katz was gonna change the avergae person's view of M$ as a wonderful US success story based on "innovation".
It took a LOT of people a LOT of work and, frankly, that is tougher than dashing off yet another cynical, got-there-first essay.
It was in tightly-controlled, studio-dominated, early Hollywood when suits _first_ used to say "Here our assets go home at night". It didn't exactly pan out then as a democratizing social force - but we have ended up with a global cult of celebrity and the increasing ability to watch horror movies on computers.
This is a well-argued and interesting piece but: most of the posts reflect one of the problems in even a "progressive" reaction to the changes it describes. Which is: they talk about only programmers, IT professionals, etc as "knowledge workers".
Even from the most pragmatic viewpoint (ie what will make companies scads of cash and give them staying power), companies should start - now - to think of EVERYONE who keeps digitally savvy and plays a role in their enterprise as collaborators in "knowledge work".
I mean the artist/creator/content provider who designs yr company logo, shoots your ad, describes your product, markets you to the world, writes you up in the press and on the Net. Not just the hardware will be involved. People need stuff to sell, that stuff needs to be well-designed and its case persuasively argued. Ditto the case of individual companies.
As someone already pointed out, clueless companies haven't changed yet (& are unlikely to). Plus it will take a little longer for forces - however strong - to make them do so or to wipe them out.
So in the meantime: how about that medical coverage?:)
If JK is seriously gonna get into the hottest emerging field of both law and jurisprudence, he's gonna need to spend considerably more time in the law libraries of numerous countries. Because no-one agrees on much of this and the (different) traditions of countries in the European Union - esp the French - are often at odds with Anglo-American legal precedents and traditions.
Much of French-derived law (some dating from before the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, often still a benchmark for decisions about copyright) mitigates against violation of an "author's" - ie artist's or creator's - "moral" rights. Those are groups of legal rights meant to protect creators from having their fine works "diminished" by caricature, moustaches, partial reproduction, distortions, mockery etc etc.
American law offers a contrast. As recently as a couple of years ago, Supreme Court decisions in the US favoured "transformative" use as consistent with their federal copyright policies...the overriding incentive here being economic and commercial interests. Also a nod towards a US history supposedly weighted towards the "free flow" of information.
Copyright law in cyberspace or electronic copyright is a contradictory and complicated field in which the law is being made (precedents are being set) case-by-case...With plenty of lawyers into its potential for big bucks. But it may also happen inch by inch, country by country and each "foreign" claimant to a right will find assertion of his/her claims depends on the environment in which that claim ends up being assessed.
James Fallows is indeed a "writer" but, as is pointed out elsewhere on/. it's his editorial credentials which make this softball analysis such a boon to Microsoft in their time of need. As a writer who was wooed by them and decided against joining the Force, I'd say: take everything he wrote with a barrel of salt.
The "creative team" I met in Redmond was 99.9% white and male. All of them had been recruited with exciting credentials; *none* of them felt as "creatives' they needed to know anything about the "technology side"...Not anything. They were, in fact, distinguished by separate instances of the very arrogance & lack of curiosity that makes a BAD "content provider". There's no way they were assembled randomly, either.
Instead of insisting they get some education in their metier (or, better, hiring folks with actual interdisciplinary skills and vision), MS was happy to have their team tech-ignorant. The duties their hires perceived as "lowly" were to be handled by what MS thoughtfully referred to as Internet "copy wranglers". This interesting term for the people who would actually create how things looked creatively insulted both parties at once!!!
In discussing what was intended to be a broad, ambitous and potentially exciting project it soon became apparent that: (a) no-one at Redmond had thought this project through at all, either "bottom-up" OR "top-down." (Although "Bill" had "given it two years to start making money"..) (b) every honest and probing inquiry that one launched about a potential problem was interpeted as an effort to screw a bigger salary out of the company - only money, not ideas or answers, was offered in reply (c) impressive though the "team's" resumes were in the non-tech world, one distressing thing was very clear. They would _never_ be able to function together...not even as a group, let alone as a group with a serious brief to conceive and execute.
These were telling realizations. (Borne out less than one year into the "two years" when "Bill" got impatient for the bucks and junked his idea.)
There is probably nothing as weird in the world as sitting in front of Microsoft's man-made waterfall and thinking, "These guys could _really_ do *anything*, they have got the money and position to do it" and swiftly realizing that it's...never gonna happen.
Right. That "union socialist view" is just "so out of fashion". And of course there are only _good_ managers in every profession. Get a grip! Or rather, take a look around, ya little Republican.
Perhaps you should have a word with a Boeing engineer. They're right down on the picket line, today, carrying those signs that say "No Nerds NO BIRDS" and "Dilbert on Strike".
Your "I've got mine so I'm not worryin'" view is the one that's gone "out of fashion".
It's interesting how many high-tech workers fail to understand that many kinds of workplaces/workers put in the same hours they do.
However, *not* all enjoy the same benefits.
Maybe it's a function of arrogance, youth or just short-term thinking. The situation of stereotypical service workers (cashiers, catering staff, Third World workers) is _clearly_ woeful. But few/. contributors seem to realize the situation of many "creative" professionals, ie designers, editors, writers, illustrators and reporters ("content providers") parallels theirs.
Those not located in the epicenters of techno-bucks, however, labor under different circumstances than you. Yeah, we all put in those 60 to 70+ hours, including weekends and evenings, etc. Especially if any of us are self-employed. The difference: no high salaries or dangling stock options.
We LOVE what we do too. But it would be nice to have medical insurance (& I don't mean crappy, cheap HMOs). It would be nice to have employers who can tell good work from bad - evaluation of creative work is more subjective than evaluation of code or systems maintenance! It would be nice if our employers actually CARED when we have RSI or work-related problems. After all, they help create those.
It would be nice, too, if they upgraded our workplaces: so we wouldn't all have to keep up with emerging tools and information on our own nickel. But DO they plow those profits we help make back into where we make them? No. Not any more than they give employees a share of them. Still, if we're not up-to-date, we're not "competitive". And there are always plenty of eager interns out there, living at home and ready to fill our shoes for next to nothing.
Wonder why us other people *do* have some interest in unions? Because we are just as expendable as any "service" worker, no matter how much we love our work and labor to do it well.
I hear a chorus of the traditional/. response, "Why put up with this shit? Take a walk!" Well, matey, easier said than accomplished.In our field/s, that's often the sum total of how it is and _what_ there is.
There's no shortage of *us*, but there's shrinkage in our (paying) market. After all, it's not content which is driving things; often, any old content will do just fine for employers.
You probably *want* good content: good reportage, well-informed journalism, state-of-the-art design. But you're not paying and, believe us, the majority of our employers don't care what YOU think, either.
Geek purists don't own the view that what you do is part of who you are. But it's a lot more complicated than phrases like "it's not just a job, it's a lifestyle."
Check out the facts. To run a Foundation like the B & M Gates Found., you must give away a certain percentage of yr holdings each year. To date, B &M G are significantly BEHIND in this endeavor. To put it another way, Bill giving $30 million to Nelson Mandela certainly doesn't hurt the entire country of South Africa - but it tells you a lot about how "philanthropic" Gates actually *is*. Proportionately, it's like me giving the homeless guy on my street five bucks!
Also Bill gives whenever he gets a DOJ or other press setback. It's so pathetically transparent
1. John Postel (explaining _his_ achivement to the public might do a lot to wise up Time readers (and editors) 2. Linus (explaining _his_ achivement to the public might do a lot to wise up Time readers (and editors) 4. David Boies 5. Penfield-Jackson (the findings of fact are better written than anything published in Time within memory) 6. Matthew Arnison, Aussie main architect of the Seattle Web site which allowed such quick distribution of (accurate) images/dispatches from Seattle's WTO protests 7. Commander Taco! 8. Buzz Lightyear
Understand, Mr Katz, these protests are also about our city. A city RUN by baby-boomers who've grown to benefit from (and endorse) a vision they happen to like, whatever the realities of Seattle today. That vision accounts for what the official media portray, it is what even "lefty" city council members endorse, it is the source of all that "Seattle, such a _nice_ place" bullshit you hear.
Reality is very different.
Reality: a city run from behind closed doors by developers - like Mayor Schell, who panicked after a few phone calls from his downtown business cronies and imposed unconstitutional restrictions on citizen movement and expression. He and his colleagues supported unconscionable police behavior, denied basic amenites and legal rights to detainees and endorsed leaderless police attacks on neighborhoods where nothing was even happening.
Reality: a "beautiful" city with the second-worse traffic in the nation, losing its historic buildings to stucco condominiums built below code standards - its actual landscape hostage to the every whim of a few billionaires (Schultz of Starbucks, Gates & Allen of M$soft, Condit of Boeing, McCaw of cellular fame, etc). Yeah this *is* about technology, and in a complex sense
Reality: a city of big talkers out-of-touch with daily reality...guys who invited a bunch of international delegates to a half-built Convention Center which is essentially a construction site
Reality: a city with plenty of official media, none of which is honest, so that the majority of the population feels disenfranchised. Most people organized, communicated and monitored events online - as usual here, official sources proved irrelevant.
Reality: no "official" media outlet published the full story about: - The WTO delegate pulled a handgun on (nonviolent) protestors - A "warehouse" building local artists were recently evicted from was taken over as an organizing HQ (constantly referred to as "an abandoned building") - 12,000 people make a "human chain" around the entire football stadium parking lot - it hardly gets an inch of ink - protestors are held in buses for 10 hours with no bathrooms, food or access to counsel - a black city councilman on his way to a WTO meeting is handcuffed by police who throw his business card on the ground
Reality: right now, Friday, four arrests have been made *inside* the WTO convention center; another huge march is underway in the "no protest" zone. What's on the website of Seattle's largest paper? "Mr & Mrs Santa" being led back into a downtown store. A store which happens to buy a lot of advertising in their pages.....
All global politics have local constituents. If you're going to generalize about what happens here, get an informed Seattleite to do it - not Katz. Plenty of truthful posts from here have hit the/. server
Pioneer Square (we live here) is almost untouched. And the Nat'l Guard don't arrive until tomorrow am anyway.
P square was affected mostly *last* night when 8,000/10,000 church-sponsored protestors staged an incredible "human chain" potest which encircled all the parking area of the football stadium, barricaded at either end against their attempt to reach the Paul Allen-sponsored Exhibition Hall, where Bill Gates and Boeing head Phil Condit were "entertaining" (read lobbying) the WTO delegates.
Aim: a protest to make the WTO cancel third world countries' debts. This was peaceful and passed off with NO problem (and almost NO media mentions at *all*). But it was incredibly powerful due to the faceoff of a set of motorcycle cops (approx 40) and riot cops who harangued the demonstrators at the demarcation line. Also because: it was pouring and freezing. They chanted, "We're here, we're wet, cancel the debt!"
BTW, check out how much Gates & Co are paying for their lobbying opportunities at www.corpwatch.org/calandar/
Police restraint? Not exactly considering the marginality of offenses actually committed amidst a 40,000-person union march and constant nonviolent actions by 5-8,000 additional protesters - which occupied most of the day (total arrests before mid-afternoon: 12, including five people arrested for banner-hanging)
None of this, however, involved Pioneer Square (although here, as everywhere else in town, the homeless have been discreetly removed from the area...unlike Belltown, tho, they haven't been replaced by pots of petunias!). The chase/gas/chase and firing of rubber bullets went on all day in the _city center_, near the WTO convention area... our poor excuse for a Mayor, Paul Schell, declared his "state of emergency" around 3pm in a dumb fit of over-reaction.
This was, sadly for him, at the same time as several local newscasters got hit by CS gas. They stopped playing nice guy and pointed out that the cops were firing rubber bullets, lobbing explosive tear gas greandes embedded with same and firing at anything which moved. They, for instance, caught some people on their way home from offices.
Most people here _outside_ the media knew something just like this would happen, for many reasons. One of the main ones, however, is that many people are sick of Gates and Allen being allowed to effectively run Seattle...whether by building sports facilities we don't need or being (esp by the media) treated as our de facto mayors and superiors.
I think not. As has been said, there are already innumerable clever, well-acted, ingenious - even improvised - movies of every genre, including horror, made in many nations. Of course, if you haven't had the chance to see them, or the interest (or the time), BWP may seem wildly original...even though ancient Twilight Zone episodes covered much the same type of territory. (One difference: they had believable dialogue and better acting.) It was fun, however, to have one entertainment-industry situation where the movie was actually an appendage of the Web site, as opposed to the lame sites which now accompany every release. Because the film itself was almost incidental to the premise - which was mainly fleshed out in the mockumentary and on the Net - it was kinda fun and a viewer could forgive the fact the cinematic experience itself proved boring, inept and unbelievable. There were some ideas present, albeit not new or novel ones (the bossy girl, the disorientation due to 'evil influences" etc). But any believability re: these was certainly swamped by comically bad dialogue ("My fucking shit!" "God damn it, oh shit!" "Shit, what were you thinking!") which was clearly totally improvised. Too bad they weren't _French_ film students; maybe we might have got a thought or two from the improvisations!
E-mail mtv europe news, their "Pro-Social Department" did a piece on those laws in '94-'95. Try kearley.eric@mtvne.com and put "france; any information on pasqua laws" in the subject line. Good luck.
you might like 'em less if you were one of the authors whose book was deemed "out of print" while still selling (and don't get amazon to search for it; they will overcharge you) check out the recent International Herald Tribune article on better ie cheaper ways to buy books on line
Slashdot Mirror
Seems the MS "grassroots campaign" is still alive and well
Let's hope you are one of a LOT of people. But it's pretty hard to have much sympathy with the theory that "there are probably nice people there too" when you live near enough MS to see every day just how deleterious MS culture has been for the last ten years. It has virally infected the value systems, judgments and attitudes towards genuine creativity held by almost every 'nice-type' person who was associated with them....plus it has leached into the surrounding community (and, to a large degree, the whole country) a sense of free-floating greed and envy which just isn't very attractive.
/.
Outside of this, of course, there are all the bad THINGS they've DONE. Rock on, DOJ! And...Give 'em PR hell,
Reason? Because someone always makes *money*
So thanks, Commander Taco, for making it clear that any gains are going to charity.
In all those paras penned by JK this basic point was not ever raised. Kinda telling.
Did JK actually READ the conclusions of law? If so (it seems a little doubtful), he should at least, as a writer, appreciate the care with which every effort was made to cover all legal bases. Especially vis-a-vis appeals and...the Supreme Court.
/. community. Certainly neither /. or Jon Katz was gonna change the avergae person's view of M$ as a wonderful US success story based on "innovation".
It's all very well for Mister Katz to feel his pen is mightier than the sword of M$, or that said sword hath grown tired or outdated or whatever. But if he were actually running a high-tech enterprise in the real world he would certainly have to deal with the present presence of M$. When you can afford to give every soul in the US a few hundred bucks - but you settle for shelling out whenever yr PR suffers instead - you remain (whatever scribes say) a very prominent power.
It's offensive that the utterly huge efforts mounted by Boies, Klein and others should be treated as if they were beside the point. Just check out what M$ has been up to in China, Europe, etc whilst JK was deciding their "irrelevance".
There *is* something to be said for the billions of hours of hard, hard work which has gone into revealing M$'s true face to those beyond the
It took a LOT of people a LOT of work and, frankly, that is tougher than dashing off yet another cynical, got-there-first essay.
It was in tightly-controlled, studio-dominated, early Hollywood when suits _first_ used to say "Here our assets go home at night". It didn't exactly pan out then as a democratizing social force - but we have ended up with a global cult of celebrity and the increasing ability to watch horror movies on computers.
:)
This is a well-argued and interesting piece but: most of the posts reflect one of the problems in even a "progressive" reaction to the changes it describes. Which is: they talk about only programmers, IT professionals, etc as "knowledge workers".
Even from the most pragmatic viewpoint (ie what will make companies scads of cash and give them staying power), companies should start - now - to think of EVERYONE who keeps digitally savvy and plays a role in their enterprise as collaborators in "knowledge work".
I mean the artist/creator/content provider who designs yr company logo, shoots your ad, describes your product, markets you to the world, writes you up in the press and on the Net. Not just the hardware will be involved. People need stuff to sell, that stuff needs to be well-designed and its case persuasively argued. Ditto the case of individual companies.
As someone already pointed out, clueless companies haven't changed yet (& are unlikely to). Plus it will take a little longer for forces - however strong - to make them do so or to wipe them out.
So in the meantime: how about that medical coverage?
Good point!!! It's (unintentionally?) pretty funny reading a letter to Gates which feels it has to end with "Thanks for listening".
If JK is seriously gonna get into the hottest emerging field of both law and jurisprudence, he's gonna need to spend considerably more time in the law libraries of numerous countries. Because no-one agrees on much of this and the (different) traditions of countries in the European Union - esp the French - are often at odds with Anglo-American legal precedents and traditions.
Much of French-derived law (some dating from before the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, often still a benchmark for decisions about copyright) mitigates against violation of an "author's" - ie artist's or creator's - "moral" rights. Those are groups of legal rights meant to protect creators from having their fine works "diminished" by caricature, moustaches, partial reproduction, distortions, mockery etc etc.
American law offers a contrast. As recently as a couple of years ago, Supreme Court decisions in the US favoured "transformative" use as consistent with their federal copyright policies...the overriding incentive here being economic
and commercial interests. Also a nod towards a US history supposedly weighted towards the "free flow" of information.
Copyright law in cyberspace or electronic copyright is a contradictory and complicated field in which the law is being made (precedents are being set) case-by-case...With plenty of lawyers into its potential for big bucks. But it may also happen inch by inch, country by country and each "foreign" claimant to a right will find assertion of his/her claims depends on the environment in which that claim ends up being assessed.
James Fallows is indeed a "writer" but, as is pointed out elsewhere on /. it's his editorial credentials which make this softball analysis such a boon to Microsoft in their time of need. As a writer who was wooed by them and decided against joining the Force, I'd say: take everything he wrote with a barrel of salt.
The "creative team" I met in Redmond was 99.9% white and male. All of them had been recruited with exciting credentials; *none* of them felt as "creatives' they needed to know anything about the "technology side"...Not anything. They were, in fact, distinguished by separate instances of the very arrogance & lack of curiosity that makes a BAD "content provider". There's no way they were assembled randomly, either.
Instead of insisting they get some education in their metier (or, better, hiring folks with actual interdisciplinary skills and vision), MS was happy to have their team tech-ignorant. The duties their hires perceived as "lowly" were to be handled by what MS thoughtfully referred to as Internet "copy wranglers". This interesting term for the people who would actually create how things looked creatively insulted both parties at once!!!
In discussing what was intended to be a broad, ambitous and potentially exciting project it soon became apparent that:
(a) no-one at Redmond had thought this project through at all, either "bottom-up" OR "top-down." (Although "Bill" had "given it two years to start making money"..)
(b) every honest and probing inquiry that one launched about a potential problem was interpeted as an effort to screw a bigger salary out of the company - only money, not ideas or answers, was offered in reply
(c) impressive though the "team's" resumes were in the non-tech world, one distressing thing was very clear. They would _never_ be able to function together...not even as a group, let alone as a group with a serious brief to conceive and execute.
These were telling realizations. (Borne out less than one year into the "two years" when "Bill" got impatient for the bucks and junked his idea.)
There is probably nothing as weird in the world as sitting in front of Microsoft's man-made waterfall and thinking, "These guys could _really_ do *anything*, they have got the money and position to do it" and swiftly realizing that it's...never gonna happen.
Right. That "union socialist view" is just "so out of fashion". And of course there are only _good_ managers in every profession. Get a grip! Or rather, take a look around, ya little Republican.
Perhaps you should have a word with a Boeing engineer. They're right down on the picket line, today, carrying those signs that say "No Nerds NO BIRDS" and "Dilbert on Strike".
Your "I've got mine so I'm not worryin'" view is the one that's gone "out of fashion".
It's interesting how many high-tech workers fail to understand that many kinds of workplaces/workers put in the same hours they do.
/. contributors seem to realize the situation of many "creative" professionals, ie designers, editors, writers, illustrators and reporters ("content providers") parallels theirs.
/. response, "Why put up with this shit? Take a walk!" Well, matey, easier said than accomplished.In our field/s, that's often the sum total of how it is and _what_ there is.
However, *not* all enjoy the same benefits.
Maybe it's a function of arrogance, youth or just short-term thinking. The situation of stereotypical service workers (cashiers, catering staff, Third World workers) is _clearly_ woeful. But few
Those not located in the epicenters of techno-bucks, however, labor under different circumstances than you. Yeah, we all put in those 60 to 70+ hours, including weekends and evenings, etc. Especially if any of us are self-employed. The difference: no high salaries or dangling stock options.
We LOVE what we do too. But it would be nice to have medical insurance (& I don't mean crappy, cheap HMOs). It would be nice to have employers who can tell good work from bad - evaluation of creative work is more subjective than evaluation of code or systems maintenance! It would be nice if our employers actually CARED when we have RSI or work-related problems. After all, they help create those.
It would be nice, too, if they upgraded our workplaces: so we wouldn't all have to keep up with emerging tools and information on our own nickel. But DO they plow those profits we help make back into where we make them? No. Not any more than they give employees a share of them. Still, if we're not up-to-date, we're not "competitive". And there are always plenty of eager interns out there, living at home and ready to fill our shoes for next to nothing.
Wonder why us other people *do* have some interest in unions? Because we are just as expendable as any "service" worker, no matter how much we love our work and labor to do it well.
I hear a chorus of the traditional
There's no shortage of *us*, but there's shrinkage in our (paying) market. After all, it's not content which is driving things; often, any old content will do just fine for employers.
You probably *want* good content: good reportage, well-informed journalism, state-of-the-art design. But you're not paying and, believe us, the majority of our employers don't care what YOU think, either.
Geek purists don't own the view that what you do is part of who you are. But it's a lot more complicated than phrases like "it's not just a job, it's a lifestyle."
They cheered that scene in South Park in Seattle too - and the theater was packed
Check out the facts. To run a Foundation like the B & M Gates Found., you must give away a certain percentage of yr holdings each year. To date, B &M G are significantly BEHIND in this endeavor. To put it another way, Bill giving $30 million to Nelson Mandela certainly doesn't hurt the entire country of South Africa - but it tells you a lot about how "philanthropic" Gates actually *is*. Proportionately, it's like me giving the homeless guy on my street five bucks!
Also Bill gives whenever he gets a DOJ or other press setback. It's so pathetically transparent
1. John Postel (explaining _his_ achivement to the public might do a lot to wise up Time readers (and editors)
2. Linus (explaining _his_ achivement to the public might do a lot to wise up Time readers (and editors)
4. David Boies
5. Penfield-Jackson (the findings of fact are better written than anything published in Time within memory)
6. Matthew Arnison, Aussie main architect of the Seattle Web site which allowed such quick distribution of (accurate) images/dispatches from Seattle's WTO protests
7. Commander Taco!
8. Buzz Lightyear
Understand, Mr Katz, these protests are also about our city. A city RUN by baby-boomers who've grown to benefit from (and endorse) a vision they happen to like, whatever the realities of Seattle today. That vision accounts for what the official media portray, it is what even "lefty" city council members endorse, it is the source of all that "Seattle, such a _nice_ place" bullshit you hear.
Reality is very different.
Reality: a city run from behind closed doors by developers - like Mayor Schell, who panicked after a few phone calls from his downtown business cronies and imposed unconstitutional restrictions on citizen movement and expression. He and his colleagues supported unconscionable police behavior, denied basic amenites and legal rights to detainees and endorsed leaderless police attacks on neighborhoods where nothing was even happening.
Reality: a "beautiful" city with the second-worse traffic in the nation, losing its historic buildings to stucco condominiums built below code standards - its actual landscape hostage to the every whim of a few billionaires (Schultz of Starbucks, Gates & Allen of M$soft, Condit of Boeing, McCaw of cellular fame, etc). Yeah this *is* about technology, and in a complex sense
Reality: a city of big talkers out-of-touch with daily reality...guys who invited a bunch of international delegates to a half-built Convention Center which is essentially a construction site
Reality: a city with plenty of official media, none of which is honest, so that the majority of the population feels disenfranchised. Most people organized, communicated and monitored events online - as usual here, official sources proved irrelevant.
Reality: no "official" media outlet published the full story about:
- The WTO delegate pulled a handgun on (nonviolent) protestors
- A "warehouse" building local artists were recently evicted from was taken over as an organizing HQ (constantly referred to as "an abandoned building")
- 12,000 people make a "human chain" around the entire football stadium parking lot - it hardly gets an inch of ink
- protestors are held in buses for 10 hours with no bathrooms, food or access to counsel
- a black city councilman on his way to a WTO meeting is handcuffed by police who throw his business card on the ground
Reality: right now, Friday, four arrests have been made *inside* the WTO convention center; another huge march is underway in the "no protest" zone. What's on the website of Seattle's largest paper? "Mr & Mrs Santa" being led back into a downtown store. A store which happens to buy a lot of advertising in their pages.....
All global politics have local constituents. If you're going to generalize about what happens here, get an informed Seattleite to do it - not Katz. Plenty of truthful posts from here have hit the
You've must have been watching KING 5 TV all day!
Pioneer Square (we live here) is almost untouched. And the Nat'l Guard don't arrive until tomorrow am anyway.
P square was affected mostly *last* night when 8,000/10,000 church-sponsored protestors staged an incredible "human chain" potest which encircled all the parking area of the football stadium, barricaded at either end against their attempt to reach the Paul Allen-sponsored Exhibition Hall, where Bill Gates and Boeing head Phil Condit were "entertaining" (read lobbying) the WTO delegates.
Aim: a protest to make the WTO cancel third world countries' debts. This was peaceful and passed off with NO problem (and almost NO media mentions at *all*). But it was incredibly powerful due to the faceoff of a set of motorcycle cops (approx 40) and riot cops who harangued the demonstrators at the demarcation line. Also because: it was pouring and freezing. They chanted, "We're here, we're wet, cancel the debt!"
BTW, check out how much Gates & Co are paying for their lobbying opportunities at www.corpwatch.org/calandar/
Police restraint? Not exactly considering the marginality of offenses actually committed amidst a 40,000-person union march and constant nonviolent actions by 5-8,000 additional protesters - which occupied most of the day (total arrests before mid-afternoon: 12, including five people arrested for banner-hanging)
None of this, however, involved Pioneer Square (although here, as everywhere else in town, the homeless have been discreetly removed from the area...unlike Belltown, tho, they haven't been replaced by pots of petunias!). The chase/gas/chase and firing of rubber bullets went on all day in the _city center_, near the WTO convention area... our poor excuse for a Mayor, Paul Schell, declared his "state of emergency" around 3pm in a dumb fit of over-reaction.
This was, sadly for him, at the same time as several local newscasters got hit by CS gas. They stopped playing nice guy and pointed out that the cops were firing rubber bullets, lobbing explosive tear gas greandes embedded with same and firing at anything which moved. They, for instance, caught some people on their way home from offices.
Most people here _outside_ the media knew something just like this would happen, for many reasons. One of the main ones, however, is that many people are sick of Gates and Allen being allowed to effectively run Seattle...whether by building sports facilities we don't need or being (esp by the media) treated as our de facto mayors and superiors.
...is how Microsoft manages to keep funding all this "grassroots" support!!! You don't even have to meet Likeable Bill. Just:
Read the evidence.
I think not. As has been said, there are already innumerable clever, well-acted, ingenious - even improvised - movies of every genre, including horror, made in many nations. Of course, if you haven't had the chance to see them, or the interest (or the time), BWP may seem wildly original...even though ancient Twilight Zone episodes covered much the same type of territory. (One difference: they had believable dialogue and better acting.) It was fun, however, to have one entertainment-industry situation where the movie was actually an appendage of the Web site, as opposed to the lame sites which now accompany every release. Because the film itself was almost incidental to the premise - which was mainly fleshed out in the mockumentary and on the Net - it was kinda fun and a viewer could forgive the fact the cinematic experience itself proved boring, inept and unbelievable. There were some ideas present, albeit not new or novel ones (the bossy girl, the disorientation due to 'evil influences" etc). But any believability re: these was certainly swamped by comically bad dialogue ("My fucking shit!" "God damn it, oh shit!" "Shit, what were you thinking!") which was clearly totally improvised. Too bad they weren't _French_ film students; maybe we might have got a thought or two from the improvisations!
E-mail mtv europe news, their "Pro-Social Department" did a piece on those laws in '94-'95. Try
kearley.eric@mtvne.com and put "france; any information on pasqua laws" in the subject line. Good luck.
E-mail mtv europe news, their "Pro-Social Department" did a piece on those laws in '94-'95. Try
kearley.eric@mtvne.com and put "france; any information on pasqua laws" in the subject line. Good luck.
But shop at amazon.co.uk? Yeah. Do. Bad spelling; good point.
you might like 'em less if you were one of the authors whose book was deemed "out of print" while still selling (and don't get amazon to search for it; they will overcharge you)
check out the recent International Herald Tribune article on better ie cheaper ways to buy books on line