[...] Subject: Warning to IP Readers: When "The Debate Show" Calls -- Hang Up!
[...] They wanted me to debate a known spammer (who they wouldn't identify at the time) regarding the scourge of spam. It would be fun she implied, since the audience would of course be on my side.
[...] Crossballs is a rigged "reality" show, where real guests, who have been kept in the dark about the show's real format, are paired off against actors (playing the debate opponents) for the amusement of the live audience. The stories I read from persons recently on the show included descriptions of crude, sexually-oriented verbal attacks (and worse, like being handed various sexual "apparatus") and concerns that their reputations would be ruined once the shows aired.
The nature of Crossballs is confirmed by a couple of other sources. According to a gopusa.com commentary:
This show is not "The Debate Show," as advertised and the name they use to procure panelists, but "Crossballs" a newly produced show for Comedy Central, owned by Viacom and MTV networks, and is a spoof of political debate shows that seeks to mock conservatives with actors posing as some of the panelists.
One such real panelist, who thought the show was going to be a serious debate show, was a conservative activist from California who prepared to appear on the show to talk about the 2nd amendment. Jim March, whose account we have attached, is a 2nd amendment activist and was mocked and ridiculed by a "psychologist" who said he had sexual issues and offered him a two month supply of penis enlargement pills if he gave up his guns.
Nowhere in the material for "The Debate Show" and the press releases for the upcoming "Crossballs" do they make the connection, or let you in on the joke that the "actor panelists" debate the real panelists, complete with props and "live feed" video designed to mock and make fun of the real panelists and their conservative views.
And according to a June 15, 2004 story from digitalspy.co.uk, an entertainment newsblog:
Debate shows on US cable news channels such as CNN's Crossfire and MSNBC's Hardball are to be "skewered" by a new Comedy Central show, Crossballs.
The new show will feature comedians posing as experts debating real people who don't realise that the show is a sham.
"Shot in front of a live audience, Crossballs is a smart, comedic spoof of programs such as Crossfire, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and the entire Fox News Network," explains Comedy Central.
The show premieres on Tuesday, July 6 at 7:30pm ET and will air for eight consecutive weeks.
A small but determined group of about 60 demonstrators displayed their anger and disgust in front of the offices of Arlington defense contractor, CACI last week.
CACI is the firm recently implicated in the report by U.S. Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. CACI employees "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib," according to the report. Taguba strongly reco
Problem: Newspapers need to discover the hyperlink
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Warning: Shameless blog self-promotion in progress.
My blog exists for one simple reason: websites don't hyperlink.
I started it two years ago because rense.com had interesting stories, about half of which are verifiable (i.e. about 80% of the non-UFO stories). The problem is it took quite a bit of time for me to research Rense's stories to figure out which ones were true. And to not let that go to waste, I started dumping my results into a blog -- all with hyperlinks to either mainstream news sites or to "original" web documents from government, scholastic, or non-profit organization websites.
In the meantime, providing such links became de rigueur for the myriad of blogs that have popped up over the past two years -- in order to provide credibility. The result is that Rense.com now provides hyperlinks a lot more frequently now due to the new competition.
Rense.com has changed its ways, but newspaper sites still have not yet clued into the mystery of Tim Berners-Lee. Newspaper websites currently just duplicate the newsprint onto the computer screen. They refer to pending legislation without linking to the legislation. They refer to charters, press releases, products, budgets, etc. without linking to them. Or, sure, some have some newspapaper site have software that automatically goes through and creates links for popular keywords such as company names and people's names, but that's about it. Blogs, such as mine, provide deep links directly to the crucial material at hand, so that readers can assess the original material for themselves.
Sites like wired.com and salon.com are a bit more with it. Sites run by "Old Print" are going to have to adapt or die.
When we start seeing mainstream popular news sites with deep links to relevant material -- i.e. when newspapers embrace the web -- then maybe I can retire my website.
Reminds me of Melissa Scott's Dreamships, where spaceships are piloted through customizable alternative user interfaces that reflect the personality of the pilot -- e.g. one woman chose hot-air ballooning.
The FCC is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is figuring out how to construct a government to ensure liberty for the people rather than fueling big government and big business. The FCC is but one branch of a centralized (so-called "federal") government that continues to usurp power contrary to the Tenth Amendment.
Washington, DC and San Diego have had a 3G Network (1X EV-DO) since October, but the only supported hardware is a laptop PC Card. Nokia is refusing (!) to build a phone because an incoming phone call would cause the data connection to drop (The "DO" means "data only", an upcoming standard 1X EV-DV would support simultaneous data and voice).
As Sun says, the network is the computer. We're not going to have phones as computers until the phones are on the Net, and I don't mean 2400 baud GPRS.
Give me, in a Treo package (i.e. with thumbboard), a 320x480 screen (like a Tungsten, not a 160x160 like the Treo 600), high-speed Internet, and a video recorder with sound (because the failure of the mainstream media demands that the citizenry does its own reporting). Give me that now. Don't wait for the translation. Don't wait for 1X EV-DV.
Laissez faire optimizes efficiency, not morality. This story illustrates an excellent counterexample to the prevalent unstated hypothesis that the dollar is the ultimate measure. No moral theologian would agree with the outcome of this economic analysis, let alone agreeing to use economics in the first place as the sole basis for analysis.
From what I could tell Xingtone doesn't have built-in ripping capability. So much for convenience. And so much for purported legal use -- and the only reason I can say this is because from what I understand the legal pay-per-download sites don't give you raw manipulable data. If the record companies and pay-per-download enterprises would just provide raw data, cell phone users wouldn't need to turn to illegal sources.
Of course, by holding out on pay-per-download for so long (to the extent that Congress was considering forcing the RIAA's hand), the RIAA has created so much bad blood that it'll take at least a generation (20 years) to work its way it, if it ever does.
Obviously anything slightly creative is going to get nicked. The best way to demonstrate it would be to run respected literature through it. I'm sure prose-as-poetry would really get a failing grade, such as Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building or the book of Proverbs from the Bible.
IANAL, but I believe ISPs are exempt from what passes through their systems provided they make no attempt to monitor anything that passes through their systems. I have not RTFA, but this is probably what the article was getting at.
So it seems that the idea might work for a $1000/month T1 line sold to ISPs, but not for a ComCast cable modem.
This would seem like a major loophole in that law protecting ISPs, but in reality, it just means that the police would have to go back to old-fashioned footwork rather than leaning back and letting Omnivore suck in the entire Internet scanning for violations.
In DC, Verizon offers a 300-2000 kbps wireless cell network (not Wi-Fi), yet the only hardware offering is a laptop card! I want the equivalent of a Sony Ericsson P900 that is compatible with this 1xEvDO network, and maybe a Treo-style thumbpad too. Meanwhile, I've had to pick up a Nokia 3650 (unlimited but slow Internet; video recorder with sound) for negative $50 to tide me over until a 3G phone is available.
I want broadband, not TV. When are business execs finally going to figure this out?
In case you're fuzzy on U.S. copyright law, all created works automatically receive copyright, regardless of whether the work is officially registered with the U.S. copyright office. Many artists choose to give away their work.
Taking at face value the statements the MPAA is "educating" public schoool students with, downloading anything from ifilm.com would be illegal. ifilm.com, which is ranked by alexa.com in the top 2000 websites (out of more than 5 million ranked), distributes videos (such as movie shorts) that their creators have given permission to be distributed for free.
Surely the MPAA is not promulgating the outrageous statements portrayed in the Globe article? Well, an Oct. 17, 2003 press release by Junior Achievement, the organization entrusted by the MPAA to carry out its propaganda in the public schools, links to the MPAA's respectcopyrights.org site, which contains a page which states:
At the end of the day, when you get right down to it, downloading copyrighted movies off the Internet is illegal. It's against the law.
A more correct statement would have been "downloading copyrighted movies off the Internet against the wishes of the copyright holder is illegal."
A minor difference? Hardly. The MPAA is inculcating the concept in students that movies and videos should exist only in a commercial context. Instead, with the advent of cheap video technology, students should be encouraged to make their own amateur videos and share them over the Internet. Script writing, staging, lighting -- that would be real education.
Public schools are a place where students learn to consume rather than create.
The "B" side of a 45 was not your choice, so the situation is like the $2.49 proposal combined with the "bundled songs" proposal. I wouldn't be surprised if the inflation-adjusted price of the old 45 market inspired this move, now that the RIAA has finally wised up to the fact that digital downloading represents a legitimate market.
I remember periodically buying 45RPM singles at Woolco in 1980 for between $1.00 and $1.50. According to the bls.gov calculator that's $2.26 to $3.39 in 2004 dollars. If a single comes without DRM, I don't see what the complaint is about. If it does come with DRM, I don't know why anyone would listen to it unless they were paid a significant amount of money, since a good song with a good hook is like a drug.
Porn doesn't sneak into your phone, VCR, or cable TV: you have to call a 900 number, rent a video, or order pay per view.
Here is where I've been unwillingly subjected to porn -- which I do not want:
Razor Magazine suddenly started coming to my home every month. I have a feeling it might have been because I subscribed to Men's Fitness a decade ago -- when it was about fitness and not about sexual technique (I canceled when they switched for that reason).
Walking through a mall and Victoria's Secret has a 12-foot high photo of a completely nude woman in the window.
Women jogging down the street in training bras. Folks, the first bra on TV was the 1986 Playtex cross-your-heart bra commercial -- 10 to 20 years after the so-called sexual revolution. Immodesty accelerated through the 90's.
Even at the office -- before 1990, sleeveless dresses were considered improper work attire. They used to be called "sundresses." Now stores don't even sell dresses with sleeves.
Your standards may be different than mine, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to choose whether or not to consume what was considered porn in 1980.
One person's nepotism is another's freedom of association.
Indeed, the obligation to one's "neighbors" is proportional to social proximity. So the examples you give represent a sliding scale of responsibility.
Regarding the issue raised in another post of firing one U.S. head of household in order to hire two out-of-country heads of household, I'm not sure. Certainly firing one U.S. head of household to hire a thousand out-of-country heads of household is the right thing to do. So there's some break-even point.
Even though all people are created equal, and even though we should strive for economic and political systems to facilitate the wealthy to help the poor (while not placing all our faith in such systems to coerce people to do the right thing), it is not the responsibility of any given business proprietor to save the world. The business proprietor's responsibility is to God, then family, then self and immediate social contacts, then community, then country, then world.
It's immoral to lay off a head of household to hire someone outside the country just to increase profits.
Hiring someone outside the country while not firing anyone is a different question. There the question is the morality of negatively impacting job opportunities in the short term while possibly (if we are to believe the globalists and if we believe that somehow multi-national monopolies will be reined in) improving the economy (and the job situation) in the long term.
This critical distinction has been untouched by the media.
Slashdot Mirror
As highlighted by slashdot.org, according to a mailing list posting (mirror):
The nature of Crossballs is confirmed by a couple of other sources. According to a gopusa.com commentary:
And according to a June 15, 2004 story from digitalspy.co.uk, an entertainment newsblog:
In similar display of mockery, according to a Jun 5, 2004 dc.indymedia.org story:
The entertainment industry is also pursuing this through another vector: through WIPO. If the U.S. signs the new WIPO treaty, then Betamax will be overturned even without Hatch's bill. See my Nov. 8, 2003 blog entry U.S. corroborating with WIPO to overturn Betamax decision and also eliminate public domain.
My blog exists for one simple reason: websites don't hyperlink.
I started it two years ago because rense.com had interesting stories, about half of which are verifiable (i.e. about 80% of the non-UFO stories). The problem is it took quite a bit of time for me to research Rense's stories to figure out which ones were true. And to not let that go to waste, I started dumping my results into a blog -- all with hyperlinks to either mainstream news sites or to "original" web documents from government, scholastic, or non-profit organization websites.
In the meantime, providing such links became de rigueur for the myriad of blogs that have popped up over the past two years -- in order to provide credibility. The result is that Rense.com now provides hyperlinks a lot more frequently now due to the new competition.
Rense.com has changed its ways, but newspaper sites still have not yet clued into the mystery of Tim Berners-Lee. Newspaper websites currently just duplicate the newsprint onto the computer screen. They refer to pending legislation without linking to the legislation. They refer to charters, press releases, products, budgets, etc. without linking to them. Or, sure, some have some newspapaper site have software that automatically goes through and creates links for popular keywords such as company names and people's names, but that's about it. Blogs, such as mine, provide deep links directly to the crucial material at hand, so that readers can assess the original material for themselves.
Sites like wired.com and salon.com are a bit more with it. Sites run by "Old Print" are going to have to adapt or die.
When we start seeing mainstream popular news sites with deep links to relevant material -- i.e. when newspapers embrace the web -- then maybe I can retire my website.
Reminds me of Melissa Scott's Dreamships, where spaceships are piloted through customizable alternative user interfaces that reflect the personality of the pilot -- e.g. one woman chose hot-air ballooning.
The FCC is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is figuring out how to construct a government to ensure liberty for the people rather than fueling big government and big business. The FCC is but one branch of a centralized (so-called "federal") government that continues to usurp power contrary to the Tenth Amendment.
I don't remember the "Chicago Lakefront" screen in Lemmings.
As Sun says, the network is the computer. We're not going to have phones as computers until the phones are on the Net, and I don't mean 2400 baud GPRS.
Give me, in a Treo package (i.e. with thumbboard), a 320x480 screen (like a Tungsten, not a 160x160 like the Treo 600), high-speed Internet, and a video recorder with sound (because the failure of the mainstream media demands that the citizenry does its own reporting). Give me that now. Don't wait for the translation. Don't wait for 1X EV-DV.
It's a non-obvious solution for a long-standing problem using technology that's been around for over a hundred years.
Laissez faire optimizes efficiency, not morality. This story illustrates an excellent counterexample to the prevalent unstated hypothesis that the dollar is the ultimate measure. No moral theologian would agree with the outcome of this economic analysis, let alone agreeing to use economics in the first place as the sole basis for analysis.
Of course, by holding out on pay-per-download for so long (to the extent that Congress was considering forcing the RIAA's hand), the RIAA has created so much bad blood that it'll take at least a generation (20 years) to work its way it, if it ever does.
(eom)
Obviously anything slightly creative is going to get nicked. The best way to demonstrate it would be to run respected literature through it. I'm sure prose-as-poetry would really get a failing grade, such as Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building or the book of Proverbs from the Bible.
So it seems that the idea might work for a $1000/month T1 line sold to ISPs, but not for a ComCast cable modem.
This would seem like a major loophole in that law protecting ISPs, but in reality, it just means that the police would have to go back to old-fashioned footwork rather than leaning back and letting Omnivore suck in the entire Internet scanning for violations.
I want broadband, not TV. When are business execs finally going to figure this out?
Is an employer required to open all snail mail to screen it for porn? Would that, actually, be illegal?
The "B" side of a 45 was not your choice, so the situation is like the $2.49 proposal combined with the "bundled songs" proposal. I wouldn't be surprised if the inflation-adjusted price of the old 45 market inspired this move, now that the RIAA has finally wised up to the fact that digital downloading represents a legitimate market.
Sadly, I believe the parent is correct, even though it is expressed in the form of a troll.
I remember periodically buying 45RPM singles at Woolco in 1980 for between $1.00 and $1.50. According to the bls.gov calculator that's $2.26 to $3.39 in 2004 dollars. If a single comes without DRM, I don't see what the complaint is about. If it does come with DRM, I don't know why anyone would listen to it unless they were paid a significant amount of money, since a good song with a good hook is like a drug.
- Razor Magazine suddenly started coming to my home every month. I have a feeling it might have been because I subscribed to Men's Fitness a decade ago -- when it was about fitness and not about sexual technique (I canceled when they switched for that reason).
- Walking through a mall and Victoria's Secret has a 12-foot high photo of a completely nude woman in the window.
- Stores display unshrouded soft porn
- South Beach Diet banner ads
- Spam (which you noted as your sole exception)
- Women jogging down the street in training bras. Folks, the first bra on TV was the 1986 Playtex cross-your-heart bra commercial -- 10 to 20 years after the so-called sexual revolution. Immodesty accelerated through the 90's.
- Even at the office -- before 1990, sleeveless dresses were considered improper work attire. They used to be called "sundresses." Now stores don't even sell dresses with sleeves.
Your standards may be different than mine, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to choose whether or not to consume what was considered porn in 1980.Indeed, the obligation to one's "neighbors" is proportional to social proximity. So the examples you give represent a sliding scale of responsibility.
Regarding the issue raised in another post of firing one U.S. head of household in order to hire two out-of-country heads of household, I'm not sure. Certainly firing one U.S. head of household to hire a thousand out-of-country heads of household is the right thing to do. So there's some break-even point.
Even though all people are created equal, and even though we should strive for economic and political systems to facilitate the wealthy to help the poor (while not placing all our faith in such systems to coerce people to do the right thing), it is not the responsibility of any given business proprietor to save the world. The business proprietor's responsibility is to God, then family, then self and immediate social contacts, then community, then country, then world.
Hiring someone outside the country while not firing anyone is a different question. There the question is the morality of negatively impacting job opportunities in the short term while possibly (if we are to believe the globalists and if we believe that somehow multi-national monopolies will be reined in) improving the economy (and the job situation) in the long term.
This critical distinction has been untouched by the media.