] Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent
] media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage
] of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by
] the profit motives and political interests of large,
] publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer,
] and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be
] clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes
] sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their
] corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just
] shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a
] corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing
] the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone,
] where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more
] than keep media giants from growing larger; they're
] already too big. We need a new set of rules that will
] break these huge companies to pieces.

Read this. All of this. Every last word. Ted Turner is discussing how bloated companies are using lobbying the FCC and using unfair/crazy laws to enforce a business model that does not work, and would not work in a truly Free Market Economy.

Jason, the core of the arguement that Ted makes is the same argument that I was making to you at the Vortex that day regarding the MPAA/RIAA and the DMCA.

'My Beef With Big Media' by Ted Turner

This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era.

The Man in the Snow White Cell

] Even so, Atlanta is "the most dangerous city in America,"
] and the positive momentum is "fragile," according to the
] summary. Atlanta's violent crime is 463 percent higher
] than the average city's, and its homicide rate is 520
] percent higher than the national average, Linder &
] Associates found.

The vast majority of this is in South Atlanta. Atlanta has some very scary neighborhoods, like the low rent apartments surrounding Atlanta's projects. Razor wire and fear. That being said, in downtown, and mid-town... I've never feared for my safety in 5 years. Being 6'3" 250 pounds doesn't hurt... but Atlanta seems less dangerous than this is making it out to be. There are really two Atlanta's. The crime is divided across the racial and economic divide that seperates North and South Atlanta. The area they cut out of maps of Atlanta for the Olympics. Outside of the more dangerous neighborhoods, Atlanta isn't THAT bad.

Atlanta is the most dangerous city in America

Any slaughter would be forgiven them if it had a meaning, if it could be interpreted as historical violence -- this is the moral axiom of permissible violence. Any violence would be forgiven them if it were not broadcast by media ("Terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But all that is illusory. There is no good usage of the media, the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror and they are part of the game in one way or another.

Repressive actions travel the same unpredictable spiral as terrorist actions -- none can know where it may stop, and what reversals may follow. At the level of the image and information, there are no possible distinctions between the spectacular and the symbolic, between "crime" and repression.

And this uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the underground and extensive ramifications of the event - not only in direct, economic, political, market and financial recessions for the whole system, and in the moral and psychological regression that follows; but also in the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc... that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world.

Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic) idea, is being erased from everyday lives and consciousness, and liberal globalization is being realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order' globalization, a total control, a policing terror. Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society.
/QUOTE

New York Times Book Review: 'First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness'

Talk about cutting through the bullshit. I kinda thought old Marxists just sat around apologizing for Lenin starting the Gulag. This one just knocked my socks off. Jean Budrillard is definately on my watch list now.

The Spirit of Terrorism -- Jean Buadrillard

Decius wrote:
] 2. You are financially incented to re-recommend songs to
] friends.

Efforts on many fronts are underway to test methods of making actual markets for music. I've been saying this was the only way to go for awhile now. We still don't know what information is worth at any given time.. At the very least context and demand are important factors.. Lots to learn here...

Keep in mind, when we were saying roughly that this kinda stuff was that we needed to be trying 1999-2000'ish, everyone though we were nuts, and it wasn't going to be possible. The music industry people are desperate now, and amazing enough, Microsoft is the big enabler.. Someone was paying attention.

] It is unfortunate that this is a Windows only.

Like we didn't know Microsoft was going to do their best to make sure that was the case.. They said "screw the store" and worried about selling the technology to those who were going to take all the risks and do all the innovation. I think their strategy has been very smart. They did have the opportunity to go the other way, I know that for fact.

They are not going to "bet the company" until they think they got the right answer..

] Of course, somewhere in middle America some stupid adult is
] going to end up throwing a fit because there are kids dealing
] weed.

Can you think of a better example of a more pervasive underground economy? You can get pot anywhere in America if you know the right people and are trusted. Might shock some people, but your burn out pot dealer may possibly know more about economics and trade then most college educated adults. Get the kids selling music. Education thru experience. Someone has a sense of humor, an additional objective, or both.

RE: Weed

... It's not about you.

New Year's Resolutions

] let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a
] firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s
] fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner
] that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using
] urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my
] entire http header including user agent, a
] database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests
] new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts
] by the 100's, good web scripting skills, and on a good
] day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over
] 1,000 monitored accounts.

This is a really great discussion between a troll and a sysop. It really speaks to the fact that governance of an internet community is a very complex problem that shares many of the social dynamics of governance of a IRL community.

Trolls vs. Sysops...

bucy wrote:
] While I agree that in principle this is possible, I'm
] not terribly worried by it. I think it would be
] extrordinarily expensive to deploy and maintain... I may have
] some more to say about this later.

Lets discuss this...

1. Asynchronous internet access:
Already occurred. I've been complaining about this for years. I have a DSL connection with a static IP and I pay through the nose for "real" internet access in a colo facility. I think this is a real problem. I think it can be solved, but it will take real market pressure from a really hot service that people want to host themselves. Even surmountable barriers chill speech.

2. DRM:
Yes, sort of. I've been warning about this for years. I think it works for software. I don't think it will work for content. The only way for DRM to work is with things like the DMCA... The future here is uncertain, but certain to be contentious (putting it mildly).

3. Micropayments: I don't see this as a technical problem. If people wanted this, then they would build something reasonable out of what they already have. Its a prisoners dilemma. You WILL get better sites when you decide to pay for them. When I imagine how cool MemeStreams would be by now if I could feed myself while working on it I almost want to cry. But it doesn't happen because everybody expects somebody else to pay. There has to be a massive social movement to encourage people to willingly donate cash to small websites before these changes will start to happen, and when it happens it won't matter what the technology is. People used to pay for online services in the early 90's... I think that all this free stuff is mostly a product of the bubble. It will probably change eventually... I think he has the basic economics right. Some WAP networks currently cut checks to content providers based on the amount of traffic they collect. The billing will be managed such that end users see a flat rate... However, I might be wrong here. He might be wrong. The social movement might not happen. People like free stuff, and prisoner's dilemmas are powerful things...

4. Personal Certs: Already here, but no one really uses them. A geek idea that has never gained traction. I think this needs an application moreso then better tech. Spam white-listing might end up being the killer app for personal certs. Fortunately we don't NEED certs to solve that problem. There will be alternative solutions available, and they are actually more likely to be adopted because the personal Cert option is more costly. Its a maybe situation. If people start banning remailers from publishing we're in a lot of trouble.

5. The end of anonymous speech: This, again, will be a social rather then technical phenomenon. On the one hand, I am amazed to see the end of anonymous mail. That is something I would never have predicted. I think its a really bad idea. On the other hand, I think the reason th... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: The Digital Imprimatur

The really horrible thing about the sudden disappearance of convenient pirate movie kiosks isn’t just that we can no longer get cheap Hollywood flicks the week they hit the screens in the Motherland, or that our money goes now to corrupt American CEOs rather than Russian gangsters. No, the really horrible thing about it is that, without a glut of pirate flicks to watch at home, I may have to start going out again at night. To meet people. You know, those two-legged things with all the paint on their faces?

Pirates Not Dead

] HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws,
] in the Internet world, are almost as controversial as the
] Patriot Act, because they tread on rights, contain
] draconian penalties, and can be abused in order to shut
] people up. What DMCA does is criminalize copyright
] issues. They were pushed in by the recording industry to
] prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for
] many other things.
]
] The provision that was used against us was an abuse of
] the DMCA pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company
] can claim they own copyright to something, write a letter
] to your Internet service provider (ISP), demand that the
] offending page be removed. The ISP must pull the page
] immediately or risk losing everything. These pull-downs
] almost always take place without a court order.
]
] Now, in our case, Diebold didn't even claim we had a
] copyrighted document on our site, they complained that we
] had a LINK to an unrelated site which, in turn, had LINKS
] to documents which they claimed copyright to. And in our
] case, our ISP overstepped its bounds. We do not know the
] extent to which it was pressured to do so by Diebold or
] whether there were other types of political pressure. Our
] ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the
] page the link was on, then it pulled our whole site down,
] then it removed access to the files on our FTP site so
] that we couldn't even relocate the files to another
] location. We have been told the site must remain down for
] 10 days, and we need to file a letter disputing their
] claim and bleed lawyer's fees to litigate this.
] Fortunately, David Allen, who knows about these things,
] had a techie-to-techie conversation with a rep at the
] ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and
] granted us access via FTP, though the site is still not
] up.

Electronic Voting Machines: Interview with Bev Harris