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Thursday, July 24, 2003
Sawbuzz 
Anybody seen the Dakotas?
| | Many fans of the state said they hope someone purchases and revitalizes Maryland before it falls into disrepair. |
| | "I don't want what happened to Oregon to happen here," said Jane Renski, a Maryland resident. "We drove by the place a few years ago and it was totally abandoned — really eerie. The whole state was infested with raccoons." |
But you have to be a quantum mechanic to fix one.
That explains it
| | So a couple minutes ago a friend called, addressing me as "SlashDoc." |
| | I've been so busy the last couple of days with technology matters (among other things, presiding over a household installfest involving three Linux boxes, one Linux laptop, various transient PowerBooks, one old Mac workstation, two networks and three wi-fi base stations — numbers that will be reduced sharply when it's over), that I missed this Slashdot item yesterday. It begins, |
| | An anonymous reader writes "Doc Searls, editor at Linux Journal, has a very insightful editorial that brings it all together - the FCC media consolidation ruling, SCO vs. Linux, why broadband is under attack by telcos and cable systems, why we lost Eldred vs. Ashcroft, what's really interesting about Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a very astute observation about the vast gulf between Liberals and Conservatives." |
| | There are 746 comments, so far. There's the usual thread drift, but also lots of fine nuggets both there and in those that follow the piece at Linux Journal. |
| | I'm putting my remarks in a follow-up for Linux Journal right now. Stay tuned over there. |
These kids today
| | My six year old was complaining that his seven year old friend failed to explain roman numerals yesterday. |
| | So I tried to explain them this morning, given the fact that I hadn't paid attention to the subject in several decades and was busy making scrambled eggs at the time. Of course, he wanted to see some roman numerals in action. I picked up a section of the New York Times, on the front of which it said VOL CLII. "That says one hudred and fifty two," he said. Like it was freaking obvious. Later I had to go do research on the Net to make sure L was 50 before I could agree with what I had just taught him. |
The Fifth Horse
| | Until this Spring, when something changed. The tide turned. |
| | This time the public, in hundreds of thousands of remarks sent to the FCC, plus countless letters to editors, letters to congresspeople, blogs, posts and emails to each other, overwhelmingly opposed the move. Simply put, they'd had enough. |
| | The White House, of course, threatened to veto the move. Writes Labaton, |
| | Today's House rebuke of the F.C.C. was embedded in a spending bill. The White House, which has threatened to veto the bill if the network provision remains in it, today sought to play down the lopsided size of the vote. Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said that presidential advisers had recommended approval of the legislation so that it could proceed to a House-Senate conference committee where the network ownership provision might be stripped out. |
| | If, as is becoming more likely, the provision survives in final legislation, President Bush will face a difficult political predicament. He could carry out his veto threat and alienate some of his traditional constituents, which include several conservative organizations opposed to a number of new rules adopted by the F.C.C. Or, he could sign the legislation, abandon the networks and undercut his own advisers who have recommended that he reject the legislation. |
| | A number of Republicans said privately today that they were surprised that the president would be willing to expend significant political capital over the issue; others said the White House felt compelled to defend the decisions of a regulatory agency whose leaders it had appointed. |
| | On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw. |
| | The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media ‹ Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) ‹ to gobble up every independent station in sight. |
| | Couch potatoes throughout the land see plenty wrong in concentrating the power to produce the content we see and hear in the same hands that transmit those broadcasts. This is especially true when the same Four Horsemen own many satellite and cable providers and already influence key sites on the Internet. |
| | Yet our friend Bill fails to mention a fifth horseman: Clear Channel, the widely and deservedly detested Texas-based radio giant with ties to the Bush family. Maybe that's because radio ownership is already so severely deregulated that the damage is long since done. And Clear Channel's big cross-ownership leverage isn't in TV of newspapers. It's in outdoor advertising and the live entertainment business, where the company boasts, |
| | Clear Channel Entertainment is the world¹s leading producer and marketer of live entertainment events. Each year, more than 66 million people attend approximately 26,000 events staged by the company, including live concerts, Broadway productions, West End and touring Broadway shows, family entertainment shows, sports and motor sports events. |
| | ... among other high-leverage businesses. |
| | Clear channel didn't like the FCC decision, either, calling it (in a .pdf, naturally) "re-regulation." In fact, for radio, it was. Clear Channel may have to give up some of its stations, such as in San Diego, where it currently owns fourteen stations (including some across the border in Mexico) |
| | Yesterday on her Fresh Air program, Terry Gross interveiwed John Hogan, CEO of Clear Channel Radio, and Eric Boehlert of Salon, who has been covering Clear Channel like a glove (and punching the company without one) for the last several years. It was good radio. Noncommercial, of course. The program is archived on the Web. Highly recommended. |
One David pointing to a world of 700,000 Goliaths
| | Says Chris to David (I'm taking notes while listening...), |
| | It seems to be you've really done the two big things we always wanted the New York Times to do. One was play God, and tell us what's really important in the world... The other is to form a community of readers... a club, a community, a kind of network, a feedback loop of who's really in and connected... Now we really have a much closer approximation of both those things.... an honest and open vote of intelligent people around the world about what's really interesting... (as well as) a network in which every voice counts. |
| | By the way, four out of Chris's eight interviewees, so far (including myself) are named David. |
Still a lousy place to shop
| | On the one hand, my vehicle registration was mailed out yesterday, more than a month after the state got the smog report, and three days after I got the $150 ticket for having an expired sticker on my license plate. |
| | On the other hand, the folks down at the DMV office were friendly, courteous, helpful, and referred to the citizens they served as "customers," even though every one of them would rather be somehwere else. |
| | And they fixed my ticket, which was nice, too. |
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