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Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Signs the blue pill isn't working 
| | Andy and Larry Wachowski, the directors and writers of the Matrix trilogy, no longer own any rights to the films or scripts. In fact, the billionaire group, which calls itself "The Matrix Rescue Team", says it will hire other writers and a different director to remake the film. A new script is due Thursday, and production is slated to begin next Monday. "We work differently in the tech business," said Bill Gates. "We won't need years to get this new film out. We plan to have it out by Memorial Day." |
| | The full cast, including Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Mary Alice, Ian Bliss, Helmut Bakaitis, Jada Pinkett Smith, Anthony Wong, Anthony Zerbe, and Lambert Wilson, have already agreed to remake the film with a new and improved script. "A script that doesn't suck," said Steve Ballmer. |
FCC mandates value subtraction in digital broadcast receivers.
| | So much for the FCC's BS about protecting "free over the air TV." Here's the HTML-free FCC poop on the "broadcast flag": |
| | Why is it that I hate the fact that this crap is released only in proprietary Web-hostile containers even more than I hate the annoyance that the crap mandates? |
Our next assignment
| | The big news, the story said, is that an Internet consultant's phone rings once a day now, not once a week or once a month. No mention that a huge base of small-sum Internet donors has demonstrated how to wipe the corrupting stain of money off democracy--a much more cleansing, practical, citizen-driven reform than the late, lumbering and maybe unenforceable McCain-Feingold legislation.The Times story was that Howard Dean has brought a new trick to the game, another fax machine, another new device "like direct mail, phone solicitation and events in restaurants" and so captured the Internetizens. Nary a hint of the more plausible counter-story: that free citizens online drafted Howard Dean and are carrying him like a hood ornament on their campaign. The closing line, ignoring the disruption of the Senatorial beauty pageant, began: "It's still the age of TV." Not once did the word "blog" appear in the Times piece. The whole thing reminded me of John Perry Barlow's generic Times headline: "Internet: Threat? ... or Menace?" It feels ironic, and all the more irksome, now that the Times online has a bigger circulation than the broadsheet. |
| | Realizing that the Big Media aren't going to get adequate about this thing any time soon, Chris issues an assignment to those of us who know what's going on — partly because we live in the habitat and traffic in clues about it; but mostly because it matters: |
| | The assignment is to find out, then tell the folks, what's going on out there. So this is a first invitation to report a new story, in a new way, as urgently as Theodore H. White did with The Making of the President 1960... Only together, it seems to me, can we reobserve and rewrite the real narrative of American politics in this campaign year. |
| | ...what's happening out there is the start of a fundamental reordering of democratic energy and political influences, a drastic subversion of a discredited game, an inversion of the old pyramids of control, or perhaps a shape shift, as Stirling Newberry argues, from pyramid to sphere. The Internet represents a rewiring of the body politic, but it's not the technology that's interesting, it's the individual engagement and social model implied in it. |
| | So here, finally, is the ask.Will you please pull up a chair, get yourself online, and join an open exploratory conversation till the first Tuesday of November next year about this choice of an American chief. Before this week is out I will open a new blog that I want to call simply "notes on the transformation." |
| | Which makes sense to me, since Chris's own blog (including its title and blogroll) is a collection of interviews with occasional commentary. He, and we, need a new space to direct (if not house) the kind of collective work he's talking about, under the direction of smart old pros who deeply get it: |
| | My initial premise is that if there are people who know what's going they aren't talking; and the ones that are talking don't know. My purpose is to create a busy space for accessible commentary and argument--no bullshit, no pandering--about what the new and old politics and media are doing to us. I've asked Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink to hold up the other end of an open tent as a co-editor with a light touch. We bring different CVs and institutional tags: he in New York as teacher and visionary reformer; I in Boston-Cambridge with New York Times campaign work in my checkered multi-media history. We share a critical and reformist curiosity and a yen for a public voice in professional journalism. |
| | Can't wait to see it. And contribute to it. |
| | We're talking about an issue that's so close to the core of the life of our body politic that, like breath itself, we can't afford to debate it as if it matters no more than, say redistricting. The power to count the votes is the key to the kingdom. |
| | He compares the urgency of the matter to his own experience in war: |
| | On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache, forcing us to deal with a fire that took out engine no. 1, ignited the left outboard fuel tank, distorted the front wing spar so that the left wing was bending down and forward outside of the no. 1 engine, knocked out the hydraulic system we needed to put the gear down, disabled the left aileron and generally scared the living shit out of five 25-year-old aviators. |
| | The flight lasted only eight minutes and 20 miles but it occupies a larger partition in my brain than many of the several years of my life. The things we need to attend to sometime add up faster than we'd like, with consequences more dire than we'd like. |
The Aurora Season
| | SUPERFLARE: Giant sunspot 486 unleashed another powerful solar flare on Nov. 4th (1950 UT). Ionizing radiation hit Earth's atmosphere soon after the explosion and caused a severe radio blackout, which radio listeners noticed across North America. |
| | This latest flare from sunspot 486 could be historic. The blast saturated X-ray detectors onboard GOES satellites for 11 minutes. The last time a flare did this, on April 2nd, 2001, it was classified as an X20--the biggest ever recorded at the time. The Nov. 4th, 2003, solar flare appears to have been even stronger. [more] |
| | Sunspot 486 is near the sun's western limb, which means the blast was not directed very much toward Earth. Even so, sky watchers should be alert for auroras on Nov. 5th or 6th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field. |
| | The movie of all this is downright scary. |
| | Anyway, you don't have to wait. It's still the 4th where I sit (in Southern California), and the Aurora is happening right now. You can almost see it from here. |
| | Somebody in Lake Sonoma, California (about 400 miles north of here) just filed a report. Seattle is in there too. |
| | Sitting outside with the kid about an hour ago, we thought we saw a diffuse greenish light to the northeast. Not sure. But it's plausable. Think of the aurora as a curtain of light. Its bottom hangs about 60 miles above the Earth. Its top ranges from 130 to 600 miles high. That means if it runs from Seattle to Green Bay, it will be visible down to Texas. |
| | I think something like that is going on now, and will probably continue over the next two days. |
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