Since 2002
"Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?" – David Dixon
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times." – Justice Kennedy
"What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins. Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world." – Mark Steyn
"There's a fine line between protecting creators and a police state." – Scott Brison
June 14th, 2008
Customers Cry Fraud Over Comcast P2P Meddling in New Lawsuit
Jacqui Cheng
Comcast may have agreed to end its practice of using forged TCP reset packets to hinder the P2P traffic of its customers, but the cable provider isn't out of the woods yet. Three class-action lawsuits were filed against Comcast this week in California, Illinois, and New Jersey, alleging that the company deceived and misled consumers by advertising that it offered "unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer."
For those just catching up, complaints from suspicious customers began surfacing last fall about Comcast using questionable methods to block BitTorrent traffic on its network. In October, the Associated Press decided to perform its own independent tests to see if the allegations were true, and found further evidence that Comcast had been sending "fake" TCP reset packets claiming to be from its customers attempting to use BitTorrent, therefore timing out their downloads and seeds. In November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report detailing its own investigation, confirming that BitTorrent performance was being selectively degraded by unexpected TCP reset packets.
Comcast, of course, repeatedly denied the allegations. Finally, the Federal Communications Commission opened up proceedings over Comcast's network management practices in January, and in March, the cable giant announced a pact with BitTorrent to ensure that traffic runs more smoothly over the network. One of the first tangible results will be the end of Comcast's current practices. Instead, the company will use a platform-agnostic technique that may ultimately slow down P2P traffic from its heaviest users, which it will begin testing very soon. But Comcast's change of heart has come too late for some irate customers.
According to copies of the complaints seen by Ars, Comcast did not tell customers that it would engage in this type of traffic shaping when the company promised "unfettered access," and was not authorized to do so by its customers. As a result, the plaintiffs and other Comcast customers believe they paid for a service that they didn't receive, resulting in deceptive business practices and deceptive advertising on Comcast's part. Additionally, they say that Comcast misrepresented its "merchandise," and Comcast's denials of the practice represented fraud and false pretense.
"Comcast's clandestine techniques are similar to those used by totalitarian governments to censor the use of the Internet," reads the complaint filed in Illinois. "No doubt Comcast would characterize the behavior as illegal and malicious hacking if perpetrated by others on Comcast and its customers." The lawsuits, which join a previous suit filed in November against Comcast, ask that Comcast be barred from continuing to violate various state laws, in addition to unspecified damages.
Trouble for Time Warner, too
Comcast isn't the only cable provider getting into hot legal water this week. The city of Los Angeles has also announced that it is suing Time Warner Cable for deceptive business practices and false advertising. Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo said that city residents were forced to suffer "months of cable television and Internet outages, substandard technical and customer service and improper price increases" after Time Warner's takeover of nearly all cable services in L.A. Delgadillo is asking the court to prohibit the company from continuing its allegedly unlawful practices, and wants $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law. He also demands an additional $2,500 civil penalty for each violation perpetrated against one or more senior citizens or disabled persons.
"We're bringing this civil law enforcement action against Time Warner Cable because the company has broken multiple laws, and harmed countless Los Angeles consumers,” said Delgadillo in a statement. “Time Warner Cable must be held accountable for illegally deceiving and ripping off its subscribers." In response, a spokesperson for Time Warner denied to the New York Times that it had misled customers.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...w-lawsuit.html
Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector
Daniel A. Begun
Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:
"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting -- that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.
In an article written by Cade Metz, a reporter for The Register, Metz explains that when the net neutrally debate first popped up at Google, Google actually considered playing along with the network-throttling ISPs:
"We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available. We could essentially buy prioritization that would ensure we would be the search engine used by everybody. We would come out fine – a non-neutral world would be a good world for us."
But more idealist minds prevailed at Google, and the company has advocated network neutrality ever since--
"or as Whitt likes to call it 'broadband neutrality'." Whitt didn't mention when the network analysis tools would become available.
Other participants of the panel discussion had very different opinions on network neutrality, such as
"George Ou and Richard Bennett, two networking-obsessed pals who have vehemently defended Comcast's right to throttle peer-to-peer traffic." The one thing that everyone on the panel appeared to agree on, however, was that ISPs need to be transparent with how they manage their network traffic. Google's stance is that if the ISPs won't disclose that information to the public, then consumers should have the tools at hand to determine for themselves what their ISPs are doing.
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Goog...ling_Detector/
Rogers Says its Internet Interference is Necessary, but Minimal
Peter Nowak
Rogers Communications Inc. is defending its control over the flow of internet traffic as necessary but light-handed, amid growing complaints from users and the threat of intervention by regulators.
The Toronto-based company, Canada's second largest internet service provider with 1.5 million high-speed customers, said its interference with how subscribers are using their connections is limited to slowing down the upload speeds of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent.
Rogers also said it does not throttle download speeds, block any applications or use a network management method called "false resets," which some companies, including Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. service provider, use to trick internet connections into dropping when peer-to-peer traffic is detected.
Dermot O'Carroll, Rogers's senior vice-president of engineering and network operations, told reporters during a briefing on Tuesday that the management practices are necessary to cope with the ever-expanding amount of internet traffic, particularly video.
"We're not complaining about it; that's just the business we're in," he said. "If you build a network and don't manage it, it fails."
Peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent have emerged as an efficient way to distribute large files such as video because they allow users to download small bits of the same file stored on a large number of computers, which can be anywhere in the world. The method has been a favourite of users trading copyrighted works such as movies, but it has also gained cachet with legitimate businesses looking for a quick way to distribute large files without having to pay for large amounts of bandwidth.
Under the client-server model, which is what streaming services such as television networks or downloads-for-sale operations such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes use, customers get their files from one source. If the television network or Apple wants to provide its customers with a fast download experience, it must pay for the bandwidth capacity.
With the peer-to-peer model, that cost is shuffled off from the content provider to the network operator, which is inefficient for the ISP. If the content provider wants to sidestep those distribution costs, it opens itself to the ISP's network management practices, said Mike Lee, Rogers's chief strategy officer.
"If you decide to cost ship, you lose the ability to control that [distribution]," he said. "It's a trade-off."
Lee said peer-to-peer traffic has been singled out because it is an application that cannot be satisfied by simply adding more capacity. Peer-to-peer, by design, constantly seeks out faster connections whenever it is in use. That means if capacity is added by an ISP in Canada, for example, peer-to-peer applications elsewhere in the world will find the network and flood it.
"You can't spend your way out of this problem," Lee said. "It has a behaviour that swamps all other behaviours."
ISPs taking heat
Rogers and several other ISPs, particularly Bell Canada Inc., the country's largest, have taken heat from a growing number of critics over the past few weeks for their network management practices.
About 300 internet users gathered on Parliament Hill two weeks ago to protest the ISPs' actions, while Liberal and NDP MPs have filed individual private members' bills seeking greater transparency and stricter rules governing internet access.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, prompted by a complaint from the Canadian Association of Internet Providers — a group of 55 independent ISPs that rent portions of Bell's network — in May launched an inquiry into the big ISPs' so-called "traffic-shaping" practices, with a public comment period closing on June 12.
Bell and CAIP will have further opportunities to comment before the June 26 cut-off, and the CRTC expects to make a ruling on the issue by late September.
Traffic-shaping practices also prompted the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, a University of Ottawa legal group, to file a complaint with the privacy commissioner last month. The group said the technology being used by ISPs to identify different uses of the internet is a violation of users' privacy.
A spokesperson for the commissioner said the matter is under investigation.
More regulations not needed: Rogers
Lee said he does not believe Rogers's network management practices violate customers' privacy because its detection technology does not need to probe traffic deeply to determine whether it is peer to peer.
Applications such as BitTorrent are easy to detect because they are the only uses of the internet that reassemble files from a large number of different computers.
"Other than knowing what type of application has been requested, I have no way of knowing if it's a Word file or a JPEG," Lee said.
He also said additional regulations are not needed since the CRTC has all the tools it needs to prevent "unreasonable" network management under Sec. 27 (2) of the Telecommunications Act, which reads:
"No Canadian carrier shall, in relation to the provision of a telecommunications service or the charging of a rate for it, unjustly discriminate or give an undue or unreasonable preference toward any person, including itself, or subject any person to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage."
Sec. 36 also says: "Except where the commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public."
Lee acknowledged that those provisions, as far as internet access is concerned, have yet to be properly challenged.
"We need to test that," he said.
CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein, however, last month said the regulator needs additional tools in the form of monetary fines to punish ISPs if they break the rules.
In the United States, Comcast was scared into promising that it will cease throttling peer-to-peer usage by the end of this year after appearing before a Federal Communications Commission probe in February.
The company has not yet announced its solution.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ch-rogers.html
Copyright Law Could Result in Police State: Critics
Peter Nowak
Minister of Industry Jim Prentice says his copyright reform bill is 'made in Canada,' but critics say it has been crafted by U.S. lobbyists.
The federal government has introduced a controversial bill it says balances the rights of copyright holders and consumers — but it opens millions of Canadians to huge lawsuits, prompting critics to warn it will create a "police state."
"We are confident we have developed the proper framework at this point in time," Minister of Industry Jim Prentice told a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday. "This bill reflects a win-win approach."
However, Liberal industry critic Scott Brison blasted the government for its lack of consultation with Canadian stakeholders and for not considering the implications of the bill if it passes.
"There's no excuse for why the government has not consulted broadly the diverse stakeholders," he said. "The government has not thought this through. It has not thought about how it will enforce these provisions."
"There's a fine line between protecting creators and a police state."
Bill C-61 spells out consumers' rights in how they are allowed to copy media and clears up some grey areas. Existing laws do not specifically allow consumers to copy books, newspapers, periodicals, photographs, videocassettes and music. The new bill would expressly allow them to make one copy of each item per device owned, such as a computer or MP3 player. The bill would also expressly allow consumers to record television and radio programs for later viewing.
The Conservatives' bill, however, also contains an anti-circumvention clause that will make it illegal to break digital locks on copyrighted material, which critics say could trump all of the new allowances. CD and DVD makers could put copy protections onto their discs, or television networks could attach technological flags to programs that would prevent them from being recorded onto TiVos and other personal video recorders. Cellphones would also be locked down, so when consumers buy a device from one carrier, they will be unable to use it with another. Breaking any of these locks could result in lawsuits seeking up to $20,000 in damages.
University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist, a vocal opponent of the legislation, said the anti-circumvention clause invalidates all the other new provisions.
"They've got a few headline-grabbing reforms but the reality is those are also undermined by this anti-circumvention legislation. They've essentially provided digital rights to the U.S. and entertainment lobby and a few analog rights to Canadians," Geist told CBCNews.ca. "The truth of the matter is the reforms are laden with all sorts of limitations and in some cases rendered inoperable."
Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the influential Boing Boing blog, said the anti-circumvention clause will lead to a revival of digital rights management, or the software that prevents media from being copied. The entertainment industry has for the past few years been moving away from protecting its content with DRM because consumers have shied away from buying restricted media.
"You have to wonder what they're smoking on Parliament Hill if they think there's this compelling need for DRM, given that the marketplace seems to be rejecting it left, right and centre," he told CBCNews.ca.
YouTube uploads could bring lawsuits
People caught downloading music or video files illegally could also be sued for a maximum of $500, but uploading a file to a peer-to-peer network or YouTube could result in lawsuits of $20,000 per file.
Canadian internet service providers, meanwhile, would continue to be immune to lawsuits from copyright holders for infringements over their networks. The bill recognizes ISPs as intermediaries and would only require them to pass on violation notices from copyright holders to their customers.
Prentice deflected questions about potential lawsuits by saying the bill is necessary to modernize Canada's laws and bring it up to date with its obligations under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty it signed more than a decade ago.
"You can get into hypothetical situations," he said, "but the purpose of the bill has been to expand the balance of protection between consumers and copyright holders."
"In fact, it touches each and every one of us, and it is no surprise to find so many different points of view with respect to copyright," he said.
The bill will receive its second reading after Parliament's summer break, which is expected to begin soon. Brison told CBCNews.ca that the Liberals plan to put together amendments to the bill over the summer.
Bill praised by video game, music industry groups
Some copyright holders voiced their support for the new bill. The Entertainment Software Association of Canada, the video game industry's lobby group, praised the legislation for trying to protect Canada's industries and artists from theft.
“It’s simple: Every time someone acquires an illegal copy of a video game, money, in turn, is not going to those Canadians who work so hard to develop and publish games. That’s money that cannot be reinvested in creativity, job growth and industry development,” Joan Ramsay, president of the group's board of directors, said in a statement. “Copyright reform is essential to strengthen our competitiveness as an industry.”
A coalition of eight music lobby groups, including the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) and the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), jointly thanked the government for tabling the bill. The coalition, which said it represents 21,000 performers and 15,000 musicians, artist managers, music publishers, music retailers, manufacturers, record labels, and distributors and retailers of musical instruments, said the legislation was overdue.
"Vocal opponents of this bill will characterize it as mimicking what's already been done in the U.S., but that's oversimplifying things," Stephen Waddell, ACTRA's national executive director, said in a statement. "Around the world, 64 countries have already implemented the WIPO copyright treaties. Canada is at least going in the direction of finally catching up."
Prices of computers, iPods could jump
Intellectual property experts said the bill is mixed in the benefits it would provide and the problems it would create.
Mark Hayes, partner in the intellectual property group of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Toronto, said ISPs — which got the exemption from prosecution they wanted — and educational institutions, which would be able to copy materials from the internet that they previously could not, were among the winners. Consumers would also benefit because what they can do with their media has now been spelled out.
"They get some recognition of the rights to time shift and format shift," he said. "Before, nobody knew what the rules were."
Among the losers could be consumers shopping for electronics devices. The bill would raise the cost of electronics by extending the private copying levy, a tax currently in place on blank media such as CDs and DVDs, to any device with a hard drive.
"Owners of computers and iPods are probably going to end up paying quite a bit more for those products in the future," Hayes said.
Downloading on the rise
According to the latest survey from Statistics Canada, one in five Canadians aged 16 and older who used the internet at home said they had downloaded or watched TV or movies over the internet, an increase from 12 per cent in 2005.
The percentage of home internet users who downloaded music — either paid or for free — also increased from 37 per cent to 45 per cent in the two-year span. Part of that increase can be attributed to a change in methodology, as Statistics Canada for the first time included 16- and 17-year-olds in the study, a demographic more likely to download media than older groups.
Critics feared the bill will mirror the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which similarly brought in restrictive measures and opened the door for copyright owners to enact huge lawsuits against violators.
The minister was forced to retreat on introducing the bill in December after being hit with major public opposition. More than 20,000 people joined a protest group started on social networking site Facebook by University of Ottawa internet and e-commerce Prof. Michael Geist, an outspoken critic of the bill.
The opposition to the legislation has only grown since then, with the Facebook group counting more than 40,000 members before the bill was introduced. More than 1,000 new members joined the group on Thursday, with many expressing their outrage with the proposed legislation.
"I was a Conservative until this morning. This one has crossed the line," one member wrote. "We need an election. NOW!"
Canadian artists, librarians and students, as well as a business coalition made up of some of Canada's biggest companies — including Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp., as well as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. — have expressed their opposition to any legislation that imposes harsh copyright restrictions.
Opposition widespread
The chorus of opposition was joined last week by a coalition of consumer groups — including Option consommateurs, Consumers Council of Canada, Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), and Online Rights Canada (OnlineRights.ca) — that wrote a letter to the two ministers. The consumer groups expressed dismay they had not been consulted on the legislation.
Prentice responded to questioning in the House of Commons last week by saying he would not introduce the bill until he and Heritage Minister Josée Verner were satisfied that it struck the right balance between consumers and copyright holders.
Geist has repeatedly attacked the government on his blog for its lack of consultation with the Canadian public on the issue. However, Prentice has met with U.S. trade representatives and entertainment industry lobbyists to discuss the legislation.
"Prentice should be honest about the core anti-circumvention rules that are likely to mirror the DMCA and run counter to the concerns of business, education and consumer groups," Geist wrote on his blog. "Those rules are quite clearly 'Born in the USA.'"
The government said a second reading of the legislation wouldn't occur until the next sitting of the house. With the government breaking soon for the summer, such a reading would not occur until the fall.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...copyright.html
Irish Voters Appear to Reject European Treaty
Eamon Quinn and Alan Cowell
In a stunning setback for efforts to reform Europe’s unwieldy institutions, a senior Irish official said Friday that voters had rejected a revised European Union treaty designed to change the way the bloc governs itself and presents itself to the world.
If that outcome is confirmed in official results, it will mean that the 27-member bloc will be in turmoil, its latest attempt to reform stymied by less than one percent of its population of almost 500 million.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern declared on television: “It looks like this will be a ‘no’ vote. At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have spoken.”
Speaking later on Irish radio he said: “We are in uncharted territory.”
Even though there was no final, official tally, Micheal Martin, the minister of foreign affairs, acknowledged: “Perhaps there is a disconnect between the European institution and its people that we need to reflect on.”
Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament who supports the treaty and the spokesman on constitutional issues for the Liberal Democrats, described the vote as a “tragedy for Ireland, the EU and Europe’s place in the world”.
“The problems the treaty was established to address are still there: effectiveness, democracy and capacity to act," he said. "If the outcome of this is that we are obliged to struggle on with the existing treaty, then the Irish will have done no favors for themselves or us."
Mr. Duff added that EU leaders will have to try to assemble a new strategy when they meet for a summit in Brussels next Thursday.
“I think the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, will have to explain himself at the summit. If he brings a credible and coherent proposal to extricate the EU from this mess, then he will be listened to. But I suspect he can’t because there isn’t one.”
“I think we are probably going to have to wait for quite a considerable time before political circumstances have improved to the degree necessary to acquire public consent.”
Officials began counting votes Friday after a referendum Thursday on the so-called Lisbon Treaty. The official result was expected late Friday afternoon.
Ireland is the only country in the European Union to put the pact to a referendum. l The other member states are approving it through their parliaments and 18 have backed it so far , but European Union rules require unanimous support for the treaty to come into effect.
The apparent defeat followed an emotional campaign that ranged over many topics not directly connected with the treaty.
Those who supported the treaty accused their adversaries of confusing the issue for voters, leading them to make their decisions for reasons other than an assessment of the Lisbon accord.
“It is very regrettable that totally untrue arguments about taxation, abortion, neutrality and even euthanasia have been put before the Irish people,” Mr. Cowen said Thursday.
The Lisbon Treaty is 287 pages long and many voters have complained that it is difficult to understand. It is supposed to make the EU function more efficiently, its supporters say, and would give the European Union its first full-time president and create a new and powerful foreign policy chief. The Irish government and political establishment has been campaigning for a “yes” vote, but a surge of opposition recalled earlier occasions when Irish voters rejected European initiatives.
The Lisbon Treaty emerged after voters in France and the Netherlands rejected a European constitution in 2005.
“The problem is that it’s not a very exciting treaty,” Gail McElroy, a lecturer in political science at Trinity College Dublin said before Thursday’s vote. “Institutional efficiency is very hard to get people excited about.”
Eamon Quinn reported from Dublin and Alan Cowell from Paris. Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/wo...14ireland.html
Mod Chips Found Legal In The UK
For many years, we've wondered why some folks considered the process of mod chipping to be illegal. After all, if you own a device, why shouldn't you be able to modify it? It's not illegal to modify your computer, so why would it be illegal to modify a game console? Well, thanks to the DMCA in the US, the question wasn't entirely clear -- because console makers use encryption, they consider any modification to be a circumvention of that encryption, and the DMCA has that pesky anti-circumvention clause. In the US, it's become even more bizarre, with federal officials taking up the cause and fining mod chippers while claiming (seriously) that mod chipping was a national security issue.
Luckily, it looks like the courts in Europe are a lot more reasonable about all of this. A few years back, we noted that an Italian court ruled that mod chips were perfectly legal (Update: Well, darn. As a commenter notes, the Italian decision was later overturned). And, now, a tipster alerts us to the news that a UK appeals court has found the same thing, tossing out all of the charges against a mod chip seller, noting that mod chips do not circumvent copy protection systems. Not only that, but the defendant was awarded legal fees. This is a big deal, as the lower court had found the guy, Neil Higgs, guilty for selling mod chips he had imported from Hong Kong. So, now that's Italy and the UK that recognizes modifying your gaming consoles shouldn't be illegal. Anyone else?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...55131385.shtml
Cable: Deregulation Good for Consumers; Ars: Like Heck it is
Nate Anderson
If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that the cable industry in the US is focused on openness, innovation, and customer satisfaction; but if we can't keep the government's knuckleheaded regulators out of our cable lines and off our Internet, cable's nearly absurd level of innovation will be throttled down more effectively than BitTorrent uploads on Comcast's network. Well, so says the cable industry, at least.
Cable: pro-consumer and innovative
Kyle McSlarrow heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the trade group that represents cable. Any job that involves getting up on a regular basis and defending cable's insane rate hikes as consumer-focused measures that spur innovation can't be a real laughfest, but McSlarrow soldiers on. Yesterday, he gave a major speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC that made the above points (though with fewer digs at Comcast) and claimed that cable was "a great American success story."
In the speech, McSlarrow described cable's basic approach as one characterized by "embracing innovation and open markets and platforms" and "focusing on the customer." (I know, right?) The point of the speech wasn't just to talk up cable, though, and it opened with a call for a "public policy approach that relies on 'self-regulatory' actions that facilitate collaborative private-sector solutions to complicated technology and business disputes" like network management and net neutrality.
It closed the same way, with the statement that "the evidence is overwhelming that marketplace collaboration and self-regulation is a pro-consumer approach that deserves our support."
So let's do as McSlarrow suggests and take a look at the evidence.
What hath deregulation wrought?
Business don't always dislike regulation; if regulation throws up such stiff barriers to entry that new competitors rarely emerge, that's great for incumbents. And if you can "capture" your regulator in such a way that you have a cozy industry/government connection that doesn't rely on market forces or respond to customer pressure, that can work out pretty well, too. But in most other cases, businesses would prefer deregulation, the more the better.
It's an idea that flourished in the last few decades, but regulatory enthusiasm is making a comeback. In the just-released new issue of The Atlantic, editors count down the "11½ Biggest Ideas of the Year," and number seven is "the return of regulation." Clive Crook notes that "this empowerment of the market was usually advantageous, sometimes bungled, and nearly always controversial—but for years the trend was mostly one-way. Now a major rethink is underway."
Certainly deregulation has been good to cable. Consumers Union, the nonprofit that puts out Consumer Reports magazine, took a look at the results. Their conclusion? It led to much, MUCH higher prices.
"Until 1984, local governments kept cable prices in check," says CU. "Then deregulation resulted in a torrent of price hikes, interrupted only by a brief period, 1993-1996, when rates were regulated. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the flood gates to deregulation and more price hikes. Since passage of the 1996 Act, cable rates have increased by 59 percent—almost three times the rate of inflation—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
The lost art of customer service
So maybe the prices are high and the competition is low, but customer service is just phenomenal. Unfortunately, it's not. Even McSlarrow admits, "You might expect me to avoid the subject of customer service." When the spinmeister-in-chief for the industry admits there are serious issues, the situation is probably dire.
For a quantitative look at just how dire it is, we can turn to the widely-watched American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan. McSlarrow admitted that "we don't find the kind of customer feedback you see reflected in some surveys acceptable," and this was certainly one of those surveys he had in mind. In 2007, the ACSI found that cable satisfaction scores were, if not actually in the toilet, at least perched on the edge of bowl.
In 2008, despite McSlarrow's newfound customer commitment, cable scores lagged below the satellite TV operators as Charter and Comcast lost even more ground (Time Warner did gain a single point, though). Smaller operators improved their satisfaction scores, but Comcast set "an all-time low for the largest cable provider in the country," according to Dr. Claes Fornell, who heads the study. Fornell also noted last year that "there seems to be an element of monopoly-like pricing in the cable industry."
Given these results, it's unclear how McSlarrow arrived at his statement that "on a fundamental level, consumers love our services and they intuitively understand the great value they receive." No one I have ever spoken with about cable service has made such claims, but perhaps I simply know the wrong sort of people.
Net neutrality: a "private sector dispute"
So, given how well Congress' "wise decision in 1996 to deregulate our industry" has worked when it comes to traditional cable television service, it's at least fair to be skeptical about cable's continued calls for government to stay completely away from network management and net neutrality issues.
To its credit, the cable industry and America has at least provided a real alternative to DSL (one not seen in much of Europe, where line-sharing is used to create competition instead), and cable companies have put some much-needed pressure on incumbent telcos with VoIP home phone services. Finally, cable has built a broadband infrastructure that, even if it's not cheap or particularly fast compared to other leading countries, reaches most Americans and is generally capable of faster speeds than DSL. With DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades currently beginning, cable should get significantly faster than DSL over the next few years.
And all of this without much in the way of government regulation!
But one has only to look at the recent FCC oversight hearing on network management that has focused on practices at Comcast to see how important it is to have a public-interest regulator looking over the shoulders of these companies. With the Internet now a key resource that has quickly come to rival water, heat, and power as a utility, such issues are surely a bit more than some mere "private sector dispute" (as McSlarrow put it). Even he admits that cable has had "helpful public-policy nudges" along the way, and one thinks about Comcast's recent decision to investigate fairer, user-focused throttling that doesn't target particular protocols or applications.
While new laws and increased regulation may not prove necessary to keep the Internet healthy in America, it would still be a shame if Congress and regulators like the FCC were so much of McSlarrow's mindset that oversight proved a mere formality and enforcement became toothless. This isn't a "reflexive desire by some to involve government in every private sector dispute," but a recognition that Internet access in a less-than-fully-competitive marketplace is too important for total self-regulation.
"Foxes" and "henhouses" come to mind, but when the henhouse is actually the most innovative henhouse in the world, a place of almost magical scope and variety where eggs of every shape and color are laid by all the chickens of the world, any prudent farmer would at least pay someone to sit at the door with a shotgun.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ell-it-is.html
Verizon Offers Details of Usenet Deletion: alt.* Groups, Others Gone
Declan McCullagh
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.
Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.
Rabe had told us earlier in the week that some newsgroups would be restricted, but didn't have the details until we spoke with him on Thursday.
No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.
Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups--out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist. In a press release, he took credit for the companies' blunderbuss-style newsgroup removal by saying: "We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers...I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry."
Usenet is a pre-Web technology that, for most of its history, relied on companies, Internet service providers, and universities to operate servers that would exchange messages posted by their users. Each server operator can choose what newsgroups they wish to offer. Today, some companies like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com offer newsgroup access for a fee. (Unlike, say, mailing lists, Usenet has no central repository.)
What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions. Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist.
That means not carrying perfectly innocuous--and, in fact, very useful--newsgroups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie.
The alt.hierarchy is even more extensive. In the discussion thread attached to our earlier story, one of our readers said: "This is ridiculous. I actually met my wife on alt.personals, 14 years ago... I still use usenet - there are a lot good discussions and a person can get answers to questions on specific topics pretty quickly. It's nice to have a decentralized place to hold discussions, one that is not beholden to a sysadmin to correctly run a forum, one that's free of blinking gifs and flash ads."
The only Usenet newsgroups that Verizon will continue to offer customers are the comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies. Customers will continue to be able to connect to other non-Verizon Usenet servers; no blocking is taking place.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-99....html#comments
Virgin Media Cable Says that the Record Industry is in Charge of Your Router Configuration
Cory Doctorow
Will McGree got a letter form Virgin Media (his cable provider) and the British Phonographic Institute (the UK version of the RIAA -- of which Virgin -- also a record label -- is a member) telling him that he could be sued and disconnected from the Internet because someone used his open WiFi to download music. It wasn't Will -- the program used for file-sharing is a Windows app, and he runs Linux. It was one of his neighbours.
Virgin and BPI take the position that being a copyright holder means you get to specify the router configuration of every computer connected to the Internet. That just because open WiFi makes it harder for the BPI to hunt downloaders, no one should be allowed to offer it, no matter how convenient useful open WiFi might be. I've run open WiFi networks for close to a decade now -- I rely on open networks when I'm out and about, so it only seems fair to return the favour. Plus, closed WiFi networks are a pain in the ass if you have houseguests, exotic wireless devices, or older consoles and the like that can't handle passwords gracefully.
If I play my music with my window open, my neighbour might decide to open his window and listen in, instead of buying his own music. Does that mean that the record industry gets to order me to bolt my window shut?
Just one more reason not to pay for Virgin Broadband -- they're just not on their customers' side.
Quote:
Virgin Media are the only ISP sending out BPI notices. They don’t have to - there’s no law or industry regulation that says so. They just leapt into bed with the BPI and the BPI couldn’t be happier that they’ve got someone doing their “policing” for them.
In September, we’re building a home server in our flat. It’ll be a Tor node so that finally Virgin Media don’t need to worry themselves with what’s flowing through their routers. It’s just data. Like I paid for.
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http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/14...a-cable-s.html
U2 Manager Slams Internet Providers
McGuinness Likens ISPs to 'shoplifters'
Patrick Frater
U2 manager Paul McGuinness launched a blistering attack on the world's Internet providers Wednesday, accusing them of strangling the music industry.
Speaking at the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness likened ISPs to "shoplifters" and accused them of "turning their heads" away from the music industry's troubles and "rigging the market."
"The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help -- not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest," McGuinness said.
He and numerous others speaking on the first day of the confab said the industry was caught between rampant piracy and ISPs' extortionate terms of trade.
Warner Music prexy Lachie Rutherford pointed out that the 2% of revenues from downloads and ringtones is shared with performers. "There are huge amounts of money being made from music (by portals and carriers) that are not supporting music or radio or magazines," Rutherford said.
McGuinness targeted many for contributing to the music biz's ills. "Cable operators, ISPs, device manufacturers, P2P software companies -- companies that have used music to drive vast revenues from broadband subscriptions and from advertising. They would argue that they have been neutral bystanders to the spectacular devaluation of music. I don't believe that is true," he said.
But McGuinness saved his sharpest criticism for China and Chinese companies.
"ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded music business -- but they have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business," he said. "That's true nowhere more than in China. China Mobile makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year from sales of ringtones yet pays a minuscule fraction of that to performers, producers and composers."
McGuinness said ISPs were unwilling to act against piracy and had ignored music-industry proposals -- even though they were not being asked to police the Internet.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...&cs=1&nid=2570
U2 Manager Accuses All of You of "Shoplifting" Music
Jackson West
While the focus of his ire was Internet service providers, U2 manager Paul McGuinness also blasted "device manufacturers" for the "spectacular devaluation of music." Like, you know, when Apple hired U2 for a commercial and packaged a bunch of low-bitrate, DRM-laden MP3s of U2's back catalog for $149 at the iTunes store.
http://valleywag.com/5013494/u2-mana...plifting-music
RIAA Dismisses Warner v. Cassin, "Making Available" Case
Ray Beckerman
The RIAA has voluntarily dismissed Warner v. Cassin, the White Plains, New York, case in which a motion to dismiss the complaint has been pending since July, 2007.
Substantial briefing had taken place in the case over the "making available" issue, and further rulings were brought to the court's attention on the subject from such cases as Atlantic v. Brennan, Interscope v. Rodriguez, Elektra v. Barker, Arista v. Does 1-21, Atlantic v. Howell, and Capitol v. Thomas.
The notice states that the dismissal is "without prejudice".
However, Fed. R. Civ. P. 41 (B) states "if the plaintiff previously dismissed any federal-or state-court action based on or including the same claim, a notice of dismissal operates as an adjudication on the merits." It is believed that the plaintiffs learned of the defendant's identity through a prior, "John Doe", proceeding, which it also voluntarily dismissed, so that the dismissal in this case "operates as an adjudication on the merits".
Although the notice was submitted on May 27th, signed by the Judge on June 4th, and entered by the Clerk on June 5th, we just learned of it today, June 11th.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...in-making.html
Judge Shoots Down Universal's Bogus Infringement Allegations
Ruling Affirms Right to Resell Promo CDs
EFF release
A federal judge has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller's right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores.
Troy Augusto, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law firm Keker & Van Nest, was sued by UMG last year in the United States District Court for the Central District of California for 26 auction listings involving promo CDs. At issue was whether the "promotional use only, not for sale" labels on those CDs could trump Augusto's right to resell materials that he owns, guaranteed by copyright law's "first sale" doctrine.
In dismissing UMG's lawsuit late Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero ruled that the promo CDs are gifts distributed by UMG, as they are mailed free and unsolicited to thousands of people without any expectation or intention of their return. The first sale doctrine says that once the copyright owner sells or gives away a copy of a CD, DVD, or book, the recipient is entitled to resell that copy without further permission.
"This is a very important ruling for consumers, and not just those who buy or sell used CDs," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "The right of first sale also protects libraries, used bookstores, and businesses that rent movies and videogames. This ruling affirms and protects the traditional balance between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the public."
"It was clear to the court that these CDs were the property of Mr. Augusto, and therefore he had the right to resell them," said Joseph C. Gratz, attorney with Keker & Van Nest. "Copyright holders can't strip consumers of their first sale rights just by sticking a 'Not for Sale' label on a CD."
Mr. Augusto's victory comes almost one hundred years to the day after the United States Supreme Court's June 1, 1908 decision in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908), established the first sale doctrine as a central part of American copyright law.
EFF has long fought efforts to override the first sale doctrine, arguing in 2004 that Lexmark should not be permitted to use a "label license" to prohibit the resale of laser printer toner cartridges.
For the full order:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/um...03106SJO-O.pdf
For more analysis:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06...-umg-v-augusto
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/06/11
Microsoft Goes After 'Career Pirates'
Shaun Nichols
Microsoft has filed 21 lawsuits in US Federal courts as part of an effort to stop those who continually pirate its software.
Microsoft has filed 21 lawsuits in US Federal courts as part of an effort to stop those who continually pirate its software.
The suits span 14 states and target people and businesses that have allegedly sold pirated copies of Microsoft software.
Eight of the suits target companies that Microsoft refers to as "repeat offender software pirates". The eight firms had already been sued by Microsoft for selling counterfeit software.
Several of the suits also address pirated software pre-loaded onto PCs and then sold as bundled software, a process known as hard-disk loading.
"These legal actions are about protecting Microsoft's customers from falling victim to some dealers who operate a business model of peddling pirated and counterfeit software," said Microsoft attorney Sharon Cates.
"Some companies previously involved in these lawsuits have discontinued their illegal business practices. Others have not."
Microsoft has stepped up its pursuit of software pirates in recent years. The firm's Windows Genuine Advantage Programme warns users who often unknowingly purchase pirated copies of Windows, Office and other Microsoft offerings.
The company estimates that pirates counterfeited more than US$8 billion of software in the US alone in 2007.
Microsoft is warning users to be wary of unusual packaging, suspicious CD labels and the absence of a certificate of authenticity.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/78119,...r-pirates.aspx
MGM: A Lion or a Lamb?
David M. Halbfinger
ON a Thursday morning last month, hundreds of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer workers filed out of the studio’s Century City office tower and into a movie theater across the street. This rare, companywide meeting was a premiere of sorts: the introduction of Mary Parent, once a top production executive at Universal Pictures, as the new chairwoman of MGM’s motion picture group.
After Ms. Parent told her troops about green-lighting enough projects for MGM to roar into theaters with as many as 12 of its own movies in 2010, and about why she’d given up a lucrative producing career to accept her new job, the man who offered it to her — Harry E. Sloan — took the podium to deliver a confidence-booster.
“We are talking right now to a number of people about getting money for Mary to make all these pictures,” Mr. Sloan said, according to several people in attendance. “There’s no doubt that we’re going to get the money. It’s just a question of what the terms are going to be.”
But Ms. Parent’s lofty new title and lush, $6 million pay package obscure a harsh reality: despite its enduring legacy as one of Hollywood’s most legendary movie studios — and a seemingly stubborn refusal to disappear — MGM hasn’t fit the profile of a full-fledged production company in years.
Yet Ms. Parent, who had never marketed or distributed her own films before, was being asked to turn MGM into a player, and do it quickly. That feat will require hundreds of millions of dollars that the studio doesn’t yet have. What MGM does have, however, is a daunting pile of debt and other financial challenges.
Two and a half years ago, Mr. Sloan — MGM’s chief executive and the would-be heir to Louis B. Mayer — invested about $15 million of his own money in the faded studio, gambling that he could turn it around.
But MGM is choking on $3.7 billion in debt, forcing it to cough up more than $300 million in annual interest payments while it delays paying down the principal, its financial statements show. Bargain hunters are circling the company as it continues to bleed cash. For the fiscal year ended in March, MGM lost about $400 million; it lost about the same amount a year earlier.
The mounting losses have caused financial headaches for an investor group led by Sony, which brought together Comcast and four private equity funds to buy MGM from Kirk Kerkorian for $5 billion in 2004.
A bright spot for MGM has been its prized library of old film titles. That unit threw off $558 million in cash in the latest fiscal year. But amid an industrywide downturn in DVD catalog sales, by the end of August MGM will have received the last in a series of guaranteed video-distribution fees totaling $625 million from 20th Century Fox. Though that deal has three more years to run, the guarantees are expiring, which means that a source of steady income will be far less predictable.
And Ms. Parent’s production spree — after unsuccessful moves putting the MGM logo on other companies’ poor-to-middling films and turning over MGM’s United Artists unit to Tom Cruise — could drive MGM’s costs through the roof next year.
Mr. Sloan, undeterred, says Ms. Parent’s push could also bolster the studio’s value in a sale. (Comcast, which owns 20 percent of MGM, has already passed on buying the rest; 20th Century Fox, which releases MGM’s movies overseas in addition to managing its library, is seen as MGM’s ideal buyer. Neither company would comment.)
“I think when people see that there’s a strong pipeline for 2010 and beyond, the value goes up,” said Mr. Sloan in a recent interview.
Still, MGM’s unexpected re-entry into the production business is sowing dissent among its financial backers, with conference calls becoming “contentious” at times, according to one participant, who, like other investors, insisted on anonymity to avoid upsetting other partners.
For the moment, the uncertainty has left Mr. Sloan and Ms. Parent in the unenviable position of having to compete for filmmakers and actors by assuring them that MGM will have the money to shoot their movies, even if it has to resort to its dwindling supply of cash.
That means the pressure is on MGM to deliver hits, with little margin for error. “Nothing else matters — it’s just the movies,” Ms. Parent says. “And making sure that the people driving the movies aren’t panicking. And that they’re not panicking because they think we don’t have money.”
SITTING in his 14th-floor office, just off a rotunda where MGM’s ancient Oscars are displayed behind glass, Mr. Sloan ticks off his accomplishments in the last six months.
It’s a recap of news releases: “Quantum of Solace” and “The Pink Panther 2” went into production; Peter Jackson will produce two new films based on “The Hobbit”; “American Gladiators” became a prime-time hit for NBC; Mary Parent was hired; MGM joined with Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate in announcing a pay-TV channel to take the place of their expiring deals with Showtime; and the new MGM HD channel, yet another outlet for its film library, has been picked up by the five biggest domestic cable and satellite distribution systems.
“I think there’s a lot of evidence that we’ve begun the turnaround,” Mr. Sloan says, looking up from his talking points.
Even so, MGM appears to be — literally — buying time, which is only the latest plot twist in the saga of a company that seems oddly indestructible. Its golden age was already over when Mr. Kerkorian bought it for the first time in 1969, then began unloading assets and scaling back its filmmaking. He sold it to Ted Turner in 1986, then bought much of it back when Mr. Turner’s financing collapsed. Mr. Turner held onto the fabled MGM library, while Mr. Kerkorian sold MGM again in 1990 to the freewheeling Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti.
In 1996, after Mr. Parretti foundered and a French bank, Crédit Lyonnais, took over MGM, Mr. Kerkorian stepped in for a third time and led a $1.3 billion buyout of the studio. For his third act, Mr. Kerkorian cobbled together a new mix of film and television libraries, overseas distribution deals and modest commercial successes like “Legally Blonde” and a remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
But MGM made fewer big bets during this time, even slowing its output of James Bond films. In the spring of 2004, Mr. Kerkorian loaded the company with $2.4 billion in debt to finance a one-time $1.89 billion cash dividend, and pocketed his three-fourths share. He also put the studio and its library up for sale. He declined to comment.
With a format war looming over the next generation of DVD players, MGM’s library of 4,000 films gained heightened importance and set off a bidding contest for the company. To bolster its Blu-ray players, Sony of America, blocked by its Japanese parent from buying MGM outright, persuaded Providence Equity Partners and the Texas Pacific Group to put up the bulk of the equity. Toshiba, which was pushing a different DVD standard, quietly backed Time Warner in a rival bid.
Once Comcast joined Sony’s side, the group got MGM for about $5 billion. Sony planned to shutter MGM’s studios and use Sony Pictures to distribute the MGM catalog, remake some MGM titles and produce only the best-known MGM franchises like James Bond and the Pink Panther.
That blueprint also called for MGM to make about four new films a year, to keep its library relevant to retailers. But Sony home-video executives bridled at the plan, and MGM’s private equity owners quietly sought a new distributor.
Enter Harry Sloan, a lawyer turned jet-setting entrepreneur who considers Rupert Murdoch to be his role model. (Their wives, both Chinese, are friends, and the two women recently set up a film production venture together.)
Mr. Sloan had steered the movie company New World Entertainment into TV production and comic books in the 1980s, but New World became hobbled by debt problems and was sold in 1989.
A year later, Mr. Sloan formed SBS Broadcasting and built it into Europe’s second-largest broadcaster, which in turn became the largest shareholder of Lions Gate Entertainment; Mr. Sloan was Lions Gate’s chairman until April 2005. That fall, he sold SBS for $2.6 billion. He declined to say how much he made, but at the time he owned 11 percent of the stock.
Five days later, he was named chairman and chief executive of MGM. Executives at Providence Equity, who were familiar with Mr. Sloan’s track record, recruited him to execute the strategy behind the $5 billion buyout.
After hiring Rick Sands, a former Miramax and DreamWorks executive, as his chief operating officer, Mr. Sloan outsourced filmmaking to independent producers. Mr. Sands, who resigned after Ms. Parent’s hiring, persuaded 20th Century Fox to commit to the five-year distribution deal for MGM’s library.
“We were looking at probably making a move to Warner, setting up our own unit, or joint venturing with CBS — a lot of possibilities,” Mr. Sloan says. “The guys from Fox came in and blew me away.”
Although the switch to Fox was a humiliating blow for Sony, Mr. Sloan said that it was necessary. “What was important was to rebuild the business,” he says. “The value of a static library is going to decline anyway, and on top of that you’re going to fall off a cliff if you’re only depending on the guarantee.”
Fox has lost $15 million on the guarantees, but made slightly more than that in distribution fees on MGM’s international releases, executives familiar with the deal said. On the other hand, outsourcing production to independents has been a disaster for MGM’s image and has done little for its bottom line.
Aside from “1408” ($72 million) and “Halloween” ($58 million) — both from the Weinstein Company — 17 other MGM titles last year averaged just $12 million in ticket sales, according to boxofficemojo.com.
“The quality of the movies, I admit, weren’t what we expected,” Mr. Sloan says. “But you would’ve expected Tom Rosenberg, coming off ‘Million Dollar Baby’ — but what does he give us? ‘Feast of Love.’ ”
Mr. Rosenberg, chairman of Lakeshore Entertainment, said he had shown that film to MGM’s publicity, marketing and distribution team and asked for a box office estimate. “They said between $40 and $50 million,” he said. “We decided to release the film through MGM based upon their enthusiasm for it. Sometimes good films lose money.” The movie’s box office receipts were $3.5 million.
As for Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who have voiced frustration to others that MGM has feckless relations with exhibitors, Mr. Sloan says: “Nobody wants to tell you they made a bad movie; they want to blame the distributor. I thought I was making a deal with the guys who’d just come off Oscars for ‘Chicago,’ ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘Aviator.’ Instead they went to the festivals, picked up movies and arbitraged MGM’s deal on Showtime. But we still made money on every single Weinstein picture.”
In response, Harvey Weinstein said: “I understand Harry’s frustration, because in the beginning, we didn’t have time to produce our own movies. We had a pipeline to fill, and we relied on acquisitions. The success or failure of our movies is our responsibility, not anybody else’s.”
Mr. Sloan says that while MGM’s string of duds may be embarrassing, it hasn’t sullied MGM’s image. After all, the ubiquitous MGM lion still roars on TV, computer and theater screens.
“You might say there was some damage to the brand in that the movies weren’t great,” he allows. “But I don’t believe people pay much attention.”
IF buying into the MGM library on the theory that it would be a huge cash cow didn’t work because it had to be nurtured with expensive new films, and renting out MGM’s distribution system didn’t work because of quality control problems, Mr. Sloan’s team still had other cards to play — like forging a partnership with Tom Cruise.
Mr. Cruise’s ejection from the Paramount lot in 2006, after his sofa-jumping antics the year before, created an opportunity in Mr. Sloan’s eyes. He quickly gave a 35 percent stake in the dormant United Artists film label to Mr. Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner. The hope was that UA would provide the four or so films a year that Sony was originally to have produced to keep the MGM library refreshed.
After saying early last year that UA was close to securing $500 million in financing from Merrill Lynch, it took Mr. Sloan and MGM’s investors an additional six months to complete the deal. The resulting production fund, which would cover up to $60 million of a single film’s budget, required MGM to kick in $75 million and cover any excess costs.
When UA released “Lions for Lambs,” a film about war and politics that cost about $35 million to make and even more to market (though Mr. Cruise, one of its stars, worked without pay), it flopped at the box office. MGM immediately lost about half of its $75 million UA investment, Mr. Sloan said.
UA then green-lighted a second war movie, “Pinkville,” about the My Lai massacre, from Oliver Stone. It spent $6 million on preproduction costs before canceling the movie a week after the opening of “Lions for Lambs.” That leaves “Valkyrie,” a costlier star vehicle for Mr. Cruise that was already surrounded by negative buzz.
In that film, Mr. Cruise portrays a heroic Nazi officer who turns on Hitler. The release date for “Valkyrie” has been delayed twice, contributing to a cloud of gloom hanging over the project. The film cost close to $95 million to make and will cost about as much to market, putting its worldwide break-even point north of $200 million in box office receipts, MGM executives said.
MGM’s financial records show that UA has already consumed about $150 million of its $500 million financing fund. But if the UA fund begins to dry up, Mr. Sloan says he is ready to replenish it.
“We’re not going to let that thing fail,” he said. “That is a non-duplicatable asset today, in these credit markets.”
Dennis Rice, a UA spokesman, said that UA was excited about “Valkyrie” but that its financing was not dependent on any one movie. “We expect to have hits and misses just like any other studio,” he said, adding that UA is close to deals for three other films with top talent. “We stand by our business plan and want to be judged over the long haul.”
As MGM continues to monitor its relationship with UA, it recently decided to end another with Showtime, the cable TV network.
Because Showtime offered only half of what it previously had paid to license MGM films for pay-TV programming, MGM formed a new cable network with Paramount and Lionsgate. But the three partners have yet to identify any distributors, and analysts are skeptical about its eventual reception.
On the theatrical front, MGM has already punted for 2009 to avoid the quality problems that have bedeviled it. Mr. Sloan says the breathing room allows Ms. Parent to put together classier projects.
“If you don’t have a major summer and a Christmas picture, you’re not a player at the studio level,” he said. “The best you’re going to be is Lionsgate.” A Lionsgate spokesman declined to comment.
In the interim, Ms. Parent says she has faith in the films that MGM will distribute with its partners. The James Bond movie this year, and the “Pink Panther” sequel next year, both to be released domestically by Sony Pictures, have already been paid for. A recent screening of “Valkyrie,” meanwhile, caused her to breathe “a sigh of relief,” she says.
“It didn’t get out of the gate right, so we have to make sure there’s adequate time to contextualize the film,” Ms. Parent says. “It’s a hard sell. It just is. But it’s a film that people will be proud of.”
Ms. Parent has been buying books and pitches, any one of which she says could become a major 2010 release. “The Matarese Circle,” a thriller based on the popular Robert Ludlum book, is being developed for Denzel Washington. A remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is planned, as is a romantic comedy from the director of “Wild Hogs.”
SHE also says she has been wooing talent by casting MGM’s negatives as positives. So, Ms. Parent says, the studio isn’t understaffed; it’s “streamlined.” It’s not desperate; it’s “hungry.”
As for complaints about MGM’s marketing, she says, “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of it.” Insiders say MGM has offered the top marketing job to Terry Press, formerly head of marketing at DreamWorks; Ms. Press confirmed that she had been approached, but declined to say more.
Meanwhile, speculation continues in Hollywood and on Wall Street that MGM will be bought, leaving Mr. Sloan scurrying for the same thing everyone else in Hollywood is seeking: cash. He says he wants to raise a new, $650 million production fund to keep MGM’s perilous finances intact — and maybe find new investors to pay down its debt.
Time is of the essence. Mr. Sloan’s and Ms. Parent’s talk of possibly dipping into MGM’s cash coffers to have movies launched drew a sharp response from one member of the studio’s board who requested anonymity to avoid friction with other directors and managers. “We are not going to jeopardize or compromise the financial health of this company based on funding negative costs of films,” the board member said.
While Mr. Sloan says he’s prepared to use MGM’s cash, what he won’t do, he says, is ask existing investors to double down.
“I think it’s a character of private equity that the last thing they’d want to do is put themselves in the situation where they said, ‘We didn’t capitalize the company optimally,’ ” he says. “So I kind of see it as my job to take the deck that I was dealt, which is a lot of leverage, and make it work. I think I can make this work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/bu...dia/08mgm.html
Hollywood Is Burning
Jonathan Kuntz
THE most famous back lot fire in Hollywood history was intentional. In 1938, David O. Selznick staged the burning of Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind” by torching the old “King Kong” Skull Island set on RKO’s back lot and then filming the spectacular results.
Another Kong, this one a 30-foot, animatronic gorilla featured in the Universal City tour, went up in flames this week, along with various sets, film prints, audio recording and videotape storage vaults, as Universal Studios suffered its latest conflagration. The tour quickly reopened and now offers a view of the fire damage as part of the tram ride.
Most of the back lot acreage built up during Hollywood’s classic studio era was long ago sold off for housing developments and commercial space (Century City lies on much of the old 20th Century Fox back lot), but Universal Studios has always held onto its 230-acre lot, once a chicken ranch, supplementing profits from moviegoers with tickets to tourists eager for a behind-the-scene glimpse of Hollywood.
Catastrophe has been too common from the start: in fact, Universal City’s elaborate grand opening in March 1915 was cut short by disaster — a stunt flier was killed when his plane crashed near the horrified crowd.
There have also been many studio fires in Hollywood’s 95 years, including about a half-dozen at Universal: made of wood, sets catch fire easily. From the earliest days, film producers prided themselves on having well-trained, vigilant fire departments. Bragging rights went to the lot with the biggest water tower.
Among the sets that burned this week were the courthouse square from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Back to the Future,” and a New York street from countless films and television shows. These sets themselves had been damaged and altered many times, and were mostly false fronts to begin with — so what has really been lost? The physical residue of great movie memories, no more, simulations of simulations. The studio can rebuild the sets, as they have before — now configured as much to the tour tram as to the camera — and they’ll likely be better fakes than ever.
More serious may be the loss of the circulating 35-millimeter theatrical prints. While not original masters, these are the copies made for screenings at repertory theaters, art museum retrospectives and in college classes. Universal has already canceled screenings of “Rear Window” and Howard Hawks’s “Scarface” for the U.C.L.A. film history class I teach, along with all their other titles for the indefinite future.
Universal controls a big chunk of Hollywood history. Their own prodigious output includes “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the third film to win the Oscar for best picture; classic monster series like “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy” and “The Wolfman”; the comedies of Abbott and Costello; the melodramas of Douglas Sirk; and hundreds more. In addition, through wise acquisitions in the Lew Wasserman era, Universal also owns the rights to many additional Paramount titles, including various Alfred Hitchcock classics, the Marx Brothers movies and Billy Wilder’s film noir “Double Indemnity.” Prints of many of these seem to have been destroyed.
This latest fire, I hope, will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles like “Duck Soup,” “Dracula” or “Vertigo” — which will surely be reprinted and return to circulation — but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.
Still, Hollywood can never be reduced to its physical remains, to false fronts or plastic film. This is an industry that delights in creating something memorable out of something fake, and creative destruction, rebuilding and reuse have always been part of the magic.
After all, the burning of Atlanta in 1938 was actually a beginning. Selznick and his crew immediately cleared the Kong wreckage, and then used the space to build the dozens of structures, from the Atlanta rail yards to Tara, needed for “Gone With the Wind.”
Those sets were used many more times: Atlanta was recycled into Mayberry for “The Andy Griffith Show” and then Gotham City in the television series “Batman.” The area is now an industrial park.
Jonathan Kuntz is a professor of film at the University of California, Los Angeles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/op...7kuntz.html?hp
Jim McKay, Pioneer Sports Broadcaster, Dies at 86
Frank Litsky and Richard Sandomir
Jim McKay, the genial ABC Sports broadcaster whose calm voice and trustworthy demeanor were synonymous with the network’s Olympic broadcasts and the celebrated sports anthology series “Wide World of Sports,” died Saturday at his country estate in Monkton, Md. He was 86.
The death was confirmed by LeslieAnne Wade, a spokeswoman for CBS Sports where Mr. McKay’s son, Sean McManus, is the president.
Mr. McManus said his father, who hosted and commented on Triple Crown races for ABC, might have had only one regret in his life: missing Big Brown’s chance on Saturday to be the first winner of the Triple Crown since 1978.
Mr. McKay was a hype-averse optimist and poetic storyteller who left analysis and brickbats to co-workers like Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona, Jackie Stewart and Bill Hartack.
Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete had won a gold medal in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Mr. McKay said: “If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?”
No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed Mr. McKay “to play Uncle Sam for two weeks.”
Mr. McKay’s sincerity came through. Bob Costas of NBC Sports, a younger-generation sportscaster, once said: “Jim McKay had a very important quality. You never felt what he expressed wasn’t genuine. You never felt his reaction was, ‘What’s called for here is a tear.’ You never had a sense that he professed to be moved and when they went to a commercial he blew his nose.”
His professionalism and sensitivity melded in 1972. During the Munich Olympics, as he left the hotel sauna and was about to go into the swimming pool on his only day off, he received word that Arab terrorists had invaded the Israeli living quarters in the Olympic Village. Mr. McKay hurried to the studio, and for 16 consecutive hours he anchored ABC’s extraordinary news coverage, with field reporting from Peter Jennings, Howard Cosell and others.
The episode ended with the murder of 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and trainers. When that word reached Mr. McKay, he said he thought that he would be the person who told the family of David Berger, an Israeli-born weight lifter whose family lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio, “if their son was alive or dead.”
He looked at the lens and said, “They’re all gone.”
When ABC finally signed off, Mr. McKay, physically and emotionally spent, returned to his hotel room. Only then did he realize he had been wearing a wet swimsuit beneath his trousers.
The next day, Mr. McKay received this cable from an old CBS colleague: “Dear Jim, today you honored yourself, your network and your industry. Walter Cronkite.” Mr. McKay’s work at Munich won him an Emmy Award for news coverage, the first for a sportscaster, and the George Polk Award. Through the years, he would win 12 more Emmys.
Mr. McKay was born James Kenneth McManus — the name he used on his passport and for hotel reservations — on Sept. 24, 1921, in Philadelphia. He moved at age 13 to Baltimore, where in 1943 he received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola College. He served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, including a period in which he captained a minesweeper escorting convoys from Trinidad to Brazil.
In 1946 and 1947, he was a police reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun before being shifted to the newspaper’s new television station as a broadcaster, writer and producer. In 1950, when he moved to CBS in New York to host a local daily 90-minute variety show, he was told that his new name, at least for TV, would be Jim McKay, to suit the title, “The Real McKay.” During his debut, Mr. McKay sang “It Had to Be You.”
The next decade brought more television stints at WCBS-TV and the CBS network as a weatherman, a public affairs moderator, a game show host and a sportscaster. He covered the Masters golf tournament, did play by play of Ivy League football games and provided sports reports on CBS’s answer to NBC’s “Today,” the “Morning Show,” which was hosted by Mr. Cronkite.
Mr. McKay was designated to host CBS’s broadcast of the 1960 Winter Olympics from Squaw Valley, Calif., but he had a nervous breakdown and Mr. Cronkite took over. At the Summer Games that year in Rome, Mr. McKay began his run as the TV personality most intimately identified with the Olympics until the late 1980s. He covered 10 Olympics for ABC and his last, for NBC, in 2002. His connection to the Olympics is so strong that it seems as if he were the prime-time host more than he really was.
Before ABC revolutionized Olympic broadcasting and satellites transmitted sports events instantly, CBS had videotapes shipped from the Rome Games daily to New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International), where a remote broadcast unit put the footage on the air while Mr. McKay narrated from a studio erected at Grand Central Terminal.
“The tapes came in frozen one night,” he said in 2002. “The producer and I held the tapes against our bodies to warm them.”
In 1961, Roone Arledge, the executive producer of ABC Sports, needed a host for “Wide World” when one of his producers suggested Burrhead, a reference to Mr. McKay’s crew cut. Mr. Arledge called Mr. McKay at the noisy press room at Augusta National Golf Club during the Masters, which was his last assignment for CBS. In his autobiography, “The Real McKay,” Mr. McKay said Mr. Arledge promised him only 20 weeks as the host of a summer replacement series that would cover “a number of sports not normally seen on TV.”
It lasted for 37 years, with Mr. McKay the host for at least 25 of them, and became the most honored anthology series. As the adventurous host, he traveled more than five million miles in all to cover boxing, skiing, soccer, gymnastics, track and field, figure skating, rodeo, barrel jumping, horse racing, cycling, demolition derby and Eiffel Tower climbing. A promoter once demanded $100,000 for the rights to cliff diving in Acapulco, but Mr. McKay moved in and offered the divers $10 each. They accepted.
He and Mr. Arledge were believed to have collaborated on the introduction to “Wide World,” which Mr. McKay narrated over a montage of sports scenes. The enduring script included the phrase “the thrill of victory,” followed by a melodramatic pause, ominous music and the words “the agony of defeat.”
Mr. McKay is yet another of ABC Sports’s early giants to die: Mr. Arledge is gone, as are Mr. Cosell and Chris Schenkel.
“Because of the profession I’m in, not a day goes by when someone doesn’t stop me and say, ‘We think of him all the time’ and ‘We admire him,’ ” Mr. McManus said Saturday. “That tells you a lot about the kind of man he was.”
In recent years, Mr. McKay owned racehorses and lived in a 19th-century farmhouse in the horse country of Monkton, north of Baltimore. His most recent work including commentary from the Winter Games in Salt Lake City and writing and narrating a documentary about himself for HBO.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Dempsey, a former columnist for The Baltimore Evening Sun; his son, Sean, the president of CBS News and Sports; a daughter, Mary Guba, of Sparks, Md.; and three grandchildren.
Except for his globetrotting, Mr. McKay and his wife were nearly inseparable during a nearly 60-year marriage. In sedentary semiretirement, he said in 2002, he read to her from newspapers and recalled a recent illness that did not allow her to move her arms or legs.
“When she said, ‘I’m dying,’ it was the worst moment in my life,” he said, with both fear and love in his familiar voice.
Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/sports/08mckay.html
NBC’s Tim Russert Dies
Katharine Q. Seelye
Mr. Russert was a towering figure in American journalism and moderated several debates during the recent presidential primary season.
Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on the air at 3:39 p.m. and reported that Mr. Russert had collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work. He had just returned from Italy with his family.
“Our beloved colleague,” a grave Mr. Brokaw called him, one of the premier journalists of our time. He said this was one of the most important years in his life, with his deep engagement in the network’s political coverage, and that he “worked to the point of exhaustion.” Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Russert was a true child of Buffalo and always stayed in touch with his blue collar roots and “the ethos of that community.”
He said Mr. Russert had just moved his father, who is in his late 80s, from one facility to another in Buffalo. He said he loved his family, his Catholic faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals.
“This news division will not be the same without his strong, clear voice,” Mr. Brokaw said.
After Mr. Brokaw made the announcement, the network switched to Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC News, who is reporting from Afghanistan this week. Mr. Williams broke down as he tried to describe what the loss meant to his network family.
The network is struggling through shock and grief to bring the story of Mr. Russert’s life and journalistic achievements to its viewers immediately. Andrea Mitchell is describing him as “the pre-eminent journalist of our time” and said he was her mentor.
Mr. Williams said that Mr. Russert, trained as a lawyer, was “always about fairness.” The network is replaying moments of Mr. Russert and Mr. Williams co-moderating a recent debate.
Mr. Russert worked for two prominent New York Democrats, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo, before being hired in 1984 by NBC in its Washington bureau. He became bureau chief four years later.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp
Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable
David Carr
Maybe it’s because I’m from Minneapolis, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Saturday nights on CBS that I spent with Mary Tyler Moore during her show’s heyday in the ’70s. Sure, Saturday night on the Tiffany network also had “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” but who else could take a nothing day, a Saturday for instance, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?
How about Kimbo Slice, a massive guy with a Unabomber beard and bare hands capable of performing autopsies?
A week ago, Mr. Slice — and I mean absolutely no disrespect, in case his range of interests includes this newspaper — stepped into the ring on “CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights,” the first in a series of mixed martial arts cage matches on the network, and solved a few mysteries.
1) Who would watch this stuff on network television? A lot of folks, 4.9 million of them in fact, including the precious young males advertisers love.
2) Is Saturday night, as Frank Sinatra suggested, the loneliest night of the week? Not when Mr. Slice has drawn a bead on you. Son, if that’s the case, you have plenty of company.
3) Most compellingly, what could possibly be inside the cauliflower ear of Mr. Slice’s opponent, a tomato can named James Thompson? As all of us found out by the end of the fight, some really yucky stuff.
In CBS’s Saturday night pantheon, the girl who could turn the world on with her smile has been replaced by a man whose missing teeth may be his most compelling feature.
Confronted by an audience that is either on the Web or a milk carton, and a writers’ strike that left the scripted cupboard a little bare, networks are opting in on all manner of contests and challenges, including human cockfighting.
Randomly flip on a network broadcast and people are dancing, fighting, singing and conniving their way to the top. The sitcom laugh track is petering out, as are the kinds of tent-pole dramas and news coverage that gave networks their brand identity.
However, for anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom.
Channels like TNT, AMC, FX and others came up with their own versions of “Trading Places” and carved out niches, sometimes huge ones, by letting viewers know that narrative, quality and drama have not gone off the grid. Those characteristics have just switched coordinates. Sure, “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” still rule the water cooler, but shows like “Mad Men,” “The Closer” and “Saving Grace” are bubbling up as well.
Need more evidence of cable’s sneaky plan to produce quality programming to get quality audiences? NBC’s big push for next season is expanding “The Biggest Loser” to two full hours. Those of us who are looking forward to the third season of “Friday Night Lights,” a riveting drama about the American family through a pigskin prism, will have to wait because the network decided to share the property with DirectTV by splitting production costs and letting satellite viewers get first dibs.
If networks are no longer in the business of coming up with must-see serials that mature over time — we all know that “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” you-name-it took a long time to turn into hits — what business are they in?
“They are on an endless search for the next big thing,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which includes TNT and TBS. “There is very little consistency in what they are doing, and people don’t know what to expect when they turn on the broadcast networks. They are still in the business of appointment television, but there are fewer and fewer appointments. There’s a great big opportunity for cable networks.”
The writers’ strike may have done some damage to the network mode, as well. Not only did viewers tune out in droves — all three networks were down double digits — but competitors also grabbed a tasty share of that pie, with ad-supported cable audiences up 9 percent. Over the course of the strike, cable grew to a 48 percent share, up four points, all of it coming from the hide of the networks.
And it’s not just broadcast entertainment that is hurting. Part of the reason that networks seem to be losing their exalted status is that news programming, typically great for the image and not so much for the ratings, has been given over to the cable news stations. When issues of civic moment are nigh, consumers have been trained to tune in to Wolf or Chris, not Brian or Katie.
Last Tuesday night was a historic one, given that a black candidate became the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party. ABC made the lonely decision to cut away from regular programming to give its viewers a seat on history. NBC covered it with short news breaks while telling its viewers to head over to MSNBC for news. And CBS broadcast the speech only to pre-prime-time West Coast audiences.
For its trouble, ABC was beaten in the ratings by a cable station, CNN. According to my colleague Brian Stelter, it was only the second time in history that a cable news network attracted more viewers than a broadcaster during a major news event. (Fox News lodged the first during the Republican convention in 2004.)
There are other signs that the signal between cable and networks is being scrambled. Tonight at 8 p.m., CBS will broadcast an episode of “The Bill Engvall Show,” a TBS sitcom. In exchange for getting a shot on network air to promote the second season of the show, which begins on Thursday on the cable network, TBS has agreed to give CBS space this coming fall to promote its new lineup.
The move suggests that cable commercial time, once thought of as the province of cheap kitchen gadgets and cut-rate loan sharks, has gained luster. And it will give additional momentum to a “The Bill Engvall Show,” a goofy family program of the kind in which networks used to excel. Last year, the show gathered 4.1 million viewers.
Turner is not only sporting networklike numbers, but it is also beginning to act like a network. Last month, the cable network went toe to toe with the networks at the upfronts, giving a presentation during the same week. Mr. Koonin did everything he could to etch a shift in paradigm, pointing out with a pop quiz from the stage that while TNT has shows with gilded performers like the Oscar winner Holly Hunter and the Emmy winner Kyra Sedgwick, the networks were pushing shows about talking cars and guys in leotards.
ABC finished the upfronts with a flourish of its own, hyping “Wipeout,” a contest that brings the aesthetic of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — gee, that looked like it really hurt — to a set that involves robotic boxing gloves and giant rubber balls. ABC picked YouTube’s pocket to bring a little mayhem to the small screen with better resolution by producing “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.” Now if it could just get a series out of that video where a bear gets shot out of tree with a tranquilizer gun, hits a trampoline and lands on a 4-year-old, my life would be complete.
Sensing an opportunity, ad-supported cable networks will jump in front of the fall network television station lineup with new episodes of “The Closer,” starring Ms. Sedgwick, and “Saving Grace,” starring Ms. Hunter, in July, while USA has already introduced its heavily promoted show about the witness protection program, “In Plain Sight,” and Lifetime’s spicy “Army Wives” came back for a second season last night.
In the meantime, network viewers will have to settle for Mr. Slice. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, but then, so is just about every night on the network schedule.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/bu...ia/09carr.html
Who Altered British TV? ‘Who’ Indeed
Sarah Lyall
RUSSELL T DAVIES, perhaps the most admired writer and producer working in British television drama, was once confronted at a wedding by a fellow guest bristling with indignation about a scene in Mr. Davies’s hugely successful, family-friendly science fiction series, “Doctor Who.” In the scene Capt. Jack Harkness, a swaggering intergalactic hero who exuberantly lusts after both men and women, plants quick kisses on the mouths of both the title character and the title character’s female sidekick as they face imminent death. (Everyone survives.)
Mr. Davies’s first instinct — as a reasonable person, as a happily gay man — was to be relaxed and placatory, he said. But something snapped.
“I was standing there saying, ‘You’re a bad mother, and your children will either grow up to be lesbians, or they will be taken into care because they’ve been badly raised,’ ” he recalled in a recent interview near the “Doctor Who” set. He began to chuckle. “ ‘You are ignorant, and you’re bringing up your children in ignorance, and that will backfire on you.’ ”
Luckily, the woman’s husband escorted her away before a fistfight broke out. But the incident was jolting, in part because it was such an anomaly. Mr. Davies, 44, had already won these arguments, at least with most people, years before. So successfully has he pushed the boundaries of British television that he sometimes forgets how far it, and he, have come.
“He has basically changed the face of television in the U.K.,” said John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack in both “Doctor Who” and a spinoff series, “Torchwood,” which is aimed at adults. “He has taken subject matter that nobody else will touch, and he has put in characters that nobody else will bother doing.”
And he has done it with mainstream programs that are immensely popular. In the last three and a half years he has built “Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and another spinoff, “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” into Britain’s most successful homegrown drama franchise. Mr. Davies recently announced that he would step down as executive producer and head writer of “Doctor Who” at the end of 2009, in order to pursue other projects (he won’t say what they are). But at a time when young audiences are fleeing television for the Internet and other hipper media, “Davies has made family television cool again,” in the words of The Guardian.
It is hard to overstate “Doctor Who’s” significance for Britons of a certain age. First broadcast in 1963, when many households here were just getting used to that novel new device, the television set, it was a triumph of family viewing, a science fiction show that (unlike, say, “Star Trek,” with its particular audience) parents and children stayed home to watch together.
The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices. It remained on the air in one form or another until 1989, the potential awkwardness of having a succession of different actors in the title role explained airily away by the Doctor’s ability to morph into a different body every few years.
The new “Doctor Who” is broadcast during Britain’s family friendliest hour — just after dinner on Saturday nights — and it too has morphed into something else altogether, science fiction that is playful, sophisticated, emotionally resonant and peppered with lightning-quick allusions to literary works, to classic “Doctor Who” episodes from long ago, and to historical events and people. But Mr. Davies presses his grown-up themes with a whisper and a laugh, not a shout. No one actually has sex on screen in “Doctor Who.” And when Captain Jack makes an appearance (only rarely, since he now has his own show), his sexuality is an issue only in that his constant, equal-opportunity flirting tends to annoy his colleagues, busy as they are fighting intergalactic evil.
“He takes ‘Doctor Who’ and pushes the envelope the whole time, not in terms of taste and decency but in terms of ideas and emotional intelligence, the size of feeling and epic stroke of narrative breadth,” said Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction. She said that no one at the BBC had ever had a problem with Captain Jack or with any of Mr. Davies’s plotlines. “How ridiculous would it be that you would travel through time and space and only ever find heterosexual men?” Ms. Tranter said.
Hiring Mr. Davies to remake the beloved but, finally, creaky old series was a daring, even counterintuitive move by the BBC. First there was the worry that “Doctor Who” had already had its day, that it belonged to another era altogether. But more than that, Mr. Davies was a risk taker with no obvious science-fiction credentials other than a fanatical lifelong devotion to “Doctor Who” and a headful of ideas about where to take it next. At the time, in 2003, he was best known for “Queer as Folk,” a 1999 series that chronicled the lives of a group of hedonistic gay men in Manchester with a frankness never shown before on mainstream television. (It was later remade in the United States.)
“Queer as Folk” was revolutionary not only because of its racy subject matter but also because of the matter-of-fact way it presented its characters: ordinary people, if unusually attractive and sexually frisky, who happened to be gay. Criticism of its content tended to be overshadowed by admiration for its wit and verve and for the mature fun of its story lines. Mr. Davies used the same philosophy when Captain Jack came on the scene in “Doctor Who” — make it entertaining, not didactic.
“I thought, ‘It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television,’ ” he said, laughing.
He tends to see the joke in most things and talks about television with a words-spilling-over-each-other enthusiasm. What better way to introduce a charming bisexual character, he asked, than to make him “an outer space buccaneer?”
“The most boring drama would be” — here he put on a whiny, fractious voice — “ ‘Oh, I’m bisexual, oh my bleeding heart’ nighttime drama. Tedious, dull. But if you say it’s a bisexual space pirate swaggering in with guns and attitude and cheek and humor into prime-time family viewing: that was enormously attractive to me.”
“Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” which is aimed at children and stars one of the original characters from early “Doctor Who,” have helped win numerous awards and accolades for Mr. Davies, who was named Industry Player of the Year in 2006 at the Edinburgh Television Festival. This season’s opening episode of “Doctor Who” drew 9.14 million viewers — more than one-seventh of the population of Britain. (In the United States “Doctor Who” appears on the Sci Fi Channel. “Torchwood” appears on BBC America and this season was its highest-rated program ever.)
Mr. Davies, who was born in Swansea, Wales, is tall and solid, his broad face dominated by a pair of black-rimmed glasses similar to those worn by Doctor Who himself. His middle initial doesn’t stand for anything; he added it early in his career to distinguish himself from a radio host who shared his name. He lives partly here and partly in Manchester and has a longtime companion who works as a customs inspector for the British government.
After a childhood in which his twin obsessions were television and comic books, he found work as a writer and producer in children’s television. He wrote for soap operas, contributed to long-running dramas and, before “Queer as Folk,” wrote “The Grand,” a multipart drama set in a hotel in the 1920s. Some of his programs have been more successful than others, but most get talked about. In 2003 he tackled religion, to controversial effect, with “The Second Coming,” a two-part drama in which a video-shop owner from Manchester realizes he is the son of God.
But it is the transformation of “Doctor Who” that has cemented Mr. Davies’s reputation. In the old days the program could be one-dimensional, almost cheesy, with cheap special effects that sometimes verged on the Ed Woodian. But serious money is being lavished on the new production. And under the care of Mr. Davies, who writes or supervises the writing of every episode, it has been imbued with newfound sensitivity, pathos and humor.
The hope is that that will be true even after Mr. Davies leaves. After the 2009 season, which is to consist of four specials rather than weekly episodes, he will be succeeded by Steven Moffat, the writer behind the successful series “Coupling” who has written some memorable “Doctor Who” episodes in the past few years.
Over these recent seasons the Doctor has traveled to far-off planets where unspeakable creatures do unspeakable things. He has traveled to Pompeii while Vesuvius erupted. He has rescued Queen Victoria from a giant werewolf, embarked on a heartbreaking love affair with Madame de Pompadour — it ended tragically, on account of her mortality — and saved Earth from annihilation by numerous bad-tempered aliens.
Mr. Davies’s “Doctor Who” has examined the bonds that tie us to even annoying family members. It has plumbed the mysteries and possibilities of chaste love. It has made the case against slavery and violence, played with existential questions about past, present and future and explored what happens when everyone is about to be annihilated by poison gas spewing from automotive exhaust pipes.
Alert viewers will notice the frequent juxtaposition of peril and comedy — the Doctor and his sidekick, Donna, start bickering about how to pronounce the name of some extraterrestrial villains who are within an inch of murdering her, for instance — as well as other signature Davies touches. When the Doctor meets Shakespeare in an episode set during the writing of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Shakespeare throws him a lustful glance.
“Davies dresses these things up in such a friendly plotline that we all have a warm glow, and he gets away with murder,” said Peter Bazalgette, the former chief creative officer of Endemol, the production company that has been responsible for some very popular British programs, including “Big Brother” and “Deal or No Deal.” “It genuinely represents the liberalization of society, which he is leading and reflecting. I think he’s a genius.”
Then there is “Torchwood,” which Mr. Davies describes as “science fiction for adults.” Broadcast later in the evening, it follows the adventures of a group of operatives who thwart the aliens that have a habit of finding their way to Cardiff. It is darker, sharper and less chaste than “Doctor Who.” Mr. Barrowman looks like a bigger and better Tom Cruise and has the charismatic bravado the role requires. Captain Jack makes no apologies; no one asks him to.
In one episode Captain Jack has a full-on fighting-and-making-out session with a former lover turned enemy. Whatever he does, Captain Jack has great fun doing it, which is the point, Mr. Davies said.
“I often get asked to write dramas or films about a man coming out of the closet to his wife, or a man coming out of the closet to his children, or a man who’s beaten up because he’s secretly gay,” Mr. Davies said. “I always refuse if it’s a negative take on homosexuality — if the only aspect being portrayed is the trouble, the tears and the angst.”
He continued: “There’s enough of that out there. Why bother? Drama is easy when it’s tragedy. Anyone could write a scene of a man crying in the rain saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ But actually it’s much more fun to see a man in a bar trying to pick up another man. That’s tense. There’s a whole minefield of emotions there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/ar...on/15lyal.html
Digital TV Coupons Tough to Redeem
Lawmakers seek to extend life of government-issued vouchers for converter boxes, as consumers find the devices hard to obtain.
AP
Some Americans are finding the government-issued coupons used to help pay for digital television converter boxes are expiring before they can be redeemed, House lawmakers said Tuesday.
Consumers also are having a tough time finding converter boxes, which are sold out in some stores, and should be given more time to buy them even after the coupons expire, several lawmakers said during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing.
"If you can't get a box within the 90 days, what good is this?" said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., who held up one of the coupons that resemble plastic gift cards.
The government established a $1.5 billion coupon program to help millions of consumers buy the converter boxes before the nationwide transition to digital programming in February.
Households are eligible for two $40 coupons, which are aimed primarily at up to 21 million owners of the older-model sets that rely on antennas to watch TV. If they don't get a converter box when the country's broadcasters complete the switchover, they will wind up staring at a blank screen. Cable and satellite TV subscribers do not need the boxes.
Overall, about 8.5 million households have requested 16 million coupons since the program started earlier this year, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is overseeing the coupon program. Nearly 3 million coupons have been redeemed so far.
There are 1,819 participating retailers in the coupon program, such as Best Buy Co (BBY, Fortune 500)., RadioShack Corp (RSH)., Target Corp (TGT, Fortune 500). and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT, Fortune 500).
Rules violations: While Stupak said there has been some evidence that several retailers have defrauded customers, NTIA Associate Administrator Bernadette McGuire-Rivera said there have been "no egregious instances of waste, fraud and abuse" in the coupon program.
Still, several unnamed retailers have been decertified from the program for various rules violations, and the agency has taken action to ensure that stores correct adverse effects on consumers.
"We have had to pull a dozen bad apples out of the barrel," McGuire-Rivera said.
Of the roughly 840,000 coupons that recently expired, 42% were redeemed, the agency said. Under current government rules, consumers with expired coupons cannot reapply for new ones.
Rep. Charles Gonzalez, D-Texas, said if 58% of consumers are ineligible to get new coupons that could present "some real serious problems."
Deadline dilemma: Several lawmakers have urged the NTIA to be flexible with consumers whose coupons expire, either by extending the deadline or allowing them to reapply for new coupons.
The statutory deadline cannot be changed, said NTIA spokesman Todd Sedmak, but the agency is examining the "new idea" that consumers can reapply for new coupons. He said the agency is weighing several factors, including whether there are enough funds to implement the idea.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/10/tech...V.ap/index.htm
Router Crashes Blamed on Windows XP SP3
Been having problems with your broadband router rebooting unexpectedly? Windows XP SP3 has been named as the culprit.
Dan Warne
Broadband modem/router maker Billion says XP SP3 has been causing its BiPAC 5200-series routers to go into a constant crash and reboot cycle.
The company has produced firmware upgrades that solve the problem.
Although Windows XP SP3 has been available for manual download from Microsoft since May 6, it has just hit Windows Update as an automatic upgrade, which will cause unexpected problems for owners of “unpatched” Billion BiPAC 5200 routers, and possibly other brands or models of router.
The affected BiPAC 5200 firmware versions are 2.9.8.x and 2.11.0.x~2.11.33.x.
Firmware is the software that runs your router, and can be upgraded via the router's web interface, accessible by typing the router's address into your web browser (generally 192.168.1.254).
PC Range managing director Raaj Menon said only a few users had reported problems since Microsoft began offering the Windows XP SP3 as a manual download last month. “However, as Microsoft plans to make Windows XP SP3 an automatic upgrade this month, the number of affected routers may increase significantly,” he said.
“We want to let any customers with affected BiPAC 5200 know about this issue so they can download the new firmware in order to avoid experiencing any problems.”
The following links provide access to downloadable firmware that can resolve this Windows XP SP issue:
5200G:
http://au.billion.com/downloads/5200...9_3_10_5_0.zip
5200N:
http://au.billion.com/downloads/5200...9)3_10_5_0.zip
http://apcmag.com/router_crashes_bla...ows_xp_sp3.htm
Top Free Hosts To Store Your Files Online
Will Mueller
Recently, the need for space has become immense. Files have become increasingly larger, there are more things to download and so on. Personally, I run out of space on multiple drives all the time. Maybe you are trying to get a file sent to someone, but it’s too large for an attachment on your email. Possibly you want to backup some files to download later or multiple times. That is why there are file hosts.
I have found numerous different file hosting companies, many of them that supply users with an extremely small amount of space or limited features. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Filedropper - Filedropper is amazing. All you need to do to upload a file is click “Upload” and select a file.
Many free file hosting sites give users the option to upload file of up to 100-150MB, yet Filedropper allows users to upload an amazing 5GB!
When you finish uploading a file, Filedropper gives you the link and the source code to add to a website, if you like.
2. Fileqube - Fileqube is another free file hosting site. It has an awesome site design that definitely shows it’s intentions. It is also extremely fast. When you upload a file, a link is provided to download the file, a link to remove the file, and HTML code to add to a website, etc. Unfortunately, Fileqube only allows for uploads of up to only 150MB, yet most certainly one of the best.
3. MyFreeFileHosting- MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.
4. Fileden - Fileden is one of the most useful file hosting services. Users are allowed to upload files, without an account, of files up to 100MB, yet you are allowed to register an account for free as well and receive unlimited diskspace, unlimited bandwith, the option to create projects, the ability to replace files, file statistics, project statistics, etc.
5. Easyshare - Easyshare adds even more features to file hosting. Registering and uploading files occur quickly, with accounts allowing for downloading files multiple times. Unlike other free file hosts though, Easyshare pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times, you’ll apparently receive $20. If you have a personalized toolbar on your website, you can receive money from their uploads through that toolbar and if you refer another person to Easyshare you’ll receive 10% of their earnings.
Another neat thing about this site is the upload options. You can upload on the site from your computer, upload using an FTP server, upload using their free software, or use a remote upload from another server. The maximum file size for a free account is 100MB.
6. FileFactory - Filefactory is similar to all of the previous file hosts, except it supports the option to send a notification email to a person of an uploaded file. Unfortunately, Filefactory contains a large amount of ads if you do not receive the premium service. Yet, unlike the other file hosts, the maximum file size is 300MB which is a large amount per file in comparison. Similar to Easyshare, users are paid for each download they receive from a certain file.
7. Badongo - Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-free-file-hosts/?%3F
Times Imposes Security Measures After Climbers’ Stunts
James Barron and Robin Pogrebin
Executives of The New York Times Company undertook security studies in planning its new headquarters after 9/11, focusing on terrorist threats but apparently never considering that the building — sheathed in rows of horizontal ceramic bars — could become an urban ladder for climbers, as it did twice on Thursday.
Michael Golden, the vice chairman of the Times Company, said he did not recall any discussion about the possibility that someone could try to scale the 52-story building. “I don’t remember that, no,” he said on Friday.
A day after one man followed by another used the building as a giant jungle gym, the executives responsible for security and engineering met with police officials. The Times Company and Forest City Ratner, the real estate company that owns 48 percent of the building, agreed to a short-term plan to keep would-be climbers away.
The plan, which involved hiring security guards and putting up plywood barriers to close gaps that climbers could squeeze through on their way up, reflected both the seriousness of the issue and the unexpected sense of vulnerability at the Times Building. The ceramic rods are one of the building’s most distinctive features, a lattice of silvery-gray bars that forms an extra outer skin, several feet beyond the plate-glass windows that run to the ceiling on each floor. The plywood installed on Friday gave a construction-zone touch to a metal-and-glass building whose look had been carefully thought out.
The skyscraper, on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, is the work of the Italian architect Renzo Piano, who declined to be interviewed on Friday, saying that Mr. Golden had specifically instructed him not to speak to the newspaper’s reporters. Mr. Golden acknowledged this, saying, “I’ve told Renzo, I don’t think there’s any good that comes from this kind of publicity.”
The design work on the building began long before the 9/11 attacks, and after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Mr. Golden said, “there was a great deal of discussion and design changes made for the security” of the new Times Building — “not for people climbing outside, but the kinds of issues 9/11 raised.” He would not discuss the details.
He said he was deeply troubled by Thursday’s events. “I hate the fact that it happened — there’s no good that comes of it,” he said.
But as to whether the Times Company would consider removing the ceramic rods, he said, “No.”
The first climber, a French stuntman named Alain Robert, said in an interview on Friday that the ease of climbing the Times Building was quite obvious to him — on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, he rated it a 1. Even so, he said, his stunt required some planning. He said he had scouted the building some weeks ago and had even done a brief trial climb about 2 o’clock one morning, apparently undetected.
Ever since the mountain climber George H. Willig scaled the south tower of the World Trade Center in 1977, architects have been careful to avoid making tall buildings easy to climb. “There is a certain logic to how accessible you make the building — how readily are you actually creating a ladder up to the top?” said T. J. Gottesdiener, a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed the Freedom Tower being built at ground zero.
“This is going to be a real big consideration on everybody’s list” because of the two incidents at the Times Building, he said.
For the Freedom Tower, Mr. Gottesdiener said, the architects designed a base of vertical, prismatic glass to avoid climbable ledges. Security issues regarding the facade were discussed at length. “It’s very practical — whether people can actually come and stick their toe in it and start to climb up it,” Mr. Gottesdiener said. “You’ve got to think about what kind of opportunities you’re presenting to people.”
Soon after The Times moved into the building last year, security duties were divided. Security in the lobby was split between officers who worked for the Times Company and others who worked for First New York Partners, a management and operations arm of Forest City Ratner. Under that arrangement, the Times Company was responsible for security on its floors — 2 through 27, and part of 28 — and First New York was responsible for the remaining floors and the exterior of the building.
Abbe R. Serphos, the director of public relations for the Times Company, said that the arrangements had changed in recent weeks. She said that security employees of the Times Company had “started to report to” First New York Partners. “They oversee our security team now,” Ms. Serphos said.
She said the Times Company’s longtime director of security, Jay McKillop, had left recently and “moved on to another opportunity.” Reached by cellphone on Friday, Mr. McKillop declined to discuss the security planning for the Times Building or say whether the issue of climbers had been considered.
John Garrity, an employee of First New York Partners who is director of security for The New York Times Building, also declined to comment. He said he had been instructed not to speak by executives of the Times Company.
No one could recollect a climbing incident at The Times’s former headquarters on West 43rd Street.
Mr. Robert and the other climber, Renaldo Clarke of Brooklyn, were both charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Both were released on bail on Friday.
Steven Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a nonprofit public interest group in Washington, said the fact that two climbers scaled the building in one day with such ease showed flaws in preparedness. Neither man used any equipment, unlike Mr. Willig, who designed special climbing apparatus for his World Trade Center ascent.
Mr. Emerson said that any news media organization needed tight security, and added that he was surprised that the Times Building did not have “prohibitive perimeter security” — something at street level to stop would-be climbers from getting a foothold. “I just naturally assumed that in the construction of the new building they would have accounted for the fact that it would be a natural magnet, particularly in a post-9/11 world,” he said.
Mr. Robert said in an interview on Friday that he chose the Times Building because climbing it seemed simple.
He said his prime goal was to ascend as quickly as possible to a height beyond the reach of the Fire Department’s ladders, which he figured was about 200 feet.
Once he knew he could not be stopped, he paused to unfurl a banner and attach it to the building. The banner promoted thesolutionissimple.org, the Web site of an environmental group that sponsored his climb.
Mr. Robert, a slight man with shoulder-length brown hair and a nose bent like a prizefighter’s, said he was neither flattered nor insulted by Mr. Clarke’s same-day ascent.
“Since climbing this building is like climbing a ladder, it doesn’t mean he is a good climber,” Mr. Robert said. “For me, it doesn’t change anything.”
Mr. Robert said he had been planning to climb the Times Building for several weeks. He described it as a “perfect target” because of the ladderlike curtain of rods, which runs from the second floor to the roof. To reach the lowest rods, he shimmied up a beam from the sidewalk on 41st Street to a glass overhang, he said.
Al Baker and Patrick McGeehan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/ny...7building.html
Military Supercomputer Sets Record
John Markoff
An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.
By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.
“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.
Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.
Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”
The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.
Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.
“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”
Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.
“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.
Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.
Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.
Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.
“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”
Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.
By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/te...aflops.html?hp
90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots
Matthew C. Nisbet
If the author is skeptical of mainstream science, is there a conservative think tank behind them?
A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.
In the study, the authors first offer a conceptualization of environmental skepticism as an ideology and movement:
In summary, environmental scepticism consists of four key themes. First, environmental scepticism is defined by its denial of the seriousness of environmental problems and dismissal of scientific evidence documenting these problems. This primary theme sets environmental scepticism apart from earlier environmental opposition movements like the US 'wise use movement' and 'sage brush rebellion' (Switzer 1997). Second, environmental scepticism draws upon the first theme to question the importance of environmentally protective policies. Third, environmental scepticism endorses an anti-regulatory/anti-corporate liability position that flows from the first two claims. Lastly, environmental sceptics often cast environmental protection as threatening Western progress.
Using this definition as a guide, they then search publishing databases to identify books between 1972 and 2005 that fall into this ideological category, observing indicators of author affiliation, sponsorship, and/or publication by conservative think tanks. As they report:
...of the 141 books which promote environmental scepticism, 130 (92.2 per cent) have a clear link to one or more CTTs -either via author affiliation (62 books) or because the book was published by a CTT (five books) or both (63 books). Furthermore, most of the remaining 11 books clearly reflect a conservative ideology, but are not connected to a CTT and are not coded as such here. Indeed, it appears that only one of the 141 books was written by a current self-professed liberal - Greg Easterbrook (1995).
Here's the conclusion to the study:
Our analyses of the sceptical literature and CTTs indicate an unambiguous linkage between the two. Over 92 per cent of environmentally sceptical books are linked to conservative think tanks, and 90 per cent of conservative think tanks interested in environmental issues espouse scepticism. Environmental scepticism began in the US, is strongest in the US, and exploded after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of global environmental concern stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit. Environmental scepticism is an elite-driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement. Promoting scepticism is a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement coordinated by CTTs, designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement's efforts to legitimise its claims via science. Thus, the notion that environmental sceptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as sceptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations.
http://scienceblogs.com/framing-scie...viro_skept.php
For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else
Robert Levine
One of the biggest music events of the summer has already taken place in Fayetteville, Ark. From Tuesday through Thursday last week, the Bud Walton Arena at the University of Arkansas presented shows by Journey, the country singer Keith Urban, the “American Idol” personality Carrie Underwood and the alternative rock group All-American Rejects.
The occasion that brought this all-star line-up together? Not a festival or cause but Wal-Mart Stores’ annual shareholders meeting. Wal-Mart was the largest music retailer in the country last year, so musicians (and their labels) are eager to maintain good relationships, appearing in the special concerts for the chain, which are also open to the public.
During her performance, Ms. Underwood volunteered that a Wal-Mart had recently opened in her hometown, Checotah, Okla., and Keith Urban changed his lyrics from “Goodbye, city, I’m country-bound” to “I’m Wal-Mart-bound.” And the retailer is using its leverage to aggressively pursue new deals.
On Tuesday Wal-Mart started selling on an exclusive basis a three-disc collection by the popular 1980s band Journey called “Revelation.” The difference, however, is that there is no middleman: the album was bought directly from the band without the help of a record label. Journey went right to Wal-Mart and kept most of the money a record company would normally take as profit for the group. Last year Wal-Mart made a similar deal with the Eagles, who like Journey are represented by Front Line Management, the nation’s largest music management company.
The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.
The Eagles’ double disc, “Long Road Out of Eden,” sold 711,000 copies in its first week and three million since its release, according to Nielsen SoundScan, impressive numbers at a time when CD sales are declining. Journey sold 45,000 albums in its first three days on sale, and Irving Azoff, founder and chief executive of Front Line Management and a music industry veteran who ran MCA Records in the ’80s, predicted that it would sell more than 80,000 copies in its first week. That is probably enough to debut in the top five, and significantly more than its last album sold in total.
“With the downturn, the labels couldn’t match the marketing commitments that Wal-Mart could make,” Mr. Azoff said. “It was well in excess of anything a label could do.”
Front Line took on some of the traditional work of a record label, producing a video and promoting songs to radio. But most of the marketing was done at Wal-Mart itself. The chain ran print, radio and television advertisements that promoted the exclusive availability of the Eagles album. Stores display the Eagles and Journey albums in several locations, not just the music department, and this week some stores had the Journey DVD playing on their big-screen televisions.
In some ways, the arrangements that Wal-Mart has made with Journey and the Eagles represent the mainstream equivalent of the path that artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have taken by releasing albums on the Internet without a traditional label.
“It just goes to show you that fewer artists need to be associated with record companies,” said Larry Mestel, chief executive of Primary Wave Music Publishing and former chief operating officer of Virgin Records. “They don’t need to give up a big chunk of money to the record companies when they’re iconic. They can go direct to Wal-Mart and make four to five dollars per CD.”
It’s hard to tell how much traditional labels are threatened by the prospect of artists’ selling directly to retailers. New albums from more established acts can be less profitable if they have negotiated a higher royalty rate. And although the Eagles are reliable sellers, Journey is what industry executives delicately refer to as a “heritage act,” a steady summer concert attraction that sells relatively few albums of new material.
One reason the Eagles and Journey albums have sold so many copies is their price: $11.98. That’s an unusually low retail price, especially for “Revelation,” which consists of one CD of new songs, one CD of new renditions of Journey classics and one DVD of a recent concert performance. But one of Wal-Mart’s goals in promoting such releases is drawing customers into stores with a bargain they can’t find anywhere else.
“The goal with almost everything we do is to figure out how to make some kind of a profit,” said Gary Severson, Wal-Mart’s head of home entertainment. “But this can also give us the opportunity to add to the brand, and I hope we’ve accomplished that as well.”
Exclusive album deals have been happening for some time with that goal in mind. Wal-Mart and Best Buy, the two largest physical retailers of music, often get special editions of albums, with exclusive songs or video footage. In 2005, Wal-Mart made a deal to become the exclusive distributor of Garth Brooks albums, including a new collection of outtakes. But the Eagles and Journey are the first two major acts that have released albums of new material that are available at only one retailer. And although record labels tread carefully around such deals, for fear of upsetting rival stores, bands need not be so sensitive.
This summer Wal-Mart will carry an exclusive release by the young country singer Taylor Swift in a promotion that also calls for Ms. Swift to promote L.E.I. jeans. (In this case, Ms. Swift’s label was part of the deal.) And Mr. Azoff said that he was already talking to Wal-Mart about an exclusive deal for Fleetwood Mac’s next release. “Classic rock really works there,” Mr. Azoff said.
Front Line is only one of the major management companies that are trying to take on roles that have traditionally been filled by labels. The Nettwerk Music Group, which manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan, has set up custom labels for some small artists. And Q-Prime, which manages Metallica, recently hired an executive to start an independent label of sorts.
The idea of treating the label as a middleman that can be cut out fits Wal-Mart’s approach to cost-cutting. In the past the chain has pushed record labels to lower their wholesale prices, arguing that customers would buy more CDs if they were less expensive.
“I think that with any product, when the price goes up, the demand goes down,” said Mr. Severson. “Sometimes it’s about the right artist with the right product at the right price.”
For Journey, some of the success of “Revelation” is also about the right timing. For a band that hit its commercial peak in the early ’80s, Journey has enjoyed an unlikely revival in the last few years. The song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” has been licensed for “Family Guy,” “Scrubs,” “Laguna Beach” and, most famously, the last episode of “The Sopranos,” and the exposure increased the song’s sales on Apple’s iTunes store. Journey, which has gone through several vocalists, recently hired a new singer, Arnel Pineda, whom Journey’s guitarist, Neal Schon, discovered singing the band’s covers on YouTube.
But Journey would almost certainly not be selling as many albums without the support of Wal-Mart.
“Shelf space has shrunk so much over the last five years that for anyone to give you shelf space and exposure is a big deal,” said Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwerk Music Group. “Should the labels be worried? There’s been a move away from the labels for a number of years now. And it’s not necessarily their fault. The shelf space to have those records sell just isn’t there. That’s the market reality.”
Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Rosenbloom contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/bu...09walmart.html
Coldplay Album Selling Fast, Music to EMI's Ears
Coldplay sold 125,000 copies of its new album on the first day of release in Britain, a solid tally industry experts say should be music to the band's ears and those of its ailing record label EMI.
"Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends" now looks "certain" to top Sunday's album chart, according to The Official Charts Company which tracks record sales, even though it was released on Thursday rather than at the start of the week.
"Coldplay are an international act ... and these sales figures in the UK are the first indication of how the album will be received, and EMI will be very pleased," said The Official Charts Company managing director Martin Talbot.
"X&Y," Coldplay's last album and most successful to date, sold 465,000 copies in its first week in Britain.
EMI, and its boss Guy Hands, will now turn their attention to the world's biggest music market in the United States, a more important barometer of the album's success when it is released there next week.
The band has expressed relief the recording process is over for one of the year's most eagerly anticipated records.
" feel very relieved that the album is finally released out into the big wide world," the band said on its Web site. "It's out of our hands now. It doesn't belong to us any more."
Interview Walkout
Lead singer Chris Martin, married to Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow, has appeared uncomfortable discussing the record in a series of radio interviews this week.
Late on Thursday, he walked out of an interview on BBC's Radio 4, saying he was "not really enjoying this" and accusing his interviewer of "twisting" his words. He also rejected the description of the new album as "morbid."
EMI, the smallest of the four major record labels which was taken private last year, lost two of its biggest acts in 2007 -- Paul McCartney and Radiohead -- and representatives for Coldplay and Robbie Williams also suggested they may look elsewhere.
Pop stars are considering alternatives to traditional record deals as Internet piracy and declining CD sales mean touring and merchandise are often more lucrative than the music itself.
McCartney launched a venture with coffee chain Starbucks while Radiohead offered their latest album "In Rainbows" over the Internet on a "pay-what-you-want" basis.
Other labels have also been affected, including Warner Bros. which was dropped by Madonna for a recording, touring and merchandising partnership with concert promoter Live Nation.
Coldplay followed the recent trend of digital initiatives by giving away "Violet Hill," the first single from their new album, for free over the Internet. Media reports said the offer was taken up by two million people.
Like other record labels, EMI is seeking to develop new models of distributing music digitally to keep pace with rapid changes that are eroding physical music sales.
The company, which announced up to 2,000 job cuts in January, has appointed former executives from online virtual world site Second Life and Google.
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...21605220080613
Radiohead Catalog Finally Available on iTunes
Eliot Van Buskirk
ITunes customers can now buy music from Radiohead's EMI label days, following a change in heart on the part of the band regarding the unbundling of albums into individual songs.
"There has been massive demand for Radiohead's music on iTunes," EMI communications SVP Jeanne Meyer told Listening Post. "Once In Rainbows was unbundled, it was a natural progression to unbundle (the rest of) their catalog" so that it would be available there.
Radiohead had previously allowed EMI to sell its albums digitally on music services only in album form. Apple refuses to do this, so Radiohead declined to sell its music on iTunes -- by far the largest of the digital music stores. However, the band's approach changed with In Rainbows, which the band released for unbundled sale on iTunes following its pricing-optional debut.
Radiohead's back catalog of EMI albums, its videos and its new Greatest Hits album are all available in the iTunes Plus store, in the DRM-free AAC format.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/06/...-sells-ra.html
Some Retailers Give Vinyl Records a Spin
Sarah Skidmore
It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.
The Portland-based company, owned by the Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.
Other retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy Co. is testing sales at some stores. And Amazon.com Inc., which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.
The bestseller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But bands including the White Stripes, the Foo Fighters, Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.
"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."
According to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36% from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17% during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.
The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.
Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound -- though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog. Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality.
But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.
"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan in Portland.
The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.
But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon. Nearly 450 million CDs were sold in 2007, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million this year.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,3936629.story
A Flashy Facebook Page, at a Cost to Privacy
Add-Ons to Online Social Profiles Expose Personal Data to Strangers
Kim Hart
Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.
Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, allow users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information -- home town, schools attended, employment history -- and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy users.
"Everything requires you to give access to personal information or it forces you to ask your friends to do the same -- it becomes a real nuisance," said David Dixon, 40, an information technology consultant in Columbia who recently deleted most of the applications he had downloaded to his Facebook profile after reading on a blog that developers may have access to his information. "Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?"
Even private profiles, in which personal details are available only to specific friends, reveal personal information, said Chris Soghoian, a cyber-security researcher at Indiana University. And they're allowing access to their friends' information -- even if their friends are not using the application. That's because MySpace and Facebook, the largest online social networks, let outside developers see a member's information when they add a program.
"You want to be social with your friends, but now you're giving 20 guys you've never met vast amounts of information from your profile," he said. "That should be troubling to people."
A year ago, Facebook started allowing outside developers to create small software programs for members to download. Since then, the company said, about 24,000 applications have been built by 400,000 developers. They've become enormously popular, with users playing poker, getting daily horoscopes and sending one another virtual cocktails, to name a few. More than 95 percent of Facebook users have installed at least one application, the company said.
Applications have grown so much that venture-capital firms have formed exclusively to fund their development, and there is a Stanford University course devoted to creating them.
In February, MySpace also opened up to developers. It has more than 1,000 applications. The company, along with other social networks such as Hi5 and AOL's Bebo, allows applications under OpenSocial, a Google-led initiative that lets developers distribute games and other programs across multiple social networks.
Each site has come up with its own policies on the data that developers are allowed to see. MySpace, the largest social network, with 110 million members, said developers can see users' public details -- name, profile picture and friend lists -- when they download a program. When a user installs one on Facebook, which has 70 million members, the developer can see everything in a profile except contact information, as well as friends' profiles. Members can limit what is seen by changing privacy controls, and both companies say developers are allowed to keep those data for only 24 hours.
Developers can collect other data from members once they've download the applications.
Ben Ling, director of Facebook's platform, said that developers are not allowed to share data with advertisers but that they can use it to tailor features to users. Facebook now removes applications that abuse user data by, for example, forcing members to invite all of their friends before they can use it.
"When we find out people have violated that policy, there is swift enforcement," he said.
But it is often difficult to tell when developers are breaking the rules by, for example, storing members' data for more than 24 hours, said Adrienne Felt, who recently studied Facebook security at the University of Virginia.
She examined 150 of the most popular Facebook applications to find out how much data could be gathered. Her research, which was presented at a privacy conference last month, found that about 90 percent of the applications have unnecessary access to private data.
"Once the information is on a third-party server, Facebook can't do anything about it," she said. Developers can use it to provide targeted ads based on a member's gender, age or relationship status.
Consumer advocates have voiced concerns over how software developers are using such data. The Center for Digital Democracy is urging the Federal Trade Commission to look into the privacy policies surrounding third-party applications.
Some developers acknowledge the value of the data at their fingertips but say they're careful not to abuse it.
"We don't care who their favorite musicians are, and we're not looking at their pictures," said Dan Goodman, co-founder of Loladex, an application that lets users find friend-recommended businesses, such as plumbers and pizzerias. Loladex does keep track of user-provided data, such as Zip codes.
Goodman said he hasn't ruled out using the data for targeted advertising, but "we're not trying to push the privacy envelope."
Hungry Machine, based in Georgetown, has created 25 Facebook applications, including programs that let users recommend movies, books and music.
"Leveraging that data would make a lot of sense," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder of the company. But he said no plans are in the works.
Slide, which designed three of the most popular Facebook applications -- SuperPoke, FunWall and Top Friends -- said it uses personal details only to make applications more relevant to users. For example, Slide collects friends' birthdays so it can remind you to "poke" them on the right day.
Many Facebook users don't mind using the tools to express themselves. Gabby Jordan of Baltimore uses the Flirtable and Pimp Wars programs to connect with friends.
"If there are too many, you could easily delete them off your profile and not have to worry about it," she wrote in an e-mail.
But revealing information on quizzes or maps of places visited, for instance, may also make it easier for strangers to piece together tidbits to create larger security threats, said Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of public policy and information systems at Carnegie Mellon University.
Some online activities ask users to list pets' names or to display their high school's mascot, answers to common security questions asked by financial companies.
"Nowadays, some people have downloaded so many [applications], it's a constant flow of information about what they've done, what they're doing, which can be mined by your friends and also by someone you don't know anything about," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061103759.html
The Wiki-Way to the Nomination
Noam Cohen
Barack Obama is the victor, and the Internet is taking the bows.
Commenting on the Democratic presidential primary campaign, the blogger Andrew Sullivan praised Mr. Obama’s success in mastering “Facebook politics.” Roger Cohen, writing online in The New York Times, likened the rapid success of Mr. Obama to that of a “classic Internet startup.” And The Atlantic Monthly, in a much discussed article titled “HisSpace,” described what Mr. Obama’s impressive online fund-raising apparatus owes to the enhanced social networking of sites like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
Mr. Obama is hardly alone in making use of the Web (remember Howard Dean in 2004). What sets him apart is his openness to contributions from those working outside the campaign organization. As he described it to a Time magazine reporter last week, “We just had some incredibly creative young people who got involved and what I think we did well was give them a lot of latitude to experiment and try new things and to put some serious resources into it.”
Consider the video “Yes We Can,” Mr. Obama’s words set to music by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which has been viewed more than 18 million times online, first at YouTube, and now at the Obama campaign’s portal, my.barackobama.com. And there is also the ubiquitous poster of Mr. Obama (with the captions “Progress” and “Hope”) created by the street artist Shepard Fairey and later incorporated into the campaign and sold on its Web site.
Mr. Fairey posted the image (inspired by the famous photograph of Che Guevara) on his own site early in the primaries, and said in an interview that “the official campaign had been hit up so many times, they asked, ‘Can we get you to do an official thing?’ ”
The receptiveness of the Obama campaign to such bottom-up influences raises a question: might the candidate actually model his approach to politics on the informal communal spirit the Internet encourages?
It is not easy to say, because Mr. Obama draws on a range of influences, not the least of which is the high rhetorical tradition of American politics. As Garry Wills recently suggested in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Obama’s characterization of himself as an “imperfect candidate” draws on Lincoln’s idea “that the preamble’s call for ‘a more perfect union’ initiated a project, to make the Constitution a means for its own transcendence.”
But at the same time, Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”
Wikipedia is the influential online encyclopedia that is in a constant state of revision, thanks to its tens of thousands of contributors around the world. There is no single “editor,” no presiding panel of experts for its 2.4 million articles in English. Indeed, anyone can pick up an article and make changes immediately (“wiki-wiki” is Hawaiian for fast).
Similarly, open-source software is created by groups working on “patches,” as programmers call them. Anyone can contribute, and the most useful ideas thrive. A result has been successes like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Internet browser.
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.”
For this reason there are thousands of people working across the Internet to build enthusiasm for the campaign, some of it even gently mocking, like Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, a site listing the many examples of Mr. Obama’s magical compassion. (“Barack Obama carries a picture of you in his wallet”; “Barack Obama thought you could use some chocolate.”)
For his part, Mr. Obama is quick to take himself out of the narrative, even as he promises to remake Washington. This isn’t simply modesty. It reflects the utopian, community-building vision central to the Internet. Wikipedia’s unpaid collaborators, for example, hope to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language,” says the site’s mastermind, Jimmy Wales. So too the thousands of programmers in the open-source world intend not just to develop a free operating system, but vanquish Microsoft.
In this scheme, Mr. Obama’s role, at least in the rhetoric, is less leader than facilitator, a conduit for decentralized collaboration as described by James Surowiecki in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” “The ethos of the Net is fundamentally respectful of and invested in the idea of collective wisdom, and in some sense is hostile to the idea that power and authority should belong to a select few,” Mr. Surowiecki wrote.
This is not to say that open projects always produce the best results. Thousands of ordinary people having their say can lead to dubious outcomes. And in politics, particularly at the presidential level, where decisions affect the lives of millions, the risks can be great.
For a candidate, there is always the danger of “making yourself vulnerable” by “giving participants control of chunks of the enterprise,” Mr. Benkler said. Mr. Obama has to walk a careful line. It’s one thing to help popularize a campaign, quite another to shape policy. And Mr. Obama’s team has been as adamant as any about staying on message.
To some extent, however, Mr. Obama has invited policy ideas from outsiders. Deb Barry, an Obama supporter in New Hampshire, said she was impressed that the organization she belongs to, Educators for Obama, had a chance to speak with his education-policy staff members before the primary there. “I went into that conference call, kind of with the impression that the purpose was for us to ask questions,” she said. In fact, “they were picking our brains. They had specific questions they wanted to ask us, and were seeing how we felt about what had already come out from the campaign.”
Not that Ms. Barry expects to play a direct role in shaping government policy. “There is a huge limitation about how much contact someone like me can have with the big decision makers,” she said, but a critical first step is reaching out: “Not just reaching out to experts, with big titles and degrees after his name, but people with experience.”
Other online activists are more skeptical about the openness to outsiders. “The Obama campaign is still very much a top-bottom operation,” Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, of the influential DailyKos Web site, wrote in an e-mail message. “They’ve made it very easy for people to hop on the bandwagon, but those in the back of that wagon still get no say in where the campaign is going.”
Yes, someone is driving the bandwagon, even if he constantly plays down his role — describing himself as a Rorshach image on whom others project. Even Wikipedia has administrators who monitor the work there, and open-source projects have their “leaders,” who keep them on course.
In truth, there is no such thing as purely collective decision making. As Mr. Surowiecki summed it up in his book: “It has historically been unusual for change to bubble up from below on its own. So it is, in fact, more likely that someone will take it on himself to champion the idea of collective wisdom, and in that way create the conditions that allow it to flourish. This is paradoxical, but no more so than the fact that an individual, not a crowd, wrote ‘The Wisdom of Crowds.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/we...w/08cohen.html
Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
Jim Rutenberg
For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.
The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”
“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron
during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.
The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”
Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.
Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.
In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2.../index.html?hp
Old NASA Footage Shows Space Program in New Light
Barry Garron
High definition is not just a way of making video look crisp and bright. It also is a reason for making programs -- maybe the reason -- as "When We Left Earth" suggests.
One can say, as the Discovery Channel does in its press materials, that this comprehensive and authoritative six-hour miniseries running June 8, 15 and 22 was produced to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA and the U.S. exploration of space. In reality, though there is abundant history on the space program, there is scant information that hasn't already been seen, heard or written somewhere else.
What makes this mini different from all those other projects is that, for the first time, we get to see rare NASA footage -- sort of like the space agency's home video -- which was removed from cold storage and transferred to high definition just for this project.
And what footage it is. Not merely breathtaking space and launch photos but clips that reveal the risks, danger and anxiety of NASA employees and astronaut wives at each new venture.
It is so simple and certain in hindsight but the NASA films show the palpable tension in Mission Control, such as just before Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon and broke out of lunar orbit. Other highlights include training for the unexpected, fiery rockets and the cool blue of an Earth rise seen from the moon.
In between clips of vintage NASA footage (more than 100 hours of old film was converted to high definition for this project) are bits of recent interviews with astronauts and flight directors, often recollecting events of decades past as if they had just happened that morning.
Like the space capsules themselves, this mini speeds through its mission. Each of the first three hours, for example, are spent, respectively, on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.
Tune in to learn about the strategy of each launch and for those amazing vintage films. Keep in mind, though, that with the focus so squarely on NASA, there is little reference to other concurrent but related events, such as domestic politics or the Cold War.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...43265620080608