IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
The bill realizes our wildest legislative fantasies: a world where cellphone companies stop inventing official-sounding fees and levying harsh ETFs, and instead allow their customers to take unlocked phones to the company with the best reception according to precise coverage maps provided free of charge.
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
(Via Engadget.)
In June, House investigators learned that Vice President Cheney exempted his office from a presidential executive order, arguing that the Office of the Vice President is not an “entity within the executive branch.” In a recent interview with Harvard’s alumni magazine, former Vice President Al Gore confirmed that the Vice President is indeed part of the executive:
You were often referred to as the most powerful vice president.
GORE: That was before Dick Cheney.
Point taken. Cheney has made the argument that the vice presidency is not part of the executive branch. Is he right?
GORE: (Laughs) Of course the vice presidency is part of the executive branch! But I fear that I’m losing my objectivity where President Bush and Cheney are concerned. Not much surprises me anymore. I have a lot of friends who share the following problem with me: Our sense of outrage is so saturated that when a new outrage occurs, we have to download some existing outrage into an external hard drive in order to make room for a new outrage.
(Via Think Progress.)
In the interest of keeping items brief I've cut the previous post and put the boring stuff here. Enjoy. Or don't enjoy, as the case may be. Skip over it. Whatever.
It's not just Disney and ABC that are out of touch. Look at the management team at NBC Universal. Look at the GE board of directors. Do these people scare the living shit out of you? They sure scare the hell out of me. They're all buffed and polished and about a hundred and fourteen years old. They look like cadavers who've been done up by the world's best funeral home makeup artist. A lot of them are just GE lifers who did time in plastics and then airplane engines and then somehow got dropped into the TV group.
Here's what I tell them. Friends, you run a television network. Now let's think about this. What the fuck is a television network? It's a system of affiliates designed to help carry a broadcast signal across the wide continent of America on airwaves and into television sets owned by millions of people. In essence, you are in the distribution business. In the second half of the twentieth century you had the great good fortune to be granted a kind of limited monopoly over the distribution of a very valuable commodity. There were only so many airwaves, hence only so many networks. There were way more advertisers than there were channels to carry their advertising. So you sat there with your choke-hold on the garden hose, controlling the flow of programming and getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
It was a wonderful system. For you anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain -- the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let's be honest here, as a kind of cartel.
It's over now. Your business model was a historical anomaly built on scarcity of a valuable resource and the willingness of a small group of network operators to not slit each other's throats and to collaborate in exploiting the content producers. Sort of like the Five Families in New York. Wars are bad for business.
You know what the new network is? It's me. I don't think people have quite figured this out yet, but just as Pixar was once a medical imaging company until I decided to make it into something completely different -- ie, the most important entertainment company of the 21st century -- so Apple is not really a computer company anymore, or even a consumer electronics company. We're a network. We take content and distribute it out to millions of people, who play it on handhelds (sold by me) and computer screens (ditto) and yes, maybe, sometimes, on actual TV sets. At one end of the value chain, the consumer end, people have already voted. They like my system better than yours.
At the other end it's trickier. We don't deal directly with the content producers. Instead, we have to deal with these network gatekeepers. But why? What value are they adding? As far as I can see the only thing the networks add is an extra step and a big scoop off the margin.
The producers of content don't like the TV network system but can't quite see the way across the divide into my digital world. Some musical artists, like Prince, are figuring it out, but they're isolated examples. Trust me, however, when I tell you that TV and movie people will figure it out too. These are not stupid people. And they are not un-greedy. Which means their desire for more money and more control and more freedom will lead them to apply their energy into figuring out how to get out of the plantation the TV networks have created for them. They will break free. Mark my words.
The talented ones will go first. Bad news for you, TV networks. You'll be stuck with the shittiest creators, the timid ones who don't dare cross the chasm. Your shows will get worse and worse. Your sitcoms will grow lamer, if that's possible. Your reality shows will grow stupider.
What's left? You've already gutted your news divisions, which was a truly moronic move since that was the only place where you really could continue to add value. Your news shows will continue to devolve into not-really-news Fox-style argument shows where retarded bullies like Bill O'Reilly come on the air and shout at people because some gangsta rapper has a deal with Pepsi, or argue with straw men about whether we should put more troops into Iraq. Where once we had Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, we'll instead have John Gibson and Sean Hannity ranting about patriotism and calling people names. All heat, no light. Well done, TV networks. When you finally die, the world will celebrate. Because you'll deserve it. Totally.
For now, when these bastards come threatening me and demanding that I join them in fucking over consumers and also allow them to grab a bigger slice of the pie, my standard response remains this: Siooma, ass-munchers. Siooma.
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
(Via Engadget.)
Apple just slapped NBC down hard. Responding to reports NBC was pulling out of the iTunes Store, Apple announced that it was prematurely canceling their partnership — Because NBC wanted $5 per episode of its shows!
Apple® today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). The move follows NBC’s decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode.
Incredible. NBC has benefited from iTunes more than anyone else, and they’re throwing out crazy price increases. I mean, that would have made Friday Night Lights Season 1 cost $110! NBC is selling the DVD for less than $20 brand-new with more special features! If this is any indication of Hulu’s pricing scheme, it’s screwed out of the gate.
Via Daring Fireball.
Rick James pic from CBC.
(Via Cult of Mac.)
Regarding the ongoing internet fun-poking at Miss Teen South Carolina and her love of maps, Jason Schultz says,
In response to the recent call to action by Miss Teen South Carolina, Maps For
Us started a blog of important maps: Link. My favorite is the map of Sparta: Link.
In BoingBoing's comment section, reader Tim Howland shared this revelation:
I think that everyone has missed something important here; she's actually been pioneering a new art form- a combination of Hindi Ghazal poetry and blank verse.
Look at the transcription:
I personally believe that us americans
are unable to do so
because osama.People out there
in our nation
don't have that,And I believe that our education
like such as south africa and
such as the Iraq.everywhere "such as".
And I believe our education
should help the US
should help the south africa
and the iraq
and the asian countries
so we can build up
our future.The themes are clear; she's worried about the way we are reacting to the war on terror, the way Osama Bin Laden still is free, and the way that we are being "educated". The irony is simply dripping from the last stanza.
She was able to deliver this call to revolution absolutely deadpan, cunningly pulling the wool over America's eyes- and people here have the temerity to mock her intellectual accomplishments? She is the latter-day heir to Rosa Luxemborg- only, without the boathook.
Previously on BoingBoing:
(Via Boing Boing.)
