[Quote:]

There are two major forms of media these days. There is Packaged Goods Media, in which “content” is produced and packaged, then sent through traditional distribution channels like cable, newsstand, mail, and even the Internet. Remember when nearly every major media mogul claimed that the Internet was simply one more media distribution channel? They were right, but only in so far as it pertains to Packaged Goods Media. Over the past few decades, massive media conglomerates have built on the deep DNA of Packaged Goods Media.

The second major form of media, is far newer, and far less established. I’ve come to call it Conversational Media, though I also like to call it Performance Media. This is the kind of media that has been labeled, somewhat hastily and often derisively, as “User Generated Content,” “Social Media,” or “Consumer Content.” And while the major media companies are unparalleled when it comes to running companies that live in the Packaged Goods Media world, running major companies in the Conversational Media field require quite a different set of skills, and consideration of radically different economic and business models – models which, to be perfectly frank, conflict directly with the models which support and protect Packaged Goods Media-based companies.

It seems clear to me that the folks now charged with running the interactive assets of NBC, Viacom, Time Warner, and Newscorp – four of the largest Packaged Goods media companies in the world – are charged not only with growing their own Conversational Media assets, but also with protecting the Packaged Goods Media assets of their bosses. And those assets are based on several heretofore unassailable pillars:

1. Ownership or control of Intellectual Property by the corporation.

2. Ownership or control of expensive distribution networks.

3. Established business models based on highly evolved approaches to advertising and subscription models.

Each of these three pillars – and I may stumble upon others as I keep thinking out loud – seem to be either irrelevant or significantly shifted in the world of Conversational Media.

Related, in a way:

[Quote:]

Andrew Sullivan has posted a youtube of the old AT&T “You Will” ads about all the things AT&T would make possible through the Internet. I think these are the most emblematic advertisements of the era, defining the way that big companies totally missed the point of the Internet. They were like Thomas Edison declaring that the phone would bring opera to America’s living rooms — AT&T posited that the Internet would just amplify our normal, everyday lives, so you could “tuck your kid in from a phonebooth.”

What they missed was that for all the normalcy that the Internet could enable, it would be much, much better at enabling deviance — all the behaviors that were suppressed by society, or impossible to engage in given social constraints. Instead of “Have you checked a book out from thousands of miles away?” they might have asked, “Have you ever ripped an 18th-century book and sent it to a Gutenberg pal in another country to be OCRed?” or “Have you ever used a global mapping service to track down mercenary armies in distant lands” or “Have you ever discovered that your secret kink has an actual name, a newsgroup, an IRC channel and a monthly convention?”

I think we’re still fighting this fight. People talk about ebooks, a phrase reminiscent of “horseless carriage,” or “digital music rentals,” or “Internet telephony,” as though all of these things are just like their analog counterparts, but moreso. It’s true that Expedia is like an automated travel-agent, but that’s the beginning of the story, not the end. Google is like a library catalog, but it’s more. Amazon is like a bookstore, but it’s more. These things are sui generis — they’re not mere “Internet libraries” and “Internet bookstores” and “Internet travel agents.”

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This film shows surgeons from the Neuroscience Institute at Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center perform a hemispher- ectomy on a 6-year-old girl with epilepsy. This involves removing a large part of the girl’s left hemisphere, and severing the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres.

One of the surgeons in the film describes epilepsy as “an electrical storm�? in the brain. The procedure was performed to prevent the spread of seizures from their source, in the left hemisphere of the girl’s brain, to the right hemisphere. Surgery is usually a last resort for epileptics who do not respond to drugs. The procedure shown in the film is very similar to the one performed on Sperry and Gazzaniga’s so-called “split-brain�? patients.

Do not ask me what’s in the video, I’ll be browsing CuteOverload instead. Sources tell me it’s a fascinating piece…

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A white supremacist was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison for attempting to acquire Sarin nerve gas and C-4 explosives that he planned to use to destroy government buildings.

Demetrius Van Crocker, 40, a farmhand from the small town of McKenzie near Jackson, was arrested in 2004 after an FBI undercover agent posing as an employee at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, delivered a water-filled Sarin canister and a small quantity of explosives.

U.S. District Judge James D. Todd sentenced Crocker, a divorced father of two children. He faced life in prison.

“There is no doubt he had what he needed to cause all sorts of destruction in the United States,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Godwin said in closing arguments last April during Crocker’s four-day trial.

No need to search for muslims the USA has plenty home-grown terrorists…

[Press Briefing by Tony Snow]

Q Well, my question now is, what is the definition of the White House of the words “civil war?”

MR. SNOW: That’s an interesting question, and there’s no clear answer to it, because the one thing — I spent a lot of time thinking about this last week, and I’m not sure you get any two people to agree. For instance, if a civil war is a situation in which you have two clearly identified organizations with clearly identified leadership, both actively soliciting support from the populace and fighting over territory, authority and legitimacy — it probably doesn’t apply. If you have as your definition of a civil war something that involves the entire land mass — north, south, east and west — doesn’t apply. But some people think the sectarian violence you’ve seen — centered largely around Baghdad, and you also have some terrorist activity in Anbar, a considerable amount — they think that is civil war. So it depends on which metrics you use for doing it. And frankly, I gave up on trying because there are any number of people who have different measurements.

Last week, John Keegan, who is probably — may be the foremost military historian in practice today, had a long piece where he argues that it is not a civil war, and he laid out his metrics. Then you had other scholars who are laying out theirs. You see what I mean, April? The thing is there is no simple dictionary definition that gives you the ability to go through this. And Jim and I went through it with the Webster’s last week.

[Definition of civil war - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary]

Main Entry: civil war
Function: noun
: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

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In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA’s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

[..]

Unlike the military’s prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases — there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation– a process called “rendition” — is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

[..]

In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight. The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.

“It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” a former counterterrorism official said. “We didn’t have to mess with others — and it was fun.”

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Forget the minimum wage. Or outsourcing jobs overseas. The labor issue most on the minds of members of Congress yesterday was their own: They will have to work five days a week starting in January.

The horror.

[..]

“Keeping us up here eats away at families,” said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. “Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.”

I had no idea that they were such proponents of a 3-day workweek. I’m sure they’ll be writing legislation to give the rest of us that right, what with them being all “pro-family” and all.

But given how much these Republicans value their families, there’s just one viable alternative for those poor souls now forced to work for a living — retirement.

[Quote:]

A mother convinced Rock Hill police to arrest her 12-year-old son after he unwrapped a Christmas present early.

The boy’s great-grandmother had specifically told him not to open his Nintendo Game Boy Advance, which she had wrapped and placed beneath the Christmas tree, according to a police report.

But on Sunday morning, she found the box of the popular handheld game console unwrapped and opened. When the boy’s 27-year-old mother heard about the opened gift, she called police.

Fark is having a “headline of the year” contest. Here are a few of the nominees:

Skeletal remains found under home by repairman. In other news, blonde wins hide-and-seek championship

Record-setting tropical storm Zeta blows into the North Atlantic, making it the second-oldest thing blown by a Zeta this year

Roof collapse in Poland injures 500. You’d think 500 poles would be enough to hold it up

Elderly woman demonstrates the ease of using a drive-through grocery store. Grocery store notes that it wasn’t a drive-through until she arrived

Man found dead in cemetery after vehicle accident. Police with shovels indicate that they just keep finding more victims

Big-ass tornado wallops New Orleans, possibly causing untold damage to move ten feet to the left

Kenya to destroy record cocaine shipment. Right now they’re storing it 26 miles outside the city. Good thing there’s no one in Kenya who can run 26 miles in one day

Robber stuffs woman inside ATM. Victim checks out okay, seems a little withdrawn

“Scientists study nuts and bolts of shuttle launches.” Presumably by picking the things off the launch pad afterwards

Financial markets cut Ford Motor’s rating from “junk” to “Mustang II”

[Quote:]

All snout and tail, the pink and brown pigs contentedly rooting in the wire pen behind Craig Baker’s stone shop seem piggishly comic. They’re racing pigs, after all, and that’s got to be funny.

But few in the sprawling subdivisions along Baker Road are laughing.

These pigs are subtle weapons, here to show the new neighbors — the Katy Islamic Association — they aren’t entirely welcome. Tension has been growing in this west Harris County community since September when the Muslim group announced it had purchased 11 acres south of Interstate 10 to build a mosque, school, community center and athletic facilities.

Hard feelings started when Baker met association officials, who, he said, advised him he should move his stone shop.

“They told me it was time for my family to pack up,” said Baker, whose family has occupied its land since the early 1800s. “They said a mosque and a marble shop didn’t go too good together.”

Angered by the perceived insult and aware of Islamic dietary laws banning pork consumption, Baker responded by announcing he would stage weekly pig races on his Muslim neighbors’ holiest day of prayer.

I’ve always wondered what it took to get a free upgrade to First Class.

I’ll pass.

[Quote:]

The sons of an elderly school bus driver killed by a boulder pushed off an overpass today expressed outrage over the sentence given to the second teen culprit.

Youth court Judge Danielle Dalton put the 19-year-old on six months’ house arrest, to be followed by 18 months probation, an identical sentence to the one she gave the first teen who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death.

Neither teen can be named because they were both 15 at the time of the deadly June 1, 2002, prank on Whitemud Drive which resulted in the death of Robert Stanley, 75.

That guy must be very glad he didn’t take a video camera to the cinema, or he’d be doing 7 years.

[Quote:]

Memo to marketers: Consumers still hate you and they’ve taken to blocking your ads.

In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled, according to a new study, “Consumers Love to Hate Advertising,” from Forrester Research. More than half of all American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches.

Broadband households have become even harder to reach: some 81% of those with high-speed Internet access employ pop-up blockers and spam filters.

Consumer attitudes toward marketers have actually improved somewhat, according to the report. However, it’s not clear whether this slight thaw in sentiment is the result of successful ad blocking.

[..]

And that distaste is strong: “Only 13% of consumers admit that they buy products because of their ads, and a paltry 6% believe that companies generally tell the truth in ads,” the report states.

[Quote:]

Microsoft on Dec. 5 warned that an unpatched vulnerability in its Word software program is being used in targeted, zero-day attacks.

A security advisory from the Redmond, Wash., company said the flaw can be exploited if a user simply opens a rigged Word document.

Affected software versions include Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac. The Microsoft Works 2004, 2005 and 2006 suites are also affected because they include Microsoft Word.

There are no pre-patch workarounds available. Microsoft suggests that users “not open or save Word files,” even from trusted sources.

Don’t open any Word documents? Right. They should put that on the Office packaging, like on a packet of cigarettes.

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SCO was the first to try to get cute with the GPL on a grand scale, and as you will see, they do it with panache, with cases and arcane arguments, even some truly silly ones, like their antitrust allegations which another judge has already laughed out of court in a companion lawsuit. Sadly, SCO’s attempt to wiggle around the GPL turned out not to be the last. The Novell-Microsoft agreement also, as Richard Stallman put it, cunningly tries to sidestep GPLv2. So we have an attack from within. A serious one, because everything SCO and its backers wanted from this litigation, but failed to achieve, Novell just handed to Microsoft on a silver platter by signing that patent agreement. Let me explain why I see it that way.

There’s a reason why corporate interests are not enamored of the GPL. It’s also the reason why it it matters: it has proven effective in forcing the greedy and unscrupulous to play fair with code they didn’t write but would love to get illegitimate money from somehow anyway. (It’s fine to make money from GPL code. IBM and Red Hat and many others do. But you have to respect the license, which has as its goal freedom for the code, so you are allowed to use GPL

code as long as you let its authors (and everyone else) freely and without restrictions outside the four corners of the GPL itself use/study/modify your code that
you write based on that code.)

However, there is a concerted effort, in my opinion, to destroy the GPLv2, death by a thousand cuts and compromises. I think they’d like to do to Linux what they did to Unix. The GPL stands in their proprietary way, so they are doing all they can dream up to overthrow it or get around it with cleverness. That is one reason we need GPLv3, obviously.

Here is one extreme example, SCO’s contribution to the effort. It’s important to remember, as you watch SCO try to persuade the court that it didn’t do what it did, or that the GPL doesn’t mean what it says and what its authors say it means, that this was one of the prime goals of this litigation:

1. to try to prove that the GPL is not legally binding and so can be violated in order to make some money, honey.

2. Another goal was to cast a legal cloud over Linux, so in the enterprise, PHBs would be afraid to employ it for fear of legal consequences of possibly violating SCO’s “IP”.

3. And also there was the apparent goal of forcing Linux to cost something, by adding on top of it the SCOsource license at $699 a pop.

Groklaw has written about all of this and more since mid-May of 2003, daily, with only two or three days off in all that time. This is Groklaw’s 2,838th article. We now have 10,549 members, who have worked very hard to disprove SCO’s scurrilous claims, and we did. We succeeded, beyond my hopes when we started.

But here’s the sad part. As victory is in sight, Novell signs a patent agreement with Microsoft that does the following:

1. Novell agrees to violate the clear intent and spirit of the GPL in an attempt to comply literally with the words but not with the actual known purpose of the license to make money off of code Novell didn’t write and doesn’t own. So instead of trying to prove the GPL isn’t binding, they just kick it to the curb and step over it and dare the community to do something about it?

2. puts a FUD legal cloud over Linux (this time a patent cloud) or in any case an “IP” cloud, as per Steve Ballmer’s vague wording — and was Darl McBride’s less vague?;

3. makes Novell’s Linux cost more, because it has agreed to pay Microsoft royalties, whereas SCO asked for money for its license;

What is the cotton pickin’ difference? Other than being worse? Novell, I’d like you to answer that question. From Microsoft’s point of view, I see no difference.
What SCO could not win, Novell has handed Microsoft without a fight. The community didn’t fight this hard and this long for such a result.

So there you have it, as I see it: two companies claiming to be Linux companies that turned on the GPL and the rest of the community for money, and the beneficiary is Microsoft. What a coincidence.

[Quote:]

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation’s energy mix.

[Quote:]

Here is a shocking story of Russian pilot, now living in the USA who was on the air 11th September 2001 and have made photos right from the air when planes crashed the WTC.

He worked at that time as a programmer in one of the dot coms and had some free time which usualy he spent flying Cessna 172SP plane around NYC.

We have this photos today.

Just when he took off he spotted a smoke coming from WTC towers. He was very surprised and headed in that direction:

When he approached to George Washington Bridge he tuned to a local 1010 WINS news radio station. He says that at that time there was news that “a small plane hit WTC�?. Then he switched to hear what other pilots flying above Gudson are talking about, but they discussed same thing “a small commuter that hit WTC�?.

So little by little he was approaching the Manhattan. He met a few small planes like his Cessna, and pilots were saying something like “Oh man there is something really bad happened!�?

He got even more closer and noticed another BOEING 737. He says that the BOEING was flying the same way it usualy does when going to landing from La Guardia destination, probably a little bit lower than usual.

And then suddenly this BOEING 737 changes his course making a very sharp curve, targeting the South WTC tower.

He shot it at the moment it hit the building.

The author of the photos says he doesn’t believe at all that this maneur could be done by some rookie who just graduated from “Florida Flight School�?. According to his opinion it was some very experienced millitary pilot making his last kamikaze mission.

After that he decided to find a place to land but all the places around NYC didn’t accept him so he had to fly to NJ and land there.

He hid the camera so that nobody could know he was filming.

[Quote:]

n 1979, the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran was overthrown by Islamic radicals, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Later that year, a group of 11 Kurdish men were lined up and shot to death, accused of various crimes. Their executions at a municipal airport in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan, followed a brief trial during which no evidence was presented.

A photograph capturing this event was published and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize, but the photographer’s identity was kept secret to protect him. An account Saturday in The Wall Street Journal reveals the photographer’s name — Jahangir Razmi — and story.

[Quote:]

In what seems to be a growing genre, we have a new trailer for Mary Poppins re-cut by a fan into a horror film called “Scary Mary”.

[Quote:]

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority.

The plane landed safely. The FBI, Transportation Safety Administration and airport authority responded to the emergency, Lowrance said.

The passengers and five crew members were brought off the plane, together with all the luggage, to go through security checks again. Bomb-sniffing dogs found spent matches.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal body odor, Lowrance said. The woman lives near Dallas and has a medical condition.

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane.

“American has banned her for a long time,” Lowrance said.

She was not charged but could have been. While it is legal to bring as many as four books of paper safety matches onto an aircraft, it is illegal to strike a match in an airplane, Lowrance said.

[Quote:]

Drink your decaf in this dazzling mug – and watch your civil liberties disappear and reappear! Simply pour in your coffee or any hot beverage and watch the painstaking work of the founding fathers vanish before your eyes and then reappear after drinking up or cooling down. A great way to amaze and entertain a guest with satire.

A pity they need a hot beverage, and cannot trigger on Cool-Aid…