hairball has so named the skylark lounge. he goies on to say it’s close to being the perfect cafe, the elusive entity he and i have been seeking for over 20 years. he may be right. it’s certainly a meeting place of the various ‘hoods, genres, ethnicities, and subcultures. it’s also a place where a hush falls and you suddenly find your self engaged in interesting conversation with a complete stranger. nice room, neither tricked out, ferned, yuppicated nor dive. the food is good, and plentiful. the booze is fairly cheap, the coffee is ok, and it opens at 4pm. great staff. but one of the waitresses bears a stunning resemblance to an old girlfriend of mine. and a lot of good looking 20 somethings of all nine sexs wander in. and it has 100 year old urinals. and people from my past keep wandering in. and people i know keep introducing me to new people. and they don’t mind me sitting here and drinking coffee for a couple hours. and i keep expecting she who mustn’t be named to walk in. and they don’t mind me pounding keys on the laptop. and the music is bartenders choice, not canned or management mandated (right now it’s some nice bebop jazz). and a 22 year old girl with the second most expressive nipples i’ve never seen followed me outside and asked me to educate her.
he’s right. it’s the nexus of fucking evil. it would almost be worth the rent to be walking distance from this place…on the (really, truely, non sardonic) downside vito and some other emotional vampires and pimps hang out here. and i don’t live next door, i live 2 hours away by bus, a bus that stops at last call. sigh. evil.
congratulations to tim boyle on his graduation!
remember to scroll down and check the previous post for details of the pilsen art event. it’s tonight…
Apple Tops Consumer Reports Survey –macslash
America rejoices as Bush’s $217 tax cut produces mass wealth in Malaysia
Plus more great news from your favorite show, NTR — “Now That’s Republican!” –salon
Code is law in gamespace, too?
Fascinating academic paper explores the way that gamers in MMORPGs are beginning to assert property and moral rights over the digital artifacts (including their own avatars) in gamespace.
Virtual worlds – online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize – are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail.
First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply – sometimes more strongly – in the virtual worlds.
Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance.
Link –boingboing
Novell Jumps to Linux Rescue
Novell said Wednesday it — not SCO Group — owns the key rights to Unix and that SCO should stop claiming Linux developers misappropriated Unix code. Linux advocates rejoice and SCO’s stock tanks. By Michelle Delio. –wired
So Much for the Freelance Economy
Guru.com will join the growing ranks of sites for freelancers that have shut down. Seems predictions that a big portion of U.S. workers will become free agents won’t pan out. By Amit Asaravala. –wired (actually that ain’t true: the vast majority of people i know are freelancers. they’re also broke, struggling, barely working hours that could be called part time, looking for anything, and like the victims of all other Big Cons perpetrated by the bizniz comunity, left without healthcare or retirement benefits. the underground economy is alive and well, and padding wallstreets bottom line while the ccreative pros who live it are dying. wait 30 years for this to really become evident. welfare and social security could collapse…)
When I was coming up in radio, back in the Seventies, there were limits on broadcast property ownership. Back then, you could own seven AM , seven FM and seven TV stations: the “7-7-7 rule.” And in any one metropolitain area, you could own at most one AM, one FM and one TV station. There were also limits on how many newspapers you could own. The big O&Os (owners & operators) — NBC, CBS, ABC, RKO, Westinghouse, Capital Cities — O&O’d the biggest signals in the biggest markets. But, again, there were limits. Newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership was highly limited.
In 1985, 7-7-7 went up to 12-12-12.
Then came the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Now the limits were 8-infinity: Up to eight stations in any one market, and no limit on the total nationwide.
In 1999 the FCC created the Eight Voices test and the 35% rule: locally, a company could own two TV stations in a market if a total of eight “voices” still existed; and nationally, no company could “own” (I hate that term in this context) more than 35% of the national TV audience.
Killed along the way were minimal requirements for non-entertainment programming (1985), the Fairness Doctrine (1987), limits on percentage of advertising content (1985) and various other limitations, including ones on operating stations you don’t own, allowing de facto ownership of programming to exceed ownership of licenses.
Why? C.H. Sterling of the TV Museum puts it this way:
Deregulatory proponents do not perceive station licensees as “public trustees” of the public airwaves required to provide a wide variety of services to many different listening groups. Instead, broadcasting has been increasingly seen as just another business operating in a commercial marketplace which did not need its management decisions questioned by government overseers. Opponents argue that deregulation violates key parts of The Communications Act of 1934–especially the requirement to operate in the public interest–and allows broadcasters to seek profits with little public service programming required in return.
On June 2, the FCC is due to release the next round of dereg rules. FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a dereg proponent, is expected to raise the local limit to ten, among other things. At issue especially is cross-ownership of newspapers as well.
Notice how much of the few minutes of non-advertising content on your local 11 O’Clock news is devoted to “stories” that are nothing more than promotions of entertainment shows on the same stations? Prepare to see the same, and worse, in your newspapers.
Nobody on the receiving end of broadcasting and newspapers is asking for more dereg. In fact, the pols, noticing which way the wind blows, are opposing it.
The problem is that broadcast spectrum, as conceived since the first radio stations went up early in the last century, is highly finite. Engineering rules have been relaxed in the extreme, to the point where I can stand here in an apartment bedroom in New York City and get two or more stations on one FM channel just by turning my radio 90 degrees in one direction or the other (and all of them sound like crap). But there are still only a few thousand stations on AM and FM, and far less on TV. In other words, there are limits to the total number of stations that can be owned.
What’s more, the business of commercial broadcasting is not one that involves listeners and viewers except in very indirect ways. You and I pay nothing to the originators of the signals we watch and hear. We are merely consumers, not customers. Since we pay squat, that’s the sum of our influence as well.
That means we need some kind of market representation. That’s what the FCC is for, and Congress as well. And they’re not listening.
As a result, we get what we can’t pay for, but that Clear Channel can: influence.
I hate to say I don’t have much hope, but I don’t.
Instead my hope is with the Net. I want regulation to protect the end-to-end nature of the Net, which will allow any of us to broadcast whatever we please to anybody else who cares to watch and listen.
That’s worth saving, big time. I’m not sure about what’s left of broadcasting.
[from Doc Searls]
