FeedsIf major media companies are serious about opposing the sedition legislation, they couldn’t go much better than this: two Polish newspapers graphically and evocatively attacking press censorship in Belarus.
Link via Jeff Jarvis.
One of the many reasons that legislators can’t possibly win their fight against violence in videogames:
Games featuring graphic scenes of cannibalism, “F.E.A.R.” and “Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse,” were among the 12 “games to avoid” listed Tuesday by the National Institute on Media and the Family.
“It’s something we’ve never seen before,” said institute president David Walsh, warning that today’s games are “more extreme” and more easily available to underage kids than ever before.
In “Stubbs the Zombie,” the lead character eats the brains of humans as blood splatters across the screen.
From Jane Galt:
Honestly, I know, you don’t think you want to take your laptop to the couch so that you can cruise the web while lying flat on your back and watching Grosse Pointe Blank, but trust me, you do.
Having just recently obtained a laptop for my home, as well as a wireless USB thing (which is frustratingly enormous, I might add), I could not agree with these sentiments more.
North Korea’s low-blow:
“CNN is losing popularity as the days go by although it had high audience rating in the world in the past,” KCNA [the North Korean news agency] said. “Much upset by this, CNN staged such poor farce to improve its image.”
Criticise our decadent capitalism all you want, but leave our withering media conglomerates alone.
ACCI has released a good publication: The Economic Case for Workplace Relations Reform (PDF), with this great detail:
One award in New South Wales specifies which culinary items may be included in meals cooked for employees: “bread, flour, meat, vegetables (potatoes, onions, beans, split and blue peas, greens)
(That is apparently from an AFR opinion piece of last year: “Allowable matters on menu for union interference,†23 July 2004)
As ACCI notes, it is unlikely that both employers and employees actually understand the entitlements they are legally supposed to be bound by.
Why should we oppose free (that is, government-sponsored, or more crucially, government-controlled) wi-fi? Hint: Its not because the free-market set is desperate to prop up big business.
Have a look at this quick fact sheet from the Pacific Research Institute (PDF). Link via the indispensible Technology Liberation Front.
This is worth an extended quote, about the impact of mobile telephones in Kenya:
Imagine that you have a restaurant or a shop and need regular deliveries of meat twice a week. With no telephones, how do you get information about where you can buy?
You don’t. So Kenyan shopkeepers had to take a chance and go to a slaughterhouse. When I visited Kenya, I was told that many journeys were in vain or that they had to sit there waiting for hours before any delivery was made.
At other times, there was meat but the buyers didn’t know it. In that case, the food was spoiled. Imagine the waste of food and man-hours.
In recent years, the situation has turned around because of the introduction of one device: the mobile phone. Now, information is widely available. If you have meat, you let the world know; if you need it, you don’t have to spend your days guessing and waiting. Meat now goes into the stomach, not into the trash can.
The advent of the mobile phone is an everyday example of how revolutionary changes can result from globalization: a technology that was invented, financed and developed on another continent can easily be put to good use in Africa, at least since governments have begun, slowly and reluctantly, to open the market for telecommunications.
Previous post on Technological change in the third world
If this is true, its fantastic:
In ancient Rome, major winemaking regions apparently compensated poets such as Martial and Horace to work brand names into their writing.
After doing some quick googling, I couldn’t find any corroborating sources, but these sorts of things tend to be a little more obscure - a problem which I hope Google Print will rapidly solve.
The Volokh Conspiracy has a discussion noting that gladiators did advertising as well, as they should.
Has it ever occurred to you that you just smash your wine glass and jump at someone, grab the top of their head and put it in their cartoid artery and ask anything?
Wise advise. Or another one:
I asked him if I was able to get on a plane with an HB pencil, which you are able to, and I further asked him if I went down and came and grabbed him by the front of the head and stabbed the HB pencil into your eyeball and wiggled it around down to your brain area, do you think you’d be focusing?
Short letter I had in the AFR today, on the question of exclusive content deals and effect on competition in new media (particularly broadband and mobile):
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel now argues that content is the determining factor in whether a media company is being anti-competitive. (”Consumers the key to media revolution”, Opinion, November 18).
Samuel says that the bar for monopoly has been substantially lowered. Now all it takes is an assessment that a company is acquiring too much premium content - sporting content, obviously, but movies as well. This judgement will continue to change as tastes do. He mentions tennis, AFL, rugby and cricket, but not soccer, which is now about as premium as you can get.
But it is the capacity for companies to make exclusive content deals that encourages entry into new, developing markets. If the ACCC punishes companies that it deems too enthusiastic in offering value to consumers, it will only make these consumers think twice about adopting the new technologies at all.
Why would the ACCC warn companies off experimenting with new products and services? Samuel may think that he is protecting competition, but by arbitrarily punishing companies he is punishing consumers and stifling innovation.
Such arguments as this betray the fact that the ACCC is merely paying lip-service to the possibilities of new media, rather than understanding its revolutionary consequences.
