I’ve published a fairly short submission (2 pages) to the ACMA’s inquiry into the future use of television channels. My submission is here, in pdf.

The US Supreme Court, ruling against minimum wage laws in 1908:

The right of a person to sell his labor upon such terms as he deems proper is, in its essence, the same as the right of the purchaser of labor to prescribe the conditions upon which he will accept such labor from the person offering to sell it … In all such particulars the employer and the employee have equality of right, and any legislation that disturbs that equality is an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract which no government can legally justify in a free land.

Read the whole post. (Link by the always fantastic Carnival of the Capitalists.)

What role for a public broadcaster in the digital age? From Wired:

News International, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, is accusing the British Broadcasting Corp. of using taxpayers’ money to build a “digital empire” that would compete with commercial rivals.

The BBC, which receives about 3 billion pounds ($5.3 billion) a year in public funding, has announced plans to relaunch its website to incorporate more user-generated content such as blogs and video, as well as developing new broadband portals in areas including sports, music, health and science.

With a host of private, commerically and non-profit organisations already providing such services, the internet isn’t really begging out for governments to replicate and compete. Government should never have been in the business of providing entertainment - leveraging public funds to expand outside their traditional jursidiction in an age when we suffer from information overload rather than scarcity is not a legitimate area of government action.

I’m not advocating that public broadcasters stay off the internet - supplementary material (like the podcasts provided by the Australian ABC) can cheaply and efficiently increase the value of their service. But a line needs to be drawn - government funds should not be used to actively expand and compete with non-government and for-profit organisations.

Jim Emerson has a list of the 102 movies you must see before you die, not because they are necessarily the most worthy, but because they form part of the cultural commons:

…the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”

Turns out I’ve seen 43. (full list after the jump)

Read the rest of this entry »

A brief snapshot of the man who invented the mobile phone, Martin Cooper.

“I called my rival at Bell and told him that I was speaking from a busy Manhattan street, on a real cellular,” says the 76-year-old San Diego resident. The 2.5-pound behemoth, christened Dyna-Tac, took years to design, and when it was eventually introduced in ‘83 as a retail cell phone, it cost $4,000. Hundreds of Motorola engineers worked to create portable antennas, low-current emiconductors and other mini miracles to make Cooper’s wireless dream a reality, all in the name of breaking up a monopoly. “We needed to prove that a company other than Bell could participate in this new industry, and our people did it,”

Fantastic essay by Frank Furedi on doomsayers, pessimists and faith in humanity:

If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today’s intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity - and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it.

I’ve completed a submission to the government’s media reform discussion paper: its available here.

Snakes on a Plane emergency card.

If you aren’t familiar with Snakes on a Plane, the upcoming cult-blockbuster (a new genre!), Snakes on a Blog is a good place to start.

Donald Pittenger proposes 1825-1925 as the 100 years where everyday life changed the most.

Google finally launches a calender.