The Washington Times recently reported that “A media watchdog group is criticizing Delta Air Lines for making the graphic HBO series ‘Rome’ and other bawdy shows available for in-flight viewing after a passenger complained that children could see nudity and sex scenes.” Apparently, the offending material was shown on overhead movie screens during a May 6 flight from Atlanta to Duesseldorf, Germany. According to the Times article:
Delta officials say the programs were intended as an option for viewing on private screens in the back of the airplane’s seat and were shown on the public overhead screens by mistake. “As soon as our flight attendants became aware it was being shown, it was cut off and we made an immediate apology to passengers,” said Betsy Talton, a spokeswoman for Atlanta-based Delta.
But a passenger who lodged a complaint with the captain during the flight and got the flight attendants to cut off the program, also notified the media activist group Morality in Media, which fired off a news release about the incident to the press last week.
I found this incident interesting because I’m about to release a new book entitled “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” As the title implies, it’s a broad survey of everything on the market today that can help parents deal with potentially objectionable media content, whether it be on broadcast TV, cable, music, cellular phones, video games, the Internet, or social networking websites.
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Previous installments (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) in this series have documented how our government seems to have a difficult time keeping tabs on laptops and personal information. The latest on this front comes from the Energy Department which notified Congress yesterday that it has lost 1,415 laptop PCs over the past six years. However, according to this report in Government Computer News, the DOE stressed that none of the laptops contained classified information. I guess that qualifies as good news on this front.
One of the most exciting things about technological progress, from a libertarian perspective, is that as technologies get cheaper, they get harder and harder for the state to regulate. The prolific Chris Anderson has the latest example: he’s built an unmanned aerial vehicle for under $1000. He explains his motivations here:
The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.
But there is another aim, which I ended being asked about a lot at Maker Faire. At the moment the FAA regulations on UAVs are ambiguous (we believe that by staying below 400 feet and within line-of-sight we’re within them). But there is a good deal of concern that as small and cheap UAVs become more common, the FAA will toughen the rules, making activities such as ours illegal. I hope this project will illustrate why that approach won’t work.
By creating a UAV with Lego parts and built in part by kids, we haven’t just created a minimum UAV, we’ve created a reductio ad absurdum one. If children can make UAVs out of toys, the genie is out of the bottle. Clear use guidelines (such as staying below 400 feet and away from tall buildings) would be welcome, but blanket bans or requirements for explicit FAA approval for each launch will be too hard to enforce. The day when there was a limited “UAV industry” that could be regulated are gone.
Government regulation almost always works by controlling intermediaries—usually large companies. As more and more technologies come within reach of individuals, using off-the-shelf parts, it will be harder and harder for the government to control them. I say bring it on.
Randy Barnett mocks George Lucas for his walled garden approach to mash-ups:
According the Wall Street Journal this morning, the fan-created videos will run along with commercials “with Lucasfilm and Eyespot splitting the proceeds.” Asked about why Lucasfilm will allow this use of their images, a spokesman said, “If someone wants to commercialize it, that’s where we’ve drawn the line.” So it’s OK for Lucasfilm to commercialize the creative efforts of Star Wars ™fans, but not the other way around.
But the laugh is really going to be on Lucasfilm because, as we all know, people won’t invest scarce time producing creative works that others want to watch without the financial incentives provided by intellectual “property” rights granted for “limited times” (i.e. in perpetuity). So it is safe to predict that no one will contribute any mashups to the new Starwars.com website. Boy, will that be embarrassing for them!
Via Ars Technica, here’s a Quad-Cities Online report on the state of Illinois using $1 million in taxpayer dollars to fund litigation in support of an unconstitutional ban on video game violence. The money was taken from other budget areas, including public health, welfare, and economic development.
The ideal would be to give the money back to taxpayers. It rightly belongs to them. But given the choice between using the funds to erode free speech rights or using them to support the welfare state, I’ll take the welfare state.
Randy Picker has been doing an excellent series of posts on the evolution of copying technologies. Today’s installment is particularly good:
In the monk era—the pre-printing press era—all copying was done by hand. These were manuscripts copied one-by-one in the scriptorium. There weren’t strong advantages—economies of scale if we are going to be economists—in producing second copies. All copies were expensive and the author/publisher, having produced one copy of the work, was no better situated to make another copy of the work than would be any holder of the work. To be sure, the technology of copying—the ability to read and write—may not have been widely distributed, so this was a key way in which copies were controlled, but presumably only the literate were much interested in copies anyhow, and for the literate, the costs of producing the second copy were high but roughly identical to the costs of the author.
The printing press changed all of that. The printing press obviously lowered printing costs generally, but note what it did for second-copy costs. Those costs dropped dramatically for publishers but changed very little for someone in possession of a physical copy of the book. Before, in the handcrafted era of the monks, publishers and copy holders faced the same, very high, second-copy costs. In the Gutenberg era, the author/publisher was much better situated than a copy recipient to produce another copy. That cost advantage served as an important way in which the effective rights of the author/publisher to control copies were made meaningful. This is not to say that we didn’t have piracy, but it was of a different sort, say a printer running a secret print runs for a pirate.
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Matthew Ingram does a good job of explaining what’s wrong with this story on how Heinz’s user-generated ad contest didn’t work very well:
” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0? advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.
As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.
I think there are three other factors here that are worth keeping in mind. First, it sounds like part of the problem is that they did too little—not too much—to harness the wisdom of crowds. Users can not only produce ads–they can filter them too. If there were a ton of ads submitted and most of them were crap, why not have the crowd help weed out the bad stuff? Set up a site showing all the submissions (and making it easy to embed them in other sites) and let website visitors vote on the best selections. You probably don’t want to just run whatever the crowd suggests, but you could choose 10 or 20 finalists that way, and then you can pick the best 5 from those.
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Tom Coseven left a comment making some good points about last week’s podcast and wireless Carterfone. I also got an email raising some of the same objections, so let me see if I can address them.
First, in response to Tom’s first point, I didn’t mean to give the impression that Carterfone was an antitrust decision. My point was simply that the policy rationale for regulatory intervention is much stronger when you have a single, government-protected monopoly than it is when there are four (relatively) lightly regulated incumbents. Whether or not you want to call them an “oligopoly,” it’s clearly more likely that market competition will discipline network operators in a 4-firm industry than in a 1=firm industry. And on the margin, that makes the case for regulatory intervention weaker.
Here’s Tom again:
On the subject of implementation of an open access requirement, it could be done quite easily. The GSM and CDMA standards allow for very transparent connectivity at the device level with no affect on your visual voice feature you use as an example. Those kind of widgets sit at a higher layer on the phone. Either the phone has the software or it doesn’t (sort of like a downloaded game).
Part of the problem here is that I have yet to see a specific explanation of what a “Wireless Carterfone” rule would actually say. If we’re just talking about a rule that says “network operators must allow any GSM or CDMA (as the case may be) phone to connect to their network,” that’s certainly a pretty clear rule, and it may not lead to any problems. However, I have the impression that two of the four carriers (the GSM ones) already respect this rule. So if that’s all we’re talking about, the rule seems kind of superfluous. Anyone who wants the freedom to attach the phone of their choice can sign up with T-Mobile or AT&T.
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Apparently I can get a Dell Dimension E520N pre-loaded with Ubuntu for $429. That’s with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of memory, and a 250 GB hard drive. The budget machine from Ubuntu hardware vendor System 76 appears to cost $785 if outfitted similarly.
I’m sure I could get an even cheaper system if I put it together myself, but I frankly am not that interested in hardware. I’m perfectly happy to give Dell $50 or $100 to save me the trouble of figuring out which hardware has good Linux support and then comparison shopping for the best deals.
But I’m curious what y’all think: are there other Linux hardware vendors with more competitive prices? Am I likely to have compatibility or other problems with the Dell systems?
Also: Jeremy Reimer at Ars reports that the “Windows tax” appears to be about $50.
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