The shuttle Atlantis lifted off for the final time today heralding the final phase of an era of manned US space flight that has spanned my lifetime so far. I was born while the Gemini program was still going on but my first really solid memory of space travel was the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1974. The era of sending Americans into space then took a pause while the Shuttles were prepared.
I was also a tech nerd and I can recall the images of the Enterprise lifting off from the back of a 747 and gliding back to earth and then watching Challenger blast off into space. By the time Challenger blew up, I was in college but actually working a co-op term at GM in St Catherines. I remember working in the office when someone came in and said that the shuttle had exploded and many of us engineers crowded into a conference room to watch the TV and find out what had happened in those pre-web, pre-Twitter days.
Eventually the shuttle program got back on track but for reasons having to do with too many cooks and only one vat of broth, it never did meet the expectations set for it. While it was clearly a triumph of engineering brute force that this kludged up system ever worked at all, the shuttle system never had any of the optimized design elegance that could have made a true success story. The amount of time and work required to turn around a shuttle and get it ready for flight again was simply insane for what was supposed to be a "space-plane"
Following the 2003 Columbia disintegration, the program probably should have been retired but with the ISS only partly finished, the shuttle was needed to get the job done. Now that the ISS is essentially complete, the orbiters will finally be laid to rest at various museums.
I only visited the Kennedy Space Center once, last November for the aborted STS-133 mission of Discovery and thus never got to see a lift off live. Fortunately I did get a tour of the orbiter preparation facility and the insanely huge vehicle assembly building where the shuttles and the Apollo craft before them came together.
While I remain a lover of science and technology, I agree that at this point in time we need to scale back manned space flight. The technology is simply not there for us to safely and affordably send humans beyond the moon and benefits of doing so remain dubious. Besides there is still far too much we don't yet understand about ourselves and the pale blue dot that we live on. We need to explore and understand our own oceans before we head to Mars and beyond. I'm glad we did what we did in space and continue to do on the ISS, but it's time for a new direction wherever that may lead us.
As America celebrates the anniversary of the birth of a nation, it's long past time for a new constitutional amendment that would correct the fundamentally flawed premise that corporations should have the rights of persons. No legal entity should have those rights without also taking on the same responsibilities. A new movement is starting that would enshrine the idea that Humans not corporations are persons entitled to the rights such as participation in the political process.
It's time to put the people back in charge!
Embedded Link
"We the corporations" | Move to Amend
"We the corporations". On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the US Const…
Rick Karr recently wrote a great piece for Engadget based on an investigation he did into broadband speeds and pricing in the US and Europe. To the surprise of no one here in America we pay too much here and get too many limits on our usage while AT&T, Verizon and Comcast fight competition at every turn. In the UK, customers often get as many as a dozen options with higher speeds and lower prices and providers are actually removing usage caps. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2011/03/10/bt-to-lift-limits-on-unlimited-broadband-40092098/
Here in the US we are getting tighter caps even as speeds creep up and we get access to new services like Netflix and Hulu streaming that threaten to put ever more users over their caps. It's even worse in the wireless field where Verizon is rolling out LTE at the same time it introduces the most expensive tiered pricing in the business.
Frankly the opposition that AT&T and Verizon have to increased competition should be all the reason that the FCC and FTC needs to deny the T-Mobile takeover. None of the big carriers should be allowed to buy out other companies until we start seeing some increased competition.
In the days before the G8 summit in France last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decided to invite influential people from the technology and content fields to discuss the role of the internet in society in a forum dubbed eG8. Unfortunately what Sarkozy had in mind was less of an open discussion on modern communications and more of a rubber stamp on his intention to increase control over content and copyright. Sarkozy has been a strong proponent of so-called “three strikes” rules that would ban people from using the net if they are accused of copyright infringement three times.
Note that was accused not convicted. Major media companies have shown no aversion over the past decade to accuse people of theft and infringement often in cases where the appearance of a piece of media was merely incidental such as a radio playing a song in the background of a video on youtube. Companies like Viacom have gone further by suing Youtube for serving up infringing material that in many cases has been posted by agents of Viacom itself for promotional purposes.
The major media companies clearly have no credibility in this game, nor does Sarkozy.
“Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s live, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum,” said Sarkozy. “Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to take the risk of democratic chaos and hence anarchy.”
Here Sarkozy couldn’t be more wrong. Even in a democracy – or especially in a democracy – government is NOT the sole legitimate representative of the people. The people themselves in a modern country can be a far better representative of their own will than a government that is typically more beholden to huge corporate donors than to its own constituents. To imply otherwise indicates that control is far more important that freedom. Freedom is messy and people like Sarkozy and the heads of big business need to learn to deal with that.
Thankfully not everyone on hand was simply a lacky for Sarkozy and the entrenched incumbents. Among the luminaries participating in eG8 were the great prof. Lawrence Lessig and musician/writer/activist John Perry Barlow. Lessig’s comments about the importance of taking a more hands-off approach to copyright and the internet are in the video at the top of this post.
Barlow was on panel with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher. Those other participants defended the need to protect the works they own, as opposed to created, since none of them are actual creators of anything. They are merely salespeople. After hearing everyone else speak Barlow summed up with the fundamental truth that IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.
Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.
This is a concept that Lessig has also been expressing for many years and it’s one of the driving forces behind creative commons. Unlike tangible property, when someone else uses or expresses your idea, it doesn’t preclude you from using it yourself. What makes it special is what you do with it.
Over the past decade in particular but for some time before that there has been an increasing movement to protect the powerful in our society at the expense of the common people. This movement has accelerated dramatically in the past year at least in part because of the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that essentially freed corporate interests to spend as much as they want on political campaigns while individuals remain shackled by campaign finance laws.
We can see the initial effects in places like Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan where newly elected republican governors and legislatures have moved rapidly to bring in legislation to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining rights and here in Michigan to dissolve local governments and school boards and replace them with private sector “emergency financial managers.”
However, the problem goes well beyond that into many other sectors of society. For example a company called Medical Justice that aims to protect doctors from frivolous malpractice suits sells them contracts that they can use with their patients. Doctors using these contracts force patients to sign them before providing treatment. These contracts are meant to provide a shield for the doctors from public reviews of their work. According to these “anti-defamation” contracts patients can either be prohibited from posting online reviews of their doctors or the doctors are given the right to edit or delete online postings from patients.
While bogus reviews from disgruntled employees or others with a grudge are always a potential problem, no such contract will do anything to stop it. Anyone can set up a blog or go on Facebook, Twitter or some other site and make negative comments. Doctors are ill-served by paying for such contracts and any patient presented with one should refuse to sign and go find another doctor. If a doctor is truly providing bad service the public should know about it and the doctor should either improve or go out of business. DoctoredReviews.com has an excellent response to this whole subject.
Another prime example of the powerful trying to gag the ordinary is pointed out by Seth Godin. In Iowa the legislature is moving forward with a law that would make it illegal to record activities at industrial farming operations without the owners consent. The reality is that many of these operations treat animals very poorly in the pursuit of higher profit margins. While there is nothing wrong in general with profit, the food produced by these farms is often of lower quality (taste and nutritional value) and more susceptible to contamination from pathogens like e-coli.
When public health is at risk, the idea of government banning anyone from showing what goes on these facilities is extremely troubling but unfortunately entirely consistent with politicians that have been funded by the wealthy and powerful.
Godin goes on to explain that public transparency is almost invariably better for business than gagging the public. Republicans like to go on and on about protecting free markets, but they really only care about one side of the equation. A truly free market requires that both buyers and sellers be informed about the true value of a product and be aware the total supply and demand. Without this knowledge, one side can easily manipulate the other to their own benefit and that is never a good thing for the long-term health of a market or a society.
Regardless of whether the market is for medical services, chicken or labor, both sides of the supply demand equation must be educated and free to take their products/services or money elsewhere.
The Planet of the Apes franchise is coming back yet again this summer for another go but this time it’s quite different from the previous six iterations. None of the previous tellings have really tried to explain how these apes came to have human-like speech and cognitive abilities.
This is where the prequel “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” comes in. A researcher played by James Franco inadvertently “creates” the apes that will take over where humanity left off.
The other major difference this time around is the visuals. The last Apes movie, directed by Tim Burton was almost universally panned except for the look of the apes. Unlike the obvious rubber masks worn by Roddy McDowall and his cohorts in the late-1960s and early-1970s, Burton’s apes looked more like the real deal.
This time around there will be no makeup jobs on the actors. Instead the visual effects gurus at Peter Jackson’s WETA studio have rendered the apes digitally after doing motion capture the way they did Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. In fact, Andy Serkis who provided the motions and voice of Gollum is back as Caeser, the prime ape that leads the uprising. From the trailer, it looks really good, although so did Burton’s take on the apes. We’ll just have to wait until August for the real deal.
Recently Time Warner Cable made a new iPad app available to its subscribers that allows them to stream live TV signals directly to the tablet and immediately a number of networks jumped on TWC and demanded that their channels be removed from the app. Now, you might be asking yourself why any TV broadcaster would want to reduce the size of its potential audience? While the networks make noise about licensing restrictions, the truth of the matter is something completely different and it poses a threat to the whole revenue stream of mainstream media.
The TWC app is actually quite restrictive in how it lets users stream content. In order to watch anything, users have to be at home on their local network, meaning that you can’t watch your shows when you are traveling or just standing in line somewhere. Time Warner’s argument is that this limitation means the iPad is just like any other TV in the house showing content. The networks argue that their licenses with cable companies only allow feeding shows to TVs over the cable and not over WiFi.
The real problem however is not the type of device being used to view shows or how the signal gets there. It’s about the fundamentally flawed way in which traditional TV viewership is measured. Broadcasters make their money by selling advertising during programming. The prices charged for ads are based on how many people watch a show. For decades, AC Nielsen has provided the ratings numbers that everyone in TV uses to set ad rates. For nearly as long, everyone that uses Nielsen numbers has known that the survey results which are based on surveys of viewers are highly inaccurate. Unfortunately they tend to err on the high side which meant that advertisers were probably paying too much for advertising time. However, since everyone was using the same numbers all broadcasters went and advertisers went along with it.
Now however, the advent of internet broadcasting turns the whole ratings game on its head. Unlike traditional broadcasts, internet streams can be counted precisely. A quick check of server logs can reveal exactly how many times a program was watched and for how long. The result is a far more accurate measure of ratings that is likely to be substantially lower than traditional measures. Rather than embracing the new technology, and finding ways to make money off it, broadcasters are shunning it in order to protect an old unsustainable measurement method.
Of course the old guard won’t be able to maintain this facade for long. Just as the music and publishing industries have had to evolve, it’s only a matter of time before traditional broadcast channels go away. Viewers increasingly watch what they want, when they want and where they want. More accurate measurements of viewer engagement will mean allow some programming to flourish while other material fades away.
With republican heavyweights like Newt Gingrich and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen showing absolutely no reluctance to reverse course on policy in Libya as soon as President Obama actually began to enforce a no-fly zone, it’s worth looking at their opinions from another perspective.
Back in 2001, when former President George W Bush decided to invade Iraq, the decision was made on the pretense that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to Al Qaeda. As many of us at the time said, neither assertion was true, and time has proven us correct. Nonetheless, Bush and his cronies sent American soldiers into Iraq and now nearly a decade later, tens of thousands of them are still there despite the fact that Iraq has never attacked America.
Now the question is what to do about Libya. We largely stood by and watched while the people of Tunisia and Egypt overthrew their entrenched leaders and we are doing the same now in Syria and Yemen.
Many republicans are now staunchly opposed to action in Libya even though they were all for it just a few weeks ago. What nobody seems to be mentioning is the fact that unlike Iraq, Muammar Ghadaffi actually has had his agents attack American interests including Pan Am flight 103 and a German disco frequented by American soldiers. Despite the fact that Ghadaffi actually has a history of attacking Americans (something that Saddam Hussien never actually did) Gingrich and Ros-Lehtinen are opposing action in Libya.
That’s not to say that U.S. forces should be involved, because the results of this are certainly unclear. My point is simply that the Republican leadership are just a bunch of political hacks and hypocrites who stand for nothing more than to oppose a Democratic president in order to further their own ambitions.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a TV show successfully runs in Britain for three years and few Americans see it, is a remake original?
If the definition of original is “new, fresh, inventive” as dictionary.com says, the answer is obviously no. Nonetheless, SyFy channel is promoting “Being Human” as a new “original” series. While it is new to the American cable channel formerly known as SciFi, it isn’t even really new to American audiences that have been able to see it on BBC America for some time now.
There is nothing fresh about remaking shows from other countries with American actors and backgrounds. It has been done with varying degrees of success (mostly commercial vs artistic) for years now with the likes of American Idol and The Office on the popular side and Coupling and Top Gear USA garnering somewhat smaller audiences. Ripping off a successful concept goes back to the origins of entertainment, with most of Shakespeare’s classics being based on older tales retold. There is nothing inherently wrong with adaptation it if executed well and especially if adds something new when redone.
However, the way its typically done by American producers, original is not a word that should be connected with the practice. I haven’t seen the American version of Being Human and I probably won’t. The British version was a reasonably entertaining tale of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost living together and trying to make their way in the modern world. But did it really need a rehash? Are Americans too parochial to deal with British accents? Why not just show the real original to a wider audience here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.