July 25, 2003
Saving the Net
Who Owns What
That's the fundamental question, and it's going to get more fundamental as
we roll toward the next presidential election here in the US. Much is
at stake, including Linux and its natural habitat: the Net. Both have
been extraordinarily good for business. Its perceived "threat" to
Microsoft and the dot-com crash are both red herrings. Take away Linux
and the Net, and both technology and the economy would be a whole lot worse.
Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely
outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what
free markets have done with their freedoms.
How to get past the intellectual and political logjams that threaten Linux and the Net.
At the same time that media concentration restrictions are being
removed, such that three companies will own everything, so too are
neutrality restrictions for the network being eliminated, so that those
same three companies--who also will control broadband access--are
totally free to architect broadband however they wish. "The Internet
that is to be the savior is a dying breed. The end-to-end architecture
that gave us its power will, in effect, be inverted. And so the games
networks play to benefit their own will bleed to this space too."
And then Dr. Pangloss says, "but what about spectrum. Won't unlicensed
spectrum guarantee our freedom" And it is true: Here at least there was
some hope from this FCC. But the latest from DC is that a tiny chunk of
new unlicensed spectrum will be released. And then after that, no more.
Spectrum too will be sold--to the same companies, no doubt.
So then, Dr. Pangloss: "When the content layer, the logical layer, and
the physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful of companies,
free of any requirements of neutrality or openness, what will you ask
then"
--
target="_blank">"But Where's the Internet" by
Lawrence
Lessig, MediaCon.
"I think that I could turn and live with the animals... Not one of them
is demented with the mania of owning things."
--Walt Whitman
Who Owns What
That's the fundamental question, and it's going to get more fundamental as
we roll toward the next presidential election here in the US. Much is
at stake, including Linux and its natural habitat: the Net. Both have
been extraordinarily good for business. Its perceived "threat" to
Microsoft and the dot-com crash are both red herrings. Take away Linux
and the Net, and both technology and the economy would be a whole lot worse.
Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely
outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what
free markets have done with their freedoms.
Yet, there are some who do not care. Unfortunately, they're driving the
conversation right now. Hollywood has lawmakers and news organizations
convinced that file sharing is "piracy" and "theft". Apple, Intel and
Microsoft are quietly doing their deals with the Hollywood devil,
crippling (or contemplating the crippling of) PC functionalities, to
protect the intellectual property of "content producers".
As I write this, SCO claims to own whatever remains of AT&T's original
UNIX. They're suing IBM and spreading FUD by the trainload all over
Linux, which they claim is derivative. I'm getting e-mails from
technologists at big companies telling me that Linux use is now a Big
Issue for their corporate legal departments. I also heard recently from
a former Novell employee who says Novell intentionally held onto their
UNIX patents (acquired from AT&T) so SCO wouldn't have full claims to
"owning" whatever it was that Novell sold them (after buying UNIX,
renamed UnixWare, from AT&T).
And I'm hearing from people who insist that Linux is not exactly
ownerless, either. "Linux is a registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds"
appears on 268,000 Web documents, Google tells me. In at least one
sense, these folks say, Linus owns Linux. That means it is, in a
limited sense, proprietary.
The Internet has been blessedly free of regulation for most of its short
life. But the companies that provide most Internet service--telcos and
cable companies--are highly regulated. They are creatures that live in
a regulatory environment that bears little resemblance to a real
marketplace. As natives of regulatory habitats, they see nothing but
Good Sense in regulating the Net. After all, any regulation will help
assert their ownership over the sections of the Net they control and
legitimize the limitations they place on what their customers can do
with, and on, the Net.
These companies have deep alliances with the big "content": industries
(in the case of cable, they are one and the same) that want to see
control extended beyond the Net, into the devices that connect to the
Net, including PCs, which have also been blessedly free from regulation.
Intellectual property protections have been built into consumer
electronics devices for a long time. These guys see no reason why PCs,
as a breed of consumer electronic device, shouldn't be subject to the
same restrictions, in the form of digital rights management (DRM), run
by content providers and burned into hardware at the factory. In fact,
they're counting on the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent any hacks around those DRM
systems. Once those cripples (for which there is zero demand on the
customers' side) are in place, you can count on Dell, HP and Gateway PCs
and laptops that are much less ready to run Linux.
Two oddly allied mentalities provide intellectual air cover for
these threats to the marketplace. One is the extreme comfort certain
industries feel inside their regulatory environments. The other is the
high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises.
Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies
whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to
highly regulated environments.
That's what's happened with broadcasting and telecom.
There are barely more than 100 channels apiece on the AM and FM bands.
No region can allow more than a couple dozen local signals at most or
the signals step on each other--which they do anyway, as the FCC has
generally relaxed interference protections over the years to allow more
stations on the air. The carrying capacities of satellites and cable
systems also limit the number of available channels. If you want to
operate a new station of any kind on licensed broadcast spectrum, your
chances of finding an opening are approximately zero. It's a closed club.
There's also a problem with conceiving broadcast service--especially
the commercial variety--as a "marketplace." Its customers and
consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial
broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In fact,
commercial broadcasting mostly is an advertising business. The "content"
it distributes is merely bait; the goods sold are the ears and eyeballs of
"consumers". That means commercial broadcasting's real marketplace is
Madison Avenue, not radio and TV dials. As a consumer of commercial
broadcast programming, your direct influence is zero because that's
exactly what you pay. (Paying for cable or satellite service doesn't
count, because that payment is for access, not for the content
itself.)
The notable exceptions are "premium" channels like HBO and public
broadcasting. The reason why programming on both is relatively higher
in quality is a simple one: there's little or no split in their markets
between customers and consumers. As a viewer or listener, you get what
you pay for.
All of which is why this talk about the "media marketplace" is highly
screwed up. Relaxing broadcast property ownership rules, in the absence
of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly
deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation
that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a
completely closed marketplace.
This is all fine if you don't care about television and radio. But what
if you care about the Net and Linux What does broadcast deregulation
have to do with those
Plenty. The local ISPs that pioneered Net delivery were born under a
transient regulatory protection that largely has been sacrificed to give
regulatory advantage to cable and telecom industries. Ironically, both
industries are in deep trouble, mostly because they have no idea how to
deal with the Internet. The Net wasn't born inside their regulated
environments, yet they find themselves obliged to carry it anyway
because customers want it.
The Net's problem, from telco and cable industries' perspective, is it
was born without a business model. Its standards and protocols
imagine no coercive regime to require payment--no metering, no service
levels, no charges for levels of bandwidth. Worse, it was designed as an
end-to-end system, where all the power to create, distribute and consume
are located at the ends of the system and not in the middle. In the
words of David
Eisenberg the Internet's innards purposefully were kept "stupid". All
the intelligence properly belonged at the ends. As a pure end-to-end system,
the Net also was made to be symmetrical. It wasn't supposed to be like TV,
with fat content flowing in only one direction.
The Net's end-to-end nature is so severely anathema to cable and telco
companies that they have done everything they can to make the Net as
controlled and asymmetrical as possible. They want the Net to
be more like television, and to a significant degree, they've succeeded.
Most DSL and cable broadband customers take it for granted that
downstream speeds are faster than upstream speeds, that they can't
operate servers out of their houses and that the only e-mail addresses
they can use are ones that end with the name of their telephone or cable
company.
And why not These companies "own" the Net, don't they Well, no, they
don't. They only "provide" it--critical difference.
The gradual destruction of the Net is getting political protection by
two strong conservative value systems. One values success, and the other
values property. Let's look at success first.
Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big
business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple:
they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and
achievement. They hate rewarding weakness for the same reason a parent
hates rewarding kids' poor grades. This, more than anything else, is
what makes conservatives so radically different from liberals. It's why
favorite liberal buzzwords like "fairness" and "opportunity" are
fingernails on the chalkboards of conservative minds. To conservatives,
those words are code-talk for punishing the strong and rewarding
the weak.
As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know
that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives
consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.
In street basketball there's a rule called "make it, take it". If you score
a basket, you get to keep the ball. Three-on-three basketball works the
same way. So do volleyball and other sports with rules that favor
achievement over fairness.
Relaxing media ownership rules is all about "make it, take it". Clear
Channel and Viacom have made it. Why not let them take more It's simply
the marketplace at work, right Again, only in a highly regulated context.
We can't change conservative value systems. But we can change the
emphasis on what we conserve and why. That's why we need to figure a way
around the Property Problem too.
We met that problem head-on and lost, with
Eldred v. Ashcroft, a
case that challenged the
target="_blank">Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Eldred made it to the Supreme Court last year, shepherded from start to
finish by
Lawrence Lessig,
Stanford law professor, author, constitutional scholar and former clerk
for archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
target="_blank">Oral arguments were heard in October.
On January 15, 2003, the justices struck down the challenge by a vote of 7-2.
Justice Ginsberg wrote the
target="_blank">majority opinion.
Justices
target="_blank">Stevens and
target="_blank">Breyer wrote dissents.
A loud hubbub followed. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I did
target="_blank">my own thinking out loud on the
American Open Technology
Consortium (AOTC) site, suggesting the reasons for Eldred's failure
had more to do with language than with politics and law:
I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully
repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they
successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of
property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict
legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme
Court...
Watch the language. While the
one
side talks about "licenses" with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share
and perform, the
other side
talks
about "rights" with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure,
authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe and
steal. This isn't just a battle of words. It's a battle of
understandings.
To my surprise, Professor Lessig found my idea convincing. In
href="http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2003_01.shtml#000889"
target="_blank">Doc's Diagnosis, Lessig wrote:
Doc has a brilliant and absolutely correct diagnosis
at the American Open Technology Consortium
web site about how we lost in Eldred. Copyright is understood to be
a form of simple property. The battle in Eldred thus sounded like
a battle for and against property. On such a simple scale, it was
clear how the majority of the Court would vote. Not because they
are conservative, but because they are Americans. We have a
(generally sensible) pro-property bias in this culture that makes
it extremely hard for people to think critically about the most
complicated form of property out there--what most call
"intellectual property." To question property of any form makes
you a communist. Yet this is precisely our problem: To make it
clear that we are pro-copyright without being extremists either way.
So deep is this confusion that even a smart, and traditionally
leftist, social commentator like Edward Rothstein makes the same
fundamental mistake in
target="_blank">a piece published
Saturday. He describes the movement, of which I am part, as
"countercultural," "radical," and anti-corporate. Now no doubt
there are some for whom those terms are true descriptors. But I
for one would be ecstatic if we could just have the same copyright
law that existed under Richard Nixon...
How to change the debate is the hardest thing. But rather than
philosophy, perspective and pragmatics seems the best way. Build a
public domain (which
Creative Commons
will help to do), and show people and companies how the public
domain helps them. Indeed, of all the companies out there, this is
the one point Disney should certainly understand: Now that they
have won the Eldred case, they should be racing to embrace the
Eldred Act. No company has depended more upon the public domain.
The Eldred Act would give them much more to build upon.
I agree about perspective and pragmatics, and I think Creative Commons
is a brilliant institution that will change the game in the long run.
But, I still think we lose in the short run as long as copyright (and, for
that matter, patents) are perceived as simple property. Our challenge
is to change that.
So, how do we out-simple "simple" It helps to revisit our original
concepts of property -- concepts conservatives can espouse and promote.
Duhaime's Law Dictionary defines property
this way:
Property is commonly thought of as a thing which belongs to
someone and over which a person has total control. But, legally,
it is more properly defined as "a collection of legal rights over
a thing". These rights are usually total and fully enforceable by
the state or the owner against others. It has been said that
"property and law were born and die together. Before laws were
made there was no property. Take away laws and property ceases."
Before laws were written and enforced, property had no relevance.
Possession was all that mattered. There are many classifications
of property, the most common being between
real property or immovable property
(real estate, such as land or buildings) and "chattel", or movable
property (things which are not attached to the land such as a
bicycle, a car or a hammer) and between public (property belonging
to everybody or to the state) and private property.
In National Review,
target="_blank">John Bloom puts the same idea this way:
Whoever turned "copy right" into one word had to be a lawyer. We
don't say "freespeechright" or "gunright" or "assemblyright" or
"religionright."
As a result, 99 percent of the public thinks that a copyright is
some kind of formal legal document. They think you have to go get
it, or protect it, or defend it, or preserve it, or buy it, or
hire a lawyer to make sure you have it.
On the contrary, it's simply a right, like all our other rights,
and it goes like this: Whoever creates something that has never
been created before has the exclusive right to copy it.
It's not the person who registers it with the Library of Congress.
It's the person who does it first. Just the act of creation
makes the right kick in.
Unlike other rights, though, this one is transferable. You can
sell your copyright, license your copyright, or give your
copyright away. What's most often done is that you let a big
company--say, a book publisher--use the copyright for a specific
period of time, in return for money, and at the end of that period
the right reverts back to you.
One other difference: This is a right with a specific term.
The Founding Fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an
additional 14 years if the author [was] still alive. After 28
years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your
creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we
would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar
to the printers guilds of Renaissance England, who tied up rights
to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be
printed and who could or could not use literary material.
In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would
never happen, they said.
Well, it's happened. It's happened because for years now Congress
has allowed it to happen. We now have an exact replica of the
medieval Stationers' Company, which controlled the English
copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL
Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of
dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and
Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic
system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity.
To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of
Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions--and it's
worked...
National Review is a conservative magazine. John Bloom is a conservative
columnist. This is significant.
What will it take to revitalize this understanding of property and to
cause outrage against the damage done to it by Congress
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that,
we need to treat the Net as two things:
- a public domain, and therefore
- a natural habitat for markets
In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done
enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
The Internet has proven to be a fine marketplace for all kinds of stuff.
Look up any product on a search engine, and you'll see free markets at
work all over the place, with power growing on both the supply and the
demand sides o every category you can name.
Markets flourish on the Net or with the help of the Net because the
Net is free. That's free as in beer, speech, liberty and enterprise.
That freedom is guaranteed by the end-to-end nature of the Net, and
the NEA principles it engenders: "Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it
and Anybody can improve it."
This may sound a bit like communism to conservative sensibilities,
unless it is made clear that the Net belongs to that class of things
(gravity, the core of the Earth, the stars, atmosphere, ideas) that
cannot be owned and even thinking about owning it is ludicrous.
Now, to the elections. Look at the two big political parties; both have
existed largely as funding mechanisms. For proof, ask yourself, "When
was the last time I went to a party meeting" Whatever other functions
they serve, the parties are fundamentally about The Money.
At least until the Net came along.
As I write this, Democratic candidate Howard Dean just gathered
his party's largest campaign fund for the most recent quarter. The
mainstream press has acknowledged that most of this money came from
fund-raising on the Internet. But they avoid visiting a fact that
should be deeply troubling to every candidate running (and then
governing) for money rather than for voters: Dean's lead is owed to a
huge number of small donations, not to a small number of large special
interests. If he's being bought, it's by his voters. This is a New
Thing. It's also been made possible by the Net.
I am not endorsing Howard Dean here (for the record, I'm a registered
independent who mostly has voted Libertarian in recent state and federal
elections). But I am endorsing a new kind of politics based on the
presence in the world of a free marketplace for ideas as well as for
products and services. We get to protect that free marketplace by
exercising our freedom to use it.
Saving the Net and the NEA goods that thrive on the Net should be a
paramount concern for technologists everywhere. Those goods include
Linux and every idea that's good enough to grow when it passes from one
brain to another, gaining value along the way.
Our work is cut out for us. Let's do it.
Additional Resources
Eldred.cc, the
plaintiff's site.
Lawrence
Lessig's site and
target="_blank">weblog.
target="_blank">"John Bloom's Right and Wrong" (an excellent piece
in National Review) and the
target="_blank">Slashdot thread that followed.
target="_blank">"A Fine Balance" and
href="http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfmstory_id=1547223"
target="_blank">"A Radical Rethink" in The Economist.
target="_blank">"Mickey Mouse in Chains" in the Sacramento Bee.
"Copyright Gets Sweeter for Big
Business", in the Toronto Star.
target="_blank">"Voluntarily Limiting Copyright Terms", on
Kuro5hin.
target="_blank">"Embrace File Sharing or Die", on Salon.
Lawmeme,
Copyfight,
GrepLaw and
Bag & Baggage
also have provided piles of coverage and many links to more sources of
wisdom (B&B's list of law weblogs is comprehensive).
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.
July 22, 2003
US leads worldwide execution of child offenders
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE:
The USA's willingness to execute prisoners for crimes committed when they were children puts it in a world of its own, Amnesty International said today, as it published a new report on global adherence to the ban on the death penalty against child offenders - - those under 18 at the time of their crimes.
"Two thirds of the world's known executions of child offenders in the past decade occurred in the USA, including the only four in the past 18 months," Amnesty International said. "This is now the only country that openly continues to carry out such executions within the framework of its regular criminal justice system."
"The execution of child offenders has become rare relative to the wider use of capital punishment, with the USA by far the leading perpetrator."
The organization recorded 22,588 executions in 70 countries between 1994 and 2002. Nineteen of these executions were of child offenders, put to death in five countries. Twelve of these internationally illegal killings occurred in the USA.
"Questions have been raised about the USA's commitment to international standards of justice since 11 September 2001.Here is the prime example of a longer-standing US tendency to adopt a selective approach to international human rights law." Amnesty International said.
The international community has adopted four human rights treaties of worldwide or regional scope which explicitly exclude child offenders from the death penalty. This exemption is also contained in the Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols. The ban is so widely recognized and respected that it has become a principle of customary international law.
In today's report, Amnesty International calls for the prohibition to be recognized as a peremptory norm of general international law (jus cogens), binding on all countries regardless of which treaties they have or have not ratified, and regardless of any conditions they may have attached to such ratifications. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reached this conclusion last October in a case of an inmate on death row in Nevada for crimes committed when he was 16.
"Half a century after the Fourth Geneva Convention was adopted, three and a half decades since the adoption of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and over a decade since the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force, it is surely time for the USA to admit that it is clinging to an unacceptable practice of the past," Amnesty International said.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by 192 countries, and is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. No state party has entered a specific reservation to its provision excluding child offenders from the death penalty. The USA made such a reservation when it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992. This US reservation has been widely condemned, including by several other countries as well as the expert body set up to oversee implementation of the treaty.
Background
In 2002, a US government delegation told the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children that the USA was "the global leader in child protection". Meanwhile, some 80 prisoners await executions on US death rows for crimes committed when they were 16 or 17. There is also concern that a Canadian national currently held at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay could yet face the death penalty if selected for trial by military commission. Omar Khadr was reported to have been 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002. He may be a suspect in the shooting of a US soldier.
For a fully copy of the report "The exclusion of child offenders from the death penalty under general international law", please see:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engact500042003
July 17, 2003
Masturbation Can Prevent Prostate Cancer, Study Claims
Scott Roberts and Linda Searing, ScoutNews, report via DrKoop.com:
The more often young and middle-age men ejaculate, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer, Australian researchers report in the journal New Scientist.
The Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne asked 1,079 men with prostate cancer to answer a survey describing their sexual habits, comparing those answers with 1,259 healthy men of the same ages.
Although the preventive effect held true for men between the ages of 20 and 50, the effect seemed greatest among men in their twenties, the researchers conclude. Those in their twenties who ejaculated more than five times a week were one-third less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer later in life, they say.
The latest findings appear to contradict previous studies, which found that having many sexual partners or a high frequency of sexual activity increased the risk of prostate cancer by up to 40 percent.
The Australian researchers have a simple explanation: "Men have many ways of using their prostate which don't involve women or other men," explains the study's lead author, Graham Giles.
The scientists speculate that ejaculation prevents carcinogenic substances from building up in the prostate, lowering a man's risk of cancer.
Copyright © 2003 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 7/17/2003
July 14, 2003
Hunting for Bambi
LuAnne Sorrell, KLAS-TV Reporter
(July 10) -- It's a new form of adult entertainment, and men are paying thousands of dollars to shoot naked women with paint ball guns. They're coming to Las Vegas to do it. This bizarre new sport has captured the attention of people around the world, but Channel 8 Eyewitness News reporter LuAnne Sorrell is the only person who has interviewed the game's founder.
George Evanthes has never been hunting. "Originally I'm from New York. What am I going to hunt Squirrels Someone's cats. Someone's dogs I don't think so," said Evanthes. Now that he's living in Las Vegas , he's finally getting his chance to put on his camouflage, grab a rifle and pull the trigger, but what's in his scope may surprise you. He's not hunting ducks or even deer. He's hunting woman. Naked women.
"I've done this three times," says Nicole, one of the three women allowing themselves to be shot at. "I've done this seven times," says Skyler, another woman participating. "I've done it seven times," says Gidget the third woman.
Hunting for Bambi is the brain child of Michael Burdick. Men pay anywhere from $5000 to $10,000 for the chance to come to the middle of the desert to shoot what they call "Bambi's" with a paint ball gun. Burdick says men have come from as far away as Germany. The men get a video tape of their hunt to take home and show their friends.
Burdick says safety is a concern, but the women are not allowed to wear protective gear -- only tennis shoes. Today while the Eyewitness News cameras were rolling, one woman chose to wear bikini bottoms but normally all they wear is their birthday suits.
Burdick says hunters are told not shoot the women above the chest, but admits not all hunters follow the rules. "The main goal is to be true as true to nature as possible. I don't go deer hunting and see a deer with a football helmet on so I don't want to see one on my girl either," said Burdick.
The paint balls that come out of the guns travel at about 200 miles per hour. Getting hit with one stings even with clothes on, and when they hit bare flesh, they are powerful enough to draw blood.
Evanthes shot one of the women and says, "I got the one with the biggest rack."
Gidget is the one who took the paint ball shot to the rear. She says, "It hurt. It really hurt. I didn't think it was going to be that bad. When asked if she cried she says,"yeah, a little bit."
So why do women agree to strip down and run around the desert dodging paint balls Nicole says it's good money. "I mean it's $2500 if you don't get hit. You try desperately not to and it's $1000 if you do, said Nicole.
Now both the men and women say this is all good, clean fun, but in Part 2 of this story, reporter LuAnne Sorrell spoke with a psychologist who says for some men playing out this sexual aggression may lead to other more violent acts against women.
Michael Burdick, the founder of HuntingForBambie.com, explains the game to three women early Monday morning: "You have to collect 4 flags throughout the course. Some are easy for you and some are not easy." It's a new adult game, that's only being played in Las Vegas. The woman begin stripping down to just their tennis shoes and start to dodge the paint balls that go buzzing by.
"We got a hit," George Evanthes says. He just shot one of the women in the butt. "It was sexy. Let's put it that way," says Evanthes. "It got me going." Although playing "Hunting for Bambi" got George Evanthis going, the fear of getting hit by a paint ball traveling at around 200 miles per hour is what gets the women going. That, and the fact that they get paid $2,500 if they escape unscathed, and $1000 if they do get hit.
George Evanthes says "as you can see this is not lethal, and it wasn't meant to hurt anybody. Just good clean fun."
Burdick says the majority of the men who pay the $5000 to $10,000 to play the game are the submissive, quite type: "For the individual who's used to saying I can't go out with the boys tonight ...my wife doesn't want me to, and yes dear, no dear, the wimp of America, it's a chance for him to come out and vent his aggression and really take charge and have some fun."
Marv Glovinsky is a clinical psychologist. He says Hunting for Bambi is every man's fantasy come true: "You might think of all men as little boys who have never grown up, so they entertain their adolescent fantasies and they go through life being adolescents on the hunt."
But Glovinsky says this so called game that mixes violence with sexuality can be dangerous for men who can not distinguish fantasy from reality, and acting out the violence in this game could lead to them acting out real violence: "If you're blurring reality and fantasy and you can't make the distinction and you're emotions over power your intellect or your higher mental function, your going to get into trouble, and if you have a control problem to boot, that's really going to cause problems." Problems like beating, raping or even hunting women with a real gun.
Hunter Evanthes disagrees: "This is just a game: get serious, get real," says Evanthes.
But some say it's a game which may have consequences that go far beyond the playing field.
July 09, 2003
Britney: I'm no virgin
The Daily Telegraph (AU) reports:
POP princess Britney Spears has admitted for the first time that she is not a virgin, but claims the only person she has slept with is her former boyfriend Justin Timberlake.
Her comments to the August issue of the style magazine W contradict her previous insistence that she would wait till marriage to lose her virginity. "I've only slept with one person my whole life," said Britney, 21.
"It was two years into my relationship with Justin, and I thought he was the one. But I was wrong!"
The star described the split from the N' Sync heart-throb as "the most painful thing I've ever experienced", and said that her love life has yet to recover. Britney also discussed her rumoured fling with Irish actor Colin Farrell, whom she accompanied to the premiere of his movie "The Recruit" in February.
"Yes, I kissed him. Of course, I did!" she said. "He's the cutest, hottest thing in the world. But it was nothing serious.
"Seriously, I haven't had a boy in a long time, and I'm really craving a kiss."
Lockheed Martin Employee Kills 5 Co-Workers
Clay Harden (), The Clarion-Ledger, reports:
MERIDIAN — Questions remain today amid the spent shell casings and blood-stained reminders as to why a plant worker burst into an ethics class Tuesday morning, killing five co-workers, wounding nine others and killing himself.
"At first, I thought it was something falling on the ground," said Lockheed Martin employee Booker Steverson. "Then I walked to the aisle and saw him aiming his gun. I took off. Everybody took off."
Lauderdale County Sheriff Billy Sollie said co-workers tried to stop Williams, 48, a production assembly man for the past 19 years. "A least two employees tried to restrain him," Sollie said. "He obviously was not stopped because he had his mind made up what he wanted to do."
Lockheed Martin President Dain Hancock said company officials were interviewing all 138 employees who were at work Tuesday. He would not speculate on a cause of the violence.
"This is a horrible tragedy and a senseless crime that has befallen this community," Hancock said. The plant, which had minimal security, will remain closed through the weekend, he said.
Sollie has planned a noon news conference today to reveal more details.
The incident is the nation's deadliest workplace shooting since a software tester in Wakefield, Mass., killed seven people on Dec. 26, 2000.
The most recent Mississippi workplace shooting occurred in 2000 when Doug Mills shot his estranged wife and a supervisor at the Heatcraft plant in Grenada.
Bobby McCall of Cuba, Ala., whose wife Lanette was killed, said she was the subject of racial threats by Williams. The remarks were made to other employees behind his wife's back.
"Obviously, he was a sick guy," McCall said of Williams. "I wish somebody had given him some help before he destroyed my life and my kids' lives."
McCall, who had worked at Lockheed for 19 years, had two daughters, 20 and 29, and two grandchildren.
Williams, 48, of Russell, was attending a mandatory ethics class before the shootings, first reported at 9:43 a.m.
Also killed were Sam Cockrell of Meridian, Thomas Willis of Yantley, Ala., the Rev. C.J. Miller of Meridian and Mickey Fitzgerald of Little Rock.
Investigators recovered a .22-caliber derringer, a .45-caliber pistol and a .22 rifle with a scope from Williams' silver Dodge Ram 1500 truck, parked 50 feet from the front left corner of the Lockheed Martin facility.
Trymonne Williams, 31, of Ridgeland said he and a colleague were working about 15 yards from the plant when they heard "three shots go off." "The bullets ricocheted after hitting a trash can. I said, 'We got to move out of the way,' and I took off running."
Williams, a pump installer for a drilling company in Jackson, ran into a field with co-worker Ricky Thompson, 34, of Jackson. They said they were soon joined by Lockheed Martin employees suddenly exiting the building.
"When it was all over, we got together and said a prayer,'' Williams said.
Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove deplored the incident.
"Mississippi's family grieves today for this senseless tragedy," he said. "My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the lost and the wounded."
Meridian Mayor John Robert Smith said such incidents are rare in Lauderdale County. "We pride ourselves as the safest city in the state with more than 35,000 people," Smith said. "These industries represent more than jobs; to us, they represent family. We will be there for them."
A prayer vigil, led by area ministers, was held in front of Meridian City Hall at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
"This is not the old South," said the Rev. John Jacob, pastor of Grace Church of Collinsville, who like others dismissed reports that Williams' actions are part of a deeper racial divide. "That's not the climate we live in (here)."
He pointed to a line at United Blood Services, which grew to nearly two blocks after the call went out for blood. There were both black and white donors.
Carl Fitzgerald, his wife, Thelma, and their daughter, Lanette Ezell, attended the vigil.
The shooting left Carl Fitzgerald with a double loss. He lost his second cousin, Mickey Fitzgerald and his good friend, the Rev. C.J. Miller. "Charlie Miller was not just a good pastor but (also) a good friend," he said.
Sollie, sheriff since 1996, said the incident is the worst he has seen since a double homicide in south Lauderdale County. "This is not supposed to happen in Lauderdale County," Sollie said. "Everyone is still pretty much in shock."
Staff writers Sylvain Metz and Andy Kanengiser contributed to this report.
Man Ends 19 Years In Coma
The Evening Times (UK) reports:
A PATIENT woke up from a coma after 19 years and greeted his mother who was at his bedside.
Terry Wallis, 39, had been unconscious since a car crash in July 1984.
"He started out with 'Mom' and surprised her and then it was 'Pepsi' and then it was 'milk' and now it's anything he wants to say," said Alesha Badgley, social director of Stone County Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre, in Mountain View, Arkansas.
Mr Wallis was injured when the car he was in plunged into a creek. He was comatose and his friend, who was also in the vehicle, was dead when the pair were found underneath a bridge the following day.
His wife, Sandi, said: "It's been hard dealing with it, it's been hard realising the man I married can't be there.
"We all, the whole family, missed out on his company."
The Wallises daughter, Amber, was born shortly before the accident.
She is now 19 and Mr Wallis, who was left a quadriplegic as a result of the crash, said that he wants to walk again, for her.
His mother, Angilee Wallis, said that her son's return to consciousness was a miracle.
She said: "I couldn't tell you my first thought, I just fell over on the floor."
Mr Wallis has spent most of his time at the rehabilitation centre but his family took him out for weekends and special occasions.
Sandi said: "The doctor said that's why he remembers things. We might have kept his mind going."
Mr Wallis regained consciousness around two weeks ago.
July 08, 2003
K5 is on vacation for the day
Yesterday those of you who were around might recall seeing the [kuro5hin.org] site down or really slow for a good chunk of the day. There were some database problems, then a really bizarre thing with the Scoop servers which was solved by rebooting them, but after the reboot one came back up without sshd running so I can't get in to configure it, and then some kind person decided to DoS us mildly. Oh, and I upgraded the database somewhere in there too.
So we're on one Scoop server at the moment, and the database really needs to be archived more. I wrote a script to do archiving a lot faster, but it needs to run for a while, and it's 4AM here and what with everything else I think I'm just calling today a maintenance day so I can go to bed.
It's summer, and I'm sure many of you have things you've been meaning to get to. So now's the time. Enjoy your K5 vacation day, and we'll see you bright and early on Wednesday.
--rusty
South African Government Opts For Open Source
[ITWeb, 4 Jul 2003] The increasing role of information technology in government offers an integral tool for the strengthening of state institutions. Last year, at the eAfrica Conference, a conference about developing information technology in governance on our continent, delegates - both politicians and officials - told of the challenges of providing government services in countries ravaged by decades of war, famine and political instability, where infrastructure is minimal.
Along with IT development comes considerable cost. In a developing country like SA, billions are spent on software licences - billions of dollars in valuable foreign exchange, money going out the country that could be used to build houses, roads, hospitals and schools, are going to multi-national companies in order to use their software.
Is there an alternative Yes, and it is called open source software (OSS).
(via Linux Today)
Government adopts an open source software strategy
SA is now joining a growing list of countries whose governments formally recognise the value of OSS. Last month Cabinet approved the OSS strategy compiled by the Government IT Officers Council joining a diverse range of countries, including Germany, Mexico, China and others in explicit recognition and utilisation of OSS.
Not only will we save taxpayers' money directly but because government is the country's largest IT user, its adoption of OSS is expected to act as stimulus for adoption in other sectors.
The value of OSS
Cost
OSS has the potential to improve the cost and speed of service delivery and thereby efficiency in the public service. It can also impact positively on quality. Existing OSS can be obtained at low expense and then redistributed widely without further payment for licences. This creates a potential for significant cost saving. Furthermore, because different vendors all have access to the source code, they can compete to sell their support services, exercising downward pressure on prices.
Support
As long as there is a market for support, the open source code allows anybody to provide it, whereas proprietary software (PS) support is dependant on the development company. If that company goes out of business, the support can disappear with it.
Security
Some critics maintain that using OSS is a security risk. Real experts can allay that fear. In fact, the availability of source code has the added advantage of enabling the user organisation to study it, determine whether its functioning poses any security risks and amend the software if so desired. Furthermore, when new problems are found, solutions are available far sooner than with PS, as anyone can examine the problem and find its solution.
Versatility
Because the OSS development communities are in general not associated with specific platforms, OSS can normally run on different platforms. (A platform is either the hardware used to run a programme, or the operating system - for example MS Windows - or a combination of the two.) Where it cannot, the open source code can make it possible to adapt, so that it does function on the desired platform. OSS is in many cases able to function on older machines that are no longer suitable for running the latest versions of comparable PS.
Forex savings and local development
OSS shifts the expenditure from licensing paid in forex to software adaptation and training, which can be done by local service providers.
Potentially better software
The more popular OSS is being used and further developed by many individuals across the world. Collectively these user communities tend to be able to find and fix flaws in programs faster than a company that develops and sells proprietary software, The peer review made possible by open source code brings many more minds to bear on the software and leads to software which is more error-free and resource-efficient than proprietary software.
How is OSS utilisation going to be driven
Two institutions in the Minister of Public Service and Administration's stable that are playing a leading role in OSS development are the State IT Agency (SITA) and the Centre for Public Service Innovation.
SITA is committed to establishing an OSS unit that will provide the support capacity for OSS applications. The Centre for Public Service Innovation has taken on the task of launching a number of demonstrator projects, aimed at implementing the OSS development philosophy for a selected number of applications, in order to demonstrate how the OSS model works in practice.
The process of establishing the "Digital Meraka", the CSIR's new OSS Resource Centre, has begun. The centre will strive to stimulate the OSS approach in SA and contribute to related efforts on the African continent and in the rest of the world.
Government's involvement in OSS
Subway to the bottom of the sea
Keith Meyers/The New York Times
An old New York City subway car was pushed into the ocean Thursday off Cape May, N.J. A total of 50 cars were added to an artificial reef.
(via BoingBoing)
Subway Cars' Last Stop: Under Sea, Not Ground
By ROBERT HANLEY
APE MAY, N.J., July 3 — The hollowed hulks of 50 obsolete New York City subway cars were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean off South Jersey today to begin a watery new life as a haven for fish.
The 50-foot cars, known as Redbirds and long the workhorses of New York's numbered subway lines, became the latest and largest additions to a man-made artificial reef about eight miles off Cape May.
Bradley M. Campbell, New Jersey's environmental commissioner, seemed ecstatic after spending about 90 minutes watching a steam shovel push the dull-red hulks off a barge into about 70 feet of water. They all sank in seconds.
"This is the biggest enhancement of our artificial reef system in one stroke," he said. "This is a win for New Jersey's fishermen, a win for the shore economy and a win for the marine environment because we're enhancing fish habitat."
Mr. Campbell expressed none of the misgivings about asbestos in the old cars that two years ago prompted the state to reject New York City's offer of 650 Redbirds. New York State passed on a similar offer. But New Jersey leaders have since changed their minds, and are eager to use the cars. Over the next two months, four more New Jersey reefs will each receive 50 of the cars.
Recreational and commercial fishermen extolled the subway cars as welcome additions to the artificial reefs, which are piles of old Army tanks and armored personnel carriers, tons of concrete and other construction debris, and scrap steel. The reefs first attract mussels, barnacles and tiny plants. Then sea bass, tautog and flounder come to feed on them. Later, bigger game fish, sometimes tuna and sharks, arrive.
Fishermen say the reefs, like all underwater structures, teem with marine life and become a boon to their hobbies and livelihood.
New York City Transit called ocean disposal the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of the 40-year-old Redbirds.
Yet some jitters about asbestos in the cars linger. New York State, for instance, has passed up a chance to obtain 650 Redbirds for the 11 reefs it has built off Long Island since 1962. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation is still not convinced the asbestos is safe for marine life.
"There's conflicting opinion on whether the cars are safe or desirable," said Matt Burns, a spokesman for the department. "Our first choice is to use more benign materials."
Mr. Campbell, New Jersey's environmental commissioner, said he was satisfied the asbestos would not harm the environment. He said he based his opinion in part on a 2002 study by the federal Environmental Protection Agency that found that ocean disposal of the cars was safe.
That study was issued about a year after New Jersey's acting governor, Donald T. DiFrancesco, rejected the offer of 650 cars for the reefs, citing concerns about the asbestos.
Asked today why the state had reversed its position, Mr. Campbell said, "We took a closer look at the science and we weighed the interests of our saltwater anglers more heavily, and then we struck a more balanced approach."
David Ross, the New York City Transit official overseeing disposal of the Redbirds, said the agency was satisfied the asbestos would not pose problems. "In the water, it doesn't have any health hazard at all," Mr. Ross said as he watched the old cars, one by one, sink into the ocean.
The asbestos, he said, is embedded in an epoxy substance in the floor tiles of the cars and between their exterior and interior walls. The substance was used for insulation, soundproofing and fire retardation. Mr. Ross said New York City Transit was satisfied the epoxy would remain intact, with the asbestos lodged in it, for decades in the ocean.
He said rocks in the ocean naturally contain asbestos. If any ever escapes from the epoxy, he said, it will be little different from asbestos getting loose from ocean rocks.
The Environmental Protection Agency study Mr. Campbell cited dealt with four New York subway cars dumped on an artificial reef off Delaware last year, and five others from Philadelphia's mass transit system placed on an artificial reef off Sea Girt, N.J., in 1990. The study's author, William Muir, an E.P.A. oceanographer, said he studied ocean water in and around the nine cars and found that asbestos levels did not exceed naturally occurring background levels at the two sites.
He also said that laboratory testing he performed on the epoxy from the subway cars shows that it did not dissolve, convincing him that there was little likelihood it would break up in the ocean.
The cars dumped offshore today were stripped of all doors, windows, hand grips, signs, wheels, engines, and oil and grease, Mr. Ross said.
Nearly 1,000 of the Redbirds have already been dumped in the last two years on artificial reefs off four other Atlantic Coast states. Delaware got 567, while 200 went to South Carolina, 150 to Virginia and 50 to Georgia, Mr. Ross said.
New York City Transit has only about 100 Redbirds left, Mr. Ross said, and they will go to museums or serve as work trains in the subway system. Cleaning and ocean disposal of the 1,200 cars will cost New York City Transit about $16 million, he said, half the estimated cost of cutting up the cars and burying them.