February 03, 2003 -
TiVo: The Rise of 'God's Machine'
- By Lauren Weinstein (a commentary),
WiredNews, When FCC Chairman Michael
Powell recently referred to TiVo as
"God's machine," he sent shivers down
the spines of the conglomerates that
control the entertainment and
broadcasting industries. He upset them
even more by expressing interest in
trading recorded TV programs with his
sister. Industry insiders are already
foaming at the mouth over Powell's
comments praising the personal video
recorder, or PVR, made during a panel at
the Consumer Electronics Show. Some are
demanding that he recuse himself from
any consideration of related issues
before the FCC. With broadcasting
industry bigwigs proclaiming that people
who skip TV commercials are breaking the
law, Powell's comments must seem like a
nightmare come true to the powerful
media moguls...
February 01, 2003 -
Making a Virtue of Vice City -
By Daithí Ó hAnluain, WiredNews,
The popular video game Grand Theft Auto:
Vice City has been nominated for a
prestigious design competition in the
United Kingdom. However, the game's
depiction of violence and sexual
material is so graphic that the
competition's organizers, the Design
Museum in London, have refused to
display the actual game as part of an
exhibit depicting the nominees. "The
museum has a responsibility toward our
child visitors," said Libby Sellers, the
curator of the exhibition that will
accompany the Designer of the Year
award. "Some of them are aged 5 or 6,
and it was never our intention to
highlight the sex and violence or
graphic content of the games..."
February 01, 2003 -
Keep Your Enemies Closer -
WiredMag, Issue 11.02, Why hackers
are good for business - and vice-versa.
By Brendan I. Koerner, To mod the Bard:
What fools these console makers be! When
the Web site for Hong Kong-based
hardware retailer Lik Sang International
mysteriously went dark last fall,
Microsoft's fingerprints were all over
the shutdown. Lik Sang had been doing a
brisk business in chips that disabled
the Xbox's security controls, allowing
hobbyists to run open source nuggets
like Mozilla and Gimp on their consoles.
When the company's site reappeared a few
weeks later - minus the mod chips - a
brief explanatory note confirmed that,
yes, Microsoft and its console kin, Sony
and Nintendo, had threatened to sue. The
Big Three pledge that other scofflaws
face similar fates...
February 08, 2003 -
Moguls in the mailroom - New
book details Hollywood history from the
bottom up, THE TODAY SHOW, -- It’s
like something out of a Hollywood
potboiler: start out in the mailroom,
end up a mogul. Only for dozens of
Hollywood’s brightest, it happens to be
true. Some of the biggest names in
entertainment — including David Geffen,
Barry Diller, and Mike Ovitz — began as
trainees in musty talent agency
mailrooms. Now, in this fascinating new
book, veteran Hollywood writer David
Rensin travels behind the scenes and
through sixty-five years of show
business history to tell the real
stories of the careers that began — and
in some cases ended –– in the mailroom.
Read an excerpt “The Mailroom: Hollywood
History from the Bottom Up,” ...
February 06, 2003 -
Michael Jackson, too close for comfort
- Documentary’s unprecedented
candidness is unsettling. TV PREVIEW, By
Teresa Wiltz, THE WASHINGTON POST, We
could sit here and analyze the effects of
stardom on a person’s psyche, on the role
of celebrity vis-à-vis the public
obsession with wanting to know. We could
do that. But most likely, you’re reading
this not for a scholarly treatise on
narcissism and the public gaze, but
because you’d like to know if Michael
Jackson could be any freakier than what we
already believe him to be...
February 14, 2003 -
George Burns & Gracie Allen: A Love Story -
"For 40 years my act consisted of
one joke," George Burns was fond of saying. "Then she died." The woman
in question, as anyone within earshot of a radio or television in the
1950s would know, was his wife, Gracie Allen--and the female side of a
showbiz team whose ditzy banter in an era of idealized domesticity made
it one of the most beloved and successful comedy acts in history...
February 01, 2003 -
Logomancer - Wired Magazine, By
Rudy Rucker, Science fiction has long
been William Gibson's electric guitar -
the instrument he uses to gain
perspective, to transform life's ditties
into anthems of transcendent strangeness.
In Pattern Recognition (Putnam, $26), he
goes acoustic, unplugging the overt sci-fi
tropes that have marked his work and
producing a mainstream product. He
succeeds because our real world has such
gnarly tech (Web surfing on a laptop with
a Wi-Fi connection is functionally the
same as jacking your brain into a
cyberspace deck) and because his riffs
make such a good read...
February
22, 2002 -
Burn down the shopping malls!
- A new game for Sony's
Playstation 2 invites you to run
amok as an anti-globalization
anarchist. Is State of Emergency
a new high in cynical corporate
exploitation -- or
consciousness-raising in a box?,
By Wagner James Au, SALON.COM,
The fascist, capitalist
oppressors have finally locked
down the whole town, so now
we've got no choice but to take
the fight to them, and so we's
spreading through the streets
like kerosene, two hundred n'
fifty strong. But their Nazi
rent-a-pigs are already out
there to meet us, and they's got
their thug sticks out, and
they's wading in and going all
Rodney King on the peeps. But
that's the match that lights us,
and when we pass, whole city
blocks go up in flame. And the
corporate stores with their
sweatshop wares are getting
thrashed and licked by fire, and
its me and Ricky Trang, and a
rainbow coalition of kickass who
gots our backs -- cholos, niggaz,
kung fu kids from Chinatown, all
going hella wild on the racist,
consumerist, globalist system,
looting it clean, and it is
friggin beautiful...
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