nettime SONY admits that CD/44.1PCM is inferior
The people at Irdial Discs deconstruct (to put it politely) Sony's hype about their newest audio technology: http://www.irdial.com/scum.htm - Sony: ...you don't have to throw out your old CDs, although once you have experienced SACD you may want to. Irdial: ...the true sound in every recording from the inception of digital mastering in the PCM era, from Betamax PCM 501 up to the CDRs and Exabytes that are now regularly sent to pressing plants, is now, by the admission of SONY lost to mankind. The true sound of these recordings will never EVER be heard by anyone, ever. Of course all of the labels that took our advice and mastered onto tape have been spared this disaster, but the truth is most record labels deafly embraced CD and digital mastering, and now, we all have to pay. - Wherever you stood in the vinyl vs. CD debate, it was not hard to see this coming. For years people have been predicting (or joking) that the record companies would at some point try to make everyone replace their entire music collections *again*. No one ever lost money overestimating the chutzpah of the record industry. But much more interesting is the question about information-loss that Irdial alludes to above. Will every record recorded in the last twenty years sound like digital garbage to listeners in 2015 (the way the amazingly accurate digital samplers of the eighties sound like shit now)? There are also frightening parallels here with Nicholson Baker's brilliant Double Fold (about libraries burning gorgeous old books and newspapers en masse to replace them with unreadable microfilm). Ditto for the situation with genetically engineered crops, but I'll save that for another time. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Project for a New Atlantis [pt 12]
True, of course, but the word cover is a bit tricky with Led Zeppelin. They famously stole dozens of old blues songs songs, in some cases almost note-for-note, and simply credited them to Page/Plant, collecting all the royalties for themselves. Nice work if you can get it. There are tapes floating around with forty minutes of Led Zeppelin songs recording thirty years earlier, some of them virtually identical to LZ's version. It's amazing how nervy they were. They were actually sued successfully in at least one or two cases. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime commercial communism
This is a fascinating subject. A few comments, if this thread isn't cold yet: The days of the paternalistic corporation are over in the U.S., but a handful of companies still provide a pretty warm cocoon for their employees. These tend to be some of the bigger and more elite financial companies, and so the beneficiaries tend to be pretty privileged workers, but it's still surprising what goes on at some of these places. (The top executives at nearly every company live in a virtual parallel universe that few people outside of their circle even know anything about, and those people are getting more and more lavish perks all the time, but that's another story.) In the extreme cases, these companies form almost a SEPARATE GOVERNMENT--not in the sense of lawmakers or -enforcers, but in the sense of protection of their citizens. For example, some of them have international SOS numbers for employees to call if they're in trouble anywhere in the world. This may not seem like much, but it's very revealing about the attitude toward government services at these elite corporations. Basically, in cases where it really matters, they wouldn't dream of relying on the government to take care of them--it's just understood that public services are not good enough for them. (And this is sort of true, in the sense that the public service infrastructure is in a constant state of decay--a vicious cycle, I guess.) They always employ private security, some of it much more elaborate (and probably more on the ball) than the Feds. Similarly, the idea of putting your kids in public school (even in wealthy neighborhoods) is often not even considered: When you're a high-level exec and you relocate, you look for a house and you look for a private school. There's a fine but real line between the usual dot-com type benefits (on-site massages, foosball, or whatever) and other kinds of services that say, We want to control everything ourselves, and not rely on the same public agencies as the hoi-polloi. Yes, some of this is the standard behavior of rich people, but there have also been subtle changes in the politics of benefits in the past couple of decades--I'd say Post-Reagan, significantly. I hate to quote Tom Wolfe, but there was an interesting throw-away line in Bonfire of the Vanities. The rich, Upper East Side bond trader takes a cab/limousine to work every morning, and this horrifies his father, a genuine Old Wall St. aristo, who took the Lexington Ave. subway to work (a twenty-minute ride) every day of his life. Forty years ago, it would have been inconceivable to actually take a limo to work every day. Now it's standard practice. For people at a certain level, the subways just don't exist. --Dave. On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, brian carroll wrote: hi Craig, .US corporations have long seemed to have become communal organizations by way of childcare, housing, eating, healthclubs, recreation when off work with employees, etc. and the role of ideology in culture is reinforced by these same mechanisms. For a minuscule portion of the working population of the .US perhaps, but for the vast majority (and still growing) they get nothing of the sort from their paymasters. true, most have none of it and few have some of it, though i wonder if it may function as part of the 'ideal' that drives ideology that this system does work at some point in some way- and possibly there is an element of the casino logic to it, to win big by landing in such jobs with the right education, etc. the yearly lists of 'best corporations to work for' judge these based on employee perks, etc. and during the dot-com boom in San Francisco, getting massages or playing ping-pong may also qualify in some way as to how the 'corporate campus', lifestyle even, may not be benign fun but a human resources gambit. Google retains this lifestyle and now is at the top, and yet it almost function as if a secret society, having replaced the machined IBM uniformed workforce. [...] -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/29/bulge/index.html [Nelson's photos at the URL above] NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president's bulge was not caused by wrinkled clothing. by Kevin Berger Oct. 29, 2004 | George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. I don't know what that is, he said on Good Morning America on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt. Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons. For the past week, while at home, using his own computers, and off the clock at Caltech and NASA, Nelson has been analyzing images of the president's back during the debates. A professional physicist and photo analyst for more than 30 years, he speaks earnestly and thoughtfully about his subject. I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate, he says. This is not about a bad suit. And there's no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt. Nelson and a scientific colleague produced the photos from a videotape, recorded by the colleague, who has chosen to remain anonymous, of the first debate. The images provide the most vivid details yet of the bulge beneath the president's suit. Amateurs have certainly had their turn at examining the bulge, but no professional with a r=E9sum=E9 as impressive as Nelson's has ventured into public with an informed opinion. In fact, no one to date has enhanced photos of Bush's jacket to this degree of precision, and revealed what appears to be some kind of mechanical device with a wire snaking up the president's shoulder toward his neck and down his back to his waist. Nelson stresses that he's not certain what lies beneath the president's jacket. He offers, though, that it could be some type of electronic device -- it's consistent with the appearance of an electronic device worn in that manner. The image of lines coursing up and down the president's back, Nelson adds, is consistent with a wire or a tube. Nelson used the computer software program Photoshop to enhance the texture in Bush's jacket. The process in no way alters the image but sharpens its edges and accents the creases and wrinkles. You've seen the process performed a hundred times on CSI: pixelated images are magnified to reveal a clear definition of their shape. Bruce Hapke, professor emeritus of planetary science in the department of geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh, reviewed the Bush images employed by Nelson, whom he calls a very highly respected scientist in his field. Hapke says Nelson's process of analyzing the images are the exact same methods we use to analyze images taken by spacecraft of planetary surfaces. It does not introduce any artifacts into the picture in any way. How can Nelson be certain there's some kind of mechanical device beneath Bush's jacket? It's all about light and shadows, he says. The angles at which the light in the studio hit Bush's jacket expose contours that fit no one's picture of human anatomy and wrinkled shirts. And Nelson compared the images to anatomy texts. He also experimented with wrinkling shirts in various configurations, wore them under his jacket under his bathroom light, and couldn't produce anything close to the Bush bulge. In the enhanced photo of the first debate, Nelson says, look at the horizontal white line in middle of the president's back. You'll see a shadow. That's telling me there's definitely a bulge, he says. In fact, it's how we measure the depths of the craters on the moon or on Mars. We look at the angle of the light and the length of shadow they leave. In this case, that's clearly a crater that's under the horizontal line -- it's clearly a rim of a bulge protruding upward, one due to forces pushing it up from beneath. Hapke, too, agrees that the bulge is neither anatomy nor a wrinkled shirt. I would think it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that there's something underneath his jacket, he says. It would certainly be consistent with some kind of radio receiver and a wire. Nelson admits that he's a Democrat and plans to vote for John Kerry. But he takes umbrage at being accused of partisanship. Everyone wants to think my colleague and I are just a bunch of dope-crazed ravaged Democrats who are looking to insult the president at the last minute, he says. And that's not what this is about. This is
nettime Citibank forced to suspend private-banking operations in Japan
This is quite a serious penalty (unless it gets overturned). U.S. regulators take note. The proof that the authorities in Japan, the EU, etc., are actually feared is in Citibank's respectful, no-bullshit response (ditto Microsoft, for example--though of course they contested the charges against them). The Financial Times reported that officials of Citibank Japan sincerely apologized in their statement. In contrast, Morgan Stanley was so flip about a fine imposed on them in the U.S. last year that they were actually scolded by the government and made to issue another statement apologizing for the first one. --Dave. - Citigroup Is Dealt Blow By Japanese Regulators By ANDREW MORSE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 17, 2004 1:48 p.m. TOKYO -- Japanese financial authorities ordered Citigroup Inc. to suspend its private-banking operations, in one of the harshest penalties ever handed down against a bank in Japan. The Financial Services Agency on Friday it would revoke subsidiary Citibank N.A.'s effective license to serve high net-worth customers. In a strongly worded statement, the financial regulatory body criticized the unit for not having properly functioning internal controls, adding that it found a long list of serious violations of laws and regulations and extremely inappropriate transactions. The order shuts down one Tokyo branch, as well as satellite offices in three major cities. The FSA said that over a three-year period, Citibank employees misled customers about the risk involved in some products, tied loans to the purchase of specific investments, allowed transactions that looked like money laundering and extended loans that would later be used to manipulate publicly traded stock, it said. Regulators also said Citibank's Japanese operations had ignored warnings from Citibank branches in other countries about problems with some clients. The punishment is the strongest against a bank since a Credit Suisse unit had its license pulled in 1999, according to FSA officials. The officials said that details of the investigation had been passed on to another regulatory body that might consider criminal charges separately. The closure of the private-banking business in Japan will have little material impact on Citigroup's overall performance. Citigroup posted net profit of $17.9 billion in 2003, of which only 3% came from the global private banking business. Though the unit's services are heavily promoted in Japan, they have fewer than 5,000 customers. Still, the severity of the punishment and the nature of the complaints will certainly further damage Citigroup's already-tarnished reputation. Earlier in the week, the financial services giant acknowledged that a huge trade it conducted in thinly traded European government bonds was problematic and had invited the scrutiny of local regulators, as well as the ire of other banks that lost millions of dollars in the trade. It's likely that Citigroup's other businesses in Japan will suffer in the wake of the FSA's actions. Japanese clients often halt business transactions with group companies when one unit falls foul of regulators. Citibank, which has been operating in Japan since 1902 and has 9,000 employees, also has a retail banking business and a securities arm in Japan. Citigroup has been on a campaign to rehabilitate its image after scandals involving controversial financing arrangements for troubled clients like Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. brought regulatory inquiries and shareholder lawsuits. Citigroup's reputation is also scuffed by a research scandal in which a high-profile analyst wrote glowing reports of companies Citigroup was doing business with. The FSA investigation portrayed a culture within Citigroup's Japan operations that tolerated lax and potentially criminal practices as long as aggressive sales targets were met. FSA officials said that Citibank salespeople routinely took advantage of Japanese customers, many of whom were wealthy, suggesting unrealistic returns on investments and encouraging them to purchase complicated, derivative products they didn't understand. In some cases, the salespeople sold derivative products based on U.S. Treasuries and Japanese government bonds at prices well above what the market would have indicated their price should be. Though FSA officials declined to say how much higher than fair value the prices were, they indicated Citibank salespeople put unreasonably high markups on the products. The private-banking arm also violated Japanese banking law by brokering and soliciting unauthorized products, including foreign real estate investments, foreign life insurance policies and deals involving art. Citibank said it was taking the appropriate measures to prevent the situation reoccurring. Six officers, including former chief country officer for Japan Charles Whitehead and head of private banking Koichiro Kitade, have left the
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
Joy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *Some US firms prefer cons to Indians* USA Today Ontario, July 8 [http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_873417,00150022.htm] But the convicted workforce elicits as much dread as interest. Companies flinch at the prospect of a public-relations backlash should news leak out that they employ hardened criminals. LOL! I was naive enough to believe, after reading the beginning of that sentence, that it would end with something like, should news leak out that they employ sub-sub-sub-minimum-wage slave-labor in prisons to do work that people should be getting real salaries and benefits for. Honestly. But, damn, it probably would be the hardened criminal aspect that would get my fellow Americans all riled up. What a country. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Un-Liberating the Airwaves: WFMU's Ken Freedman on the FCC
Un-Liberating the Airwaves WFMU's Ken Freedman on the Post-Janet Jackson FCC Interview by Dave Mandl Brooklyn Rail (http://brooklynrail.org) Dave Mandl (Rail): How have things changed for radio broadcasters in the wake of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance? Ken Freedman: Things have changed drastically in recent months. As recently as last fall, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a series of decisions that loosened their language rules considerably--ruling, for example, that the word fuck was permissible if used non-literally, as an adjective. Things have now not only reverted to the way they were before, they've become much more rigid than ever. Although there have not been any new rules passed into law yet by either the FCC or Congress, it's an entirely new landscape for TV and radio broadcasters. And as is always the case with the FCC, there are absolutely no written guidelines or definitions to help broadcasters determine what is legal speech and what is illegal speech. Rail: Does this affect mostly high-profile broadcasters, or is no one under the FCC's radar any more? Freedman: It's safe to say that no one is under the FCC's radar. Although most language fines have been leveled at larger commercial broadcasters, the FCC has historically fined many small community and college stations as well. And small non-commercial stations have (historically) had to pay the same fines as larger commercial stations. I think it's also safe to say that the FCC's most inexplicable and unfair language decisions have been leveled at small non-commercial stations. The best example of this was KBOO's airing of a Sarah Jones poem called Your Revolution, which was clearly a feminist poem, not sexual in nature, but it contained the phrase blow job. The FCC gave KBOO (a small, non-commercial, community station in Portland, Oregon) a $7,000 fine. KBOO spent double that in legal bills fighting the fine, but they eventually prevailed. Bear in mind that this case was several years ago, well *before* the current crackdown began. Rail: So why now? Is this really just because Janet Jackson flashed a breast on TV? Are there politics at work here--say, kissing up to the religious right? Or is this crackdown the kind of thing that some FCC member was dreaming of already, and Boobgate provided a golden opportunity? Freedman: The Super Bowl incident just added momentum to a process that was already in place. Due to rulings like last October's Bono ruling, TV and radio stations had been getting more and more adventurous with regard to sexual talk and antics on the air. For years, one of the FCC's five commissioners (Michael Copps, a Democrat) had been lobbying for more severe FCC punishments for language violations. He had been getting ignored until earlier in 2003, when several highly publicized incidents (including the Opie and Anthony sex at St. Patrick's broadcast, and the Madonna-Britney kiss) started giving him some traction. Then there was the Bono ruling, which really started the censorship wheels rolling. And then the Super Bowl just ignited it all and turned it into a hot political issue in an election year. The FCC claims they received 200,000 emails in the days following the Super Bowl. (They now claim that closer to 800,000 emails and letters have been received about this.) This put enormous pressure on Michael Powell (FCC head honcho) to deal with it. Powell took an enormous public black eye over the FCC's ownership issue last year [when the FCC relaxed restrictions on the number of stations individual companies could own]. Up until the Super Bowl, the ownership issue was the FCC's most popular debate ever, and the public came out largely *against* the FCC's stance on it. Powell couldn't politically afford to ignore Boobgate after the ownership fiasco. In fact, Powell did a 180-degree about-face on language. Up until the Super Bowl, Powell had a fairly sane approach to the censorship issue. He used to make public pronouncements that he didn't want the FCC to become the nation's nanny, etc. No more. This crackdown also has to be taken in historical context as yet another in a series of language crackdowns that the FCC periodically undertakes. But there's a big difference--during this crackdown, it looks like there will be new federal laws passed regarding language and censorship. That's never happened before. So even after this political storm subsides, broadcasters may have a whole new set of federal laws on the books that they will have to deal with for years. Rail: You mentioned the fact that this is happening in an election year. What's the significance of that? Is there pressure on the FCC from senators or the White House, for example? Freedman: There has been a great deal of pressure on the FCC from senators and congresspeople, over the indecency issue as well as other issues. But mostly, the indecency issue has simply become a point that incumbents can point to during the re-election
nettime We don't support that
Excellent article in Salon describing the nether world of customer service in the twenty-first century (what I like to call the No-Service Economy), from someone who spent a lot of time working there: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/ The explicitly stated goal of these people is to GET YOU THE HELL OFF THE PHONE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE--no more, no less. If that's not enough for you, there's an interesting discussion of the article on Slashdot, with some more illuminating first-hand accounts, here: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/23/163241.shtml --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Era of LibreSelf-Deception Society Manifesto
On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Morlock Elloi wrote: Generic capitalism bad something else good essays are FUCKING BORING. NO ONE READS THAT. MAKES YOU LOOK DUMB AND NOT BEING LAID IN MONTHS. So if we prevent everyone from getting laid for a couple of months they'll all turn against capitalism? Let's try it. Except me--I already dislike capitalism. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime CyberINsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly
http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf CyberINsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly How the Dominance of Microsoft's Products Poses a Risk to Security [From the introduction:] Computing is crucial to the infrastructure of advanced countries. Yet, as fast as the world's computing infrastructure is growing, security vulnerabilities within it are growing faster still. The security situation is deteriorating, and that deterioration compounds when nearly all computers in the hands of end users rely on a single operating system subject to the same vulnerabilities the world over. Most of the world's computers run Microsoft's operating systems, thus most of the world's computers are vulnerable to the same viruses and worms at the same time. The only way to stop this is to avoid monoculture in computer operating systems, and for reasons just as reasonable and obvious as avoiding monoculture in farming. Microsoft exacerbates this problem via a wide range of practices that lock users to its platform. The impact on security of this lock-in is real and endangers society. Because Microsoft's near-monopoly status itself magnifies security risk, it is essential that society become less dependent on a single operating system from a single vendor if our critical infrastructure is not to be disrupted in a single blow. The goal must be to break the monoculture. Efforts by Microsoft to improve security will fail if their side effect is to increase user-level lock-in. Microsoft must not be allowed to impose new restrictions on its customers - imposed in the way only a monopoly can do - and then claim that such exercise of monopoly power is somehow a solution to the security problems inherent in its products. The prevalence of security flaw in Microsoft's products is an effect of monopoly power; it must not be allowed to become a reinforcer. Governments must set an example with their own internal policies and with the regulations they impose on industries critical to their societies. They must confront the security effects of monopoly and acknowledge that competition policy is entangled with security policy from this point forward. [snip] -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime New from Autonomedia: BEHIND THE BLIP, by Matthew Fuller
New from Autonomedia... BEHIND THE BLIP: ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF SOFTWARE by Matthew Fuller Software actively shapes the way we know, see, and do things in the world. In BEHIND THE BLIP, a far-reaching and strikingly original collection of essays on the culture of software, new-media critic Matthew Fuller sets out some of the ways in which people are opening this process up to greater debate and experimentation. BEHIND THE BLIP brings together insights from social studies of science and philosophies of technology, with accounts and ideas from hackers, artists, inventors, programmers, and other users of software. BEHIND THE BLIP surveys the potential grounds for software criticism and proposes some currents in software that call for new ways of thinking about the subject. It also offers numerous case studies taken from Fuller's own experience participating in the production of a popular experimental web browser; a site parasiting search engines to hack racism on the net; and a large-scale disassembly of the world's favorite writing machine, Microsoft Word. BEHIND THE BLIP refuses to stop asking questions or settle for what's served up on the desktop. Along the way, fundamental possibilities for technology, computers, and culture are set loose. While most institutions are still trying to figure out what to do with 'new media,' some of the best new-media artists and theorists have already moved on to the next paradigm: the study of software culture. Matthew Fuller's excellent collection is the first monograph in this emerging field. Combining solid understanding of theory and modern art history with the groundbreaking practical work in software culture, Fuller brilliantly analyzes the tools which we all use every day to interface with the world and each other: web browsers, search engines, word processors. What Fuller gives us is not just a usual book of theory but rather a kind of software--a 'critical help system' to help us understand what is really going on behind the menu and the windows of our computer screens. --Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego; author of THE LANGUAGE OF NEW MEDIA (MIT Press) A compelling hybrid of sci-fi style merged with hard-edged software criticism from the perspective of a very dissatisfied customer. This book is your chance to ingest the venom and bile of Bill Gates's evil twin. --Critical Art Ensemble Matthew Fuller is Reader in Media Design at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. As a member of the group I/O/D and collaborator with the group Mongrel, he participated in some of the key experiments in software that ground this book. He is the author of ATM (Shake Editions) and co-editor of README! ASCII CULTURE AND THE REVENGE OF KNOWLEDGE (Autonomedia). BEHIND THE BLIP is published by Autonomedia: http://www.autonomedia.org Paper, $14.95, 6x9, 165 pages, ISBN 1-57027-139-9 Information: http://www.autonomedia.org/behindtheblip Individual orders and course adoptions: Autonomedia, Phone/Fax (718) 963-2603 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regular mail orders: PO Box 568, Brooklyn, NY. 11211-0568 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Quick note on Weill, Spitzer, and the N.Y.S.E.
However you feel about New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer's motives in his prosecution of Wall St. criminals, you've got to admire the guy. He may merely be grandstanding (with his eye on a higher political office), and naturally he's been ignoring deeper Wall St. issues while focusing on the prosecution of high-profile bogeymen like Jack Grubman, but the guy just keeps drawing blood. The latest: Sandy Weill, the C.E.O. of Citibank, was recently nominated as a director to represent public investors on the board of the New York Stock Exchange. He withdrew his nomination a few days later after a public outcry, mainly from Spitzer, who said: I can think of few people less-suited to represent the public interest on the New York Stock Exchange board than Sandy Weill. His company is paying one of the largest fines in history for perpetrating one of the largest frauds on the investing public. To imagine he should be the voice of the small investor is ludicrous. I was stunned to read this, even though it's so painfully obvious. The fact is that even though Citibank has just been fined a staggering $400 million for defrauding investors (with Weill directly implicated in the chicanery, incidentally), the public perception of them really hasn't changed at all. This is just not the kind of thing government officials say publicly about the head of Citibank. It was great to read it on the front page of the Wall St. Journal. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Christopher Hill, R.I.P
Christopher Hill, the great Marxist historian and author of The World Upside Down died this past Monday. Obituary at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,902955,00.html -- Dave Mandl [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
