Web Persuades WB to Scale Back Toon Designs

CNN reports on an eleven-year-old boy who started a web site (Save Our Looney Tunes) to protest Warner Brothers's angular redesigns of its classic Looney Tune characters. It apparently has paid off: the execs have decided to make them not so menacing. Score another one for the web? Wait till fall when the new show, "Loonatics" bows on the WB.

Evening Links

Seth Finkelstein has some interesting thoughts defending Google's new "TrustRank" effort to evaluate the credibility of news sources.

Open-source developer Edd Dumbill is dissatisfied with how the GNOME developer community is overly reluctant to make decisions about using higher-level programming languages. This article is useful as an insight into the problems that sometimes plague projects developed by communities even if you aren't a Linux type. OSNews discussion.

Americans want bloggers to have the same protections as journalists, according to survey. A bill currently in the federal House judiciary committee is trying to create a quasi-journalistic immunity but it does not include bloggers, at least not explicitly.

Ezra Klein endorses controlled nuclear proliferation, at least compared to the alternative which is unrestrained weapons development. This is a pretty heretical notion in foreign policy circles but one I think will catch on. I'm glad, too, because I think the ability of Pakistan and India to nuke each other now probably will avert their desire to invade each other. I'm not sure controlled proliferation is a good policy in all cases, but it's a proven fact that nuclear nations do not attack each other.

Michelle Malkin surveys several state governments' efforts to require photo identification in order to vote. If Republicans were smart, they'd make more of an issue of Democratic opposition to such sensible laws.

Bits: BBC launches big RSS effort. Virus takes down Reuters's internal IM system which was based on MSN Messenger. Samsung to release combo hard drive/flash disk for mobile systems to reduce power consumption. Steve Jobs bans all of publisher's books from Apple stores after it prints unauthorized biography. In-depth look at Wikipedia's Wikinews project.

Toll Lanes

The nickle-and-diming of America continues apace:

A provision in the $284 billion highway bill under consideration on Capitol Hill could open the way for more tolls on the nation's congested interstates, marking a departure from long-standing federal highway policy that has traditionally frowned on collecting tolls to pay for roads built with federal tax dollars.

Under the transportation bill passed by the House of Representatives last month, states would be allowed to convert overall up to 25 segments of the interstate highway system into toll roads over the next six years. The Senate is expected to vote on similar legislation this month.

It's already happening in my neck of the woods. Naturally, the government doesn't want to give up the tolls even after the construction is paid for. What happened to the idea of public service?

Canadian Poll Bias

Ed Morrisey has been doing a spectacular job of late keeping track of the "Adscam" scandal that is currently rocking Canadian politics, including breaking a draconian censorship regime imposed by a panel investigating the affair (which involves the minority government Liberal Party misappropriating hundreds of millions of dollars meant to preserve national unity and taking and giving bribes), but it looks like Ed might have fallen for some skewed polling data which purported to show lower Conservative support. Blue Maple Leaf has the details.

Any poll giving the Greens 10 percent should be automatically suspect in my book.

Related: U2 invites Prime Minister Paul Martin onstage, prompts crowd to boo him to increase foreign aid spending. Still, "he's a great leader for Canada." This came after band lead singer Bono bashed Martin on Canadian radio and told fill up his comment line with requests for more international spending to "end poverty."

And since you didn't ask, Canadian politics has always been one of my interests. The past few years have been decidedly so with the merger of two right parties, the rise of the NDP, and the ethical collapse of the Liberal party. I should also add that I'm a supporter of Quebec independence.

UPDATE: At least two Canadian MPs--Monte Soldberg of Alberta and Steven Fletcher of Manitoba--have a blog on their sites. For more on political blogging in Canada, see this from Stephen Taylor.

UPDATE: And you thought Canadian politics was boring: Conservative MP calls liberals "whores."

Weekend Television

Saturday is the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. Best two places online for coverage and comment will be gossip blog FishbowlDC and FreeRepublic.com where the members are continuing their annual tradition of "freeping" the press corps in-person and making snarky remarks about their outfits online. The dinner will also be on C-SPAN starting at eight.

"Family Guy" returns to Fox, Sunday, May, 1. Will it be able to withstand the primetime grind or is it just a late-night cable phenom?

UPDATE: C-SPAN's archive of the event is here (RealPlayer required).

UPDATE: The ratings are in for "Family Guy." Not too shabby.

O'Reilly: Wallace Best Broadcaster in American History

In his most recent column, FNC host Bill O'Reilly calls "60 Minutes" veteran Mike Wallace the best. Ever.

"Word for word, the best American broadcaster in history has to be Mike Wallace. The guy turns 87 in a few days and he's still hitting cleanup for CBS on Sunday night," he writes. "Wallace must have some kind of Dorian Gray thing going on, because he looks 25 years younger than he is, and can still put your fanny on the canvas during an interview. Here's the absolute bottom line on Mike Wallace: If you see him in a restaurant, have what he's having."

One other good line: "As everyone knows, the old school of broadcasters is closing down. Brokaw, Walters, Rather, Koppel, and maybe even Jennings are cutting back. In their place are some highly skilled people without much panache. Americans are incredibly distracted with all the new gadgets, and to get their attention, you almost have to break into their homes. The age of broadcast superstars is almost over. The age of 'Who's that, again?' is just about here.

Say what you will about his personality, but Bill O'Reilly has an intuitive feel for the medium of television.

Night Links

Norwegian woman convicted of raping a man.

How do you compare to British body politic? Take this test to find out where you are on their political axes. From the same people who brought you the creatively named Political Survey.

I have to get me one of these, a Motorola A630. Too bad only T-Mobile has them. I'm a Cingular subscriber.

Congressmen Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Albert Wynn are trying to fix the mess created by the travesty formerly known as McCain-Feingold. Senators, meanwhile, want more censorship reforms. So far, the media drums are staying quiet.

DUers (well one of them at least) discuss "biphobia."

Cookies, those little bits of information online advertisers and most web sites store on surfers' computers, are apparently irksome to most people. Adrants has the goods. I generally accept cookies only from sites where it's convenient for me to be logged in next time I visit.

David Limbaugh: Why do [liberals] seem to think that only Christians must keep their views to themselves once they are elected to office?

Great article by Stewart Brand on how the environment movement needs to change and embrace technology (such as nuclear power and genetic engineering) more. I suspect in less than 10 years, there will be a significant rift in the movement between tech skeptics and tech supporters, especially when more conservatives realize there's a lot of money to be made in preserving the environment through the market. (Via Dean.)

Joe Gandelman rounds up the reactions to the launch of Apple's new OS release. Joe also reports that the famous "Soup Nazi" from "Seinfeld" is actually opening up a chain of restaurants across the country.

Joi Ito on different cultures' attitudes towards punctuality. All the stereotypes are true he thinks, but largely because punctuality is something everyone in a society has to sort of agree on.

Matt Yglesias dismisses complaints of a long-term Chinese threat on the grounds that the US and its Asian allies have far more resources than China. Probably true, though I don't see how this argument applies to a short-term action. He also makes some sensible points on libertarian drug policy to illustrate how knee-jerk anti-paternalism doesn't make sense.

A Peek at Drudge's Laptop

Watching Matt Drudge on C-SPAN today, I happened to notice that he runs an unregistered version of the Opera on the laptop he was using. (Can't afford to register?) As far as content management goes, Drudge keeps it old-school with a text editor and WS_FTP to upload his plain-text HTML files.

Dave Matthews Band Settles Bus Waste Case

The Dave Matthews Band, settling a lawsuit stemming from human waste dumped from a tour bus onto people touring the Chicago River, has agreed to pay $200,000 to an environmental fund and take measures to avoid a repeat of the incident, the Illinois attorney general said Friday.

The bus was crossing a bridge last summer when the waste poured through metal grates onto the open deck of an architectural tour boat carrying more than 100 passengers. The agreement with Attorney General Lisa Madigan does not settle several personal-injury lawsuits that also have been filed.

The band agreed to record when and where its tour buses empty septic tanks.

More at SF Chronicle.

Be the Media

Marc Danziger (aka Armed Liberal) and Roger Simon announce a new venture, Pajama Media, to serve advertising and news content to other web sites. Sounds promising.

Pajamas Media was announced at a celebration of the LA Times's pioneering "Outside the Tent" feature where many of those present said lots about the impending death of newspapers. Coverage from: LAVoice.org, Patterico's roundup, Ezra Klein, LA Observed, Jay Rosen, Hugh Hewitt.

My take: newspapers are to computers what news is to data. The first two exist only for the sake of the second. Data processing is why we use computers. News is why people read the newspaper.

For decades, the tech world has been continually updating its data delivery systems, now, the media world needs to do the same with news delivery. As a physical medium, news publications are doomed, as a virtual medium, they have a chance if they adapt. Otherwise, Pajama Media and its successors and rivals will dispose of them.

UPDATE: The Associated Press recently set off many of its members by announcing that it will begin charging for online distribution of its content. Writing at Online Journalism Review, two Scripps Newspapers execs call for a true peer-to-peer replacement for AP. Will there be two noveau news services in the near future?

UPDATE: Jim Pinkerton and Glenn Reynolds write about the videogame and movie industries, two sectors of media I think are destined for collision and eventual merger. One-way news is on the way out. One-way entertainment will be as well.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall gives more details on the group blog project he's been dropping hints about.

Contradictory Kaus

Mickey Kaus looks at some ratings data from TVNewser and jumps to the conclusion that President Bush's approval ratings have fallen along with FNC's ratings. Nonsense. Fox's audience skews conservative and conservatives are generally more politically minded than liberals. With less political news around after the election, they've simply stopped tuning in. For further proof of this phenomenon, see this Washington Post article on how ratings are lower for talk radio as well as these Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds posts which inadvertently demonstrate my point.

CNN, meanwhile, attracts the more watching-the-news-is-good-for-you types who have steadier viewing patterns. Thus, its ratings haven't fallen as much post-election.

Another thing: if FNC's and Bush's ratings are directly proportional, doesn't this mean that the Bush-is-alienating-the-moderates idea that Kaus posted on just four hours earlier (while endorsing that Ron Brownstein piece I mentioned earlier) is wrong?

If conservatives are tuning out Bush and FNC, then that must mean Bush needs to be even more right-wing to win them back. If there is a hole in the center, then the Bush/FNC ratings are not tied together. Both can't be true.

When TV News Attacks

As you might know, Fox Broadcasting and its owner Rupert Murdoch are extremely upset over an upcoming ABC News report on the show "American Idol," a report which Fox says is designed to discredit "Idol" during May sweeps.

If that's true and it's wrong for ABC to do this, why did I catch a promo on Thursday's FNC informing me about a report on tomorrow's "O'Reilly Factor" investigating whether ABC has "gone too far?"

I doubt that either media giant's news division has been asked to play the flack by the suits upstairs, but surely there is some desire to please them at work here on both sides.

Now if only we could get them to do a reenactment of the fight scene from "Anchorman."

Bush Social Security Conference Notes

CBS and NBC cut off the Bush press conference before 9pm. ABC carried the whole thing.

ABC is testing the live anchoring skills of Elizabeth Vargas by continuing into the 9:00 hour and occupying more of its Thursday deadzone. NBC rotates to "Apprentice," CBS to "Survivor."

UPDATE: Is it just me or is George Stephanopolous starting to look more like Terry Moran?

UPDATE: 9:07, someone's phone goes off in the background at ABC.

UPDATE 4/29: BCBeat offers a helpful guide to telling the difference between Moran and Stephanopolous

MediaLife reports the ratings.

Woodruff Leaves CNN

The next chapter in the end of 90s television anchordom: Judy Woodruff, the host of CNN's "Inside Politics," is retiring from daily work at the network in June.

Forums: Instant reactions from Free Republic and Democratic Underground seem to indicate that both sides of the spectrum didn't have much use for her show.

While she was a bit bland at times, I think "Inside" improved in fairness and quality in the past few months. It was also one of the few respites on cable news from trial/celebrity/missing persons stuff. I hope CNN keeps the same focus in this timeslot.

Ratings data (old)

Afternoon Links

Fusion experiment produces no energy but may lead to new drilling, scanning techniques.

Guardian lampoons Huffington blog project. I'm detecting a parody of blogging in general as well. Funny stuff.

Maybe this is just the first time I noticed them, but this morning, I discovered Slashdot is now including advertising in its XML stream. In other web news, Yahoo unveiled its revamped news service today. I like. Jason Clarke talks about Weblogs, Inc's usage of RSS.

Captain Ed comments on the huge scandal in Canada revolving around the Liberal Party's enrichment of itself and supporters with money meant to bribe Quebec into staying in the country. Why haven't American media outlets covered this story much, he wonders.

I'd say its partly because they're filling their meager foreign news holes with Iraq stuff and that foreign affairs in this country is too often perceived as our dealings with Europeans. On this point, I note that Oxblog hasn't touched the scandal at all according to Google.

Peter Johnson, USA Today's head TV writer, has a lengthy piece in today's editions on how the broadcast networks are trying to change things now that Brokaw, Rather, and apparently Jennings, are fading into history.

Are Republicans reading too much into their electoral victories? Joe Gandelman is beginning to think so.

Speaking of misreading, the Washington Times says Bush critics are misinterpreting the final Iraq chem/bio weapon report I posted about earlier. It does not, according to the Times, deny the possibility that weapons were shipped out of Iraq. Perhaps I should get around to reading the actual report or at least the summary.

Microsoft Goes After PDF

The next version of Windows will include a new document format, code-named "Metro," to print and share documents, Microsoft said Monday. Metro appears to rival Adobe Systems's PostScript and PDF (portable document format) technologies.

Metro was demonstrated during Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates' keynote at the start of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) on Monday in Seattle.

The format, based on XML (extensible markup language), will be licensed royalty free and users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser.

More at Computerworld.

A Not-so-Bad Copyright Law

The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act which just passed Congress and was signed by President Bush yesterday has two major provisions. The most widely reported section gives cover to companies (such as ClearPlay) which create software that allows users to automatically skip portions of DVD movies. This provision of the bill is, in some sense, the first in a long time to give media consumers more rights to control media they already own. In other words, this was a good thing.

To buy the support of the entertainment industry, the law has provisions making it an explicit federal offense to make a recording in a theater of a movie, and to try to crack down on people who share movies, songs, or software before their official release dates.

Of course, this law isn't going to stop dedicated pirates who will simply move their warez to some country where it's not illegal to share them or where cyberlaw enforcement is minimal. I also think the way portions of it are worded might (accidentally) give cover to institutions whose members use their networks to pirate stuff with a value of less than $1,000 without the institution's knowledge.

Another positive provision in the law is a title that makes it easier for libraries to make copies of "orphan movies" (non-commercially exploitable films) during the last 20 years of their copyright. We need a similar law for abandoned software for history's sake.

Considering that this law could have been the infamous Induce Act, I think things didn't turn out so badly.

(For those wondering, the donkey picture does not represent a Democrat, but is the logo of eMule, a popular file-sharing program. Merci à Cont@ct.)

Related: Slashdot, DU, Hollywood Reporter, N. Todd Pritsky

UPDATE: French judge bans DVD copy protection (hat tip: PaidContent)

Found in the Referrers

Opera 8 Working Again with Blogger

After having some trouble getting my preferred browser, Opera, to work with the Blogger software, looks like someone finally fixed the incompatibility, but only partially. I can finally type text into the <textarea> but the toolbar buttons don't work. Better than nothing but still...

Get Over Yourself

Politics, religion, art are the only areas of life where some people think they have the right to have others share their tastes.

In the political sphere, this attitude periodically manifests itself in anguished essays saying that America is going to hell, or if the author doesn't believe in that, becoming a theocracy.

During the late 90s after Republicans ran a crappy presidential candidate and had no message in the 1998 elections, it was the social conservatives' turn to whine about how terrible and stupid America was. Now, with the passage of many traditional marriage amendments, the victory of George W. Bush, and the terrible evil of Republicans trying to stop Terri Schiavo from dying, it's social liberals who are practically cutting themselves over how their fellow Americans suck.

Bill Clinton and his supporters did not destroy America after winning reelection or managing to avoid being removed from office. George Bush, Rick Santorum and their supporters aren't about (or willing) to turn America into a totalitiarian religious state. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get over themselves and stop being such an extremist.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay lampoons the "fundamentalism is upon us" folks.