A New York City Councilman wants to pass a law to force people to turn off their cell phones while they’re in a performance space, like a theater.

From the NY Post:

Council staff cited reports of movie star Laurence Fishburne’s profanity-laced admonition of a patron whose phone went off during his performance in “The Lion in Winter” and a similar incident involving Kevin Spacey during his turn in “The Iceman Cometh.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the prospect of being bitch-slapped in front of an audience by Laurence Fishburne or Kevin Spacey is a whole lot more of a deterrence than the prospect of some fine.

 

The man who perfected the Frisbee died recently. His ashes will be incorporated in a special edition of Frisbees distributed to friends and family. From Reuters via CNN.

How long before one shows up on eBay? The clock starts …. NOW!

 

I’m part of a fascinating new experiment called blogcritics.com. It goes like this: there are tons of recording artists with no access to mass media to help promote their products. There are tons of good writers who love to write about music. How about using weblogs to bring them together?

A perfect application of the Internet. You bet I’m in. So are about 100 other writers.

The brainstorm of producer Eric Olsen, blogcritics.com goes live Tuesday morning.

I’m starting with two reviews: “Elaine Stritch: At Liberty,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising.” You’ll be able to find them on my site and at blogcritics.com. But remember: the point isn’t to review such major releases; it’s to get at the good stuff that’s under the radar. There’ll be submission guidelines published soon. Right now, Eric has his hands full getting the site launched.

 

You are 38% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You’ll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com (Thanks, Dawn!)

The NRDC is going to sue the U.S. Navy over a new kind of sonar. From Reuters via CNN:

Reynolds cited Navy estimates that the LFA system generates sounds capable of reaching 140 decibels more than 300 miles (483 kms) away….

But the fisheries service, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, said it approved the Navy’s use of the sonar after determining that marine mammals were “unlikely to be injured.”

 

From CNN:

BUTLER, Pennsylvania (AP) — The sport utility vehicle that rolls out of the Ibis Tek shop looks just like those driven by millions of soccer moms.

But with a flip of the switch, out of the sunroof pops weaponry ranging from a .50-caliber M2 machine gun to an MK-19 40 mm grenade launcher.

On the other hand, you have to buy your own gun, gas mileage sucks, and it’d set you back $500,000 even if you could buy one in the U.S. But if you need one, you can probably afford one.

 

From Mitch Wagner:

DOES THIS MEAN ALL JEWS ARE THEREFORE SUPERHEROS?. “A debate for the silly season.” Teresa notes that all superheros, unless specifically stated otherwise, can be assumed to be Jewish. “This is an insight of Paul Krassner’s. He explained once in an interview that when he was a kid, he figured all superheroes were Jewish, because where he was growing up, if your name ended in “-man”, you probably were: Feldman, Feinman, Superman, Lieberman, Aquaman, Zuckerman, Iceman, Bergman, Sandman, Goldman, Silberman, Hawkman, Wolfman, Batman, Spiderman, Schneiderman–how much more obvious can you get?”

Interesting insight, but you’re missing one even more profound. Every one of these Jewish superheros are deeply assimilated; they all have “secret identities” they put forward to the public. Spiderman? Peter Parker — not a hint of Yiddishkeit there. Superman? Clark Kent. And it never works the other way, does it? The goyishe superheros — The Flash, The Hulk, Green Lantern, Daredevil (who’s even a lawyer, fer chrissakes) — not a Cohen or Levin in those secret identities, are there?

 

After extending its “final” deadline no fewer than four times, Ziff Davis has gotten the requisite 95 percent (actually, it’s 95.1 percent, at last count, thank you very much) of its bondholders to agree to swap their bonds for cash and equity in the company. The result gives Ziff an extra $30 million in breathing room a year — no small matter, these days. With that $30 million, for instance, they could have afforded to keep Yahoo! Internet Life and Sm@rtPartner running, with enough extra to buy a couple of beers besides.

There’s a hint about what held up the deal for two weeks. In its most recent press release, Ziff says it will pay one (unnamed) bondholder $720,000 for the stock he’ll be getting in exchange for his bonds. In other words, someone’s had enough and wanted to cash out.

 

More on the security/authorization piece from earlier today, below.

Jon Udell is one of the smartest technology writers out there, though you may never have heard of him or read his stuff, because he works the techier side of the street, at Byte Magazine and now Infoworld. He wrote a fine piece yesterday about why business weblogs need better security:

… when commercial interests rub elbows in blogspace, this much transparency might be too much. The names of referring URLs, and the numbers attached to them, represent a kind of information leakage. www.internalgroove.net is not accessible to outsiders, of course. But its existence, and its level of interest in Ray’s blog experiment, are charted for all to see.

In other words, the very openness of the weblog infrastructure can argue against its use. We’ve got to be able to close the door.

 

A very good piece in Fast Company (and, hey — when’s the last time you heard anyone say that?) about what we at NetGuide used to call Revenge of the Empire. No one knew just when the free ride on the Net would end, but even in the earliest days, everyone knew there was going to be a tollbooth somewhere. We just didn’t know where it would be, when it would be erected, or who’d be getting the cash.

The thing is, I don’t mind paying for content one way or another. I read the NYTimes for free online, but I also have a paid sub to the print edition; if they wanted to impose some nominal charge for all of you who don’t buy the paper version of the paper, I doubt that I’d squawk. Bandwidth and servers ain’t free.

I hate the idea of being nickel and dimed, though, which makes me wonder about the various ways of paying for content.

Let’s get rid of one idea right away: micropayments. I hate micropayments. Administering a large-scale micropayment system — billing in increments of under $1 for nuggets of information — is expensive and unwieldy, and only Visa wins. Micropayments just aren’t worth the trouble, either from the user side or the vendor side. Hell, even the porn industry — the first to use any successful business model or technology — doesn’t use micropayments.

The porn industry uses a two-tier payment system. You can get a lot of low-bandwidth and low-quality content for free, if you let them throw a lot of intrusive ads at you. Or, you can get high-bandwidth and high-quality content if you pay. Oddly enough, that’s what broadcast news sites are starting to do: you can read CNN and ABCNews all you want, but if you want streaming content, that’ll cost a few bucks a month.

But the adult industry does something even more interesting than that: they pay bounties for traffic. Here again, it’s a two-tier system. They pay a much, much lower bounty for junk traffic that just looks at the low-bandwidth low-quality stuff. But they pay a higher bounty for traffic that converts into paid subscriptions. I don’t know of any legit sites that do that kind of referrer business, but it seems like a good idea.

There’s another wrinkle. It’s not uncommon for adult sites to carry links to content on other adult sites — syndicated content. If you pay on the originating site, you don’t have to pay on the syndicated site. This is a lot like what Real Networks is doing with its Gold Pass: one monthly fee for a full menu of content.

Real is in a good position to succeed with the streaming media syndication business because it controls the player and server software. But there’s no reason that there can’t be other syndicators, too. What about, for instance, a Publisher’s Clearing House kind of site, where you’d pick from a paid list of content providers and pay the syndicator once, letting the syndicator deal with payments to the providers. On the back end of the deal, the content provider could cut deals with the syndicator for better positioning on the subscription page and so forth. Not all content providers would get the same cut from the syndicator.

This seems to me to be a particularly good business for an ISP. When you’re paying your $30 to Earthlink, maybe you could pay an extra $5 or $10 for access a list of paid content sites. And Presto! You’ve built a cable TV business model.

There’s no question that paid content is the future of the online world. The question is only who will pay who for what and how.