"Neil Johnson" <njohnson@interl.net> wrote
As for the V-Chip. I've seen enough programs rated "For All Ages" that are not appropriate for young kids to know that they are worthless. (By the way I want a P-chip to filter Politicians, a BB-(Bible Beater) chip to filter out the 700 Club. etc. I seem to remember that's what made the billions for the character in Sagan's "Contact" ).
[From memory] The device you describe is called Ad-nix (mutes the sound when the commercials come on) which was closely followed by Preach-nix (mutes sound when televangelists appear). This device was made possible by impossibly good speech/context recognition software running in a set top box. And, when I first heard about the set top dirty word filters mentioned in Wired, I assumed these were a hoax... In the book, advertisers and televangelists fought back against the loss of their income with a suit claiming that THEIR first amendment protected rights were being infringed. Imagine the AFA whining about not being able to inflict their speech on the unwilling. (All that TV has rotted my long term memory :-) The lawsuit was unsuccessful, although the NSA eventually snatched the speech recognition algorithms away in the interests of national security. BTW: Can Uncle Sam slap a secrecy order on GPL/public domain code, or do you have to actually apply to the patent office to risk this happening? [Also from memory] There was a short film (first shown in the UK in 1998? I think it won some kind of award) called King of Chaos, in which a small time programmer works his way up to become an international software and media magnate. His crowning achievement was the invention of a set top box, which retransmitted subscription channels to other boxes for free. After destroying traditional media, he then made his fortune selling ratings and searching for content that matched the user's requirements, selling this service for a fee. Using this fortune he diversified into other markets (health, education, pensions, unemployment insurance) and attempted to replace the government's role in all these fields. He fell foul of the UK government when he refused to inflict 'party political broadcasts' on his unwilling customers. All very Cyphernomiconish... If anyone can knows where I can get a script of this could you please tell the list?