The definition of “event promoter” is so loosely defined it could apply to a band that books its own shows or a teenage kid trying to get his favorite band into town.
The “event promoter” must be licensed and will pay $500 – $2000 depending on expected audience size.
To get the license, applicant must be over 21, get fingerprinted, submit to a background check, and jump over several other hurdles.
This proposed ordinance seems targeted towards smaller venues, since those with 500+ permanent seats are exempt.

These issues have been tirelessly highlighted by Jim DeRogatis at the Sun Times. There are two interviews that are very much worth reading: Alderman Shulter and the Department of Business Affairs. Please, if you're in Chicago, sign the "Stop the promoter’s ordinance petition" and contact your alderman. via CYSTSFTS

UPDATE: the ordinance has been put back into committee, to get more input from the community.

you know how you already pay for internet (DSL, dialup, whathaveyou)? what if every site you visited was begging for donations so that they could pay up to AT+T, Comcast, and AOL, to use the same internet that you're already paying for? it's not far fetched. remember how AT+T got broken up, so that people could get fair phone service? neither do i, i wasn't born yet. but my grandma does. remember how SBC just became AT+T all over again? This is what the CEO of then-SBC has to say:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

click the link. seriously. congress is a push over for big business. unless we push harder.

congratulations, conservative america, you're getting what you want. the ESRB is becoming a weapon for closed-source, closed-API software. the hacker's statement from the linked article about the mod:

I do this because I hate government/society/whatever forcing companies to 'protect our innocent population from seeing those evil dirty things 50% of them posess personally anyways' not because I'm trying to turn it into a porn game."

if the ESRB continues to be pressured into re-rating games, the ultimate end will be that all PC-based games will be rated M. despite the fact that they are not shipping with nudity. despite the fact that hackers are modifying and redistributing copyrighted material (which is already illegal). the only games immune to this are console games. and they're only immune until someone releases a mod chip.

the closest analog to this would be if a woman is walking past a police officer, and someone runs by and steals her shirt. if the police officer then fined her for public indecency, and made no attempt to stop the theif, that would be roughly equivalent to what's happened here.

and only if the woman was a vile and unattractive demonic alien. for the record, i don't have oblivion, but i have played unreal against topless characters. and while we're at it, a retroactive re-rating should go out to unreal, half-life, and pretty much any PC game released in the last decade. i don't normally post about news, but this has been annoying me as much as it annoyed the hacker. he just has the time + skill to do something about it.