Category: Future News

August 23, 2060
GENEVA–Hot on the heels of widespread charges that selected competitors’ doses at this year’s Olympic games had been ‘cut’ with various inactive ingredients, officials from the International Olympic Committee are responding to recent claims by both the U.S. and British teams that athletes from as many as 16 other countries have been engaging in illegal exercise regimens designed to increase their resistance to and ability to metabolize a number of competition-grade drugs. “We have been made aware of allegations of unapproved exercise,” notes IOC spokesman Kipper Pecka. “We take such allegations very seriously and will investigate them vigorously and in accordance with established IOC procedures.”

In recent weeks, a number of American and British athletes have made skeptical remarks to the press about opponents’ exercise regimens.

Alistair Griffet, a world-record-holder in three separate huffing events, has remarked of the Taiwanese athlete known simply as ‘Q’: “I mean look at that guy; look at the lungs on him. You can just tell that he’s been doing wind sprints for months to get ready for this.”

Though somewhat ambiguous, IOC regulations prohibit competitors from pursuing any “program, system, or regimen of physical exercise designed to affect performance in a sanctioned, licensed, franchised, or participating competition.” IOC guidelines based on the rule have developed what is known as the ‘Armchair Athlete’ standard, suggesting that competitors are not permitted to engage in any exercise beyond that typical of “the average resident of the 8 (eight) most industrialized countries.”

Under pressure from a coalition of National Olympic Committees to clarify the ‘Armchair’ standard, the IOC released last year a list of 1,203 banned exercises, including “jogging,” “sprinting,” “jumping jacks,” “deep knee-bends,” “heavy lifting,” “yoga,” “stair-climbing,” and “prolonged standing.”

Despite these steps, most Olympic athletes remain skeptical, but resigned.

“They try to stop it, but what can you do?” asks Canadian Jennifer Loleaf, a contender in both the 5 and 10 gram Kibbles-n-bits. “I personally know that I’m going to be going up against a number of athletes that have done a lot more than smoke crack to get ready for this competition. But there’s no room for excuses. It’s just something I can think about to challenge myself more.”

“Yeah,” explains Henry Wong, U.S. favorite in the 10-minute Woolah. “Yeah, heh heh. It’s all good.”

Speaking for the IOC, Pecka promises a “rapid and just resolution” to all complaints, but confides that reports of illegal exercise are most likely excessive. “As with the recent allegations that doses in the 3-line and 4-line sprints had been cut with chalk by bribed officials, I suspect that there’ll be nothing substantial behind these charges. People’s imaginations get overexcited. The competition, the pressure, it’s all very intense. People sometimes go more by what they want to believe of their opponents than by what they actually know about them.”

Olympic competition is scheduled to conclude next Tuesday, with closing ceremonies slated for the following weekend.

August 28, 2065
NEW YORK–A U. S. Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed Wednesday the existence of an elite team of economists, financial experts, and government prosecutors dedicated to hunting down and eliminating zombie corporations. “The threat posed by zombies is quite real,” explains the unidentified Treasury spokesperson. “Zombie companies have been terrorizing the Wilshire 5000 for long enough. We’ve assembled a dedicated search-and-destroy team. The days of the zombies are numbered.”

Zombie corporations, described by the team spokesperson as “soulless, capital-eating monsters,” arise, for little-understood reasons, during the bankruptcies of certain large, complex corporations. Characterized by an absence of shareholders, directors, and upper-management, zombies continue to function like real corporations but without recognizable assets or revenues. “It’s a rather bizarre phenomenon,” explains Jurgen Wentz, Chairman of the IRS Standing Committee on Undead Financial Entities. “Zombies are completely bankrupt, they have been completely dissolved, their assets liquidated and distributed, and yet, somehow, they continue prowling the Street, threatening the living.”

Because they lack management and traceable assets, zombies have proved particularly difficult to track down. “It’s quite common for zombies to have wholly-owned subsidiaries that are real, living, breathing companies,” explains Wentz. “The only way to ferret out the zombies is to keep tracing ownership as far back as you can. If it’s a zombie, you’ll find a vacuum at the top; everything will just seem to lead nowhere. Nobody will own it; nobody will be running it. Just nothing. That’s a zombie.”

Experts differ over explanations for the ability of zombies to continue functioning after bankruptcy and for their apparently insatiable appetite for shares in living corporations. “We do know that zombies prey on firms with depressed market prices,” opines Wentz. “Exactly how they launch their takeovers without assets, without management, and without shareholders of their own remains a mystery. Often the takeover happens and nobody even knows a zombie has been involved, it’s just munch, munch, munch, the prey is driven into bankruptcy by the zombie and becomes a zombie itself.”

In addition to hostile takeovers, zombies have reportedly attacked companies with deadly “brain drains”, hiring away upper-management with the promise of millions of options in the zombie. “Because they have no shareholders to answer to, zombies can just print as many options as they want,” notes Wentz. “No shareholders, no dilution. No dilution, no problem.”

Adam Bendleton, a sales engineer at Introtech, a mid-sized software and services company, witnessed such an attack first hand: “It was eerie. I came into work one day and management was gone, just gone, just a bunch of resignation letters and that was it. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

Citing strategic reasons for keeping the special team’s hunting techniques secret, Treasury spokespeople did confirm speculation that zombies originate offshore and are rooted in complex ownership relationships among bankrupt companies, offshore holding companies, and off-book partnerships and subsidiaries.

“We don’t want to say much more than that at this point,” notes an unidentified member of the zombie-hunting team. “But it is our belief that all existing zombies were ‘made’ by a master zombie, and that if we take out the master we’ll take out all the progeny.”

Asked about the identity of the mysterious ‘master zombie,’ Treasury spokespeople indicated that they were pursuing multiple leads and had reason to believe that, in life, it had been a powerful player in the energy sector.

October 8, 2006
WASHINGTON, DC–In a closely watched proceeding, DC District Court Judge Natalia Wimbley ruled Friday in favor of claims by a coalition of media companies to rights to the ‘attention’ of consumers. “This ruling is crucial to the continued vitality of American art and culture,” explains RIAA President-elect Richard Mound. “Recognition of attention rights goes a long way to guaranteeing that artists and musicians will have access to sustainable revenue streams.”

The case, known as ‘In Re the Sony Music catalog,’ involves a request by a number of major media companies and industry associations that the courts recognize a relatively new legal doctrine extending traditional copyright protection by granting copyright owners limited rights to demand that consumers watch or listen to their intellectual property. “Digital technologies have undermined the ability of simple copyright to secure reasonable pay for artists,” explains RIAA’s Mound. “Attention rights will restore the balance by giving the advertising model a firm legal foundation. With attention rights, companies will be able to guarantee advertisers a robust and predictable audience.”

Though Judge Wimbley stayed enforcement of her ruling pending appeal, the decision appears to grant companies an enforceable legal right to require consumers to pay a “reasonable share of attention relative to the property consumed.” In practice, record companies could, under the ruling, require that consumers listen to a minute of ads for every three minutes of music. Failure to listen to ads, and attempts to circumvent or delete advertising, would receive punishment commensurate with that ordered under the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

Critics of the decision suggest that such ‘attention rights’ would be even less practical to enforce than copyright. “The weakness of copyright today is the weakness of rights-management technologies,” explains Professor Jimmy Sprig of Stanford Law School. “Do they really expect some sort of ‘attention-rights management’ technology to work any better? Do they really expect, practically, to outlaw the mute button as a circumvention measure?”

At least one company, though, has plans to market just such an ‘attention-rights management’ system. GE Surveillance Solutions, a subsidiary of the General Electric Corporation, demonstrated ‘Iful’ last month, a “passive, anonymous intellectual property consumption monitor” that, integrated into speakers and displays, uses infrared monitoring technologies to determine the “gaze-orientation” of consumers within its perimeter and to measure “consumer attention” through “progressive, comparative analyses of dynamic cranial heat topographies.”

“Most of the critics have been squawking about how impractical these ‘rights’ may be,” notes June Myrmidon, Executive Director of The Michigan Artists Collective. “But they seem to me to actually have more traction in the real world that copyright does. Copies are digital, ephemeral. They’re hard to keep track of; they float around in the ether. People’s heads don’t. I’d much rather bet my cash flow on my ability to monitor heads as a proxy for ‘attention’ than on my ability to monitor digital copies.”

A hearing before the Appellate Court has been scheduled for early next year.

May 8, 2032
WASHINGTON–In a bid to “foster innovation” and “encourage the efficient use of public resources,” the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday plans to auction exclusive rights to the use of the English definite and indefinite articles. “For a number of years the Commission has been studying the possibility of enhancing the value of English through selective privatization of some of its features,” explains FCC Chairwoman Glenda Friedboot. “The auction we propose today is the first Commission initiative implementing the lessons of that research. It is also a test initiative, designed to gauge the effectiveness of a broader privatization policy.”

The auction will affect use of the English words “a,” “and,” and “the,” as well as any “derivatives or functional equivalents,” and will bestow upon the highest bidder the exclusive right to license use of the words in all digital media. “It’s important the people understand that the auction applies only to digital media, and not to conventional print or face-to-face conversation,” explains Chairwoman Friedboot. “Partly that’s because of technical limitations. The licensing we hope to foster depends upon computer-driven and enforced rights management schemes that aren’t currently feasible offline. But we also recognized the importance of protecting the historic practice of free, unlicensed use of many parts of speech in daily conversation.”

An FCC report issued alongside the auction announcement describes a state of “stagnation” in the area of “language technologies.” “The committee was unable to discover a single recent innovation in the use or function of many grammatical mechanisms,” noted the report. The committee went on to note that “distribution of rights in and to many of these mechanisms would likely provide sufficient incentive, in the form of licensing revenues, to spur investment and drive innovation in an important but otherwise static intellectual asset.”

The bidding system proposed by the Commission includes the sale of rights to the articles on a regional basis, with winning bidders acquiring the right to license use of the articles in all digital formats within a bounded geographic area. “Local control of media assets has always been an important value here at the Commission,” explains Chairwoman Friedboot. “So we require that all bidding entities be majority owned by members of the geographic regions they serve.”

Critics of the plan acknowledge its potential to raise billions of dollars for the public coffers, but point to the risks of privatizing key public resources. “This auction is simply a corporate giveaway,” exclaims Robert Desk, executive director of the Commons Defense Force (CDF). “The local ownership rules are a joke, and easily circumvented through a series of shells and dummy corporations. We’ve dug down in the list of preliminary bidders, and what we’ve found behind the mask of local ownership is, almost universally, big media companies like AOL, KT, and NPR. This plan is just going to extend already excessive private control over public discourse.”

A number of planned legal challenges to the FCC auction, including one joined by the CDF, argue that the sale infringes important free speech rights by privatizing words. “We’ve looked carefully at the [free speech] issue and designed the auction accordingly,” responds Chairwoman Friedboot. “The auction does not actually sell rights to the words ‘a’, ‘an’, and ‘the’. The plan offers only the rights to the definite and indefinite articles as grammatical functions. People will still be free to use the words, as long as they are not used as articles. By the same token, people will not be permitted to make unlicensed substitutions for the articles. Assigning rights in the grammar is key to driving substantial innovation in language. We don’t want to simply encourage cosmetic changes in the look and sound of words.”

Though a number of potential bidders were pre-qualified during a plan feasibility study, the period of bidder qualification begins officially today and is scheduled to run through the end of the year.