Slashdot Mirror

"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet, Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar

I know it's off topic but I had to say something about your sigline. The line reminds me of a line from one of my fav singers sings in one of my fav songs of her's, "The difficult I'll do right now, the impossible will take a little while." By Billie Holiday.

The point is not how to catch a 360 degrees scene, but how to view it!
The actual view angle of a scene we can enjoy is a fraction of a 360 degrees, if we don't count the case of Mr. Marty Feldman.
So we should move our eys and neck in order to embrace the whole scene and then loose the rest of it.
It seems that someone in the movie industry is willing to save the money for a good scene shooter and photo director!

It's 'Win one for the Gipper'
See http://www.cmgww.com/football/gipp/index.html

Some info here

I missed the bulk of this conversation, but I would add a couple of compilations:

Swing Time. 3 CDs of swing music from 1925 to 1955. From old scratchy mono recordings to polished studio stuff. I lub it.

Tito Puente: 50 years of swing. Yeah, maybe this is more Tito than the law allows, but don't rule out Latin-themed jazz in your collection.

Similarly, the Buena Vista Social Club albums, especially the first, are pure sweetness.

Also consider some guitar jazz. Wes Montgomery is my fave. I've got several albums .. the only one I'm not sold on is "California Dreaming". It just doesn't hit my spots for some reason.

Isn't it spelled Matrix... unless, of course, Redd Foxx wrote the storyline.

(Before you mod me into troll/flamebait heaven, consider that I am taking on issues of race and cultural history and talking about such things is hard to do without offending...)

Harlem in the 1930s was a flourshing center of art, culture, literature, and music. The boom period known as the Harlem Renaissance is unparalleled in American history with perhaps the exception of the late 1960s, also known as the Countercultural Revolution. The Harlem Renaissance inspired poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, musicians the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, novelists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, and painters like Jacob Lawrence.

Art Deco, the style of art and architecture that exalts urbanism and the modernist avant-garde, flourished during this time, undoubtedly due to the broad sex appeal of jazz, an African-American musical form.

The amazing part about the Harlem Renaissance is that this is period of cultural growth during one of the most abysmal periods in economic history, a period so awful it is named "The Great Depression." You may not know a damn thing about niggers, but you should know that like the Founding Fathers of the United States, they know how to survive when things are tough. But more importantly, they know how to survive with style.

Niggers also have quite a bit in common with geeks. They are despised for their gifts and feared for their power. "Beautiful people" commit violence upon blacks and geeks and laugh about it. Now, imagine being a black geek (reading at -1) and coming to this thread.

It's now 2002, and the systematic (if unorganized) oppression and rejection of African Americans as "niggers" and "shit" is as strong as ever. In the early part of the twentieth century, groups of European-Americans killed blacks with impunity. Blacks were lynched and the KKK was scapegoated for America's racial hatred. I'm not saying the KKK were not guilty, but they were singled out, while everyday forms of racism survive unscathed.

Slashdot is one of my favorite webites. But I've never for a second doubted that some of my fellow /.'ers are racists. Now I have the proof. But I also know many /.'ers really don't have a lot to say about race, and the silence is deafening. So I thought in addition to those moderators who are on the job that I'd send out a few tendrils and try to turn up the signal to noise ratio, FWIW.

Isn't that what we're coming to? Endless copyright fights over the images of famous people? Wouldn't it be hysterical if all the movie houses started snapping up the copyrights to all famous people-- MGM gets the image of George Washington, Universal gets the Sta Puft Marshmallow Man, etc. Yeah. I'd have to laugh.

Don't laugh. There's an organization in Indianapolis called CMG Worldwide, whose main business is buying up the rights to use the names and likenesses of dead celebrities. Their list of "clients" (that's what they call them!) include Duke Ellington, Frank Lloyd Wright, Glenn Miller, Buddy Holly, Mark Twain, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Picture a web page that is copyrighted by CMG and "The Estate Of Mark Twain"; that's what you get when you go to the official web site of the famous author who died in 1910!. And among their latest news, CMG is proud to "welcome Frank Zappa as its newest client". There's something morbid about the way they phrase their business relationship with the dead.

CMG's founder, Mark Roesler, is credited on the website with having "establishing the rights of deceased personalities throughout the world and has been a pioneer in protecting intellectual property rights abroad".

Go to their about CMG worldwide page, and see if that doesn't chill your blood. To me, at least, this smacks of avarice that's extreme even for vultures. Wish I could get a gig representing clients who don't argue about their contracts or how much of the pie they're getting, and whose names and likenesses could conceivably pay all my expenses if I could lobby Congress hard enough to keep them trademarked forever.

I mean, come on. Even with the increasingly restrictive US copyright and trademark laws, Mark Twain should be in the public domain with his books. He's been dead for over 90 years, and his writings were in public domain before the latest extentions to the copyright laws a few years ago.