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He is spending his time working on Sex and the City

You mean like HBO On Demand?

How can "The Gardening Channel" and the like "ruin a population"? Oh, they won't watch that. Last nite I watched "Star Wars - Attack of the Clones", and today I don't feel like jumping around like Yoda did and holding off falling bolders, chunks of ceiling, etc. with my Jedi powers.
Seriously, though, I can see where the Bhutans would be effected if they watched "The Sopranos" have an executive card game.
Now I know where all the jackasses at work get their language.

Are you referring to Gia?

I remember watching the war start live on the evening news -- they were talking to their correspondant in Bagdad and he said all was quiet. They were just about ready to break away when he started hearing explosions. They stayed on the story the rest of the night.

If you're interested in what a transsexual deals with during his/her time of change, you should check out the new HBO movie Normal. I caught it Sunday night (on HBOHD, even!), and it was pretty damn good.

As a side note, they got Central Illinois pretty dead on, though there was mention that the story was set in DeKalb county -- definitely not Central Illinois. The setting of the story (not the story itself) was nostalgic for me because of that. And the guy worked for Case/International! Damn, I remember back when Case was Case with the orange and white tractors, and International was the red tractor company. Ah, just ignore this paragraph.

Sounds like that about fits the bill to me.

I think this guy and his associated group were doing more than merely "warez shopping". From a quick glance at the Wired article, simple piracy is just the beginning. Cracking apps, setting up servers, distributing apps, etc -- that's what got him (and others?) the jail time.

While owning copies of software illegally isn't the right thing to do, I doubt you're gonna end up in Oz anytime soon. Start hacking into other people's systems, setting up warez serves, cracking apps for illegal purposes -- well, maybe you'll get to enjoy some conjugal visits from your friendly jailhouse pimp for those "horrific crimes".

Stupid Americans have been bilked out of thousands of dollars,
lured to Africa and (as described in this state department pdf) murdered.

Not saying you're necessarily courting death by jerking a spammer's chain but you might want to consider that some of these Nigerian fraudsters are serious thugs.

Would you make prank calls to Furio?

How much was that check from Larry Diveny for?

I always thought it was an interesting coincidence how the film "Bring it on" had vampire connections: Kirsten Dunst, interview with a vampire; Elisha Dusku, aka Faith the Vampire Slayer; and whats her name who played Glory in Buffy.

Is it just me, or does Carly Fiorina look disturbingly like Carmela Soprano?

Showtime is the name of a premium movie channel owned by Viacom.

Showtime is also a film directed by Tom Dey produced by AOL Time Warner, who owns HBO, which competes with Showtime the channel.

Wait till Showtime the movie hits cable. Watch the legal sparks fly.

get cable

> This includes CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC, HBO, and PBS (Nature shows are excellent in HD).

I bet real sex and shock video are also =P

They snubbed my articles on TV about Band of Brothers and Mr. sissy-punkass-blabbermouth-poopy-pants Jon Katz gets to show off his lack of brains!!! Hey someone at Slashdot start rejecting Mr reporterboy's sh*tty articles....

I would have like to have had the chance to participate in this discussion, but I was asleep :(

If there is anyone still reading, let me ask you this. Do you watch TV? If so, is there anything that you like to watch religiously? Enterprise? Coronation Street? Friends back before it Jumped the Shark? And did you ever go out and forget to tape it, then ring your mom or your mate, ask them to tape it? Well unless they can break into your house, say goodbye to that.

Because DRM will also apply to TV. Programs will be copy protected. So you will be able to tape a first-run episode of The Sopranos, but only if you don't watch it at the same time, and you will only be able to watch it once. Or that old Friends episode, that's been on loads of times, so you will be able to tape it and watch it however many times you want, but don't expect to be able to lend it to your girlfriend's dad so he can watch it too.

This is not stuff that will affect geeks only. We need to be telling people about this, people outside of the napsterriffic MP3 downloaders.

Here's an idea. Find out your TD/MP/Congressman/Tribal leader's favourite programme. I'm sure that this sort of person regularly has to get someone to tape the News to see if theyre on it, or Bull Island to see if they're on that. Then tell them that they will not be able to do that within 3 years.

Then see how long this shit lasts...

Aside from the (questionable) joy of explaining cryptography to suits and explaining licensing requirements to geeks (Harry Fox helps throw a real monkey wrench in there, administering rights for song-writers), one of the things that came up time and time again was anti-trust issues.

SMEI and WMG were well-aware that together they represented about 30% of the market (they split that up, flip-flopping every year over who has the most based on who had bigger hits). Their expectation was that a joint venture between them would attract BMG, Universal, EMI and whoever was number six at the time. Then independents would simply have to fish or cut bait and join up as well.

Everyone was very careful to avoid using words and phrases like "controlling", "domination", etc. at least in written materials. People would verbally joke that they needed to make sure those words weren't written down, in case they ever got subpoena'ed for anti-trust, but everyone knew that the objective was making the HBO of electronic music distribution. You see, they recognized that HBO had the movie companies by the short and curlies as far as cable distribution of films went, and didn't want the same to happen to them in a new media distribution - the film companies have been worrying about this for themselves for electronic distribution for a couple of years now.

Of course, Napster beat them to it, so they beat on Napster legally. One of the funniest things about the timing of these things for me was SDMI being announced just after MP3 hit the cover of Time Magazine, when I'd been working on it for years prior. And of course they got the DMCA passed in the meantime, making cracking even the stupidest of copy control schemes illegal. Of course, every crypto expert they talked to at the time (myself included) emphasized that no scheme was foolproof and you should be sure to design the system to minimize damage in the case of a crack. Being powerful executives with lobbyists on retainer, a legal solution was obvious.

So, all in all, I'm pleasantly amused that the music companies got just a bit too eager and slipped in one phrase too many.....

Foul language is not necessary (and belies an absence of creative talent). If you want to go that route, then use a pay channel, the way Time Warner does with The Sopranos. In fact, a really steamy Star Trek (R to NC-17) is not such a bad idea. It just doesn't have any business on broadcast TV.

PS: I thought the decontamination scene was great, or would have been great, if the human male weren't such a whining, effeminate wimp.

Now I don't mean to get off on a rant, but...
Someone remind me how the RIAA can charge $15 per CD, get $14 of that, and say that they aren't getting enough money? What about the artists, man?! I'd hope that they deserve something. I mean, god forbid that the RIAA would ever have to lose any of their precious, precious money. What are they even managing to spend it on that they need it so badly? That'd be an interesting story: Where The Money Goes: A VH1 Exclusive Look At The Lives Of Record Company Executives.

The most pathetic thing is they don't realize that by trying to squeeze every last dime out of the market they're pissing more and more people off and, in effect, endorsing the P2P transferring.
While I think the RIAA should crash'n'burn, at the same time, some things I agree with them on. Downloading entire albums should not happen (support artists!), but unfortunately human instincts are to Cheat, to Lie, and to Steal (and the artists don't get much, anyway). I mean, can anyone honestly say that they haven't ever been tempted to cheat on a test, or that they haven't ever lied to get out of something, or ever wanted to steal something so they wouldn't have to pay outrageous prices (see: Adobe, heh). No, I didn't think so.

I seem to have gotten a bit off track. I think that someone (or some people) should start a new music union. Fuck if I know how it'd manage to grow, but I think that if there was something like that that would give more money to the artists, charge less for CDs, and, most importantly, not combat P2P sharing but support it, the world would be a better place.

"Don't you hate pants?
I hope he tells us to burn our pants."

I'll get one, if they have Tony Soprano's voice.

"Hey, you little fuck my car better be ready by 3 o'clock, capisch?

And I'm beginning to be convinced that sites like this will be invaluable in the future. I am definately beginning to believe circumventing the law, or just quietly breaking it, are the ways to go.

>Microsoft's trying to get a foot in the Open Source Market to gain control as they always do.

Indeedly oh, neighbor.

Here's how it works:
MS: You need a revenue model? Want to do .NET?
Ximian: Sure! We are going out of business without some VC $$$.
MS: O.K., but here' the catch. Most of what you produce has to be BSD license. The rest is closed source.
Ximian: We are desperate, so ok.
MS: (To themseslves, with a Snicker) We just embraced and extended the Open Source movement on the cheap. They do free development and we can ultimately control their compatibility with us.
Ximian: (To themseslves, with a relief) We can stay in business for another xx months.
MS: (To DOJ) See, you don't need to regulate .NET. We can play nice.
Slashdot: Cool, we have .NET too. We'r so 7337!!!

Our desire to have Linux see commercial sucess could be our undoing. Putting compatibility with MS products in the hands of a company, without it being licensed under the GPL, is suicide. MS can destroy a commercial venture at will. It's the GPL that they can never have. Without the protection of the GPL, GNU/Linux would be dead meat, yesterday's news.

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

~Dennis Miller

This website is intended for viewing solely within the United States. ©2001 Home Box Office, a Division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.

Yeah, The Lone Gunmen might be an okay spinoff, but I'll have to catch it some other time. Tonight is the premiere of the third season of The Sopranos!

Damn. I was hoping they'd take a storyline from the animated D&D show from the eighties. I'll see it anyway.

You're kidding right? The D & D cartoon is very, very far away from AD&D my friends and I played and enjoyed. This cartoon is as disconnected from D & D that captured the hearts of geeks everywhere as the goofy looking PG-13 Spawn movie is disconnected from the emmy award winning, R rated Spawn cartoon or comic book.
The cartoon sucked and was a poor mirror of the game that kept my friends and I engrossed for hours on end (ThAC0, hit dice, bastard swords...it brings a tear to my eye remembering those times), if the movie is anything like the animated series then it should be avoided like the plague. On the other hand if it is actually a realistic depiction of D & D (e.g. the game Baldur's Gate) then it should become a geek treasure (sorta like the Matrix) watched the evoke memories of simpler times when an 18 on a 20d was all that saved you from a harsh, horrifying end.

Why not? I love intelligent web design. I got an email the other day from a mailing list I subscribed to (for the band Shootyz Groove; highly recommended, btw) and it mentioned a show on HBO called Reverb. I've never heard of it. So I typed www.hbo.com/reverb into the address bar of my browser and baaam! I was there. I think that it's important for companies to be able to have a domain name that is the same (or similar) to their "bricks and mortar" name (in hindsight, HBO was a bad example there. sorry). I didn't much care to jump through hoops and search engines to find the web site for Strawberries (a music store). I didn't have much luck with a cursory search so I said fugheddaboutit and just made a note-to-self the next time I was actually in the store (and I said "duh! should've figured that one out myself").

As for the record companies holding the trademark on the name of an artist... that's a different rant entirely.