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In short, he thinks small icon advertisements (eg. "drink coke") should be put in the corner of a TV show, and then the TV show should be freely distributed on bittorrent. Everyone wins.

I'm also a fan of product placement, so long as its done tastefully. Products are a part of our culture, we use them all the time. Its unlikely that a billionaire business tycoon on TV would drive a 1976 Pinto. Why not have Ferarri or some high end/high dollar car manufacturer compete for having this new billionaire business tycoon drive one of their products instead of the Pinto?

Probably the most successful product placement campaign in history was by the De Beers diamond cartel. In a few decades they were able to convince much of the world that their rocks were always something involved with love and marriage, especially those failed Hollywood marriages, and you too should participate and give them money in the name of love.

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features /diamonds/mystique1.html
http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/thismonth/artic le.jsp?cid=90486&mainArticleId=118128
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debeers#Marketing

Despite the complete marketing con and manipulation by De Beers, it does not really bother me because it was tastefully done. Diamonds are a girl's best friend is a cute song, and metaphorically it sums up a majority of Eastern European derived women.

Life is better when you have a child's understanding of the world. Beyond that, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

That's not exactly what http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/thismonth/artic le.jsp?cid=114166&mainArticleId=114160 says about Castle in the Sky:
For Disney's 1999 English-language version, composer Joe Hisaishi rescored the film to make it suitable for Western audiences, both in terms of the soundtrack's fidelity and its orchestral arrangements, while using the original themes as a starting point.

Most movies I see are shown at "limited art houses", at least at first. My favorite theatres where I live now are Landmark Theatre. Many of them latter make it the general cinemas. And if I like it enough I also buy the DVD when it comes out. Actually that's the only reason I got a DVD player, one movie I saw I wanted to get but it didn't come out on tape at first so I bought a DVD player to watch the dvd on. Now I buy mostly DVDs and not the tape, and no I don't rent movies, these places want your name, rank, and serial number, or at least your credit history which they will not get from me.

stolen material before it's even been released to the theatres.

This is a problem with the studios and/or distributers not file sharing. How can file sharing be responsible when a movie appears on a P2P before it's even released? Nobody from a P2P service should be able to get a hold of a movie before it's released.

Ah, I see their playing a documentary on Steve McQueen, The Essence of Cool. I may go see it.

Here's an example going to the 30's in movies. http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/ThisMonth/Artic le/0,,90481,00.html

Other good movies in this genre which deal with real life cases of academic bureaucracy are Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and The Story of Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and Yellow Jack. It is amazing how many times throughout history, the untalented have thrown up roadblock after roadblock at scientific progress. Not preachers causing trouble, mind you, but professional academic careerists who are the trouble makers.

Turner Classic Movies has a searchable schedule which tells when these great films will be on next.

(OK, maybe just the second one. And it was a troll-y subject line. But not a troll! Not a troll!)

I've been waiting a long time for Sopranos season 2 disk 1. Solaris was on my list for a long time until I saw it on TCM and removed it from my NetFlix queue. TCM is a good source for older movies if you have access to it.

For those who get TCM on their cable/satellite lineup, all 13 Marx Brothers movies are being aired today, starting at 9:30am Eastern time. Which means they are partway into "A Night In Casablanca" as we speak... but anyway, go here for today's schedule.

The woman is a photographer - unlike us geeks her skills are technology 'agnostic' and not subject to becoming 'antiquated' or at least not until AI makes all human skills antiquated.

I don't believe you can conclude that she's technologically agnostic just because she's a professional photographer. There are some designers here at work who insist on using Macintoshes, for example. (not pro or con, here, just refuting agnosticism, okay?)

Having said this, we are reacting according to an extremely compressed version of a doctoral dissertation. We are also confusing what technology can be used for with how it might currently be used for. We don't really know the point she's making.

On one of those movie channels they have the occasional documentary about how old celluloid is deteriorating. This doesn't mean that all movies should now be made as permanent as the pyramids--merely that we should be aware that yesterday's B-movies are tomorrow's treasures of history, and we should keep an eye toward preserving the past.

Similarly, although the technology of digital photography may be no less permanent than traditional photography, and since digital photographs are often considered an ephemeral, low-grade substitute for film photography, the author might instead be addressing a culture of disposing digital images, and recommending that we keep them. We don't know. We are treated to precious few of her actual words.

Since what we're reading addresses the general practice of deleting images rather than any failing of the technology itself, I find it to be pretty valid, even though the language irritates me fiercely for its vagueness.