It was only when their economies were developed enough to actually make them think they have something worth protecting from new upstarts that they started getting concerned with copyright.
I'm always amazed when the Chinese think nothing of copying every program offered for sale in the USA. But, when I want a program that does Optical Character Recognition on Chinese characters and converts them to Unicode, and just ask for a free copy, they're just stunned and amazed that I would assume that they would give it to me without my spending many hundreds of dollars for this precious resource.
The willingness of the Americans to allow their software to be copied and distributed throughout Asia for the past fifty years must be viewed as a form of long-term investment in intellectual property. The assumption on the part of the Americans that they can copy and freely distribute amoung themselves advanced programs developed recently by the Asians should be seen as a return on this long-term investment.
By the way, does any one know if OCR programs for Chinese characters really exist?
With a Walkman or Discman or whatever, you're listening to just one album. An iPod can hold the entire music collections of most people.
I agree. These little iPods need a jack that allows fast (like USB 2.0) bidirectional transfer of the collections when plugged together.
Or a one gigabyte partition of MP3 tunes specifically designed for quick transfer when connected.
The concept turns 'iPod' into a verb. "I saw this really cute guy in the park. I went up to him and we iPod'ed. But he seems to be into Beatles and old Iggy Pop, so I'm pretty sure we won't hook up..."
I saw her, IPod'ed her, she slapped me.
Re:Odds are it -was- a commercial
on
iPod-Jacked
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· Score: 2, Informative
Since the young woman walked up to the man, yanked his cord out of his jack, and invited him to plug it into her jack, it should be obvious what she was selling.
Why is a 64 bit entry by a consumer chipmaker such a big deal? Sure, making cutting edge tech affordable is nice, but the 4GB barrier is not what's keeping the average Joe from making Jurassic Park.
In my experience it's not the speed of my 1Gig Duron that is the biggest limiter of my productivity on a PC, it's the clucky and non-ergonomic software.
For example, Windows message boxes. So easy to code, but a true pain in the ass to deal with. You can't just click left for yes or OK and right for no. You got to take your hands off the keyboard and move the idiot mouse pointer to some tiny little place on the screen.
Another truely stupid concept is the idea (in Windows again, naturally) that positioning the mouse cursor to the exact point in your text where you want to insertion point to appear will ALWAYS highlight the entire text passage, either the word, phrase, or file name. It's driving me nuts, because I can't change anything in Windows that will make me more productive, while I have near infinite flexablity over trivial things like icon title font size.
It's almost enough to make me switch to Linux. Which I suppose will happen someday (if I can ever get over the deep fear and hatred of UNIX that seems to have been embedded into every college student who had to take one computer science class in the 1970s).
But anyway.
We need more better, more flexable, more configurable, and cheaper software far more than we need a 64 bit PC.
Thank you for taking the time to list the good and bad points about DVDs.
I got a DVD-ROM for my PC about ten months ago and have been getting DVD disks exclusively from the public library since then.
Here's what I like about DVDs:
-clear sharp image on PC monitor.
-ability to copy the movie to hard disk so that I can watch it for 15 or 20 minutes at a time over several days or weeks after returning the DVD to the library.
-ability to get the text dialog as subtitles from the movie into a text file.
-ability to play the movie back in French or Spanish, which is great for language learning. In the same area, the ability to view the film in French or Spanish with French or Spanish subtitles would be fantastic for language learning if the foreign language dialog actually matched the subtitles. But it rarely does because usually the movie is translated twice for each language; once by the subtitle writer and again by the voice-over crew.
-Being able to save the movie in DivX format and giving a copy to a friend on a 20 cent CD.
-Skipping the endless corporate logos and previews after copying the movie to the hard disk.
-Fast forwarding 16x or 32x the dull and dumb parts.
-capturing a screen snapshot as a JPG file image.
The things that are touted as DVD advantages, such as director's commentary and outtakes, seem to be of little importance.
Outside of films, the ability to put 4.7 gigabytes on a single $1 disk is certainly going to catch on soon. I once sent an e-mail to the local classic-Rock FM station manager saying that every song that they've played for the past thirty years would fit on a single DVD if all the songs were stored in MP3 format. She actually wrote back with lots of numbers showing that I wasn't correct. But actually I was just trying to say that they should start playing different music instead of the same one cut for every album from that time period.
Also, I have stopped going to movie theatres since getting a DVD-ROM. The idea of paying $9 to see the same-old-stuff redone over and over (another buddy cop movie anyone?) has just done lost its appeal.
DVDs are going to paint Hollywood in a corner because their average budget per film is going up much faster than the actual number of people who go to movies. The movies are getting more expensive every year and are being focused on a younger demographic every year. Within about five years, Hollywood will find itself with a whole season of $200 million movies that bring in $100 million each in box-office and $50 million in rentals.
Hollywood in 2003 is in the same place that the dot-com industry was in 1998. Completely convinced of the inevitability of its continued growth to the point where they believe that they have finally created an industry that transcends basic economic cycles.
I am an advocate of a law that says the loser in a tort must pay the winner's court costs.
I don't believe that I can agree with this statement. Giant law firms would randomly pick people breaking some stupid regulation and use their vast legal resources to sue them for large amounts of money. Since they had more lawyers, they would usually win and then force the randomly selected victim to pay the court costs. (RIAA anyone?) The law would become a vast automatic random extortion machine. Historically, when that happens people form criminal organizations that use violence and terrorism to protect themselves. Even when the legal environment changes, the criminal violence secret societies remain and become the extortionists that the state was previously.
The real effect of DMCA extortion lawsuits is to transfer economic development to the underdeveloped world. In these places, the amount of wealth generated by reverse-engineering technology and putting it to alternative uses is greater than the amount of generated by lawsuits. Which is why the authorities in the developing world ignore first-world legalities that serve primarily to transfer wealth (to law firms) instead of creating wealth.
In the Congo, no one gives a fuck if you manage to figure out how a garage door opener works. But if you can rewire a surplus garage door opener to make it easier to load heavy sacks onto a river barge, then yeah, someone will be interested in working with you.
All bicycle innovation is welcome, but... It usually is absurd, pointless, and only of interest to either professional racers or the people who will spend for a bicycle than a used car.
What we bike riders really need is:
1) Tires that don't go flat! Or, rather, I should say... tires that don't go flat and only cost two or three minimum wage units. $15 US. Yes there are Kevlar tires that are as thin as your thumb and cost $200, hold 100 PSI air pressure, and rarely go flat, but they don't count.
2) Something to keep the rain and road dirt from putting a big skunk stripe up our backs when riding in wet climates. There are fenders, but they don't work well.
3) The ability to fold the frame so that it can fit in the back of a small car or on the bus.
4) Brakes that work in the rain.
5) Tires that don't go flat. So important, I'm saying it twice.
We don't need auto transmissions, $150 helmets, $1500 frames that weigh next to nothing, and stupid yuppie mommies who want to pass stupid yuppie mommie laws to protect us for our own good. The ones who drive around Oregon and California with the east coast Ivy League college decals on the back window of their Volvo's, almost kill you when they cut you off in the bike lane ("I didn't see you, and besides, you should be wearing a helmet!" "Well yeah, dumb bitch, you were changing the tape, dialing the phone, and reaching for the babie's bottle on the floor while changing lanes."
In fact, I HATE bicycle helmets. Their sole purpose is to show all the people driving around that the person on the bike is middle class, has a car at home, can afford a $100 helmet, and is seriously concerned about saving the environment to the point of actually going out into the public on a bicycle. The guys who don't speak English and ride a bicycle because they make $7 an hour and have four kids aren't wearing helmets.
"But," the yuppies tell me, "you NEED a helmet for safety! It should be illegal to ride without one."
Bull. The same people who say this think nothing about strapping two skinny long little boards to their feet and flying down an snow-covered mountain at 50 MPH with nothing on their heads but designer sunglasses!
When they put a Burger King on the top of the ski slope then all the yuppies will start wearing $200 ski helmets to show how concerned about safety they really are (and to make sure that no one confuses them with the people who work at the BK and ski home.)
Recently , in Beaverton Oregon (just outside Portland), Stream International has been looking for top-flight technical support professionals. They require several years of experience and training, a urine test, and successful completion of a 30-page psychological evaluation test. Also skilled in accounting software and networking. Perferred candidates will be fluent in one or more foreign languages, and hold one or more technical degrees from accredited colleges.
All for $8.00 US an hour! Oh, by the way, if you are fluent in English and Chinese or Japanese you can start at $8.50/hr.
Serious candidates only, no agencies please. Proof of citizenship required.
Go to their web site and see if YOU are qualified for this amazing career opportunity!
I've just restarted my old hobby of playing with MIDI tone modules. These are music synthesizers without keyboards. Just the sound generating circuitry in a box, available for $40-$100 on EBay. They are run by computers that use a bizarre, outdated, and weird version of a serial port called Musical Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI.
All of these older (late 1980's - early 1990's)tone modules have dozens of digital parameters that roughly correspond to individual knobs and sliders on the old 'Switched On Bach'-style Moog monsters from the early 1970's. The programs that display these virtual knobs and sound controls are called sys-ex editor/librarians. Each tone module needs an individual editor/librarian program because they all have different internal structures of their digital sound controllers. Commercial MIDI editor programs cost around $100 each per tone module.
Many times people have written their editors and have put them on BBSes in the early 1990s and on the web more recently. But they never include the source code for their work, only the executable files that are more often than not crippled by shareware nag screens and disabled functionality.
These programs NEVER work!
Either they were written for a now obsolete computer or operating system version, or an extinct MIDI interface, or have port addresses and IRQs coded as CONSTANTS that prevent the program from now functioning on a modern PC or Mac. I've searched, downloaded, installed, and previewed about twenty of them so far for the various tone modules in my collection.
And what's so tragic about the situation is that if the source had been included, all these little nitwit hardware 'magic number' issues could be easily resolved. All the work that went into designing and coding these editor/librarian programs would continue to serve their intended audience for another decade. Instead we just have thousands of hours of development of dead code.
So, yes, we need the source code for any program that is seriously useful and specialized. (Aren't all programs this?) Not because we're trying to rip you off now for all your programming work, but so we can keep the code maintained and operating as the host computer's environment changes. And the host computer environment (its OS, its hardware details, ect...) are constantly changing!
This is why I'm (slowly) changing from the closed Windows model to the open source model. The more advanced that I get into computing, the more the open-source model reflects my changing needs.
Hello,
I have an EPSON Stylus color 740i ink-jet printer and I have been refilling the same black and color cartridges for three years.
The biggest problem that I've had with this printer model is ink jets getting clogged. I run the cleaning cycle two or three times, squirt a little more ink in the cartridge, and let it sit for a day. Then it works again.
I've read about Hewlett-Packard having chips in the cartridges that prevent printing about six months after their purchase, regardless of ink level, but not Epson. It's a sleazy marketing strategy; whoever does it. Plus it's just dumb to create a climate of fear, doubt, and loathing towards you from your customers. Nobody thinks in the long term about creating a customer base that will be eager to buy your products for twenty years.
They can say stuff like "We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!"
A product is ruined when hacked only when its manufacturer is using a business model based on the idea that the hardware will be a loss-leader and the profit will be made by providing a service connected to the product.
This business idea is really dumb in the digital age, but seems to pop into the heads of overpaid C+ average marketing majors on a regular basis. Possibly one of their professors remarked on as a brilliant strategy (for 1962).
Most likely this product will disappear in a year because the performance of the $100 non-disposable digital cameras will rise to the point that it's not worth it to the customer to go through the hassle procedure of exchanging the 'disposable' camera. After all, customers will think, if it's being sold as a disposable, why do the sellers insist on it being exchanged when you get the pictures printed?
If the camera makers do use the DMCA to shut down the exchange of information about expanding the use of this camera, it will only increase the speed with which the product dies in the marketplace. If ordinary middle-class people don't buy the returnable-disposable camera, and the techno-geeks are the only ones interested, then why would the manufacturer want to use heavy handed legal techniques against their best customers. Probably because their legal department just runs on automatic pilot.
This is basically a third-world product: its audience is the third-world middle class. In other words, those people in developing places whose income level would be poverty-line in the US and Europe, but whose work ethic and entrepeneurial spirit is same as the US and European middle-class. They want digital cameras but can't pay first world prices.
If the manufacturers were smart they would hire the guys who did the USB hack (they're looking for work according to their web site) to develop a profitable $25 digital camera product like this for the underserved consumers in the developing world. It would serve as an entry-level product and would focus the initial purchasers towards higher quality models from the same company as their income rises. BTW, does the company who makes this 'disposable' camera have a product line for their customers to grow into?
Unfortunately the people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to loss-leader digital equipment at drug stores usually aren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, so a lot of good products die due to an inability of brain-dead urine-tested marketing majors to creatively position new concepts in the market.
person on phone " Hi, You have been randomly selected by the RIAA to be sued for $200,000,000 by our team of hundreds of lawyers who get $100,000 a year each to do nothing but make your day! Or you can just pay us $2000 now. But before you decide I just have to ask one question: 'Do you have any MP3 files on your PC? Or have you deleted them all recently like a good citizen?'"
person answering phone "I deleted them all recently, sorry. If I had known that you were going to call I would have saved you one."
On the basis of an in-depth telephone survey, CNN (owned and operated by Time-Warner (owners of one the five largest record companies)) have determined that millions of people have deleted all of their 'illegal' MP3 songs!
I hope that someone else will now step forward to help these poor people that have already lost so much and then have to suffer Israeli terrorism.
The Israelis don't wrap their kids in twenty pounds of plastic explosives and then send them off to the mosques in the middle of Friday prayers.
Arabs routinely send their children to Israel to be blown to bits and murdering anyone else in the pizza parlor, bus, or university student union cafe who happens to be there. Then they dance in the streets and hand out sweets in celebration!
These people are animals and they need to be kept apart from the rest of the world until they learn to act like civilized human beings. Everything bad that has happened to them has been a direct result of their own stupidity, brutality, corruption, religious obsession, and lack of fundamental human decency.
This is also going to be bad for the USA export sectors. Say you're in a developing country and you're trying to convince the client to buy a fleet of $100,000 American tractor-trailers vs. a Korean or German company's product.
Some recent-graduate twerp in the purchasing dept (who got deported from the US on a visa screw-up because the Homeland Security couldn't tell the difference between him and the thousand other students with the same name, then had to start university studies all over in another country, and got stuck with the bill for four years of tution at the American college) finds this story and shows it to the purchasing manager.
The purchasing manager thinks: 'If I buy American, then at any time and for any reason, someone can just push a button in Oklahoma and all of my trucks will just stop running and might not ever work again'.
The German-Korean joint conglomerate get the contract, and the next one, and the next one. The American company fires 15% of its workforce each year. Ten years later they sell out to the German-Korean conglomerate pennies to the dollar of the original worker's pension fund investment.
This short-sighted stupidity just goes on and on year after year.
The user puts his finger into his ear for the vibrations to be picked up by the eardrum, which then transcribes them back into sound signals for the brain. I can't wait to see my mechanic use one of these while working on my car.
Or hubby calls when mummy is changing the babie's diaper.
This whole story shows that while the Japanese have the technology, they need to start smoking a whole lot better brand of weed if they're going to get creative in the commercial application of all this high-tech.
The really great thing about weed that its detractors never seem to understand is that it enables the free association between vastly different concepts that wouldn't be made otherwise. The weed suppression people argue that even if that were so, it doesn't matter because only one in a thousand ideas generated under the influence has any relevance to the real world, while all the other are just embarrassingly stupid.
It doesn't matter, just apply the scientific method to the vast stream of intoxicant-generated weirdness to seperate the gems from the sand.
I'm writing a screenplay about two guys who spend their days scheming to rob Tiffany's, but open a bar instead. It's called "Jewels and Gin".
"This was the 21st century children. We know they watched this thing called television but the record of these shows ceases beyond 2005. The reason for this gap or what happened during the ensuing decades is unknown to us, since their records are undecipherable or lost but we believe this marked the beginning of the rebellion against the panglobal corporations."
This has started to happen with books that popular in the first half of the 20th century. They're just gone. The Mickey Mouse protection copyright extensions make it illegal to republish (even for archives) popular books published after the mid-1920s without the direct authorization of the copyright owner. Yet for most of this stuff no one knows what the copyright status is. No one kept track of these seemingly meaningless details because it was all supposed to go into public domain in the last quarter of the 20th century. Now, no one will touch it lest they get hit with a piracy lawsuit out of nowhere.
When the books wear out, the libraries just take them off the shelves and burn them. There may be one copy of most titles deep in the warehouse storage of the Library of Congress, but that's it for most of the popular literature published in the US between 1925 and 1955. There are maybe a dozen titles per decade that get remembered and saved as 'classics of the era' but all the rest has mostly disappeared. Gone.
It's a shame because these books reflect how people lived and thought in that period. They should be at least perserved by automated OCR scanning and stored as compressed text on CD-R. Hundreds of thousands of pages can be stored on a 20 cent CD-R.
It's odd that the Japanese are more interested in perserving ordinary American culture from the 20th century than the Americans are. In a hundred years the Americans might have to pay a huge price to buy back the artifacts of their culture when it was at its peak; back when they actually passed laws making it illegal to copy and preserve the television, movies, and popular music that defined their place in history.
remember that the fcc is ultimately run by people that are *elected*. if in 2005 poeple are bitching about not wanting to lose old-analog, it's not going anywhere.
I suspect that most people will not know that TV is going off the air in Dec 2006 until the commercials about it start airing Thanksgiving 2006.
Most of the people who will be affected will be the poor and illiterate; those who can't afford cable or a $4000 super-sized HDTV digital receiver.
There are going to be a lot of people (if this actually goes through - and I don't know how to predict if it will or not) in January and February 2007 that are just going to be starring at that snowy TV screen and slowly but surely realize that , yes, TV is...gone.
Actually now that I've written the above, and given it a little thought, I think you're right and it's absurd to think that broadcast TV will cease by fiat in just a few years.
Even if it were and the government had painted themselves into a corner technologically and actually HAD to shut down the analog broadcasts, people in Canada and Mexico would set up huge antennas and just keep on pumping out Oprah and Jerry Springer. FCC regulations don't apply there.
There's just too much money to be made by selling network TV boardcasting for it to just stop because of some nitwit regulation hidden in dense law passed way back in the Clinton era.
If it did stop then there would be a media vacuum and people would eventually fill it with something. There would be a lot of neighborhood unlicensed microbroadcast stations popping up and boardcasting on the old analog frequency bands intermittently, probably showing DivX files of old TV shows. They might even solict semi-commercial advertising somehow.
This whole thing seems to have a Y2K flavor: what will happen Dec 2006?
I suspect that the regulation in the 1996 TeleCom Act will be struck down by the Supreme Court as 'limiting free speech'. Or in other words, denying the opportunity for the politicians to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions on TV ads to make sure that people vote 'correctly'.
Nothing in a Hollywood movie happens by accident or coincidence.
The art director probably approached Microsoft with an offer to do a product placement for only $x thousand dollars. Microsoft probably then told her that if any Windows product appeared in the finished film then they wanted ten $x thousand dollars, or else.
Furious, the art director mentioned it to her assistant who happened at the time to be fucking the liason to CGI effects company....who suggested using Linux instead.
I sold my TV 3 years ago and haven't looked back since. I get my entertainment from books, the Internet, and games.
I'm in the same position. I put my TV in the closet about two months ago and only bring it out once a week for Star Trek: Enterprise and the Joyce and Leonard Hot Ticket show.
It's been really strange not having the TV around to flick on when you come home. I'm been spending a lot more time on the internet (like writing to Slashdot) and learning to program microcontrollers. I've never liked video games: to me they're just electronic cocaine. They take your money over and over and leave you with a synthetic feeling of acomplishment and a real yearning to put in another quarter or hour and try to win at it again.
As for books, let me recommend "Bangkok 8" by John Burdett and "Modern Jihad" by Loretta Napoleoni.
When TV goes off the air in December 2006, will there be anyone but the poor and the illiterate that notice?
In 40 years the electronics/computer industry will have sunk into such a deep depression that you will just have to give any engineer $512 for any password or secret that he knows.
Remember, social engineering will always triumph over technology in any war.
Open Source will change the balance of power in the information age between the industrial first world nations towards the poorer third-world.
As more industrial and post-industrial nations put patent and copyright restrictions on software (or, as the case in the USA with SCO vs. Linux, try to make open-source illegal altogether), development will shift to areas of the world where the amount gained by bringing in the open-source software industry is greater than the amount lost to entrenched software companies.
In the long-run fifty year period, efforts by the first-world to restrict dissemination of information by means of the Internet will backfire as the new on-line libraries of data shift to distant locations that are less affected by the legal means used by monopoly media corporations to shut them down. As the libraries shift, so will the technical expertise migrate to the third-world. And, as the technical expertise of the information age moves away from the software cops of the media monopolies, so with the creative community that is now locked to the media corporations.
In the long run, the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and other enforcement arms of the first-world media monopolies will destroy the very media conglomerates that they are trying to protect.
They spent $100,000 to inform 900,000 young people that they could get free music and movies by plugging their computers into their telephones and going to something called 'Kazaa'.
When I was in high school, the local gestapo would force anyone that they caught smoking weed to come to the school and tell the kids that it was 'wrong and dangerous'. No mea-culpa, no early release from your twenty-year sentence for that seed found on the floor of your car.
I wonder if the RIAA is going to parade all those guys who wrote popular songs in the 1950's that have sold hundreds of millions of copies over the past half century and received nothing by $100, a bucket of fried chicken, and a bus ticket home in compensation. Let them tell the young people about theft!
I used to be against DARE because of its crypto-fascist background. Such as, 'let's put all the people in the Marijuana Community (the hippies and their friends) into federal prison because they aren't conservative Republicans'.
Now I realize that DARE was a sincere but mickey mouse attempt on the part of educators to deal with a situation that they really couldn't handle, that is, drugs are simply more fun and interesting than school.
All in all, teaching the difference between wieed and contentrated op*iates like M (greek god of sleep) and H (girl hero) - (wouldn't want to put these words in a web message with the feds monitoring everything that goes in and out of a place like slashdot, would we?) is probably not a bad thing, except no one involved with the DARE program would ever tell the truth about these subjects.
I'm reminded of the scene in Alicia Silverstone's "Clueless" where she's sitting in her debate class and trying to get the attention of the cute boy sitting behind her. He's reading William Burrough's 'Junkie'; which is the one book in the past fifty years that convinced the most people not to pursue a career in the lifestyle alluded to in its title.
(BTW, I'm nearing sixty years old and I still think that "Clueless" is a great film. Even though it seems that the younger that people are, the more embarrassed to admit that they've seen or liked it.)
I've gone from seeing maybe fifty feature films a year (in the mid-to-late 1990's) in theatres to seeing maybe three features in theatres this year.
There have been two main causes of this shift:
1) the ever-increasing admission price for the theatre that is much greater than the inflation rate.
2) the explosion in availablity of DVDs. They have great sound, sharp images, multiple languages and subtitles, and production commentary.
Two forces - one pulling me out of the theatres and the other drawing me into watching movies on my computer.
Ten years ago you could go see double features of second-run Hollywood films (an average of two to three months after their original theatrical first-run release) for $2 to $3 dollars. First run matinees were $3. Five years ago all second-run double features stopped effectively doubling the admission price instantly when the inflation rate was only 2% a year. First-run matinee admission rose a dollar a year in quarterly increments every year since 1997 in the monopoly Regal Cinema chain. (which owns roughly 80% of the movie theatres in the USA).
About 2001 DVDs start appearing in the Blockbuster and supermarket rental outlets. These were basically the 'junk' titles released to DVD after playing first-run and not even going to second-run theatres.
In 2002, classic Hollywood and European art films start appearing in large numbers in the local public libraries, available for free checkout for a few days to a week. DVD stand-alone players (that play MP3 CD-R and CD-RWs) along with DVD-ROM drives for PCs appear for less than $60 at Fry's and PriceWatch.com.
In 2003, local suburban public libraries in Portland Oregon have nearly every title available on DVD that was previously only on video cassette along with hundreds of 'new' features that were in first-run theatres the previous year. Many were donated from the local Hollywood Video world-corporate headquarters (located nearby) or the local Blockbuster Video (to clear surplus product from their limited shelf space). Other titles were donated to the local library by ordinary people who had purchased a DVD at retail and had already seen it a few times.
The result is that thousands of people who used to go to the movies a few years ago are now just staying home and watching DVDs from the public library or supermarket rental outlet. This shift is beginning to influence the type of films that are produced for the theatres: fewer mid-budget films directed at mature audiences (mature meaning over 25 years old) and more comic-book megabudget productions for the date-night younger audience that are increasingly the only people who still go to theatres.
Personally, I don't see how downloaded versions of feature films are going to make any difference to anyone. The film files are too large and too low-resolution (thinking of DivX) to be widely traded on the net. The wide availablity of DVD titles and their low prices (plus small physical size) make downloading movies absurd for the vast majority of people.
The people who are seriously interested in seeing a particular movie (to the point of actually spending hours to download it) are in all likelihood going to pay to see it in a nice theatrical setting anyway; with bright large crisp film images and blasting surround-sound.
Who's losing money? Where is the evidence that film downloading off the web is really an issue that is affecting the bottom line of anyone?
This whole thing seems to be a hysterical over-reaction to a problem that doesn't really even exist.
Hollywood's real problem is their inablility to control production budgets coupled with a box-office audience that is no longer growing. If present trends continue, then within five years most major big-budget films will not return their production costs through box-office receipts.
When that happens, Hollywood will be forced to go back to making $10-$20 million dollar movies and, frankly, they've forgotten how to make profitable movies in this price range.
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It was only when their economies were developed enough to actually make them think they have something worth protecting from new upstarts that they started getting concerned with copyright.
I'm always amazed when the Chinese think nothing of copying every program offered for sale in the USA. But, when I want a program that does Optical Character Recognition on Chinese characters and converts them to Unicode, and just ask for a free copy, they're just stunned and amazed that I would assume that they would give it to me without my spending many hundreds of dollars for this precious resource.
The willingness of the Americans to allow their software to be copied and distributed throughout Asia for the past fifty years must be viewed as a form of long-term investment in intellectual property. The assumption on the part of the Americans that they can copy and freely distribute amoung themselves advanced programs developed recently by the Asians should be seen as a return on this long-term investment.
By the way, does any one know if OCR programs for Chinese characters really exist?
With a Walkman or Discman or whatever, you're listening to just one album. An iPod can hold the entire music collections of most people.
..."
I agree. These little iPods need a jack that allows fast (like USB 2.0) bidirectional transfer of the collections when plugged together.
Or a one gigabyte partition of MP3 tunes specifically designed for quick transfer when connected.
The concept turns 'iPod' into a verb. "I saw this really cute guy in the park. I went up to him and we iPod'ed. But he seems to be into Beatles and old Iggy Pop, so I'm pretty sure we won't hook up
I saw her, IPod'ed her, she slapped me.
Since the young woman walked up to the man, yanked his cord out of his jack, and invited him to plug it into her jack, it should be obvious what she was selling.
Geeks can be so dense sometimes.
Why is a 64 bit entry by a consumer chipmaker such a big deal? Sure, making cutting edge tech affordable is nice, but the 4GB barrier is not what's keeping the average Joe from making Jurassic Park.
In my experience it's not the speed of my 1Gig Duron that is the biggest limiter of my productivity on a PC, it's the clucky and non-ergonomic software.
For example, Windows message boxes. So easy to code, but a true pain in the ass to deal with. You can't just click left for yes or OK and right for no. You got to take your hands off the keyboard and move the idiot mouse pointer to some tiny little place on the screen.
Another truely stupid concept is the idea (in Windows again, naturally) that positioning the mouse cursor to the exact point in your text where you want to insertion point to appear will ALWAYS highlight the entire text passage, either the word, phrase, or file name. It's driving me nuts, because I can't change anything in Windows that will make me more productive, while I have near infinite flexablity over trivial things like icon title font size.
It's almost enough to make me switch to Linux. Which I suppose will happen someday (if I can ever get over the deep fear and hatred of UNIX that seems to have been embedded into every college student who had to take one computer science class in the 1970s).
But anyway.
We need more better, more flexable, more configurable, and cheaper software far more than we need a 64 bit PC.
This is not a rant or troll, just an observation.
Thank you,
Thank you for taking the time to list the good and bad points about DVDs.
I got a DVD-ROM for my PC about ten months ago and have been getting DVD disks exclusively from the public library since then.
Here's what I like about DVDs:
-clear sharp image on PC monitor.
-ability to copy the movie to hard disk so that I can watch it for 15 or 20 minutes at a time over several days or weeks after returning the DVD to the library.
-ability to get the text dialog as subtitles from the movie into a text file.
-ability to play the movie back in French or Spanish, which is great for language learning. In the same area, the ability to view the film in French or Spanish with French or Spanish subtitles would be fantastic for language learning if the foreign language dialog actually matched the subtitles. But it rarely does because usually the movie is translated twice for each language; once by the subtitle writer and again by the voice-over crew.
-Being able to save the movie in DivX format and giving a copy to a friend on a 20 cent CD.
-Skipping the endless corporate logos and previews after copying the movie to the hard disk.
-Fast forwarding 16x or 32x the dull and dumb parts.
-capturing a screen snapshot as a JPG file image.
The things that are touted as DVD advantages, such as director's commentary and outtakes, seem to be of little importance.
Outside of films, the ability to put 4.7 gigabytes on a single $1 disk is certainly going to catch on soon. I once sent an e-mail to the local classic-Rock FM station manager saying that every song that they've played for the past thirty years would fit on a single DVD if all the songs were stored in MP3 format. She actually wrote back with lots of numbers showing that I wasn't correct. But actually I was just trying to say that they should start playing different music instead of the same one cut for every album from that time period.
Also, I have stopped going to movie theatres since getting a DVD-ROM. The idea of paying $9 to see the same-old-stuff redone over and over (another buddy cop movie anyone?) has just done lost its appeal.
DVDs are going to paint Hollywood in a corner because their average budget per film is going up much faster than the actual number of people who go to movies. The movies are getting more expensive every year and are being focused on a younger demographic every year. Within about five years, Hollywood will find itself with a whole season of $200 million movies that bring in $100 million each in box-office and $50 million in rentals.
Hollywood in 2003 is in the same place that the dot-com industry was in 1998. Completely convinced of the inevitability of its continued growth to the point where they believe that they have finally created an industry that transcends basic economic cycles.
Stay tuned...
I am an advocate of a law that says the loser in a tort must pay the winner's court costs.
I don't believe that I can agree with this statement. Giant law firms would randomly pick people breaking some stupid regulation and use their vast legal resources to sue them for large amounts of money. Since they had more lawyers, they would usually win and then force the randomly selected victim to pay the court costs. (RIAA anyone?) The law would become a vast automatic random extortion machine. Historically, when that happens people form criminal organizations that use violence and terrorism to protect themselves. Even when the legal environment changes, the criminal violence secret societies remain and become the extortionists that the state was previously.
The real effect of DMCA extortion lawsuits is to transfer economic development to the underdeveloped world. In these places, the amount of wealth generated by reverse-engineering technology and putting it to alternative uses is greater than the amount of generated by lawsuits. Which is why the authorities in the developing world ignore first-world legalities that serve primarily to transfer wealth (to law firms) instead of creating wealth.
In the Congo, no one gives a fuck if you manage to figure out how a garage door opener works. But if you can rewire a surplus garage door opener to make it easier to load heavy sacks onto a river barge, then yeah, someone will be interested in working with you.
All bicycle innovation is welcome, but...
It usually is absurd, pointless, and only of interest to either professional racers or the people who will spend for a bicycle than a used car.
What we bike riders really need is:
1) Tires that don't go flat! Or, rather, I should say... tires that don't go flat and only cost two or three minimum wage units. $15 US. Yes there are Kevlar tires that are as thin as your thumb and cost $200, hold 100 PSI air pressure, and rarely go flat, but they don't count.
2) Something to keep the rain and road dirt from putting a big skunk stripe up our backs when riding in wet climates. There are fenders, but they don't work well.
3) The ability to fold the frame so that it can fit in the back of a small car or on the bus.
4) Brakes that work in the rain.
5) Tires that don't go flat. So important, I'm saying it twice.
We don't need auto transmissions, $150 helmets, $1500 frames that weigh next to nothing, and stupid yuppie mommies who want to pass stupid yuppie mommie laws to protect us for our own good.
The ones who drive around Oregon and California with the east coast Ivy League college decals on the back window of their Volvo's, almost kill you when they cut you off in the bike lane ("I didn't see you, and besides, you should be wearing a helmet!" "Well yeah, dumb bitch, you were changing the tape, dialing the phone, and reaching for the babie's bottle on the floor while changing lanes."
In fact, I HATE bicycle helmets. Their sole purpose is to show all the people driving around that the person on the bike is middle class, has a car at home, can afford a $100 helmet, and is seriously concerned about saving the environment to the point of actually going out into the public on a bicycle. The guys who don't speak English and ride a bicycle because they make $7 an hour and have four kids aren't wearing helmets.
"But," the yuppies tell me, "you NEED a helmet for safety! It should be illegal to ride without one."
Bull. The same people who say this think nothing about strapping two skinny long little boards to their feet and flying down an snow-covered mountain at 50 MPH with nothing on their heads but designer sunglasses!
When they put a Burger King on the top of the ski slope then all the yuppies will start wearing $200 ski helmets to show how concerned about safety they really are (and to make sure that no one confuses them with the people who work at the BK and ski home.)
Recently , in Beaverton Oregon (just outside Portland), Stream International has been looking for top-flight technical support professionals. They require several years of experience and training, a urine test, and successful completion of a 30-page psychological evaluation test. Also skilled in accounting software and networking. Perferred candidates will be fluent in one or more foreign languages, and hold one or more technical degrees from accredited colleges.
All for $8.00 US an hour! Oh, by the way, if you are fluent in English and Chinese or Japanese you can start at $8.50/hr.
Serious candidates only, no agencies please. Proof of citizenship required.
Go to their web site and see if YOU are qualified for this amazing career opportunity!
I've just restarted my old hobby of playing with MIDI tone modules. These are music synthesizers without keyboards. Just the sound generating circuitry in a box, available for $40-$100 on EBay. They are run by computers that use a bizarre, outdated, and weird version of a serial port called Musical Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI.
All of these older (late 1980's - early 1990's)tone modules have dozens of digital parameters that roughly correspond to individual knobs and sliders on the old 'Switched On Bach'-style Moog monsters from the early 1970's. The programs that display these virtual knobs and sound controls are called sys-ex editor/librarians. Each tone module needs an individual editor/librarian program because they all have different internal structures of their digital sound controllers. Commercial MIDI editor programs cost around $100 each per tone module.
Many times people have written their editors and have put them on BBSes in the early 1990s and on the web more recently. But they never include the source code for their work, only the executable files that are more often than not crippled by shareware nag screens and disabled functionality.
These programs NEVER work!
Either they were written for a now obsolete computer or operating system version, or an extinct MIDI interface, or have port addresses and IRQs coded as CONSTANTS that prevent the program from now functioning on a modern PC or Mac. I've searched, downloaded, installed, and previewed about twenty of them so far for the various tone modules in my collection.
And what's so tragic about the situation is that if the source had been included, all these little nitwit hardware 'magic number' issues could be easily resolved. All the work that went into designing and coding these editor/librarian programs would continue to serve their intended audience for another decade. Instead we just have thousands of hours of development of dead code.
So, yes, we need the source code for any program that is seriously useful and specialized. (Aren't all programs this?) Not because we're trying to rip you off now for all your programming work, but so we can keep the code maintained and operating as the host computer's environment changes. And the host computer environment (its OS, its hardware details, ect...) are constantly changing!
This is why I'm (slowly) changing from the closed Windows model to the open source model. The more advanced that I get into computing, the more the open-source model reflects my changing needs.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Hello,
I have an EPSON Stylus color 740i ink-jet printer and I have been refilling the same black and color cartridges for three years.
The biggest problem that I've had with this printer model is ink jets getting clogged. I run the cleaning cycle two or three times, squirt a little more ink in the cartridge, and let it sit for a day. Then it works again.
I've read about Hewlett-Packard having chips in the cartridges that prevent printing about six months after their purchase, regardless of ink level, but not Epson. It's a sleazy marketing strategy; whoever does it. Plus it's just dumb to create a climate of fear, doubt, and loathing towards you from your customers. Nobody thinks in the long term about creating a customer base that will be eager to buy your products for twenty years.
They can say stuff like "We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!"
A product is ruined when hacked only when its manufacturer is using a business model based on the idea that the hardware will be a loss-leader and the profit will be made by providing a service connected to the product.
This business idea is really dumb in the digital age, but seems to pop into the heads of overpaid C+ average marketing majors on a regular basis. Possibly one of their professors remarked on as a brilliant strategy (for 1962).
Most likely this product will disappear in a year because the performance of the $100 non-disposable digital cameras will rise to the point that it's not worth it to the customer to go through the hassle procedure of exchanging the 'disposable' camera. After all, customers will think, if it's being sold as a disposable, why do the sellers insist on it being exchanged when you get the pictures printed?
If the camera makers do use the DMCA to shut down the exchange of information about expanding the use of this camera, it will only increase the speed with which the product dies in the marketplace. If ordinary middle-class people don't buy the returnable-disposable camera, and the techno-geeks are the only ones interested, then why would the manufacturer want to use heavy handed legal techniques against their best customers. Probably because their legal department just runs on automatic pilot.
This is basically a third-world product: its audience is the third-world middle class. In other words, those people in developing places whose income level would be poverty-line in the US and Europe, but whose work ethic and entrepeneurial spirit is same as the US and European middle-class. They want digital cameras but can't pay first world prices.
If the manufacturers were smart they would hire the guys who did the USB hack (they're looking for work according to their web site) to develop a profitable $25 digital camera product like this for the underserved consumers in the developing world. It would serve as an entry-level product and would focus the initial purchasers towards higher quality models from the same company as their income rises. BTW, does the company who makes this 'disposable' camera have a product line for their customers to grow into?
Unfortunately the people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to loss-leader digital equipment at drug stores usually aren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, so a lot of good products die due to an inability of brain-dead urine-tested marketing majors to creatively position new concepts in the market.
ding..a..ling
picks up phone " Hello?"
person on phone " Hi, You have been randomly selected by the RIAA to be sued for $200,000,000 by our team of hundreds of lawyers who get $100,000 a year each to do nothing but make your day! Or you can just pay us $2000 now. But before you decide I just have to ask one question: 'Do you have any MP3 files on your PC? Or have you deleted them all recently like a good citizen?'"
person answering phone "I deleted them all recently, sorry. If I had known that you were going to call I would have saved you one."
On the basis of an in-depth telephone survey, CNN (owned and operated by Time-Warner (owners of one the five largest record companies)) have determined that millions of people have deleted all of their 'illegal' MP3 songs!
Film at 11...
I hope that someone else will now step forward to help these poor people that have already lost so much and then have to suffer Israeli terrorism.
The Israelis don't wrap their kids in twenty pounds of plastic explosives and then send them off to the mosques in the middle of Friday prayers.
Arabs routinely send their children to Israel to be blown to bits and murdering anyone else in the pizza parlor, bus, or university student union cafe who happens to be there. Then they dance in the streets and hand out sweets in celebration!
These people are animals and they need to be kept apart from the rest of the world until they learn to act like civilized human beings. Everything bad that has happened to them has been a direct result of their own stupidity, brutality, corruption, religious obsession, and lack of fundamental human decency.
This is also going to be bad for the USA export sectors. Say you're in a developing country and you're trying to convince the client to buy a fleet of $100,000 American tractor-trailers vs. a Korean or German company's product.
Some recent-graduate twerp in the purchasing dept (who got deported from the US on a visa screw-up because the Homeland Security couldn't tell the difference between him and the thousand other students with the same name, then had to start university studies all over in another country, and got stuck with the bill for four years of tution at the American college) finds this story and shows it to the purchasing manager.
The purchasing manager thinks: 'If I buy American, then at any time and for any reason, someone can just push a button in Oklahoma and all of my trucks will just stop running and might not ever work again'.
The German-Korean joint conglomerate get the contract, and the next one, and the next one. The American company fires 15% of its workforce each year. Ten years later they sell out to the German-Korean conglomerate pennies to the dollar of the original worker's pension fund investment.
This short-sighted stupidity just goes on and on year after year.
The user puts his finger into his ear for the vibrations to be picked up by the eardrum, which then transcribes them back into sound signals for the brain.
I can't wait to see my mechanic use one of these while working on my car.
Or hubby calls when mummy is changing the babie's diaper.
This whole story shows that while the Japanese have the technology, they need to start smoking a whole lot better brand of weed if they're going to get creative in the commercial application of all this high-tech.
The really great thing about weed that its detractors never seem to understand is that it enables the free association between vastly different concepts that wouldn't be made otherwise. The weed suppression people argue that even if that were so, it doesn't matter because only one in a thousand ideas generated under the influence has any relevance to the real world, while all the other are just embarrassingly stupid.
It doesn't matter, just apply the scientific method to the vast stream of intoxicant-generated weirdness to seperate the gems from the sand.
I'm writing a screenplay about two guys who spend their days scheming to rob Tiffany's, but open a bar instead. It's called "Jewels and Gin".
"This was the 21st century children. We know they watched this thing called television but the record of these shows ceases beyond 2005. The reason for this gap or what happened during the ensuing decades is unknown to us, since their records are undecipherable or lost but we believe this marked the beginning of the rebellion against the panglobal corporations."
This has started to happen with books that popular in the first half of the 20th century. They're just gone. The Mickey Mouse protection copyright extensions make it illegal to republish (even for archives) popular books published after the mid-1920s without the direct authorization of the copyright owner. Yet for most of this stuff no one knows what the copyright status is. No one kept track of these seemingly meaningless details because it was all supposed to go into public domain in the last quarter of the 20th century. Now, no one will touch it lest they get hit with a piracy lawsuit out of nowhere.
When the books wear out, the libraries just take them off the shelves and burn them. There may be one copy of most titles deep in the warehouse storage of the Library of Congress, but that's it for most of the popular literature published in the US between 1925 and 1955. There are maybe a dozen titles per decade that get remembered and saved as 'classics of the era' but all the rest has mostly disappeared. Gone.
It's a shame because these books reflect how people lived and thought in that period. They should be at least perserved by automated OCR scanning and stored as compressed text on CD-R. Hundreds of thousands of pages can be stored on a 20 cent CD-R.
It's odd that the Japanese are more interested in perserving ordinary American culture from the 20th century than the Americans are. In a hundred years the Americans might have to pay a huge price to buy back the artifacts of their culture when it was at its peak; back when they actually passed laws making it illegal to copy and preserve the television, movies, and popular music that defined their place in history.
remember that the fcc is ultimately run by people that are *elected*. if in 2005 poeple are bitching about not wanting to lose old-analog, it's not going anywhere.
...gone.
I suspect that most people will not know that TV is going off the air in Dec 2006 until the commercials about it start airing Thanksgiving 2006.
Most of the people who will be affected will be the poor and illiterate; those who can't afford cable or a $4000 super-sized HDTV digital receiver.
There are going to be a lot of people (if this actually goes through - and I don't know how to predict if it will or not) in January and February 2007 that are just going to be starring at that snowy TV screen and slowly but surely realize that , yes, TV is
Actually now that I've written the above, and given it a little thought, I think you're right and it's absurd to think that broadcast TV will cease by fiat in just a few years.
Even if it were and the government had painted themselves into a corner technologically and actually HAD to shut down the analog broadcasts, people in Canada and Mexico would set up huge antennas and just keep on pumping out Oprah and Jerry Springer. FCC regulations don't apply there.
There's just too much money to be made by selling network TV boardcasting for it to just stop because of some nitwit regulation hidden in dense law passed way back in the Clinton era.
If it did stop then there would be a media vacuum and people would eventually fill it with something. There would be a lot of neighborhood unlicensed microbroadcast stations popping up and boardcasting on the old analog frequency bands intermittently, probably showing DivX files of old TV shows. They might even solict semi-commercial advertising somehow.
This whole thing seems to have a Y2K flavor: what will happen Dec 2006?
I suspect that the regulation in the 1996 TeleCom Act will be struck down by the Supreme Court as 'limiting free speech'. Or in other words, denying the opportunity for the politicians to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions on TV ads to make sure that people vote 'correctly'.
Nothing in a Hollywood movie happens by accident or coincidence.
The art director probably approached Microsoft with an offer to do a product placement for only $x thousand dollars. Microsoft probably then told her that if any Windows product appeared in the finished film then they wanted ten $x thousand dollars, or else.
Furious, the art director mentioned it to her assistant who happened at the time to be fucking the liason to CGI effects company....who suggested using Linux instead.
This is the best of all times, and the worst of all times for the movie industry.
They're bringing in record bucks, but they're running out of ideas.
More people are paying more money to see dumb flicks, but their audience is not growing as fast as the movie budgets
I sold my TV 3 years ago and haven't looked back since. I get my entertainment from books, the Internet, and games.
I'm in the same position. I put my TV in the closet about two months ago and only bring it out once a week for Star Trek: Enterprise and the Joyce and Leonard Hot Ticket show.
It's been really strange not having the TV around to flick on when you come home. I'm been spending a lot more time on the internet (like writing to Slashdot) and learning to program microcontrollers. I've never liked video games: to me they're just electronic cocaine. They take your money over and over and leave you with a synthetic feeling of acomplishment and a real yearning to put in another quarter or hour and try to win at it again.
As for books, let me recommend "Bangkok 8" by John Burdett and "Modern Jihad" by Loretta Napoleoni.
When TV goes off the air in December 2006, will there be anyone but the poor and the illiterate that notice?
In 40 years the electronics/computer industry will have sunk into such a deep depression that you will just have to give any engineer $512 for any password or secret that he knows.
Remember, social engineering will always triumph over technology in any war.
Open Source will change the balance of power in the information age between the industrial first world nations towards the poorer third-world.
As more industrial and post-industrial nations put patent and copyright restrictions on software (or, as the case in the USA with SCO vs. Linux, try to make open-source illegal altogether), development will shift to areas of the world where the amount gained by bringing in the open-source software industry is greater than the amount lost to entrenched software companies.
In the long-run fifty year period, efforts by the first-world to restrict dissemination of information by means of the Internet will backfire as the new on-line libraries of data shift to distant locations that are less affected by the legal means used by monopoly media corporations to shut them down. As the libraries shift, so will the technical expertise migrate to the third-world. And, as the technical expertise of the information age moves away from the software cops of the media monopolies, so with the creative community that is now locked to the media corporations.
In the long run, the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and other enforcement arms of the first-world media monopolies will destroy the very media conglomerates that they are trying to protect.
They spent $100,000 to inform 900,000 young people that they could get free music and movies by plugging their computers into their telephones and going to something called 'Kazaa'.
When I was in high school, the local gestapo would force anyone that they caught smoking weed to come to the school and tell the kids that it was 'wrong and dangerous'. No mea-culpa, no early release from your twenty-year sentence for that seed found on the floor of your car.
I wonder if the RIAA is going to parade all those guys who wrote popular songs in the 1950's that have sold hundreds of millions of copies over the past half century and received nothing by $100, a bucket of fried chicken, and a bus ticket home in compensation. Let them tell the young people about theft!
I used to be against DARE because of its crypto-fascist background. Such as, 'let's put all the people in the Marijuana Community (the hippies and their friends) into federal prison because they aren't conservative Republicans'.
Now I realize that DARE was a sincere but mickey mouse attempt on the part of educators to deal with a situation that they really couldn't handle, that is, drugs are simply more fun and interesting than school.
All in all, teaching the difference between wieed and contentrated op*iates like M (greek god of sleep) and H (girl hero) - (wouldn't want to put these words in a web message with the feds monitoring everything that goes in and out of a place like slashdot, would we?) is probably not a bad thing, except no one involved with the DARE program would ever tell the truth about these subjects.
I'm reminded of the scene in Alicia Silverstone's "Clueless" where she's sitting in her debate class and trying to get the attention of the cute boy sitting behind her. He's reading William Burrough's 'Junkie'; which is the one book in the past fifty years that convinced the most people not to pursue a career in the lifestyle alluded to in its title.
(BTW, I'm nearing sixty years old and I still think that "Clueless" is a great film. Even though it seems that the younger that people are, the more embarrassed to admit that they've seen or liked it.)
I've gone from seeing maybe fifty feature films a year (in the mid-to-late 1990's) in theatres to seeing maybe three features in theatres this year.
There have been two main causes of this shift:
1) the ever-increasing admission price for the theatre that is much greater than the inflation rate.
2) the explosion in availablity of DVDs. They have great sound, sharp images, multiple languages and subtitles, and production commentary.
Two forces - one pulling me out of the theatres and the other drawing me into watching movies on my computer.
Ten years ago you could go see double features of second-run Hollywood films (an average of two to three months after their original theatrical first-run release) for $2 to $3 dollars. First run matinees were $3. Five years ago all second-run double features stopped effectively doubling the admission price instantly when the inflation rate was only 2% a year. First-run matinee admission rose a dollar a year in quarterly increments every year since 1997 in the monopoly Regal Cinema chain. (which owns roughly 80% of the movie theatres in the USA).
About 2001 DVDs start appearing in the Blockbuster and supermarket rental outlets. These were basically the 'junk' titles released to DVD after playing first-run and not even going to second-run theatres.
In 2002, classic Hollywood and European art films start appearing in large numbers in the local public libraries, available for free checkout for a few days to a week. DVD stand-alone players (that play MP3 CD-R and CD-RWs) along with DVD-ROM drives for PCs appear for less than $60 at Fry's and PriceWatch.com.
In 2003, local suburban public libraries in Portland Oregon have nearly every title available on DVD that was previously only on video cassette along with hundreds of 'new' features that were in first-run theatres the previous year. Many were donated from the local Hollywood Video world-corporate headquarters (located nearby) or the local Blockbuster Video (to clear surplus product from their limited shelf space). Other titles were donated to the local library by ordinary people who had purchased a DVD at retail and had already seen it a few times.
The result is that thousands of people who used to go to the movies a few years ago are now just staying home and watching DVDs from the public library or supermarket rental outlet. This shift is beginning to influence the type of films that are produced for the theatres: fewer mid-budget films directed at mature audiences (mature meaning over 25 years old) and more comic-book megabudget productions for the date-night younger audience that are increasingly the only people who still go to theatres.
Personally, I don't see how downloaded versions of feature films are going to make any difference to anyone. The film files are too large and too low-resolution (thinking of DivX) to be widely traded on the net. The wide availablity of DVD titles and their low prices (plus small physical size) make downloading movies absurd for the vast majority of people.
The people who are seriously interested in seeing a particular movie (to the point of actually spending hours to download it) are in all likelihood going to pay to see it in a nice theatrical setting anyway; with bright large crisp film images and blasting surround-sound.
Who's losing money? Where is the evidence that film downloading off the web is really an issue that is affecting the bottom line of anyone?
This whole thing seems to be a hysterical over-reaction to a problem that doesn't really even exist.
Hollywood's real problem is their inablility to control production budgets coupled with a box-office audience that is no longer growing. If present trends continue, then within five years most major big-budget films will not return their production costs through box-office receipts.
When that happens, Hollywood will be forced to go back to making $10-$20 million dollar movies and, frankly, they've forgotten how to make profitable movies in this price range.