Ebert began lambasting Lucas in the press ever since Lucas went full-court-press for digital projection. Ebert loves film, and sees Lucas as a threat to that medium, which of course, he is. I think that Lucas' statement that the next installment of the trilogy would ONLY be shown at digital projection theaters gave Ebert the impetus to fire both barrels at Attack of the Clones.
Personally, I'm troubled by the whole digital projection / all-digital-shoot / all-digital-post-production mentality, even as I recognize that it may open up new opportunities for small filmmakers.
After looking into the statutes for a while, it seems even the loophole may have a loophole. According to Section 114 (d)(1)(B)(i), the exemption for retransmissions only applies as long as "the radio station's broadcast transmission is not willfully or repeatedly retransmitted more than a radius of 150 miles from the site of the radio broadcast transmitter."
So, it's not licensing that's the issue, it's range. Or so it seems. The RIAA wins again.
Like I said before, I'm not a lawyer. But I haven't found any requirement that the lower royalty rate only applies to licensed broadcasters in any of the relevant statutes. If you have, hey, clue me in.
However, if this oversight happens to be real, then it's worth exploiting. For-profit webcasters could operate this way for the year or two or three it would take for a court case to come to trial, or for Congress to legislate against it (keep in mind how long it's taken the royalties process to get to THIS stage). That would allow them more time to build their audience, catalyze their public against the CARP rulings, and save a decent chunk of change in meantime. For some webcasters, it might just save their business. That's my point.
And yes, BTW, I do think the RIAA are morons. By clinging so stubbornly to old models of revenue generation and handicapping all legal methods of downloading music, they only make things worse for everyone. They earn consumer emnity while losing their money. I call that moronic.
So. Can you find anything within the relevant webcasting laws that says the reduced royalty rates only apply to licensed broadcasters? Maybe you can. If so, say so. If not, quit whining.
I didn't do the blackout thing because I hated the Big Ads. I did it to see if a web community could engage in a dialogue with its providers about how to run that community. Slashdot seems to be falling apart at the seams some days, and I thought perhaps by starting a dialogue, we could change that. The dream of a community telling marketers how it should be marketed to seemed worth the sacrificing comments for a week.
But it didn't work. Which sucked. Maybe when Slashdot hits harder times, we'll try again. Something different next time. Without parentheses in it.
Bah! Anonymous cowards suck. What's so scary about using a pseudonym, anyway?
*sigh*
Anyway, you're wrong.
Not about the FCC rules, but about the fact that broadcasting an FM-10 (or an AM-1, which would be even more well-suited to the task) is illegal. It's not. An FM-10, when assembled according to instructions, puts out about 8 mw of power (see "FM-10 Myths") making it perfectly legal under Part 15 rules.
Actually, no, they wouldn't need a license. That's the whole point. Like your cordless phone or your Wi-Fi link, microtransmitters like the FM-10 broadcast at such low powerlevels that they don't require a license.
So, in theory, a large webcaster like Soma webcasting several streams could simply broadcast them first over a micro FM transmitter. The webcasts would then be "retransmissions" of a "nonsubscription broadcast transmission", and subject to the lower royalty rates.
The statutory royalty rate for Internet simulcasts of FM radio broadcasts is only half that of Internet-only broadcasts. So couldn't any web station cut their royalties in half by spending $34.95 (plus shipping) to buy a micro-FM transmitter?
Here's what the law says in Title 17, 114. Scope of exclusive rights in sound recordings:
The performance of a sound recording publicly by means of a digital audio transmission, other than as a part of an interactive service, is not an infringement of section 106(6) if the performance is part of...a nonsubscription broadcast transmission.
It doesn't require you to be a licensed or noncommercial broadcaster, simply that your performance is broadcast freely over the airwaves.
Has the webcasting industry looked into this loophole at all? Seems to me that cutting your operating expenses roughly in half could be the difference between economic life and death for most companies.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (thank God!), but I am a pirate radio broadcaster.
Dead Man's Switch might help. It can post to web pages, encrypt your hard drive, and send e-mails after you die (or after your computer is stolen, or seized, or you become comatose, or whatever misfortune should befall you first).
From what I know of Douglas Adams, I bet he wished he had something like this set up.
Actually, like your cordless phone, the FM-10 broadcasts at powerlevels which don't require any license, not even the micro-licenses which have been proposed and defeated in recent years.
By the way, PBS and NPR are two of the biggest opponents of micropower radio. If it weren't for their efforts, we might have 100- and 1000-watt stations licensed all over America right now. Because I help run a pirate station here in Minneapolis, I'm not pledging to either PBS or MPR until they change their stance on this, and I encourage others to do the same.
Which is too bad, because Frontier House r0x0rz.:)
But the term "amateur station" isn't mentioned in any of the relevant documents.
Here's what the law says in Title 17, 114. Scope of exclusive rights in sound recordings:
The performance of a sound recording publicly by means of a digital audio transmission, other than as a part of an interactive service, is not an infringement of section 106(6) if the performance is part of...a nonsubscription broadcast transmission.
Nothing about pencuniary interests, amateur radio, or licenses. Just a nonsubscription (meaning free-over-the-air) broadcast transmission.
Sure the RIAA would freak out if webcasters adopted this model, but if nothing else, it would buy webcasters more time to fight the higher royalty levels.
Broadcasting: The term ''broadcasting'' means the dissemination of radio communications intended to be received by the public, directly or by the intermediary of relay stations.
Nothing about licenses in there. Nothing at all.
This isn't to say the royalty rates aren't obscene, just that it seems to me an interesting loophole exists.
Of course, IANAL. And I didn't do an exhaustive investigation. Do you have information to the contrary, where it says that only licensed broadcasters would recieve the reduced rate? If so, would you share it? Thanks.
The statutory royalty rate for Internet simulcasts of FM radio broadcasts is only half that of Internet-only broadcasts. So couldn't any web station cut their royalties in half by spending $34.95 (plus shipping) to buy a micro-FM transmitter? Why not?
Hemos, Taco: You blew it.
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I just want to say two things:
First, the notion that "posting is payment enough!" is a troll. Posting doesn't pay the bandwidth bills. I think it's sad that Slashdot has become a victim of its own popularity, but I understand their need to search out new sources of revenue. I'm not even against it.
On the other hand: Sorry Hemos, Taco, but it doesn't sound like you put *any* thought into this subscription plan at all. (Proof: grep the IRC log for "i dunno", see how many times Taco says it.) Shouldn't you guys have thought this out before you implemented the thing? Isn't that the first rule of programming?
And, not to be too pointed, but what about asking us what we want? For a site which prides itself on providing community, I'm profoundly disappointed in the way Slashdot rolled this out.
You had a real chance to change the world here. What is Slashdot supposedly about? Open Source. Imagine if you'd practiced what we all preach: You could've let the Slashdot community propose and moderate the features they most wanted in a subscription service. Like Google, you could have shown all the failing dotcoms that, if you give the customer exactly what they want, you'll be successful where everyone else fails.
You had a chance to lead the way, and you blew it. The current plan seems like -- forgive me - a Microsoft patch. Poorly thought out, badly implemented, causing more problems than it fixes.
You could still do this right, you know. And I'll probably pay a few bucks because I know how much I've enjoyed reading Slashdot. But I can't help feeling like this is the beginning of the end. Here's hoping you pull this together, and thanks for the memories if it turns out you can't.
...college students tell administrators they are all going to sleep at 9:30 pm and saying NO to alcohol, too! And that joint on the dresser was their roommate's, they swear.
That Rolling Stone article is fantastic. I like the Alan Kay quote near the end where he says that most of computer science can be mastered in just one year. An eerily clarvoyant piece.
Am I the only one who feels that Ridley's stupid obsession with making Deckard a replicant ruins the whole plot arc of the movie?
For years, Scott was silent on the subject, then in the '90s he began telling anyone who asked that, yes, Deckard was definitely a replicant. I don't buy it. I believe this idea only blossomed in Ridley's head long after the movie was released.
Part of what made Blade Runner powerful for me is that Deckard redeems himself in the end by rejecting the idea that replicants are morally less than human. Make Deckard a replicant and his moral victory becomes nothing more than faulty programming.
It's a shame Ridley seems hellbent on destroying the philosophical significance of his work just for the sake of an idea on par with, "Wouldn't it be cool if Superman and Batman fought?"
I've been working with VXML, CallXML, and other voice oriented IVR solutions for a while on a hobby basis, and I've been really frustrated that no workable open source VXML solution exists.
SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.
Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.
All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.
I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.
I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.
I had the same thought when I first read Cringely's article, but you're missing something here. The hold the media companies have on us isn't through hardware, it's through Congress.
As long laws like the DMCA (or the future SSSCA) are around, there are no "safe" alternatives. Illegal is illegal, and anything large scale will be shut down.
The thing is, if we had the clout to get rid of the DMCA, we wouldn't *need* to build an alternative way.
If we want free networks, the infrastructure we really need to hack is Congress.
It only takes tiny steps to walk off the edge of a cliff. I'm sure eventually they'll propose we pay a small monthly fee (just a trifle, really!) for every.MP? we have sitting on our hard drives.
I get a little more militant about this stuff every day. But I don't think I'm wrong, either.
"Voting with your dollars" is a fallacy. It sounds good (democratic, even!) and paints critics of "free" markets as dictators, winning arguments in a sort of oblique ad hominem attack.
But a vote, in any meaningful democratic sense, is a share of power distributed equally among participants. Money isn't distributed equally, and literally can't be, without losing its worth. Hence it's not a vote.
To be a little more concrete:
Imagine we have a new presidential election tomorrow, but instead of ballots, people purchase their politician. Money as real votes! Would you still say this is a democratic election? Would you say it represents the "majority vote"? Why not?
We also shouldn't forget that Big Money works to eliminate choices and competition from the marketplace. A glance at the Microsoft antitrust documents should remind anyone of that. So Big Money can oftentimes "buy out" the choice you would've voted for.
This isn't to say we should vote for who gets a cellphone. Markets are good things. But it's important to remember that markets work best when smartly checked by a framework of democracy, and that money != votes. (God help us if it ever does!)
I see this attitude a lot on Slashdot, and every time I do I think, "Could you bury your head a little further in the sand?"
Statements like "Don't buy it if you don't want it" really do nothing to address the fact that digital rights management *is* being rolled out, that many if not most people *will* buy into it, and that this will change the legitimate options left for others.
Think automobiles.
Once upon a time, if you didn't like the new-fangled horseless carriages, you could simply "not buy what you didn't want" and ride your trusty steed or horse-drawn carriage instead. How many horses do you see on the roads now?
* * *
When something become ubiquitous, it changes people's mindsets. Ideas that once seemed unconscionable begin to seem not only bearable but familiar and preferable.
Just not buying DRM yourself isn't enough. We all have to organize and work together to defeat strong DMR if we want to continue to enjoy free (as-in-liberty) information ourselves.
Cooltown, RIAA/MPAA style
on
Digital Lifestyle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's five o'clock in the morning. The alarm beeps to life and a soft female voice with an American accent comes over the speakers:
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early so you can change into your grey suit before the Copyright Police arrive to detain you. I've alerted them to the unauthorized copies of several Universal film properties I detected on your portable drive after you docked it last night, as required by the Intellectual Property Theft Act of 2009. Would you like me to play you some light rock as you get dressed? Current prices are $4.99 per half hour."
Every episode of "The Simpsons" broadcast in syndication has a few scenes cut for insertion of extra commercials. I wouldn't mind if they ran this process on each episode if it meant they were able to give us back those scenes.
Of course, they'll probably do it anyway just to add *more* commercials, and save the deleted scenes for the DVDs, damn their moneygrubbing souls. Mr. Burns would be proud.
Slashdot Mirror
Ebert began lambasting Lucas in the press ever since Lucas went full-court-press for digital projection. Ebert loves film, and sees Lucas as a threat to that medium, which of course, he is. I think that Lucas' statement that the next installment of the trilogy would ONLY be shown at digital projection theaters gave Ebert the impetus to fire both barrels at Attack of the Clones.
Personally, I'm troubled by the whole digital projection / all-digital-shoot / all-digital-post-production mentality, even as I recognize that it may open up new opportunities for small filmmakers.
After looking into the statutes for a while, it seems even the loophole may have a loophole. According to Section 114 (d)(1)(B)(i), the exemption for retransmissions only applies as long as "the radio station's broadcast transmission is not willfully or repeatedly retransmitted more than a radius of 150 miles from the site of the radio broadcast transmitter."
So, it's not licensing that's the issue, it's range. Or so it seems. The RIAA wins again.
Like I said before, I'm not a lawyer. But I haven't found any requirement that the lower royalty rate only applies to licensed broadcasters in any of the relevant statutes. If you have, hey, clue me in.
However, if this oversight happens to be real, then it's worth exploiting. For-profit webcasters could operate this way for the year or two or three it would take for a court case to come to trial, or for Congress to legislate against it (keep in mind how long it's taken the royalties process to get to THIS stage). That would allow them more time to build their audience, catalyze their public against the CARP rulings, and save a decent chunk of change in meantime. For some webcasters, it might just save their business. That's my point.
And yes, BTW, I do think the RIAA are morons. By clinging so stubbornly to old models of revenue generation and handicapping all legal methods of downloading music, they only make things worse for everyone. They earn consumer emnity while losing their money. I call that moronic.
So. Can you find anything within the relevant webcasting laws that says the reduced royalty rates only apply to licensed broadcasters? Maybe you can. If so, say so. If not, quit whining.
I didn't do the blackout thing because I hated the Big Ads. I did it to see if a web community could engage in a dialogue with its providers about how to run that community. Slashdot seems to be falling apart at the seams some days, and I thought perhaps by starting a dialogue, we could change that. The dream of a community telling marketers how it should be marketed to seemed worth the sacrificing comments for a week.
But it didn't work. Which sucked. Maybe when Slashdot hits harder times, we'll try again. Something different next time. Without parentheses in it.
Bah! Anonymous cowards suck. What's so scary about using a pseudonym, anyway?
*sigh*
Anyway, you're wrong.
Not about the FCC rules, but about the fact that broadcasting an FM-10 (or an AM-1, which would be even more well-suited to the task) is illegal. It's not. An FM-10, when assembled according to instructions, puts out about 8 mw of power (see "FM-10 Myths") making it perfectly legal under Part 15 rules.
In conclusion: Don't spread FUD. Thank you.
Actually, no, they wouldn't need a license. That's the whole point. Like your cordless phone or your Wi-Fi link, microtransmitters like the FM-10 broadcast at such low powerlevels that they don't require a license.
So, in theory, a large webcaster like Soma webcasting several streams could simply broadcast them first over a micro FM transmitter. The webcasts would then be "retransmissions" of a "nonsubscription broadcast transmission", and subject to the lower royalty rates.
Here's what the law says in Title 17, 114. Scope of exclusive rights in sound recordings: It doesn't require you to be a licensed or noncommercial broadcaster, simply that your performance is broadcast freely over the airwaves.
Has the webcasting industry looked into this loophole at all? Seems to me that cutting your operating expenses roughly in half could be the difference between economic life and death for most companies.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (thank God!), but I am a pirate radio broadcaster.
Dead Man's Switch might help. It can post to web pages, encrypt your hard drive, and send e-mails after you die (or after your computer is stolen, or seized, or you become comatose, or whatever misfortune should befall you first).
From what I know of Douglas Adams, I bet he wished he had something like this set up.
Actually, like your cordless phone, the FM-10 broadcasts at powerlevels which don't require any license, not even the micro-licenses which have been proposed and defeated in recent years.
:)
By the way, PBS and NPR are two of the biggest opponents of micropower radio. If it weren't for their efforts, we might have 100- and 1000-watt stations licensed all over America right now. Because I help run a pirate station here in Minneapolis, I'm not pledging to either PBS or MPR until they change their stance on this, and I encourage others to do the same.
Which is too bad, because Frontier House r0x0rz.
Here's what the law says in Title 17, 114. Scope of exclusive rights in sound recordings:
Nothing about pencuniary interests, amateur radio, or licenses. Just a nonsubscription (meaning free-over-the-air) broadcast transmission.
Sure the RIAA would freak out if webcasters adopted this model, but if nothing else, it would buy webcasters more time to fight the higher royalty levels.
which turns out to be:
Nothing about licenses in there. Nothing at all.
This isn't to say the royalty rates aren't obscene, just that it seems to me an interesting loophole exists.
Of course, IANAL. And I didn't do an exhaustive investigation. Do you have information to the contrary, where it says that only licensed broadcasters would recieve the reduced rate? If so, would you share it? Thanks.
The statutory royalty rate for Internet simulcasts of FM radio broadcasts is only half that of Internet-only broadcasts. So couldn't any web station cut their royalties in half by spending $34.95 (plus shipping) to buy a micro-FM transmitter? Why not?
I just want to say two things:
First, the notion that "posting is payment enough!" is a troll. Posting doesn't pay the bandwidth bills. I think it's sad that Slashdot has become a victim of its own popularity, but I understand their need to search out new sources of revenue. I'm not even against it.
On the other hand: Sorry Hemos, Taco, but it doesn't sound like you put *any* thought into this subscription plan at all. (Proof: grep the IRC log for "i dunno", see how many times Taco says it.) Shouldn't you guys have thought this out before you implemented the thing? Isn't that the first rule of programming?
And, not to be too pointed, but what about asking us what we want? For a site which prides itself on providing community, I'm profoundly disappointed in the way Slashdot rolled this out.
You had a real chance to change the world here. What is Slashdot supposedly about? Open Source. Imagine if you'd practiced what we all preach: You could've let the Slashdot community propose and moderate the features they most wanted in a subscription service. Like Google, you could have shown all the failing dotcoms that, if you give the customer exactly what they want, you'll be successful where everyone else fails.
You had a chance to lead the way, and you blew it. The current plan seems like -- forgive me - a Microsoft patch. Poorly thought out, badly implemented, causing more problems than it fixes.
You could still do this right, you know. And I'll probably pay a few bucks because I know how much I've enjoyed reading Slashdot. But I can't help feeling like this is the beginning of the end. Here's hoping you pull this together, and thanks for the memories if it turns out you can't.
...college students tell administrators they are all going to sleep at 9:30 pm and saying NO to alcohol, too! And that joint on the dresser was their roommate's, they swear.
Let's see them put a network switch inside a *real* bear. Then I'll be impressed.
That Rolling Stone article is fantastic. I like the Alan Kay quote near the end where he says that most of computer science can be mastered in just one year. An eerily clarvoyant piece.
My thoughts exactly. Thanks.
Am I the only one who feels that Ridley's stupid obsession with making Deckard a replicant ruins the whole plot arc of the movie?
For years, Scott was silent on the subject, then in the '90s he began telling anyone who asked that, yes, Deckard was definitely a replicant. I don't buy it. I believe this idea only blossomed in Ridley's head long after the movie was released.
Part of what made Blade Runner powerful for me is that Deckard redeems himself in the end by rejecting the idea that replicants are morally less than human. Make Deckard a replicant and his moral victory becomes nothing more than faulty programming.
It's a shame Ridley seems hellbent on destroying the philosophical significance of his work just for the sake of an idea on par with, "Wouldn't it be cool if Superman and Batman fought?"
SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.
Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.
All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.
I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.
I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.
I had the same thought when I first read Cringely's article, but you're missing something here. The hold the media companies have on us isn't through hardware, it's through Congress.
As long laws like the DMCA (or the future SSSCA) are around, there are no "safe" alternatives. Illegal is illegal, and anything large scale will be shut down.
The thing is, if we had the clout to get rid of the DMCA, we wouldn't *need* to build an alternative way.
If we want free networks, the infrastructure we really need to hack is Congress.
"It begins."
.MP? we have sitting on our hard drives.
It only takes tiny steps to walk off the edge of a cliff. I'm sure eventually they'll propose we pay a small monthly fee (just a trifle, really!) for every
I get a little more militant about this stuff every day. But I don't think I'm wrong, either.
"Voting with your dollars" is a fallacy. It sounds good (democratic, even!) and paints critics of "free" markets as dictators, winning arguments in a sort of oblique ad hominem attack.
But a vote, in any meaningful democratic sense, is a share of power distributed equally among participants. Money isn't distributed equally, and literally can't be, without losing its worth. Hence it's not a vote.
To be a little more concrete:
Imagine we have a new presidential election tomorrow, but instead of ballots, people purchase their politician. Money as real votes! Would you still say this is a democratic election? Would you say it represents the "majority vote"? Why not?
We also shouldn't forget that Big Money works to eliminate choices and competition from the marketplace. A glance at the Microsoft antitrust documents should remind anyone of that. So Big Money can oftentimes "buy out" the choice you would've voted for.
This isn't to say we should vote for who gets a cellphone. Markets are good things. But it's important to remember that markets work best when smartly checked by a framework of democracy, and that money != votes. (God help us if it ever does!)
Don't buy what you don't want. It is that simple.
I see this attitude a lot on Slashdot, and every time I do I think, "Could you bury your head a little further in the sand?"
Statements like "Don't buy it if you don't want it" really do nothing to address the fact that digital rights management *is* being rolled out, that many if not most people *will* buy into it, and that this will change the legitimate options left for others.
Think automobiles.
Once upon a time, if you didn't like the new-fangled horseless carriages, you could simply "not buy what you didn't want" and ride your trusty steed or horse-drawn carriage instead. How many horses do you see on the roads now?
* * *
When something become ubiquitous, it changes people's mindsets. Ideas that once seemed unconscionable begin to seem not only bearable but familiar and preferable.
Just not buying DRM yourself isn't enough. We all have to organize and work together to defeat strong DMR if we want to continue to enjoy free (as-in-liberty) information ourselves.
It's five o'clock in the morning. The alarm beeps to life and a soft female voice with an American accent comes over the speakers:
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early so you can change into your grey suit before the Copyright Police arrive to detain you. I've alerted them to the unauthorized copies of several Universal film properties I detected on your portable drive after you docked it last night, as required by the Intellectual Property Theft Act of 2009. Would you like me to play you some light rock as you get dressed? Current prices are $4.99 per half hour."
Every episode of "The Simpsons" broadcast in syndication has a few scenes cut for insertion of extra commercials. I wouldn't mind if they ran this process on each episode if it meant they were able to give us back those scenes.
Of course, they'll probably do it anyway just to add *more* commercials, and save the deleted scenes for the DVDs, damn their moneygrubbing souls. Mr. Burns would be proud.