Also Harry Shearer's (who plays Skinner) least favorite episode. He was livid with the writers for throwing out eight years of character development in one fell swoop. It had one truly great line, though: Skinner, having decided to return to his roots as a cheap hood, rides his motorcycle past several kids and yells "Up yours, children!"
There's an article in Rolling Stone about Columbia pilot Willie McCool taking the first Weezer album into orbit with him. Apparently he was a huge fan of the group and got to know them fairly well before the flight.
I think the answers are faily straightforward: 1) It was actually a pretty good film, though it was damaged at the box office by being released around the same time as "The Two Towers" and the second Harry Potter installment. Hindsight being 20/20, it shouldn't have been released during the holiday season. 2) Although audiences certainly knew who the Romulans were, audiences had no connection with either Shinzon or the Remans. So why should they care? Once people actually saw the movie they got to see some of the best space battle scenes in the entire series, but in terms of getting people into the theatres the movie would have been better served by dispensing with the Remans entirely, substituting a rogue faction of the Romulan military in their place. 3) Frankly, the whole "this-is-probably-the-last-film" vibe from the cast and crew just sounded like loser talk. Far from luring fans into the theatres, I think it turned people off.
If they want to take cash to play stuff from artists with deep pockets, why shouldn't they be able to?
No one is saying that they can't. Feingold's bill would just force them to be upfront about it with listeners.
Oddly enough, I foresee almost as much kicking and screaming from the broadcast industry over this as there will be over having to shed stations. The illusion that the music which gets played on the radio is there because it "rocks" - and not because the station is paid to play it - is one which has been very important to broadcasters over the years; the time-honored stereotype of stations programmed by music directors who are "in it for the music, man." Which is a farce. You could probably count the number of major-market radio stations in the US which are still programmed that way on one hand. The Feingold bill, as currently worded, won't prevent broadcasters from doing anything they're doing right now. They'll just have to come clean about it with the listeners. And that scares broadcasters like you can't imagine.
What about the problem with BREAKING UP radio stations? Many might go under or have severe financial problems due to restructuring and cutting off from their main backup cash source (companies like ClearChannel). I'd hate to see a single station go down or be forced to let a bunch of staff go just because they are essentially forced to by a bill...
I'm not convinced that's going to happen. Even if Feingold gets some version of his bill through congress and the prez signs it, the chances of turning back the limits on radio/TV/newspaper ownership to pre-'96 levels are slim and none. What's more likely is the ownership limits will be somewhere between the pre-'96 limits and current limits.
In any event, there will be some selling of assets, but it's not like stations will be put on an ice floe and shoved out to sea. Stations will be sold, and their new owners will have to have the cash resources to back up the stations. They'll probably end up in far better hands since Clear Channel has been sitting on a pile of debt for the past few years thanks to their buying spree; one of the main reasons why they're as notoriously cheap as they are.
To be fair, it's not like nationwide liberal talk shows haven't been attempted; Mario Cuomo, Alan Colmes, and so on. The problem is that the ratings on those shows tend to suck, so they don't last that long. I mean, it's a shame, but what are you going to do? Force people to listen?
That's why she chose now to resign her position as head of the RIAA. She doesn't want to preside over a sinking ship.
Funny, yes. But also probably accurate to a surprising degree. The timing of her announcement - the day after the RIAA court victory over Verizon - allows her to go out on one of the few high notes that the RIAA has seen lately. Had the RIAA been rebuffed by the courts I have no doubt that she would have stuck it out until another short-term victory allowed her to leave on a similar face-saving note.
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear and assumed the reader would be able to handle pronouns.
Hey, don't blame the reader. Your only mention of the Slashdot audience comes in the very first sentence of your post. The sentence that begins the section I commented on reads, 'That's right, the continual we are better than you from the EU and the USoA.' There's certainly nothing there about the Slashdot audience and it seems more directed at American and European public attitudes towards China in general. Which is a fair criticism, but don't blame the reader just because you didn't express yourself as clearly as you otherwise might have.
Where's the huge stink that the EU is putting up a GPS system when the USoA already has one there.
"Huge stink" might not be the right phrase, but it's no secret that the US government would be perfectly happy to see the EU's proposed Galileo GPS system scuttled.
How does the resolution of CED compare to the VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD video formats?
RCA didn't use Lines of Resolution in their CED specifications, but a bandwidth of 3 MHz translates to about 240 Lines, the same resolution as VHS, but less than the 425 Lines of LaserDisc and 500 Lines of DVD. The subjective evaluation of people familiar with all these formats is that CED is better than VHS, but not as good as LaserDisc or DVD. CED does pale in comparison to modern LaserDisc and DVD players, but in 1981 there wasn't a lot of difference, because LaserDisc technology was young, and at that time RCA had superior mastering techniques. A comparative review of the Zenith VP2000 CED player and the Magnavox VH8000 LaserDisc player in the July '81 issue of Popular Electronics rated the Zenith unit better in Video and Audio Signal-to-Noise ratios, but lower in total Video bandwidth.
It was the 3d person of a 15 member group of bikers that had died in the course of about 2 years, and i had enough. OK, most of the blame was up to us, we drove at incredible speeds on public roads ( 200 kph+ was not at all unusual
Christ, what was the name of this group? The Lemmings?
The company wants to avoid a situation where they introduce the vest into the US and the government comes along a few months later and sets higher standards for similar devices than what the vest has been engineered for, inviting potential lawsuits down the road. Having said that, I suspect there will be a pretty good number of grey market US sales in the meantime through eBay and third-party distributors.
Anyone else remember that hilarious Tintin satire in National Lampoon about 20 years back, "Tintin Goes to Lebanon?" Brilliant. They really nailed down the artwork. It's been years since I've read it, but it ended up with Tintin being safe on an American battleship off the Lebanon coast while then-Vice President Bush let Tintin launch a cruise missile that nuked Beirut.
now that you have publicised the radiation risk, there is no way that Nsync singer will go into space... and there dies our last chance of getting him sterilised and stopping him from having offspring...
According to this, I'd say the chances of him ever having offspring are pretty much nil.
Infamous in a sense that it was commercial crap. Infamous in a sense that it was produced by the same guy (Bob Rock) that used to produce Poison and similar commercial crap. No wonder it sold. So did Britney, and does that tell us anything?
Sorry, but that just sounds elitist. Quality isn't measured inversely to quantities sold. Sure, Britney Spears sells a lot of records. But so does "Back in Black," and I don't think there are many who'd doubt that record's ass-kickin' quotient.
Actually, Metallica didn't start to go artistically bankrupt until the infamous Black album.
Infamous in what sense? Just curious. I mean, it's not my favorite Metallica album, but God knows the thing sold. Someone liked it.
Interestingly, if you look at the RIAA website you'll notice that the band hasn't received any gold or platinum awards since January 2000, which is shortly before they started taking on Napster (around March or April of '00, I think). Now, of course, there could be perfectly good reasons for that; that the records are selling as well as ever and the band's management asked the RIAA to hold off on future awards until they have something new to promote. But you've gotta admit that a 2 1/2 year stretch of *no* gold or platinum awards for a band that was regularly collecting RIAA certifications in each year between 1986 and 2000 (look it up here) looks pretty odd.
On top of that, the last RIAA certification for "Load" (1996) was for 4 million copies in November 1997, and the last certification for "Re-Load" ("Load" outtakes; 1997) was for 3 million copies; also in November 1997. In other words, you're looking at the sales of the band's two most recent studio albums levelling off nearly *five* years ago. In the meantime, the band's earlier records continued to pick up awards for more than another year before mysteriously stopping altogether around the time of the Napster controversy. Now I don't know about you, but that sure spells "commercial decline" to me: The old stuff continues selling and the new stuff stalls out at a level well below the old stuff.
I'm betting that the robot is going to see the inside of a place where teenagers have been partying for years; a mildewed matress in the corner, empty beer bottles and cans all over the place, and graffiti on the walls; stuff like "JUDAS PRIEST RULEZ," "VENOM," and "CLASS OF '86."
Slashdot Mirror
Also Harry Shearer's (who plays Skinner) least favorite episode. He was livid with the writers for throwing out eight years of character development in one fell swoop. It had one truly great line, though: Skinner, having decided to return to his roots as a cheap hood, rides his motorcycle past several kids and yells "Up yours, children!"
There's an article in Rolling Stone about Columbia pilot Willie McCool taking the first Weezer album into orbit with him. Apparently he was a huge fan of the group and got to know them fairly well before the flight.
I think the answers are faily straightforward:
1) It was actually a pretty good film, though it was damaged at the box office by being released around the same time as "The Two Towers" and the second Harry Potter installment. Hindsight being 20/20, it shouldn't have been released during the holiday season.
2) Although audiences certainly knew who the Romulans were, audiences had no connection with either Shinzon or the Remans. So why should they care? Once people actually saw the movie they got to see some of the best space battle scenes in the entire series, but in terms of getting people into the theatres the movie would have been better served by dispensing with the Remans entirely, substituting a rogue faction of the Romulan military in their place.
3) Frankly, the whole "this-is-probably-the-last-film" vibe from the cast and crew just sounded like loser talk. Far from luring fans into the theatres, I think it turned people off.
If they want to take cash to play stuff from artists with deep pockets, why shouldn't they be able to?
No one is saying that they can't. Feingold's bill would just force them to be upfront about it with listeners.
Oddly enough, I foresee almost as much kicking and screaming from the broadcast industry over this as there will be over having to shed stations. The illusion that the music which gets played on the radio is there because it "rocks" - and not because the station is paid to play it - is one which has been very important to broadcasters over the years; the time-honored stereotype of stations programmed by music directors who are "in it for the music, man." Which is a farce. You could probably count the number of major-market radio stations in the US which are still programmed that way on one hand. The Feingold bill, as currently worded, won't prevent broadcasters from doing anything they're doing right now. They'll just have to come clean about it with the listeners. And that scares broadcasters like you can't imagine.
What about the problem with BREAKING UP radio stations? Many might go under or have severe financial problems due to restructuring and cutting off from their main backup cash source (companies like ClearChannel). I'd hate to see a single station go down or be forced to let a bunch of staff go just because they are essentially forced to by a bill...
I'm not convinced that's going to happen. Even if Feingold gets some version of his bill through congress and the prez signs it, the chances of turning back the limits on radio/TV/newspaper ownership to pre-'96 levels are slim and none. What's more likely is the ownership limits will be somewhere between the pre-'96 limits and current limits.
In any event, there will be some selling of assets, but it's not like stations will be put on an ice floe and shoved out to sea. Stations will be sold, and their new owners will have to have the cash resources to back up the stations. They'll probably end up in far better hands since Clear Channel has been sitting on a pile of debt for the past few years thanks to their buying spree; one of the main reasons why they're as notoriously cheap as they are.
To be fair, it's not like nationwide liberal talk shows haven't been attempted; Mario Cuomo, Alan Colmes, and so on. The problem is that the ratings on those shows tend to suck, so they don't last that long. I mean, it's a shame, but what are you going to do? Force people to listen?
That's why she chose now to resign her position as head of the RIAA. She doesn't want to preside over a sinking ship.
Funny, yes. But also probably accurate to a surprising degree. The timing of her announcement - the day after the RIAA court victory over Verizon - allows her to go out on one of the few high notes that the RIAA has seen lately. Had the RIAA been rebuffed by the courts I have no doubt that she would have stuck it out until another short-term victory allowed her to leave on a similar face-saving note.
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear and assumed the reader would be able to handle pronouns.
Hey, don't blame the reader. Your only mention of the Slashdot audience comes in the very first sentence of your post. The sentence that begins the section I commented on reads, 'That's right, the continual we are better than you from the EU and the USoA.' There's certainly nothing there about the Slashdot audience and it seems more directed at American and European public attitudes towards China in general. Which is a fair criticism, but don't blame the reader just because you didn't express yourself as clearly as you otherwise might have.
Where's the huge stink that the EU is putting up a GPS system when the USoA already has one there.
"Huge stink" might not be the right phrase, but it's no secret that the US government would be perfectly happy to see the EU's proposed Galileo GPS system scuttled.
[...]or dead.
I thought he had a theatre in Branson. Which is far worse than death.
Did it even beat the quality of VHS? I can't really imagine it being competitive with Laserdisc on quality.
From the RCA SelectaVision VideoDisc FAQ:
How does the resolution of CED compare to the VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD video formats?
RCA didn't use Lines of Resolution in their CED specifications, but a bandwidth of 3 MHz translates to about 240 Lines, the same resolution as VHS, but less than the 425 Lines of LaserDisc and 500 Lines of DVD. The subjective evaluation of people familiar with all these formats is that CED is better than VHS, but not as good as LaserDisc or DVD. CED does pale in comparison to modern LaserDisc and DVD players, but in 1981 there wasn't a lot of difference, because LaserDisc technology was young, and at that time RCA had superior mastering techniques. A comparative review of the Zenith VP2000 CED player and the Magnavox VH8000 LaserDisc player in the July '81 issue of Popular Electronics rated the Zenith unit better in Video and Audio Signal-to-Noise ratios, but lower in total Video bandwidth.
A friend told me about a data transfer service that uses a very expensive device that plays vinyl with a laser.
In the mid-to-late '80s some company actually marketed a turntable that read the record with a laser, like a CD player. It sounded like shit.
At no point does the post say "the last." It says "one of the last." Twice, as a matter of fact.
It was the 3d person of a 15 member group of bikers that had died in the course of about 2 years, and i had enough. OK, most of the blame was up to us, we drove at incredible speeds on public roads ( 200 kph+ was not at all unusual
Christ, what was the name of this group? The Lemmings?
The company wants to avoid a situation where they introduce the vest into the US and the government comes along a few months later and sets higher standards for similar devices than what the vest has been engineered for, inviting potential lawsuits down the road. Having said that, I suspect there will be a pretty good number of grey market US sales in the meantime through eBay and third-party distributors.
According to Google News Mel Gibson has signed up for a new Mad Max film "Fury Road".
And it's already available at sidewalk kiosks throughout China.
This site has a fine collection of abandoned stations on Boston's MBTA system.
Anyone else remember that hilarious Tintin satire in National Lampoon about 20 years back, "Tintin Goes to Lebanon?" Brilliant. They really nailed down the artwork. It's been years since I've read it, but it ended up with Tintin being safe on an American battleship off the Lebanon coast while then-Vice President Bush let Tintin launch a cruise missile that nuked Beirut.
just take a look at how many times the Sex Pistols ripped off Chuck Berry
Not to mention Eddie Cochran - mod this guy up!
And million rejoice as the glory hole finally achieves perfection!
now that you have publicised the radiation risk, there is no way that Nsync singer will go into space ... and there dies our last chance of getting him sterilised and stopping him from having offspring ...
According to this, I'd say the chances of him ever having offspring are pretty much nil.
Infamous in a sense that it was commercial crap. Infamous in a sense that it was produced by the same guy (Bob Rock) that used to produce Poison and similar commercial crap. No wonder it sold. So did Britney, and does that tell us anything?
Sorry, but that just sounds elitist. Quality isn't measured inversely to quantities sold. Sure, Britney Spears sells a lot of records. But so does "Back in Black," and I don't think there are many who'd doubt that record's ass-kickin' quotient.
Actually, Metallica didn't start to go artistically bankrupt until the infamous Black album.
Infamous in what sense? Just curious. I mean, it's not my favorite Metallica album, but God knows the thing sold. Someone liked it.
Interestingly, if you look at the RIAA website you'll notice that the band hasn't received any gold or platinum awards since January 2000, which is shortly before they started taking on Napster (around March or April of '00, I think). Now, of course, there could be perfectly good reasons for that; that the records are selling as well as ever and the band's management asked the RIAA to hold off on future awards until they have something new to promote. But you've gotta admit that a 2 1/2 year stretch of *no* gold or platinum awards for a band that was regularly collecting RIAA certifications in each year between 1986 and 2000 (look it up here) looks pretty odd.
On top of that, the last RIAA certification for "Load" (1996) was for 4 million copies in November 1997, and the last certification for "Re-Load" ("Load" outtakes; 1997) was for 3 million copies; also in November 1997. In other words, you're looking at the sales of the band's two most recent studio albums levelling off nearly *five* years ago. In the meantime, the band's earlier records continued to pick up awards for more than another year before mysteriously stopping altogether around the time of the Napster controversy. Now I don't know about you, but that sure spells "commercial decline" to me: The old stuff continues selling and the new stuff stalls out at a level well below the old stuff.
According to Democratic President Candidate polls, Reverend Sharpton has a lot of credibility in the Democratic Party.
Not according to this poll. Sharpton's at the bottom of the pack as of about a month ago, with support from 2% of Democratic voters.
I'm betting that the robot is going to see the inside of a place where teenagers have been partying for years; a mildewed matress in the corner, empty beer bottles and cans all over the place, and graffiti on the walls; stuff like "JUDAS PRIEST RULEZ," "VENOM," and "CLASS OF '86."