"The person who will have converted iTunes songs will be able to make it available elsewhere," Marc Guez, head of the French Collecting Society for Music Producers rights (SCPP) told Reuters.
[comment]
Not legally. The music is still protected by copyright law. Currently, the DRM can be removed illegally, and then the music can be illegally shared. Making the first step legal doesn't make the second step legal.[/comment]
You're misunderstanding Mr. Guez. He is against the law (note his affiliation), and he is arguing that if this law is passed, ordinary people will have the ability to illegally send the non-DRM'd content around the world, and thus Apple would close its French iTunes store. To him, this is a reason why the law should not be passed. In the original story, the previous paragraph explained this.
Short quotes from wire stories should not be taken out of context to criticize the story's author.
Ambush Marketing doesn't need to use specific words like "summer" or "olympics". For instance, Nike has been ambush-marketing the Olympics for years, and in 1996, many people thought they were an official sponsor.
Here's how Nike ambushes: Put up billboards of Nike athletes all over London; buy TV advertising that shows, say, a top Nike sprinter winning a generic race. People won't tell the difference. In the past, "official" advertisers would put an Olympic logo on their ads to prove they were legit, but people didn't notice or care. This silly list of no-no words will be the same -- no viewer will think, "Coke used the word 'Gold'? They must be official!" The law won't stop ambush marketing at all.
What does make an advertiser look "official" is repetition, and this is the problem with official sponsorships. For Atlanta they cost US $50 million; for London they'll be much more. Spend that much on the sponsorship, and Reebok simply can't afford to blanket the airwaves as much as Nike can. So Nike has more TV spots than Reebok, and thus viewers think Nike is "official."
The only way the Olympic Committee could really help their official sponsors is by giving them signage at the venues. Like, if during a basketball game Reebok could put its logo on the scorer's table. (As of now, the Olympics bans all venue advertising, a relic of its "amateur" history.) I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen by 2012.
A company -- say, Amazon.com -- owns the title to a website. They have rights to the property at http://www.amazon.com/ . But the actual bits on the server don't have to reside on computers owned by Amazon; they could hire a hosting company to do that.
That's what's going on with Second Life. The video game is hosting the "site", and they're licensing rights to areas of the "site" to individual people.
Come to think of it, it also reminds me of an IPO. But instead of selling ownership, Second Life is selling rights to its product. I don't see anything wrong with this whatsoever.
Rich people, actually. Not *many* rich people (after all, how many rich people are there?), but enough so that the golf channel can say that their audience skews towards wealth. With that, BMW etc. will advertise with the Golf Channel, because the advertiser will know that their ads won't be wasted on the proles. Other channels that skew rich are CNN and the History Channel.
One issue for advertisers is that no one knows exactly how much the Golf Channel skews rich. As the article stated, Nielsens only help you so much given their small sample size. Thus the introduction of new viewer-counting technologies.
You're exactly right, Ex Deo. Just because Disney doesn't return calls from BusinessWeek doesn't mean that they don't return calls from SBC.
Moreovoer, IPTV is not the same as Video on Demand. Expanded VOD is one of the possibilities with IPTV, but it's not necessarily going to happen. All IPTV entails is a server of content at a node connected to ~300 homes. You turn on your TV, and you want to watch CBS, and your cable box sends a request back to the node for "CBS". Because there's only one channel being streamed, you can use the bandwidth for lots of things, including VOD.
Disney et al would love cable TV competition, but they're a bit nervous about VOD. (Not just because of cannibalizing DVD, but also because of the effects on TV networks, syndication, etc.) I bet IPTV will happen soon enough, but not initially with a whole lot of VOD.
You're right that Pearl Harbor made money, but the story is a little more complicated than adding up the grosses and comparing them to the production budget and marketing costs.
First, grosses include money that goes to studios and exhibitors. So, for the $450 million that Pearl Harbor grossed in theaters, a good chunk of that went to AMC, etc. The formula to determine how much the studios get is complicated -- studios make a higher percentage in the first weeks and a lower percentage deep into the run -- but it's about a 50-50 split. Next, there's distribution fees. Disney produced the film (through Touchstone) and released it in the U.S. via its subsidiary Buena Vista, but internationally there's probably a foreign distributor that gets a cut of what the film earned in its country. That's probably 10% of the international gross. So, Touchstone's theatrical gross is about $450 - $225 - $25, or $200 million.
Second step: Gross participants. This movie was a Jerry Bruckheimer production and starred Ben Affleck, and you bet your ass that they got gross percentage points. This means that they get a certain % of the studio's revenues before the studio takes costs into account. (These are NOT counted in the production budget or marketing costs.) I'll take a rough guess of 30% for total gross participation points. Now Disney's take is down to $140 million.
Third step: Cost of capital. A dollar three years from now isn't worth as much as a dollar today. For a studio, this cost of capital is more or less 10% annually. Marketing costs are thankfully paid nearly during the theatrical run, but production costs are paid two years in advance. So the "real" production budget, in year-of-release relative dollars, is more like $170 million.
So Disney is paying $240 million and getting $140 million. Sounds bad? Yeah, but like BTWR noted, Disney gets TV rights, DVD sales, Pay-per-view, HBO... that adds up. Plus, it's pure cash flow -- in current Hollywood contracts, people like Affleck and Bruckheimer don't get much of a slice of that pie. (For DVD sales, the store gets about 50%, and of the remaining 50%, the studio gets about 80%). How many DVDs did Pearl Harbor sell? Try
$130 million worth in its first week. Disney makes 40% of that, or about $34 million, in pure cash.
All in all, Pearl Harbor is almost certainly already a profit for Disney. If it's not yet, continuing DVD sales will push it over the hump very soon.
Looking at the linked box office data it is pretty obvious that movies released to very few theatres (e.g. "Cowboy Bebop") don't do as well as movies heavily marketed and released to thousands of theatres.
The same could be said for most products. For instance, cookies sold in very few stores don't do as well as cookies sold in many stores.
Trust me, there isn't a conspiracy here. If Buena Vista thought that investing $10 million more in marketing would have assured $20 million more in box office receipts, they would have done it.
"Spirited Away", which did pretty well despite all the effort by Disney to not market the movie, shows that anime can be successful when done right. The fact that it took an Oscar to get the public to notice the movie is sad...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Academy Awards aren't a pure meritocracy. Studios spend lots of money on "For Your Consideration" ads touting their pics for Oscars. Did you ever consider that Buena Vista spent its marketing budget on winning an Oscar for Spirited Away instead of on highway billboards? It's a formula that's worked for indie pics in the past, and it worked in this case as well.
I know it's frustrating that anime is slow to catch on here, but there is no conspiracy. Michael Eisner would sell his grandmother to add 1% to Disney's profits.
If cable/satellite providers would only sell channels individually, there would be no need for "decency standards".
This would completely change the Pay TV business model, and as such cable channels would fight it like crazy.
Currently, cable channels get revenues from two sources: Advertising and per-user fees. So if your cable package has TNT, then approximately $1 per month of your bill goes to TNT.
As such, nearly all cable channels want to be on "basic" packages. First, by having more potential viewers, the channel will likely get higher ratings and thus more advertising. Second, if a cable channel is on a "basic" package, it can charge everyone who subscribes to that package their fee, which ranges from a few pennies a month to ESPN's >$2/month.
Now, cable operators (i.e., Comcast) don't like putting everyone on Basic; it hurts their ability to make money. But the major media companies force Comcast to put their minor cable channels on basic packages by threatening to withhold major channels. See Viacom vs. Echostar of last year -- Viacom threatened to take away CBS before the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Uh, Echostar lost that fight.
So if the Government allows us to pick cable channels individually, then a LOT of minor channels will be in trouble. My guess? They'd raise rates -- like, the Golf Channel would charge around $4 or $5 per month. A lot would probably die though, and Major Media Companies would lose a lot of bargaining power.
is for AOL-Time Warner to buy them out. Oh wait, Warner Brothers music is already one of the big four...
Actually, Time Warner sold their music business to Edgar Bronfman Jr. earlier this year as AOL-TW tried to dump their unprofitable divisions. So, despite the name, Time Warner is a wholly seperate company from Warner Music Group.
Moreover, I wouldn't expect AOL-TW to buy anything soon. Not until their stock price goes up some...
Well marketing wants Engineering to slow the unit down so they have a low cost unit to sell. Then sell them upgrades to full speed at an enormous price. These would be physically identical, just one would have the code messed up on purpose to run slow.
Happens more often than you'd think.
There was a case -- I forget the exact company -- but they were producing chips of some sort. Like Canon, they wanted to sell a "basic" version and a "premium" version; the latter having more functions and a higer price.
Here's where it gets interesting: To make the "basic" chip, the company realized it was most cost-efficient to make the premium chip and then physically remove some of its functionality. So the basic chip cost more to produce -- it had a higher marginal cost -- yet it was priced lower.
What the chip manufacturer did isn't counter to economics. Same for Canon (software-wise). Both of these products have high fixed costs -- the R&D, the manufacturing -- but marginal costs that approach zero. Basic economic theory says that you should set price=marginal cost; but what do you do if MC=0?
Well, we know what Linus would say. But what companies like Canon try to do is set price equal to YOUR willingness to pay. Like, what's the most you would pay for a camera? It's called segmenting the market. That's why there is a premium camera (for rich people who can't be bothered) and a basic camera (for poorer people). Both cost the exact same to produce.
This isn't that special. You see many examples of different types of customers being charged different prices for products that cost the same to produce. Think of where Marginal Cost=0. Movies (you get discount for matinees); Microsoft Office (student vs. corporate); Adobe Acrobat (free reader vs. pay version). What Canon's doing isn't that crazy.
This is just an opinion piece by one of the paper's writers, and is a lot lower on the food chain than an editorial.
Moreover, it's also part of the Sunday magazine, which is a very different entity than the daily paper and its opinion writers. In fact, there is more than a bit of tension at the NYT between the "daily" people and the "mag" people. Since the Editorial Board (and its op-ed writers) are part of the "daily" staff, we should not assume anything about their opinion of closed-source voting machines based on this article.
Yeah, they did ruin the movie for me. To say that the bearskin romance scene irritated me is to say that George Lucas has a bit of an ego. As I watched it I was quite literally in physical pain.
In comparison, Episode I wasn't as bad. But lord, it wasn't good.
Anyway, I'd like to hear your responses as I've been wondering why people seem to rag on the new SW movies a bit.
Episode I had Jar-Jar and his stupid race talking in their demeaning pigdin language. Also, the CGI wasn't up to snuff for what it needed to be, and everyone basically looked foolish.
Episode II had less Jar-Jar (but did have the memorable, "Me-so gonna vote for WAR! We's done got rid of the writ of habeas corpus!"). However, Episode II had the absolutely worst romantic scene I have ever seen in my life. This comes from a person who has seen every Jean-Claude Van Damme movie in existence. When Anni and Padme were on the shag bearskin rug I had to look away from the screen and shut my ears.
Also, the Yoda fight was ridiculous. If he was really that fast, he shoulda killed Doookooo in 2 seconds.
With apologies to one of my favorite movies of all time, not to mention the Beach Boys, here's a joke that maybe 10 of you will get:
*********
If everybody had a surfboard
And lightsabers too
Then everybody'd be surfing
On volcanic goo
'Cuz Anakin is totally bitchin'
When he's stopping Jedi missions
And it's neat dueling l33t when you're on hot magma all day
First wave! Don't get tired.
Second wave! Slash higher.
Third wave! You're on fire!
Jedi surfin! (it's all right)
Waxin' down our surfboards
Charging up our swords
Tell Yoda we're surfin'
Good side has me bored
I've got a surfboard on my speeder
For when the waves are 15 meters
And we're cool with the duel till volcano erupts us away...
I wish they all could be double-sided, wish they all could be double-sided, wish they all could be double-sided swords...
Have a separate page, labeled simply "Advertisments". Put all advertising there. Keep it away from the news and editorial content.
[...]
The idea is to be maximally non-annoying.
No, the idea is for advertisers to pay you.
Advertisers want two things: A large audience, and a targeted audience with known demographics. Shunting your ads off to a side page won't help them, and if you don't help them, they won't help you.
We experimented with this in a paper magazine I worked for - putting all the commercials in a clearly designated spot in the back.
You aren't gonna make a lot of money off these.
I sincerely hope your newsstand price covers most of your costs. Most magazines/newspapers aren't like that -- normally, they get 2/3 of their revenues from ads.
Other magazines have tried the same approach. AFAIK, however, they haven't kept statistics and neither did we.
Don't forget the fact that not only will they allow you to watch movies on a tiny screen, they'll cost you $7 a pop, and only be watchable for 48 hours before they evaporate...
I don't understand why anyone would want Internet Video on Demand in its current form. If you care about immediacy, you use your cable box to order a pay-per-view or OnDemand; if you don't care about immediacy, you rent from Blockbuster or whatever. In both cases the price is about the same (or less) as Internet movies, and the quality is better.
Now, if I could watch movies on my PDA on the subway... that's a different story.
Disney is just trying to get into the "last mile" game. Its media business is well vertically integrated except for its lack of cable/telephone/ISPs that actually enter people's homes and generate monthly revenues.
In contrast, Viacom, AT&T, AOL et al have last-mile capabilities, which freaks out other media companies like Disney and NewsCorp. (This is also why NewsCorp is going after DirecTV.) Disney/NewsCorp are afraid that they'll lose pricing power, not to mention being more susceptible to the advertising market because of the lack of monthly cable fees.
Anyway, it's an interesting play by Disney. I don't suppose that cable companies will much like it. I'd expect "HBO on Demand"-type services to be beefed up soon, because that in effect price-undercuts Disney's new service (HBO service for many people is a sunk cost.)
I agree that hyphens should not be confused with em dashes. However...
Em dashes aren't the length of two hyphens. They are the length of the capital letter "M."
The Associated Press Style Guide, the style guide of choice for most journalists, specifically instructs to put spaces on both sides of em dashes -- like that. This is to prevent confusion with hyphens and en dashes -- which are like an em dashes, but the size of a capital "N." En dashes don't get spaces on each sides; think of them as mega-hyphens.
And IMHO, English majors commit more grammatical errors than the rest of humanity =)
Slashdot Mirror
[comment] Not legally. The music is still protected by copyright law. Currently, the DRM can be removed illegally, and then the music can be illegally shared. Making the first step legal doesn't make the second step legal.[/comment]
You're misunderstanding Mr. Guez. He is against the law (note his affiliation), and he is arguing that if this law is passed, ordinary people will have the ability to illegally send the non-DRM'd content around the world, and thus Apple would close its French iTunes store. To him, this is a reason why the law should not be passed. In the original story, the previous paragraph explained this.
Short quotes from wire stories should not be taken out of context to criticize the story's author.
Ambush Marketing doesn't need to use specific words like "summer" or "olympics". For instance, Nike has been ambush-marketing the Olympics for years, and in 1996, many people thought they were an official sponsor.
Here's how Nike ambushes: Put up billboards of Nike athletes all over London; buy TV advertising that shows, say, a top Nike sprinter winning a generic race. People won't tell the difference. In the past, "official" advertisers would put an Olympic logo on their ads to prove they were legit, but people didn't notice or care. This silly list of no-no words will be the same -- no viewer will think, "Coke used the word 'Gold'? They must be official!" The law won't stop ambush marketing at all.
What does make an advertiser look "official" is repetition, and this is the problem with official sponsorships. For Atlanta they cost US $50 million; for London they'll be much more. Spend that much on the sponsorship, and Reebok simply can't afford to blanket the airwaves as much as Nike can. So Nike has more TV spots than Reebok, and thus viewers think Nike is "official."
The only way the Olympic Committee could really help their official sponsors is by giving them signage at the venues. Like, if during a basketball game Reebok could put its logo on the scorer's table. (As of now, the Olympics bans all venue advertising, a relic of its "amateur" history.) I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen by 2012.
This reminds me a lot of website property.
A company -- say, Amazon.com -- owns the title to a website. They have rights to the property at http://www.amazon.com/ . But the actual bits on the server don't have to reside on computers owned by Amazon; they could hire a hosting company to do that.
That's what's going on with Second Life. The video game is hosting the "site", and they're licensing rights to areas of the "site" to individual people.
Come to think of it, it also reminds me of an IPO. But instead of selling ownership, Second Life is selling rights to its product. I don't see anything wrong with this whatsoever.
Golf Channel
Score: 0 (who the hell watches it?)
Rich people, actually. Not *many* rich people (after all, how many rich people are there?), but enough so that the golf channel can say that their audience skews towards wealth. With that, BMW etc. will advertise with the Golf Channel, because the advertiser will know that their ads won't be wasted on the proles. Other channels that skew rich are CNN and the History Channel.
One issue for advertisers is that no one knows exactly how much the Golf Channel skews rich. As the article stated, Nielsens only help you so much given their small sample size. Thus the introduction of new viewer-counting technologies.
You're exactly right, Ex Deo. Just because Disney doesn't return calls from BusinessWeek doesn't mean that they don't return calls from SBC.
Moreovoer, IPTV is not the same as Video on Demand. Expanded VOD is one of the possibilities with IPTV, but it's not necessarily going to happen. All IPTV entails is a server of content at a node connected to ~300 homes. You turn on your TV, and you want to watch CBS, and your cable box sends a request back to the node for "CBS". Because there's only one channel being streamed, you can use the bandwidth for lots of things, including VOD.
Disney et al would love cable TV competition, but they're a bit nervous about VOD. (Not just because of cannibalizing DVD, but also because of the effects on TV networks, syndication, etc.) I bet IPTV will happen soon enough, but not initially with a whole lot of VOD.
You're right that Pearl Harbor made money, but the story is a little more complicated than adding up the grosses and comparing them to the production budget and marketing costs.
First, grosses include money that goes to studios and exhibitors. So, for the $450 million that Pearl Harbor grossed in theaters, a good chunk of that went to AMC, etc. The formula to determine how much the studios get is complicated -- studios make a higher percentage in the first weeks and a lower percentage deep into the run -- but it's about a 50-50 split. Next, there's distribution fees. Disney produced the film (through Touchstone) and released it in the U.S. via its subsidiary Buena Vista, but internationally there's probably a foreign distributor that gets a cut of what the film earned in its country. That's probably 10% of the international gross. So, Touchstone's theatrical gross is about $450 - $225 - $25, or $200 million.
Second step: Gross participants. This movie was a Jerry Bruckheimer production and starred Ben Affleck, and you bet your ass that they got gross percentage points. This means that they get a certain % of the studio's revenues before the studio takes costs into account. (These are NOT counted in the production budget or marketing costs.) I'll take a rough guess of 30% for total gross participation points. Now Disney's take is down to $140 million.
Third step: Cost of capital. A dollar three years from now isn't worth as much as a dollar today. For a studio, this cost of capital is more or less 10% annually. Marketing costs are thankfully paid nearly during the theatrical run, but production costs are paid two years in advance. So the "real" production budget, in year-of-release relative dollars, is more like $170 million.
So Disney is paying $240 million and getting $140 million. Sounds bad? Yeah, but like BTWR noted, Disney gets TV rights, DVD sales, Pay-per-view, HBO ... that adds up. Plus, it's pure cash flow -- in current Hollywood contracts, people like Affleck and Bruckheimer don't get much of a slice of that pie. (For DVD sales, the store gets about 50%, and of the remaining 50%, the studio gets about 80%). How many DVDs did Pearl Harbor sell? Try
$130 million worth in its first week. Disney makes 40% of that, or about $34 million, in pure cash.
All in all, Pearl Harbor is almost certainly already a profit for Disney. If it's not yet, continuing DVD sales will push it over the hump very soon.
Uh-oh Slashdot folks. Were in trouble!
Looking at the linked box office data it is pretty obvious that movies released to very few theatres (e.g. "Cowboy Bebop") don't do as well as movies heavily marketed and released to thousands of theatres.
The same could be said for most products. For instance, cookies sold in very few stores don't do as well as cookies sold in many stores.
Trust me, there isn't a conspiracy here. If Buena Vista thought that investing $10 million more in marketing would have assured $20 million more in box office receipts, they would have done it.
"Spirited Away", which did pretty well despite all the effort by Disney to not market the movie, shows that anime can be successful when done right. The fact that it took an Oscar to get the public to notice the movie is sad ...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Academy Awards aren't a pure meritocracy. Studios spend lots of money on "For Your Consideration" ads touting their pics for Oscars. Did you ever consider that Buena Vista spent its marketing budget on winning an Oscar for Spirited Away instead of on highway billboards? It's a formula that's worked for indie pics in the past, and it worked in this case as well.
I know it's frustrating that anime is slow to catch on here, but there is no conspiracy. Michael Eisner would sell his grandmother to add 1% to Disney's profits.
If cable/satellite providers would only sell channels individually, there would be no need for "decency standards".
This would completely change the Pay TV business model, and as such cable channels would fight it like crazy.
Currently, cable channels get revenues from two sources: Advertising and per-user fees. So if your cable package has TNT, then approximately $1 per month of your bill goes to TNT.
As such, nearly all cable channels want to be on "basic" packages. First, by having more potential viewers, the channel will likely get higher ratings and thus more advertising. Second, if a cable channel is on a "basic" package, it can charge everyone who subscribes to that package their fee, which ranges from a few pennies a month to ESPN's >$2/month.
Now, cable operators (i.e., Comcast) don't like putting everyone on Basic; it hurts their ability to make money. But the major media companies force Comcast to put their minor cable channels on basic packages by threatening to withhold major channels. See Viacom vs. Echostar of last year -- Viacom threatened to take away CBS before the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Uh, Echostar lost that fight.
So if the Government allows us to pick cable channels individually, then a LOT of minor channels will be in trouble. My guess? They'd raise rates -- like, the Golf Channel would charge around $4 or $5 per month. A lot would probably die though, and Major Media Companies would lose a lot of bargaining power.
Nice idea, but don't bet on it.
Sounds like a great way for us to blow up even more servers!
That you put the government in the control of the flow of information when you let them provide you with Internet access?
That you put the government in the control of the flow of information when you let them provide you with libraries?
Actually, Time Warner sold their music business to Edgar Bronfman Jr. earlier this year as AOL-TW tried to dump their unprofitable divisions. So, despite the name, Time Warner is a wholly seperate company from Warner Music Group.
Moreover, I wouldn't expect AOL-TW to buy anything soon. Not until their stock price goes up some ...
More info here.
Well marketing wants Engineering to slow the unit down so they have a low cost unit to sell. Then sell them upgrades to full speed at an enormous price. These would be physically identical, just one would have the code messed up on purpose to run slow.
Happens more often than you'd think.
There was a case -- I forget the exact company -- but they were producing chips of some sort. Like Canon, they wanted to sell a "basic" version and a "premium" version; the latter having more functions and a higer price.
Here's where it gets interesting: To make the "basic" chip, the company realized it was most cost-efficient to make the premium chip and then physically remove some of its functionality. So the basic chip cost more to produce -- it had a higher marginal cost -- yet it was priced lower.
What the chip manufacturer did isn't counter to economics. Same for Canon (software-wise). Both of these products have high fixed costs -- the R&D, the manufacturing -- but marginal costs that approach zero. Basic economic theory says that you should set price=marginal cost; but what do you do if MC=0?
Well, we know what Linus would say. But what companies like Canon try to do is set price equal to YOUR willingness to pay. Like, what's the most you would pay for a camera? It's called segmenting the market. That's why there is a premium camera (for rich people who can't be bothered) and a basic camera (for poorer people). Both cost the exact same to produce.
This isn't that special. You see many examples of different types of customers being charged different prices for products that cost the same to produce. Think of where Marginal Cost=0. Movies (you get discount for matinees); Microsoft Office (student vs. corporate); Adobe Acrobat (free reader vs. pay version). What Canon's doing isn't that crazy.
But they should have protected the interface!
This is just an opinion piece by one of the paper's writers, and is a lot lower on the food chain than an editorial.
Moreover, it's also part of the Sunday magazine, which is a very different entity than the daily paper and its opinion writers. In fact, there is more than a bit of tension at the NYT between the "daily" people and the "mag" people. Since the Editorial Board (and its op-ed writers) are part of the "daily" staff, we should not assume anything about their opinion of closed-source voting machines based on this article.
Yeah, they did ruin the movie for me. To say that the bearskin romance scene irritated me is to say that George Lucas has a bit of an ego. As I watched it I was quite literally in physical pain. In comparison, Episode I wasn't as bad. But lord, it wasn't good.
Anyway, I'd like to hear your responses as I've been wondering why people seem to rag on the new SW movies a bit.
Episode I had Jar-Jar and his stupid race talking in their demeaning pigdin language. Also, the CGI wasn't up to snuff for what it needed to be, and everyone basically looked foolish.
Episode II had less Jar-Jar (but did have the memorable, "Me-so gonna vote for WAR! We's done got rid of the writ of habeas corpus!"). However, Episode II had the absolutely worst romantic scene I have ever seen in my life. This comes from a person who has seen every Jean-Claude Van Damme movie in existence. When Anni and Padme were on the shag bearskin rug I had to look away from the screen and shut my ears.
Also, the Yoda fight was ridiculous. If he was really that fast, he shoulda killed Doookooo in 2 seconds.
Hope this helps! :)
With apologies to one of my favorite movies of all time, not to mention the Beach Boys, here's a joke that maybe 10 of you will get:
*********
If everybody had a surfboard
...
...
And lightsabers too
Then everybody'd be surfing
On volcanic goo
'Cuz Anakin is totally bitchin'
When he's stopping Jedi missions
And it's neat dueling l33t when you're on hot magma all day
First wave! Don't get tired.
Second wave! Slash higher.
Third wave! You're on fire!
Jedi surfin! (it's all right)
Waxin' down our surfboards
Charging up our swords
Tell Yoda we're surfin'
Good side has me bored
I've got a surfboard on my speeder
For when the waves are 15 meters
And we're cool with the duel till volcano erupts us away
I wish they all could be double-sided, wish they all could be double-sided, wish they all could be double-sided swords
Have a separate page, labeled simply "Advertisments". Put all advertising there. Keep it away from the news and editorial content.
[...]The idea is to be maximally non-annoying.
No, the idea is for advertisers to pay you.
Advertisers want two things: A large audience, and a targeted audience with known demographics. Shunting your ads off to a side page won't help them, and if you don't help them, they won't help you.
We experimented with this in a paper magazine I worked for - putting all the commercials in a clearly designated spot in the back.
You aren't gonna make a lot of money off these.
I sincerely hope your newsstand price covers most of your costs. Most magazines/newspapers aren't like that -- normally, they get 2/3 of their revenues from ads.
Other magazines have tried the same approach. AFAIK, however, they haven't kept statistics and neither did we.
Ehhh .... why not?
And the slander against Greedo's shooting accuracy continues ...
I don't understand why anyone would want Internet Video on Demand in its current form. If you care about immediacy, you use your cable box to order a pay-per-view or OnDemand; if you don't care about immediacy, you rent from Blockbuster or whatever. In both cases the price is about the same (or less) as Internet movies, and the quality is better.
Now, if I could watch movies on my PDA on the subway ... that's a different story.
Hmm... Ewoks don't sound that bad, especially if there could be a scene where Agent Smith takes on Jar Jar Binks!
"Mee-so name be ... Neo!!!!!!!"
Disney is just trying to get into the "last mile" game. Its media business is well vertically integrated except for its lack of cable/telephone/ISPs that actually enter people's homes and generate monthly revenues.
In contrast, Viacom, AT&T, AOL et al have last-mile capabilities, which freaks out other media companies like Disney and NewsCorp. (This is also why NewsCorp is going after DirecTV.) Disney/NewsCorp are afraid that they'll lose pricing power, not to mention being more susceptible to the advertising market because of the lack of monthly cable fees.
Anyway, it's an interesting play by Disney. I don't suppose that cable companies will much like it. I'd expect "HBO on Demand"-type services to be beefed up soon, because that in effect price-undercuts Disney's new service (HBO service for many people is a sunk cost.)
Yesss .... cowbell precious ... precious cowbell is to Gollum ...
I agree that hyphens should not be confused with em dashes. However
And IMHO, English majors commit more grammatical errors than the rest of humanity =)
I was able to get on with mosaic. Lynx didn't work th0.