You don't think people will pay for what they could get for free? Explain hookers, please.
Funny, but not a bad analogy. Pretend you're in Amsterdam and see two beautiful women in the window. One is free, one is $250 an hour, and she is slightly better than the free one. I know which one I'd pick. B)
If you're saying "why pay if your wife or gf gives it free" I would suggest that if you have a steady wife/gf you probably would make less use of professional resources.. heh.
This sounds a lot like the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act), which added a surcharge onto the cost of tapes, divided among labels, songwriters and artists, under the assumption the blanks would be used to duplicate music.
I don't think you'll ever get people to pay for what they can get for free. Why would I pay $1 for what I can get for free three clicks away?
There is an interesting experiment going on where ex-members of Candlebox, (now KMHW) are giving away their next CD in return for label-like benefits ($$) by increased sales of their sponsors product. It's more like the sports model, where Shaq and Tiger make more money from Reebok and Buick than they do from their team/winnings.
Interesting alternative. But pay Kazaa though my ISP? Wouldn't that violate the "no internet taxes" law? Also, how would FTP, Usenet, and Freenet (among others) transfers be taxed?
It seems that what is happening is that labels are saying "hey this worked before, let's try it again!" Perhaps if more people considered new models like the KMHW one, taxing bandwidth would be unnecessary.
I have a 5mw one and took it to Disneyworld last year for a night time Christmas party. Aside from freaking out many a small child I almost got the shit kicked out of me outside the Haunted Mansion. I was playing with it in there (BIG fun, lemme tell ya, especially hitting the "head in the globe" and making it glow like nuclear waste) and some yahoo wanted to beat me up for "ruining his experience."
Took it to Epcot the following night for Illuminations and almost had the thing confiscated the second I shone it on the big golf ball thing. They aren't real fond of lasers down there.
Sat in the hotel drawer after that, but they are fun, especially in snowstorms.
Asimov postulated on such a huge population density with his concept of the planet Trantor. In the Foundation series, Trantor is depicted as the former capital of the First Galactic Empire. Its land surface of 200 million sq. km. was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace, entirely encased in metal. It consisted of an enormous megalopolis that stretched deep underground and was home to a population of 40,000,000,000 (40 billion) human inhabitants.
George Lucas continued the tradition of megaplanets with Coruscant: a huge city covering the entire planet. The Death Star could also be considered derivative of Trantor.
I've often thought of the logistic problems of encasing a planet in metal (tectonic movement? mountains? magnetic effects from a huge metal ball? etc...), but Trantors fate was interesting: after the fall of the Galactic Empire, the native population ripped up the metal both for building material and access to the soil below.
It was also the home of the Second Foundation, but that's another story altogether. B)
They're acting on behalf, with the full permission of, the copyright holders, dumbass.
Which means they can present the case as attorneys but cannot be plaintiffs. Think the RIAA sued Napster? Wrong.
You can't be sued by a lawyer unless he has a plaintiff (or rarely, is one himself). So, the RIAA will not be "suing loads of people" the individual labels will, using RIAA attorneys to present the case.
Stop being so damn arrogant, and try to wrap your mind around the concept. It's not the RIAA suing, but record labels.
What is it about you people
"you people?"
always trying to find "loopholes" that are patently idiotic?
I'm not looking for a loophole, I'm simply pointing out the law. The law says the copyright owner (not his agent) must sue.
I'm glad you think the DMCA is idiotic. You're not alone in that opinion.
Artists own the copyrights, but they assign the legal authority to protect the copyrights to the record companies, who, in turn, band together under the guise of the RIAA.
Not quite really. We have to separate music into two things: master recordings and songs.
Your description is absolutely accurate for songs, changing "record companies" to "publishers." A songwriter always owns his songs, and if a band leaves a label, they can often re-record old songs legally, even if earlier versions are on another label.
What labels (record companies) sell is master recordings (one particular rendition of a song), and there is debate over who owns them. About ten years ago George Michael sued Sony Music for ownership of his masters. I think he lost, IIRC.
Typically, the copyrights of master recordings ARE actually owned by the labels, who collect the money and divvy it up, ocassionally giving a few bucks to the artist.
The songs, however, are always owned by the writer, and protected by his/her publisher.
The RIAA does not own the copyrights to anything. According to the DMCA only the owner of the copyright can sue for infringement. The owner first must communicate in writing to the user's ISP, demanding that they take action.
The ISP is bound by law to inform the user, who has the right, under penalty of perjury, to deny that he/she is offering infringing material.
Now it gets interesting.
If the user denies that he/she has been sharing, the ISP must inform the copyright owner, and that copyright owner has a limited amount of time during which it MUST bring suit against the alleged infringer, or the ISP MUST restore access.
So, someone please tell me how the RIAA has the right to sue, since they own no copyrights?
Also, if every person sued denies they are sharing, forcing the actual copyright holder to bring suit, wouldn't the sheer weight of litigation costs make this a really bad strategy?
While the Powerbook stand probably is only gonna work on a Powerbook the other two stands are pretty generic. One is angled, for use on an eMac or (optimistically) an old-style iMac. The last is designed for the Cinema Display (the one I'm using) and uses basically snazzy double stick tape to secure it to the back of the Display so it just sticks over the top. This last stand will probably work fine on any flat backed LCD.
There's a swivel/pan mechanism in the iSight as well.
The camera is absolutely amazing. About the size of a long C cell, the quality blows away any USB cam I've ever seen, and looks better than my camcorder as well. The whole iChat/iSight experience is, as Apple promised, beyond simple. Download iChat AV (had it already) plug in the camera, and off you go...well at least to the other two people I know who have iChat AV installed.
Well there had to be a caveat, eh? Forget about it if you have a slow Mac. I first hooked it to a dual 500mhz G4, and with bandwidth limits off, the thing bogged down my machine like nothing I had ever seen. I had to do a pushbutton restart twice.
Then I tried it on my daughter's 1ghz 17" iMac. Perfect. Flawless. I was having chats with people at 600kbps and it was like television on the other side, or so I was told.
Back to the dual 500, but with bandwidth limited to 200kbps. Now it works fine, but the moral here is that Apple is not telling all about processor requirements. To be honest, anything less than an 800mhz G4 is going to choke without the bandwidth limiter.
Yeah other cams are cheaper and there aren't many people to communicate with yet. But the difference between this type of chat and generic AIM is, forgive the cliche, paradigm changing.
In 2000 I was recruited by Sapient from another 'nt' consultancy. They got me by basically pouring money on my head till I said yes. (Those were the days, huh..) When I got there I found a confused company going in nine directions, none of them with any passion.
Except one: India. Sapient had opened an office in Delhi (even though it seemed like the bulk of tech work was in Bangalore) and sent a few US consultants there to set up shop.
Their strategy was to hire from the top 5% of Indian tech graduates, and as usual, pour money on their heads till they said yes (which came to about $12,000 per employee, far in excess of typical tech wages.)
Sapient looked at this offshore work as the way to save the company, and soon began focusing all their attention on "India."
I blatantly called it sweatshop coding and found the sales pitch offensive. "24 hour development cycles! We code while you sleep!" was the big pitch. Of course they had no answer for "But doesn't that mean you sleep while we are doing business?"
I wrote an email to the CEO(s) expressing my disgust for this Nike-like behavior, and predicted any benefit would be short lived as China and other countries became even cheaper. They then would be forced to again relocate to a cheaper country, or lose contracts to systems integrators who moved into these cheaper countries.
In return, Sapient closed the entire Media and Entertainment division stating "media has no digital future" and went whole hog into the tech sweatshop business. They also gave a few hundred US coders an awful choice: move to India with a pay cut, or leave the company. Most wisely chose to leave, as did I.
Usually I would be pleased to be vindicated by the even cheaper labor markets coming online and making Sapient's Indian enterprise too expensive to sell, but in this case, I know it will put more fellow US techs out of work and projects will be outsourced to countries where trying to speak to someone who wrote the fucked up code on your monitor is an exercise in Babelfishing.
What I'd like to know is, when do Neiman-Marcus consulting firms finally admit they have turned into WalMart?
THis article talks about a high quality rip of Matrix Reloaded. That sure as hell didn't come from a theater-goer with a sony..
Actually, it did. The group Centropy has been releasing incredibly high quality Telesync SVCD copies of films for a few months (Centropy has been around for years, but only started the beautiful TS copies recently.)
They have obviously mounted a camera way up in the rafters (the angle is close to perfect) and have some talented post production people making TS copies look like Screeners.
I never would watch any cammed movie till these guys started putting out these awesome SVCDs. Now, in my DVD player connected to a big projection screen, it is not unlike the DVD experience.
Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..
on
Water Flows Uphill
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· Score: 5, Informative
Since the 70's, there has been a cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyworld in which water appears to flow uphill.
The Imagineers did it cleverly with a slanted room and no point of reference. Not as geeky, but a really cool effect nonetheless which amazed me back in the day.
Re:Eh? Cams are usually nuked anyway...
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Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 2, Informative
Taxpayer money? You make it sound like the MPAA is a branch of the federal government.
From the article: "The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency. "
I WISH it was an MPAA funded project. Then it would simply be a waste of their money. But it's not - it's a waste of our money.
First off, this technology is only for digital cinemas. Not very many of them right now.
This also shows how little the MPAA and their minions know of film piracy culture. Most cams are nuked anyway, since they usually are unwatchable. Telesyncs (a tripodded cam with direct sound source) are a little better (and can be very good if shot properly), but are typically released if they are the only option - for the past six months, most films released eventually have Screener versions released. If the first release is a Cam/TS, that is usually superceded by a Screener within a week or two. Hey Hollywood: fix the leaks in the studios and your post facilities first before you attack the lowest of technologies. A PDA cam with a tiny surveillance lens? Please.
Before Oscar season, almost any popular film was available in DVDRip format, since the studios felt piracy was less important than gathering Academy votes, and they issued tens of thousands of Consideration DVDs to Academy members. If piracy of their most popular and valuable assets was secondary to winning awards, why all the fuss now about Cams?
There are also rips taken directly off the DigiBeta which are absolutely stunning. Again, this is an internal studio problem, and $2 million in taxpayer money will do NOTHING to stop that.
This is like fighting cocaine importation by attacking the kids on the street smoking cheap nickel bag weed.
Oh sure, if they made this I can just see the fire engines outside my smoldering house right now.
"Sorry sir, we traced the ignition point, and someone hacked into your iGrill. They sent it a Ping of Death and it burst into flames. Don't go in...you don't want to remember your kitchen like that..."
Worse...someone could DDoS my grill and I'd starve!
So, ok these guys have essentially done what FastTrackMovies has done and hashed each file. Hunky dory. So, people implement this and think "no one can trade my files, cause we know what they look like (and have the hash), so we can block it."
Now, Joe Pirate simply.zips or.tars the music or movie.
Exactly how would they then block the.zipped asset from being traded? I know it won't compress the MP3, but it will change the fingerprint.
Methinks WinZip is the Sharpie for this expensive DRM.
I submitted an article to/. last weekend about the Simpsons cast on Bravo. To my utter shock, it was accepted and posted. I stupidly put my very private email (the one that didn't ever get spam) in the Email field. I know, I know...
Less than two hours later, I started getting weird email, complete with.zip.pir attachments, and a few with blatant Trojans. Luckily, I'm OSX so they had no effect, but I was amazed how quickly the email hoovering app grabbed that email addy. They seemed more malicious than sales oriented.
I haven't received any today at that address but I'm still kicking myself. Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.
Story two: For almost five years I had the email bruce@altavista.net. In November, I got mail from Mail.com stating that the Altavista.net domain was being closed down and they were replacing my long-used address to something like bruce@way-cool-dude.com. Um, no thanks I said, I use this account for business and that doesn't work for me.
Ok, they said, how about we reactivate bruce@mail.com and you can have that? "Hmm, neat addy, easy to remember," so I agreed. They activated it on a Monday night.
Tuesday morning I woke up to more than 400 mails. Maybe 20% were typical Hotmail "make your penis so big you need a hose reel" spams but a full 80% were Joe jobs: spammers who had used that address as a reply-to. I knew I was going to shut it down but I watched it for three days just to see.
Total Joe job spams, almost four thousand (in three days) before I had them cut the damn thing off. Said fuck it, and bought a domain for business mail, and ended that adventure.
B) The show I mentioned is on barely-watched Bravo, not Fox.
C) The Simpsons needs little promotion: it's Fox's biggest show ever.
D) Notice my relatively low five digit/. number? It would take quite a fuckwit to lurk on Slashdot for four or five years just so I could post about an obscure show in a few years.
E) Moron.
Re:YRO Needs an annual public cluefulness award...
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 1
Interestingly, while you may be right (I was a producer/engineer and am still a member of NARAS) the reason each organization was formed was exactly opposite, with RIAA being a technical organization and NARAS a creative one.
"In 1957, a visionary group of music professionals and label executives in Los Angeles recognized the need to create an organization that would represent the creative people in the recording arts and sciences.
The founding members of the Recording Academy [NARAS] wanted to recognize and celebrate the artistic achievement of not only talented musicians and singers but also important, behind-the-scenes contributors such as producers and engineers.
Conceived as a way to create a real recording industry community and address some of these concerns, the Recording Academy was born and the GRAMMY Awards process began."
"The RIAA was formed in 1952 to facilitate the technical standardization of records by bringing together engineers from member companies to develop the RIAA curve, a frequency response specification for optimizing the performance of phonographic playback systems."
So, the RIAA was formed as a standards organization which would ensure that competing standards would not be an issue. In 1958, they decided to copy RCA 's "Gold Record" sales award and gave one to Perry Como (I think) for selling something like $50,000 worth of albums.
So, the RIAA was initially a totally technical organization which slowly got into the business of also certifying sales figures with their gold/platinum albums.
Then came Hilary.
Hasn't the Hydra been proven?
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Years ago, many warned Hilary Rosen that killing off Napster ( a company that WANTED to do business with them) would lead to the Hydra-effect: an emergence of multiple, more difficult to control services that would fill the Napster void. This was, of course, exactly what happened.
With the announcement of even greater antifilesharing efforts by the labels and the brick and mortar dealers trying to get into the digital game, one must wonder when the music industry will finally realize that the days of sellling copies of Intellectual Property are fast fading, and that directing resources and effort into palatable alternatives (hardware please, that streams any record ever recorded to my stereo rack) is the only alternative?
If they succeed in killing Kazaa, a thousand more services will pop up in its place. iCommune is already connecting iTunes users via P2P.
Legal control over culture has never worked before, what makes the RIAA and labels think it will work this time?
Uh huh. What I don't get is once it collapses into a briefcase, how did Moller reduce the mass so you can actually lift the briefcase?
In case the sarcasm tag wasn't on, I no more believe that Moller can actually make a reliable flying car that gets 28mpg (running on good old Texaco Regular of course) @ 350mph @ 20k feet @ 65dba than they could accomplish the aforementioned mass-reduction-briefcase trick.
What they will offer is a hunk of red, expensive vaporware that sits in your garage like the Russian shuttle they tried to sell on ebay a year or so ago.
Maybe ebay should have a "got too much money sitting around?" section....
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think people will pay for what they could get for free? Explain hookers, please.
Funny, but not a bad analogy. Pretend you're in Amsterdam and see two beautiful women in the window. One is free, one is $250 an hour, and she is slightly better than the free one. I know which one I'd pick. B)
If you're saying "why pay if your wife or gf gives it free" I would suggest that if you have a steady wife/gf you probably would make less use of professional resources.. heh.
This sounds a lot like the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act), which added a surcharge onto the cost of tapes, divided among labels, songwriters and artists, under the assumption the blanks would be used to duplicate music.
I don't think you'll ever get people to pay for what they can get for free. Why would I pay $1 for what I can get for free three clicks away?
There is an interesting experiment going on where ex-members of Candlebox, (now KMHW) are giving away their next CD in return for label-like benefits ($$) by increased sales of their sponsors product. It's more like the sports model, where Shaq and Tiger make more money from Reebok and Buick than they do from their team/winnings.
Interesting alternative. But pay Kazaa though my ISP? Wouldn't that violate the "no internet taxes" law? Also, how would FTP, Usenet, and Freenet (among others) transfers be taxed?
It seems that what is happening is that labels are saying "hey this worked before, let's try it again!" Perhaps if more people considered new models like the KMHW one, taxing bandwidth would be unnecessary.
I have a 5mw one and took it to Disneyworld last year for a night time Christmas party. Aside from freaking out many a small child I almost got the shit kicked out of me outside the Haunted Mansion. I was playing with it in there (BIG fun, lemme tell ya, especially hitting the "head in the globe" and making it glow like nuclear waste) and some yahoo wanted to beat me up for "ruining his experience."
Took it to Epcot the following night for Illuminations and almost had the thing confiscated the second I shone it on the big golf ball thing. They aren't real fond of lasers down there.
Sat in the hotel drawer after that, but they are fun, especially in snowstorms.
Asimov postulated on such a huge population density with his concept of the planet Trantor. In the Foundation series, Trantor is depicted as the former capital of the First Galactic Empire. Its land surface of 200 million sq. km. was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace, entirely encased in metal. It consisted of an enormous megalopolis that stretched deep underground and was home to a population of 40,000,000,000 (40 billion) human inhabitants.
George Lucas continued the tradition of megaplanets with Coruscant: a huge city covering the entire planet. The Death Star could also be considered derivative of Trantor.
I've often thought of the logistic problems of encasing a planet in metal (tectonic movement? mountains? magnetic effects from a huge metal ball? etc...), but Trantors fate was interesting: after the fall of the Galactic Empire, the native population ripped up the metal both for building material and access to the soil below.
It was also the home of the Second Foundation, but that's another story altogether. B)
Peter! Foundation! PLEASE?????
They're acting on behalf, with the full permission of, the copyright holders, dumbass.
Which means they can present the case as attorneys but cannot be plaintiffs. Think the RIAA sued Napster? Wrong.
You can't be sued by a lawyer unless he has a plaintiff (or rarely, is one himself). So, the RIAA will not be "suing loads of people" the individual labels will, using RIAA attorneys to present the case.
Stop being so damn arrogant, and try to wrap your mind around the concept. It's not the RIAA suing, but record labels.
What is it about you people
"you people?"
always trying to find "loopholes" that are patently idiotic?
I'm not looking for a loophole, I'm simply pointing out the law. The law says the copyright owner (not his agent) must sue.
I'm glad you think the DMCA is idiotic. You're not alone in that opinion.
Wow if this has happened (and I don't doubt it has) , it is totally against the law as set forth in the DMCA.
1. Offending material is found by Corporate Industry. I'm sure it has been completely verified (sarcasm)
2. Corps contact the ISP and acquire the users information.
Only recently is this possible, since the Verizon decision. If it was done previously, it was blatantly illegal.
3. Corps have internet access disabled.
Wow without proper takedown notification? That's actually actionable, you know. If you know a person to whom this was done, they can sue.
4 Now, they issue a letter directly to the offending party detailing what has happened.
By law this has to happen before any service interruption. Why didn't this person sue the ISP and copyright owner?
If you know someone to whom this was done, contact the ACLU or EFF. You have a DMCA test case.
Artists own the copyrights, but they assign the legal authority to protect the copyrights to the record companies, who, in turn, band together under the guise of the RIAA.
Not quite really. We have to separate music into two things: master recordings and songs.
Your description is absolutely accurate for songs, changing "record companies" to "publishers." A songwriter always owns his songs, and if a band leaves a label, they can often re-record old songs legally, even if earlier versions are on another label.
What labels (record companies) sell is master recordings (one particular rendition of a song), and there is debate over who owns them. About ten years ago George Michael sued Sony Music for ownership of his masters. I think he lost, IIRC.
Typically, the copyrights of master recordings ARE actually owned by the labels, who collect the money and divvy it up, ocassionally giving a few bucks to the artist.
The songs, however, are always owned by the writer, and protected by his/her publisher.
The RIAA does not own the copyrights to anything. According to the DMCA only the owner of the copyright can sue for infringement. The owner first must communicate in writing to the user's ISP, demanding that they take action.
The ISP is bound by law to inform the user, who has the right, under penalty of perjury, to deny that he/she is offering infringing material.
Now it gets interesting.
If the user denies that he/she has been sharing, the ISP must inform the copyright owner, and that copyright owner has a limited amount of time during which it MUST bring suit against the alleged infringer, or the ISP MUST restore access.
So, someone please tell me how the RIAA has the right to sue, since they own no copyrights?
Also, if every person sued denies they are sharing, forcing the actual copyright holder to bring suit, wouldn't the sheer weight of litigation costs make this a really bad strategy?
While the Powerbook stand probably is only gonna work on a Powerbook the other two stands are pretty generic. One is angled, for use on an eMac or (optimistically) an old-style iMac. The last is designed for the Cinema Display (the one I'm using) and uses basically snazzy double stick tape to secure it to the back of the Display so it just sticks over the top. This last stand will probably work fine on any flat backed LCD.
There's a swivel/pan mechanism in the iSight as well.
Mm, nice picture. Looks like that here too.
But upon closer inspection, is that really a PAIR of Segways behind the iMac?
!
I was amazed..I expected to wait months.
The camera is absolutely amazing. About the size of a long C cell, the quality blows away any USB cam I've ever seen, and looks better than my camcorder as well. The whole iChat/iSight experience is, as Apple promised, beyond simple. Download iChat AV (had it already) plug in the camera, and off you go...well at least to the other two people I know who have iChat AV installed.
Well there had to be a caveat, eh? Forget about it if you have a slow Mac. I first hooked it to a dual 500mhz G4, and with bandwidth limits off, the thing bogged down my machine like nothing I had ever seen. I had to do a pushbutton restart twice.
Then I tried it on my daughter's 1ghz 17" iMac. Perfect. Flawless. I was having chats with people at 600kbps and it was like television on the other side, or so I was told.
Back to the dual 500, but with bandwidth limited to 200kbps. Now it works fine, but the moral here is that Apple is not telling all about processor requirements. To be honest, anything less than an 800mhz G4 is going to choke without the bandwidth limiter.
Yeah other cams are cheaper and there aren't many people to communicate with yet. But the difference between this type of chat and generic AIM is, forgive the cliche, paradigm changing.
I ordered two more iSight's today.
In 2000 I was recruited by Sapient from another 'nt' consultancy. They got me by basically pouring money on my head till I said yes. (Those were the days, huh..) When I got there I found a confused company going in nine directions, none of them with any passion.
Except one: India. Sapient had opened an office in Delhi (even though it seemed like the bulk of tech work was in Bangalore) and sent a few US consultants there to set up shop.
Their strategy was to hire from the top 5% of Indian tech graduates, and as usual, pour money on their heads till they said yes (which came to about $12,000 per employee, far in excess of typical tech wages.)
Sapient looked at this offshore work as the way to save the company, and soon began focusing all their attention on "India."
I blatantly called it sweatshop coding and found the sales pitch offensive. "24 hour development cycles! We code while you sleep!" was the big pitch. Of course they had no answer for "But doesn't that mean you sleep while we are doing business?"
I wrote an email to the CEO(s) expressing my disgust for this Nike-like behavior, and predicted any benefit would be short lived as China and other countries became even cheaper. They then would be forced to again relocate to a cheaper country, or lose contracts to systems integrators who moved into these cheaper countries.
In return, Sapient closed the entire Media and Entertainment division stating "media has no digital future" and went whole hog into the tech sweatshop business. They also gave a few hundred US coders an awful choice: move to India with a pay cut, or leave the company. Most wisely chose to leave, as did I.
Usually I would be pleased to be vindicated by the even cheaper labor markets coming online and making Sapient's Indian enterprise too expensive to sell, but in this case, I know it will put more fellow US techs out of work and projects will be outsourced to countries where trying to speak to someone who wrote the fucked up code on your monitor is an exercise in Babelfishing.
What I'd like to know is, when do Neiman-Marcus consulting firms finally admit they have turned into WalMart?
THis article talks about a high quality rip of Matrix Reloaded. That sure as hell didn't come from a theater-goer with a sony..
Actually, it did. The group Centropy has been releasing incredibly high quality Telesync SVCD copies of films for a few months (Centropy has been around for years, but only started the beautiful TS copies recently.)
They have obviously mounted a camera way up in the rafters (the angle is close to perfect) and have some talented post production people making TS copies look like Screeners.
I never would watch any cammed movie till these guys started putting out these awesome SVCDs. Now, in my DVD player connected to a big projection screen, it is not unlike the DVD experience.
Since the 70's, there has been a cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyworld in which water appears to flow uphill.
The Imagineers did it cleverly with a slanted room and no point of reference. Not as geeky, but a really cool effect nonetheless which amazed me back in the day.
Taxpayer money? You make it sound like the MPAA is a branch of the federal government.
From the article: "The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency. "
I WISH it was an MPAA funded project. Then it would simply be a waste of their money. But it's not - it's a waste of our money.
First off, this technology is only for digital cinemas. Not very many of them right now.
This also shows how little the MPAA and their minions know of film piracy culture. Most cams are nuked anyway, since they usually are unwatchable. Telesyncs (a tripodded cam with direct sound source) are a little better (and can be very good if shot properly), but are typically released if they are the only option - for the past six months, most films released eventually have Screener versions released. If the first release is a Cam/TS, that is usually superceded by a Screener within a week or two. Hey Hollywood: fix the leaks in the studios and your post facilities first before you attack the lowest of technologies. A PDA cam with a tiny surveillance lens? Please.
Before Oscar season, almost any popular film was available in DVDRip format, since the studios felt piracy was less important than gathering Academy votes, and they issued tens of thousands of Consideration DVDs to Academy members. If piracy of their most popular and valuable assets was secondary to winning awards, why all the fuss now about Cams?
There are also rips taken directly off the DigiBeta which are absolutely stunning. Again, this is an internal studio problem, and $2 million in taxpayer money will do NOTHING to stop that.
This is like fighting cocaine importation by attacking the kids on the street smoking cheap nickel bag weed.
Oh sure, if they made this I can just see the fire engines outside my smoldering house right now.
"Sorry sir, we traced the ignition point, and someone hacked into your iGrill. They sent it a Ping of Death and it burst into flames. Don't go in...you don't want to remember your kitchen like that..."
Worse...someone could DDoS my grill and I'd starve!
Other than a convenient way to gather multiple tracks together, to prevent these guys from doing this kind of stuff.
Yep, little old Winzip is the Sharpie for this expensive DRM.
Damn, deja vu.
Well, I guess that's corroboration. B)
So, ok these guys have essentially done what FastTrackMovies has done and hashed each file. Hunky dory. So, people implement this and think "no one can trade my files, cause we know what they look like (and have the hash), so we can block it."
.zips or .tars the music or movie.
.zipped asset from being traded? I know it won't compress the MP3, but it will change the fingerprint.
Now, Joe Pirate simply
Exactly how would they then block the
Methinks WinZip is the Sharpie for this expensive DRM.
Two stories, one related to /.
/. last weekend about the Simpsons cast on Bravo. To my utter shock, it was accepted and posted. I stupidly put my very private email (the one that didn't ever get spam) in the Email field. I know, I know...
.zip.pir attachments, and a few with blatant Trojans. Luckily, I'm OSX so they had no effect, but I was amazed how quickly the email hoovering app grabbed that email addy. They seemed more malicious than sales oriented.
I submitted an article to
Less than two hours later, I started getting weird email, complete with
I haven't received any today at that address but I'm still kicking myself. Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.
Story two: For almost five years I had the email bruce@altavista.net. In November, I got mail from Mail.com stating that the Altavista.net domain was being closed down and they were replacing my long-used address to something like bruce@way-cool-dude.com. Um, no thanks I said, I use this account for business and that doesn't work for me.
Ok, they said, how about we reactivate bruce@mail.com and you can have that? "Hmm, neat addy, easy to remember," so I agreed. They activated it on a Monday night.
Tuesday morning I woke up to more than 400 mails. Maybe 20% were typical Hotmail "make your penis so big you need a hose reel" spams but a full 80% were Joe jobs: spammers who had used that address as a reply-to. I knew I was going to shut it down but I watched it for three days just to see.
Total Joe job spams, almost four thousand (in three days) before I had them cut the damn thing off. Said fuck it, and bought a domain for business mail, and ended that adventure.
Someone oughta make a law.....
A)Uh, no, I don't work at Fox
/. number? It would take quite a fuckwit to lurk on Slashdot for four or five years just so I could post about an obscure show in a few years.
B) The show I mentioned is on barely-watched Bravo, not Fox.
C) The Simpsons needs little promotion: it's Fox's biggest show ever.
D) Notice my relatively low five digit
E) Moron.
Interestingly, while you may be right (I was a producer/engineer and am still a member of NARAS) the reason each organization was formed was exactly opposite, with RIAA being a technical organization and NARAS a creative one.
Why was NARAS formed?
"In 1957, a visionary group of music professionals and label executives in Los Angeles recognized the need to create an organization that would represent the creative people in the recording arts and sciences.
The founding members of the Recording Academy [NARAS] wanted to recognize and celebrate the artistic achievement of not only talented musicians and singers but also important, behind-the-scenes contributors such as producers and engineers.
Conceived as a way to create a real recording industry community and address some of these concerns, the Recording Academy was born and the GRAMMY Awards process began."
Now, how about the RIAA?
"The RIAA was formed in 1952 to facilitate the technical standardization of records by bringing together engineers from member companies to develop the RIAA curve, a frequency response specification for optimizing the performance of phonographic playback systems."
So, the RIAA was formed as a standards organization which would ensure that competing standards would not be an issue. In 1958, they decided to copy RCA 's "Gold Record" sales award and gave one to Perry Como (I think) for selling something like $50,000 worth of albums.
So, the RIAA was initially a totally technical organization which slowly got into the business of also certifying sales figures with their gold/platinum albums.
Then came Hilary.
Years ago, many warned Hilary Rosen that killing off Napster ( a company that WANTED to do business with them) would lead to the Hydra-effect: an emergence of multiple, more difficult to control services that would fill the Napster void. This was, of course, exactly what happened.
With the announcement of even greater antifilesharing efforts by the labels and the brick and mortar dealers trying to get into the digital game, one must wonder when the music industry will finally realize that the days of sellling copies of Intellectual Property are fast fading, and that directing resources and effort into palatable alternatives (hardware please, that streams any record ever recorded to my stereo rack) is the only alternative?
If they succeed in killing Kazaa, a thousand more services will pop up in its place. iCommune is already connecting iTunes users via P2P.
Legal control over culture has never worked before, what makes the RIAA and labels think it will work this time?
Uh huh. What I don't get is once it collapses into a briefcase, how did Moller reduce the mass so you can actually lift the briefcase?
In case the sarcasm tag wasn't on, I no more believe that Moller can actually make a reliable flying car that gets 28mpg (running on good old Texaco Regular of course) @ 350mph @ 20k feet @ 65dba than they could accomplish the aforementioned mass-reduction-briefcase trick.
What they will offer is a hunk of red, expensive vaporware that sits in your garage like the Russian shuttle they tried to sell on ebay a year or so ago.
Maybe ebay should have a "got too much money sitting around?" section....