Blue Sky Studios won an Oscar for Bunny , a brilliant CGI short that, among other things, pioneered the use of radiosity in a short film. (It's been too expensive for use in anything but stills until now.) Now, anyone with a better memory than mine should correct me, but I believe Bunny was first distributed with RealPlayer. It was several weeks before it was accepted into Spike & Mike's Animation Festival, which would have been the first time anyone would get to see it in the cinema.
I believe you are right. I first saw it on the web, later at Siggraph well before it was added to Spike & Mike's Festival. (BTW, an MPEG clip is available on the site).
Of course revealing the source doesn't cause a loss of intellectual property rights. Every song is copyrighted. The performance could be considered the binary, the sheet music the source. Sheet music has been available for far longer than recordings, but others having that "source" does not lessen the ability of the copyright owner to enforce their IP rights. (Just ask ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or The Harry Fox Agency.)
Actually, they have no choice, the legislation requires them to broadcast in HDTV by 2003 (or was it 2004, can't recall).
The FCC requires them to broadcast digitally by that time, but does not require them to broadcast H/DTV (1080i or 720p). And a lot of the broadcasters plan to show 4 480p channels - 1 of the same crap they've been dishing all along, and 3 additional channels of shopping.
Get some monofiliment fishing line. It's small enough to thread into the gap between the card edge connectors and the motherboard. Use this to make a loop to secure the back edges of all the cards. I built some systems to go on the road, and the cards normally are only secured on one end by a single screw. This is not enough to keep the card secured.
Before I did this, every system had to be opened at the site before power-on and the cards re-seated. After I put the fishing line tie-downs in (using a "surgeon's knot" and acetone) we didn't have a single badly seated card. Oh, and a small amount of silicone to hold the drive connectors on.
The X-Rays themselves are not a problem. The problem is the huge-ass power supply for the X-Ray machine, with it's giant transformer. That's the problem. That's what screws up magnetic data. The safest place, in terms of shielding, is right in the middle of the X-Ray machine. The worst place is on the belt after the X-Ray machine...where the power supply is located.
Actually, I'm most intesteted in a clockworks-driven laptop power supply. I've seen spring powered flashlights - it seems silly, but consider how useful one would be during a prolonged power outage. No batteries needed. A wind-up laptop would be a wonderful thing...crank that sucker!
The basic idea, except that the company that administers loads of music publiching rights in the US, the Harry Fox Agency, convinced Interpol to sieze this guy's computer and shut lyrics.ch down. Then, in order to stay out of jail, he worked out a way to put the lyrics up, with permission, but in an almost completely useless form. If you want to see lyrics.ch, you have to accept an browser application that will install on your system to show the lyrics in a way that is supposed to prevent copying.
How can anyone support Disney keeping sole control over Mickey Mouse and yet have a clean conscious incorporating 'the entertainer' into their copyrighted movie of slot machine or game program?
Even more offensive is how they have liberally dipped into the Public Domain for virtually every one of their movies and animated films. Only a handful of Disney films paid any royalties to anyone other than themselves. If they had any morals, they'd be ashamed, but both "shame" and "morals" are not words that exist in the corporate lexicon.
Actually, the passage of the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act" was even more insidious - it was passed by voice vote during the Monica Lewinsky nonsense. The Congress-critters who were bought off didn't even have to put their names on it!
How were they bought off? Well, one of the most important bits for re-election is the endorsement of the local paper and TV stations. Guess who owns a large chain of newspapers and TV stations? Why, the Mouse of course! You either support this bill Senator, or we endorse your opponent. In the corporate world thay call this "synergy".
Challenger blew up happened because the sub contractor for the solid fuel boosters decided to make them in several pieces instead of one like they had been before. The seals between the sections failed and the main fuel tank blew up.
Challenger blew up because a powerful US Senator from Utah decided that he wanted the contract to build the boosters awarded to one of his friends, Morton Thiokol. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have seen the value of building the boosters as a single section, but that would have required building them on the Atlantic or Gulf coasts and towing the sections by barge. Instead, to provide pork to Utah, the fatally flawed multiple section design was chosen.
It was a going to happen at some point, and may well happen again. The boosters should be a single unit, or welded sections.
This "solution" has been bandied about so often that it's obvious that it's the one Gates wants and has been promoting. Anyone remember a monopoly called AT&T and what happened to it? As "punishment" it was broken up into a number of smaller companies - AT&T long distance, Bell Labs (which became Lucent) and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). Holders of AT&T stock got shares in these newly created companies.
The combined value of the individual companies now far exceeds the value of the original entity. From the perspective of the majority shareholder, this can only be a "good thing".
Also, anyone been following how, like the T-1000 Terminator, the globs of the original phone system (Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, Pac Bell) are reforming back into the national monopoly? And they're doing it in the name of "competition".
Choose some other remedy that has not been so extensively promoted in the national media...the media wholly owned and operated by wealthy individuals that doubtlessly own large amouts of Microsoft stock. Open Windows' source code...if only to hear the rollicking laughter from the coders who download it.
But, whatever you do, don't throw Briar Bill in that briar patch.
Fired nothing!! In oregon, you could have been arested.
You do understand that I was referring to hardware that I had brought from home. The original crap configuration of a P90 with 16 megs of RAM and a 400 meg HD was restored. Or are you just being difficult?
True enough. Terry Gilliam has stated many times that he neither likes nor trusts technology, that all too often it is a tool for repressive types to use th strengthen their grip on power. The parody of technology, the insanely over-complicated telephones, user-hostile computers and such seem (IMO) to reflect Gilliam's own distaste for technological fixes. The only group in the film who seem to have a technology that actually works is the brutal department of Information Retrieval
But, on the other hand, Harry Tuttle is a hacker archtype. Anyone who has ever worked in a company with a huge "Information Technology" department has had to hack around the system by bringing in unauthorized hardware and software in order to be able to get the job done. Maybe it's just me, but the hassles involved in getting additional RAM (i.e. filling out a "twenty-seven bee stroke zed" and waiting forever) made it easier to bring in my own. In 6 months working for a particularly brain-damaged division of Lucent, I was never able to get upgraded from a P90 with 16 megs of ram and a 400 meg HD. When I left, I took my 2 gig HD, 166 mhz processor and 64 megs of ram with me. If they had found out that I had added any of this, I could have been fired for even opening my computer.
Almost any of Tuttle's lines could be spoken by any hacker anywhere: "I got into this game for the action! Get in, get out, man alone. Your entire apartment could be on fire and I couldn't so much as turn on a tap without filling out a 27b/z!". Also, Tuttle hacked the Central Services phone system to intercept Sam's phone call.
It's not much of a stretch to compare Harry Tuttle's free air-conditioning services to a bunch of Linux geeks at a shopping mall doing free Linux installs ("Remember kid, we're all in this together.")
Terry Gilliam made the film he intended, and the suits didn't like the final result and tried to supress it. Gilliam managed to show the completed film to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and they voted it their film of the year. This gave him fuel to embarrass Sid Sheinberg with fill page ads in Variety that said:
Dear Sid Sheinberg,
When are you going to release my film "Brazil"?
signed, Terry Gilliam
I remember seeing Brazil when it was first (barely) released. It was allowed to play in Kansas City for one week, if I recall. It wasn't able to really gain it's audience in America until it was released on home video.
It seems that a lot of people are missing the fact that brazil is actually based on the view of the future presented in george orwells great novel "1984", the novel that actually defined the concept of big brother..
The working title of the film was "Ninteen Eighty Four-and-a-half".
Steve Albini wrote an article some of your may be familiar with, but others may not. The famed producer details exactly how a new band can sign a contract, record an album, have a hit and tour...and wind up oweing money to the record company and spend a year making a third of what they would have if they had spent the same amount of time working at a convenience store.
It's a lovely answer to those who argue that Napster and free distribution are a worse deal than they have currently. Read this and you'll see it's not possible to have a worse deal than you'll get from a major record label.
Maybe I'm just showing my ago, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?
* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.
Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.
When I saw the name of this program, I thought of one of the best ABC "Aftershool Specials" ever, "The Wave".
Starring Bruce Davison, it was based on a real incident. A skilled and empathetic teacher was trying to answer a student's question: "Why did the people of Germany follow Hitler?". So he set up an experiment, and created a symbol, a stylized wave logo, and became leader of this movement. The "Wave" movement stressed Power, Discipline and Superiority. They had "Wave" t-shirts, banners, etc. Anyone who was not part of the movement was an outsider, and wound up being threatened.
This film had a profound effect on me when I was in school, and I'm stunned that the company was so clueless that they didn't do a simple search to find out that "The Wave" had already been used as a noxious symbol of school opression. Bad corporation! No cookie!
I've never quite understood the difference between sound and sound editing.
To their credit, the producers did work quite hard attempting to make that distinction clear. They presented the "sound editing" clips as an audio-only montage with no visuals other than the titles of the films. You could get a feeling for how much of the film experience is sound effects.
Another often overlooked film in the sci-fi "nature of reality" subgenre is Dark City.
Agreed, briliant film. The DVD is a treasure as well, with film critic Roger Ebert contributing a commentary. It's practically a course in film theory, pointing out all the references the director makes to other films.
However, to get back to my point, Paul is doing what anyone would do if someone was stealing a whole shitload of money away from them--stand up and say "Hi, that music's mine, and you didn't pay for it."
...except in Paul's case, it's often not music that he's written. Paul Macartney and Michael Jackson are two of the largest owners of publishing. Paul doesn't even own the Beatles songs - Jackson does. So this is a lot more complex than a poor artist protesting about being ripped off, this is the owner of a business that his done it's fair share of artist-screwing, protesting to preserve the status quo.
The idea that music could be "owned" is a recent concept, probably no older than the Victorian era with sheet music sales. The idea didn't really take hold until the invention of the phonograph, when a few performers could become massively popular.
Two trends have been the result of recorded music:
A small number of popluar artists make a lot of money
Fewer and fewer people make music
At one point, every family had at least one musician. Most middle-class homes had a piano; virtually no home was so poor that it didn't have at least one instrument, and someone to play it. But the popularity of heavily promoted popular music has had a devestating effect on home-made music. Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
All these carefully orchestrated pleas from carefully chosen artists ignore one fact: the same digital revolution that has made "piracy" possible has made it amazingly cheap to record music. "Project studios" are within the reach of most anyone, and the equipment, including professional quality microphones, has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Recording your own music can now be considered a "hobby".
Cream does rise. Talented artists produce followings, and the internet can enable you to become known outside of your city. But we have been programmed by the recording industry to believe that anyone who plays in only one area is a failure, that success only exists on the country-wide or global scale. But every dollar spent on the massive world-wide tour by the platinium-selling artist is one less that could be spent supporting locally generated music.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you are right. I first saw it on the web, later at Siggraph well before it was added to Spike & Mike's Festival. (BTW, an MPEG clip is available on the site).
Uh...Andy Warhol is dead, isn't he?
Of course revealing the source doesn't cause a loss of intellectual property rights. Every song is copyrighted. The performance could be considered the binary, the sheet music the source. Sheet music has been available for far longer than recordings, but others having that "source" does not lessen the ability of the copyright owner to enforce their IP rights. (Just ask ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or The Harry Fox Agency.)
Orson Welles said it best:
Get some monofiliment fishing line. It's small enough to thread into the gap between the card edge connectors and the motherboard. Use this to make a loop to secure the back edges of all the cards. I built some systems to go on the road, and the cards normally are only secured on one end by a single screw. This is not enough to keep the card secured.
Before I did this, every system had to be opened at the site before power-on and the cards re-seated. After I put the fishing line tie-downs in (using a "surgeon's knot" and acetone) we didn't have a single badly seated card. Oh, and a small amount of silicone to hold the drive connectors on.
The X-Rays themselves are not a problem. The problem is the huge-ass power supply for the X-Ray machine, with it's giant transformer. That's the problem. That's what screws up magnetic data. The safest place, in terms of shielding, is right in the middle of the X-Ray machine. The worst place is on the belt after the X-Ray machine...where the power supply is located.
Actually, I'm most intesteted in a clockworks-driven laptop power supply. I've seen spring powered flashlights - it seems silly, but consider how useful one would be during a prolonged power outage. No batteries needed. A wind-up laptop would be a wonderful thing...crank that sucker!
The basic idea, except that the company that administers loads of music publiching rights in the US, the Harry Fox Agency, convinced Interpol to sieze this guy's computer and shut lyrics.ch down. Then, in order to stay out of jail, he worked out a way to put the lyrics up, with permission, but in an almost completely useless form. If you want to see lyrics.ch, you have to accept an browser application that will install on your system to show the lyrics in a way that is supposed to prevent copying.
Even more offensive is how they have liberally dipped into the Public Domain for virtually every one of their movies and animated films. Only a handful of Disney films paid any royalties to anyone other than themselves. If they had any morals, they'd be ashamed, but both "shame" and "morals" are not words that exist in the corporate lexicon.
Actually, the passage of the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act" was even more insidious - it was passed by voice vote during the Monica Lewinsky nonsense. The Congress-critters who were bought off didn't even have to put their names on it!
How were they bought off? Well, one of the most important bits for re-election is the endorsement of the local paper and TV stations. Guess who owns a large chain of newspapers and TV stations? Why, the Mouse of course! You either support this bill Senator, or we endorse your opponent. In the corporate world thay call this "synergy".
Challenger blew up because a powerful US Senator from Utah decided that he wanted the contract to build the boosters awarded to one of his friends, Morton Thiokol. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have seen the value of building the boosters as a single section, but that would have required building them on the Atlantic or Gulf coasts and towing the sections by barge. Instead, to provide pork to Utah, the fatally flawed multiple section design was chosen.
It was a going to happen at some point, and may well happen again. The boosters should be a single unit, or welded sections.
This "solution" has been bandied about so often that it's obvious that it's the one Gates wants and has been promoting. Anyone remember a monopoly called AT&T and what happened to it? As "punishment" it was broken up into a number of smaller companies - AT&T long distance, Bell Labs (which became Lucent) and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). Holders of AT&T stock got shares in these newly created companies.
The combined value of the individual companies now far exceeds the value of the original entity. From the perspective of the majority shareholder, this can only be a "good thing".
Also, anyone been following how, like the T-1000 Terminator, the globs of the original phone system (Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, Pac Bell) are reforming back into the national monopoly? And they're doing it in the name of "competition".
Choose some other remedy that has not been so extensively promoted in the national media...the media wholly owned and operated by wealthy individuals that doubtlessly own large amouts of Microsoft stock. Open Windows' source code...if only to hear the rollicking laughter from the coders who download it.
But, whatever you do, don't throw Briar Bill in that briar patch.My apologies. I am unfamiliar with the Randal Schwartz case. Sorry for appearing dense.
You do understand that I was referring to hardware that I had brought from home. The original crap configuration of a P90 with 16 megs of RAM and a 400 meg HD was restored. Or are you just being difficult?
It credits "La Jetée" as inspiration.
True enough. Terry Gilliam has stated many times that he neither likes nor trusts technology, that all too often it is a tool for repressive types to use th strengthen their grip on power. The parody of technology, the insanely over-complicated telephones, user-hostile computers and such seem (IMO) to reflect Gilliam's own distaste for technological fixes. The only group in the film who seem to have a technology that actually works is the brutal department of Information Retrieval
But, on the other hand, Harry Tuttle is a hacker archtype. Anyone who has ever worked in a company with a huge "Information Technology" department has had to hack around the system by bringing in unauthorized hardware and software in order to be able to get the job done. Maybe it's just me, but the hassles involved in getting additional RAM (i.e. filling out a "twenty-seven bee stroke zed" and waiting forever) made it easier to bring in my own. In 6 months working for a particularly brain-damaged division of Lucent, I was never able to get upgraded from a P90 with 16 megs of ram and a 400 meg HD. When I left, I took my 2 gig HD, 166 mhz processor and 64 megs of ram with me. If they had found out that I had added any of this, I could have been fired for even opening my computer.
Almost any of Tuttle's lines could be spoken by any hacker anywhere: "I got into this game for the action! Get in, get out, man alone. Your entire apartment could be on fire and I couldn't so much as turn on a tap without filling out a 27b/z!". Also, Tuttle hacked the Central Services phone system to intercept Sam's phone call.
It's not much of a stretch to compare Harry Tuttle's free air-conditioning services to a bunch of Linux geeks at a shopping mall doing free Linux installs ("Remember kid, we're all in this together.")
Terry Gilliam made the film he intended, and the suits didn't like the final result and tried to supress it. Gilliam managed to show the completed film to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and they voted it their film of the year. This gave him fuel to embarrass Sid Sheinberg with fill page ads in Variety that said:
I remember seeing Brazil when it was first (barely) released. It was allowed to play in Kansas City for one week, if I recall. It wasn't able to really gain it's audience in America until it was released on home video.
The working title of the film was "Ninteen Eighty Four-and-a-half".
Whatever. I originally typed "owing" and it looked odd. Mea culpa. But, Mr. AC, I stand by my misspelled words.
Steve Albini wrote an article some of your may be familiar with, but others may not. The famed producer details exactly how a new band can sign a contract, record an album, have a hit and tour...and wind up oweing money to the record company and spend a year making a third of what they would have if they had spent the same amount of time working at a convenience store.
It's a lovely answer to those who argue that Napster and free distribution are a worse deal than they have currently. Read this and you'll see it's not possible to have a worse deal than you'll get from a major record label.
Maybe I'm just showing my ago, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?
Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:
Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.
When I saw the name of this program, I thought of one of the best ABC "Aftershool Specials" ever, "The Wave".
Starring Bruce Davison, it was based on a real incident. A skilled and empathetic teacher was trying to answer a student's question: "Why did the people of Germany follow Hitler?". So he set up an experiment, and created a symbol, a stylized wave logo, and became leader of this movement. The "Wave" movement stressed Power, Discipline and Superiority. They had "Wave" t-shirts, banners, etc. Anyone who was not part of the movement was an outsider, and wound up being threatened.
This film had a profound effect on me when I was in school, and I'm stunned that the company was so clueless that they didn't do a simple search to find out that "The Wave" had already been used as a noxious symbol of school opression. Bad corporation! No cookie!
To their credit, the producers did work quite hard attempting to make that distinction clear. They presented the "sound editing" clips as an audio-only montage with no visuals other than the titles of the films. You could get a feeling for how much of the film experience is sound effects.
Agreed, briliant film. The DVD is a treasure as well, with film critic Roger Ebert contributing a commentary. It's practically a course in film theory, pointing out all the references the director makes to other films.
...except in Paul's case, it's often not music that he's written. Paul Macartney and Michael Jackson are two of the largest owners of publishing. Paul doesn't even own the Beatles songs - Jackson does. So this is a lot more complex than a poor artist protesting about being ripped off, this is the owner of a business that his done it's fair share of artist-screwing, protesting to preserve the status quo.
The idea that music could be "owned" is a recent concept, probably no older than the Victorian era with sheet music sales. The idea didn't really take hold until the invention of the phonograph, when a few performers could become massively popular.
Two trends have been the result of recorded music:
At one point, every family had at least one musician. Most middle-class homes had a piano; virtually no home was so poor that it didn't have at least one instrument, and someone to play it. But the popularity of heavily promoted popular music has had a devestating effect on home-made music. Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
All these carefully orchestrated pleas from carefully chosen artists ignore one fact: the same digital revolution that has made "piracy" possible has made it amazingly cheap to record music. "Project studios" are within the reach of most anyone, and the equipment, including professional quality microphones, has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Recording your own music can now be considered a "hobby".
Cream does rise. Talented artists produce followings, and the internet can enable you to become known outside of your city. But we have been programmed by the recording industry to believe that anyone who plays in only one area is a failure, that success only exists on the country-wide or global scale. But every dollar spent on the massive world-wide tour by the platinium-selling artist is one less that could be spent supporting locally generated music.