What's even worse, is the EULA on an actual victrola. Yes.. I do actually own an RCA victrola and the EULA on it says that you can only play RCA records on it.
Uniform standards for phonograph records and players all evolved very late. Disk size. Speed. Composition. The shape of the needle. The Columbia disk - might - be playable on the Victrola. But that did not mean that what you heard would bear listening.
The acoustic Victrola was impressive - and expensive - tech for it's day. The Victor-Victrola Page
Neil Gaiman is an immensely popular sci-fi/fantasy author.
But what DreamWorks wants from this deal is what every other studio has been looking for and hasn't found: a winning formula for delivering audiences on the scale of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. It's why Warner cut a deal with James Patterson's fiction factory for the rights to When The Wind Blows and Maximum Ride.
That's a new one. The history I've always heard basically says that the movie industry started there because of the sunshine.
It was also because of the land:
Three decades earlier Hollywood had been chosen by the emergent film industry for more than just a balmy climate and abundant sunshine. Within a day's drive from Los Angeles was an astonishing variety of topography. Hitchcock found on a production-office wall a map of California that marked where within the state could be found the Blue Nile, the Swiss Alps, the sands of the Sahara, Sherwood Forest, the rugged coast of Spain, the Siberian snows, the Red Sea, the South African veldt, to say nothing of the mighty Mississippi, the cattle ranches of Wyoming, the horse pastures of Kentucky, and the mountain forests of Vermont. Hitchcock on Location
I wonder if, even a hundred years ago, RCA was trying to shut down the resellers of used music.
There were no resellers of used music. The first commercial acoustic recordings were good for about 100 plays. The cylinders were wax. The needles and tone arms steel.
It was probably necessary to make a clear distinction at that early point that when you bought the record, you did not buy the copyright to the recorded sound.
You weren't buying the right to public performance either. Columbia Records has been around since 1888. The coin-the-slot music machine, the carousel band organ, were everywhere in the 1890s.
Marvel had a LONG and notorious history of bad films (anyone remember the 70's and 90's "Captain America" movies? The bad TV-series? The Roger Corman version of Fantastic Four?
Marvel Studios will be producing its own superhero movies instead of licensing the superheros to other Hollywood studios. It's all about the money
Desilu in it's prime had I Love Lucy and its successors, innovative series like The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek to its credit. But, in the end, it was too small and too fragile to survive as an independent studio.
Disney has a 75 year back list of marketable films, plus revenue streams from cable and broadcast TV, music sales, theme parks, stage productions, publishing, product licensing, etc., etc.
Yet how many times has a string of failures like Treasure Planet brought the studio to edge of bankruptcy?
And when you arrive, your chances to actually get a hospitable planet are slim to nil
I would have thought we are likely to have mapped some worthwhile systems for study within this generation. You aren't launching tomorrow, you will have decades, centuries or millenia of deep-space planetary studies to build on.
But do you really need a habitable planet - or simply the understanding and resources to make a planet habitable? Or to sustain a wholly man-made construct, like Ringworld?
When the Puppeteers packed up and left, they took their worlds with them.
In effect, reconstructing their civilization around an immense fleet of sub-light ships. They weren't looking back and they didn't have and they didn't need a particular destination.
It will requires several miracles in molecular biology before we can hibernate the way other mammals can. And no known organism larger than a microbe can survive for the durations interstellar travel will require.
So maybe you chose non-biological survival as Arthur Clarke proposed in Rendevouz with Rama - an idea which has made an appearance now and again in Dr. Who. Storing the essentials of your species and culture - perhaps the memories and personalities of individuals - in other ways.
As a social libertarian, you should know that the market drives companies to produce closed captioning
Try again.
Closed Captioning wasn't a market-driven process, it was a social-equity driven process, a government-driven process.
[T]he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1976 set aside line 21 for the transmission of closed captions in the United States. Once the Commission gave its approval, PBS engineers developed the caption editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs, the encoding equipment that broadcasters and others would use to add captions to their programs, and prototype decoders.
Toward the end of the technical development project at PBS, it became clear that in order to get the cooperation of the commercial television networks, it would be necessary to establish a nonprofit, single-purpose organization to perform this captioning. And so in 1979, HEW announced the creation of the National Captioning Institute.
On March 16, 1980, NCI broadcast the first closed-captioned television series. The captions were seen in households that had the first generation of closed caption decoders. A silence had been broken. For the first time ever, deaf people across America could turn on their television sets-with a caption decoder-and finally understand what they had been missing on television.
With this success, it was only natural that captioned television viewers would want more accessible programming like prime-time series, soap operas, talk shows, game shows, sports, children's programming, cartoons, and home videos--the same rich and wide variety of programming that hearing people take for granted. They wanted instant access to live programs such as national and local newscasts.
In 1982, NCI developed real-time captioning, a process for captioning newscasts, sports events, specials or other live broadcasts as the events are being televised. In real-time captioning, court reporters who have been trained as real-time captioners type at speeds of over 225 words per minute to give viewers instantaneous access to live news, sports and information. As a result, the viewer at home sees the captions within two to three seconds of the words being spoken.
In addition to a wide variety of captioned TV programs, viewers also can enjoy their favorite releases on home video. In 1980, there were only three-captioned home video titles. Today, deaf viewers can routinely expect new home video releases on VHS and DVD to be captioned.
NCI ensured a bright future for captioned television by partnering with ITT Corporation to develop the first caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television sets at the manufacturing stage. This led to the introduction and subsequent passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990, which mandated that, by mid-1993, all new television sets 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must contain caption-decoding technology. Now, millions of people have access to captions with the push of a button on their remote controls.
Also in 1990, The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to ensure equal opportunity for persons with disabilities. The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, State and local government services, businesses that are public accommodations or commercial facilities, and in transportation. Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not movie theaters), provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or slide shows. Captioning is considered one way of making such information available to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Federally funded public service announcements also must be captioned.
The U.S. Congress continued to show its support of closed captioning by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996. To implement the closed captioning requirements included in the Act, the FCC established rules and implementation schedules for th
The Victor Talking Machine Company - "His Master's Voice" - was incorporated in 1901 and was aggressively recruiting artists for exclusive contracts from Day 1. It was - even then - using "loss leaders" to build sales.
Artists became successful on records because they recorded well. The technology has always shaped the industry.
Caruso had a splendid voice for acoustic recording and sold to enormous audiences who knew nothing and cared nothing for Grand Opera. Bing Crosby's career in the vacuum tube era follows a similar arc.
Let's go back in time 100 years. It's 1897.
When the number of American cities with significant concert venues could be numbered on one hand. New York, Chicago, San Francisco... Scott Joplin plays the brothels, Sousa takes his band to the streets.
Your town might rate a one-night stand on the vaudeville circuit. [and if you that was a good living to all but the headliners, you are delusional.] The big money was in sheet music sales for the pianoforte in the front parlour.
Today, every single Slashdot reader failed to give me $10.
While all Pixar offers in return for your $10 ticket is a commitment to the production of films like The Incredibles and Ratatouille - each representing five to ten years of work from concept to theatrical release - full time employment for 400 or so exceptionally gifted artists and technicians, and billions of dollars worth of cultural exports.
Why the fuck should I pay to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film
An excellent question in itself.
And one the downloader should be asking himself before he pulls this particular excuse out of his ass.
The truth is that the geek wants his pop culture fix without paying the price of entry - even when that price is nothing more than a four block walk to his nearest public library.
That's Republican logic. Just ignore the facts and manufacture a reality. Deny and assert. Repeat until reporters' heads explode.
The man just said that the evidence accepted by the court was false.
The judge - no, two judges, didn't believe him. Some people lie - even posters to Slashdot.
And you can petition for cert to SCOTUS (since you have exhausted state court appeals).
Which the Supreme Court is as likely to grant as I am to win the Tri-State Lottery.
Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices have to agree that there is a clearly defined legal question - a federal constitutional question - here that urgently needs to be resolved.
This happens no more than 100-200 times a year depending on how comfortable the justices are with their case load.
with DVD players so widely used, don't be surprised that we will start seeing TV series done specifically for DVD distribution, unfettered by FCC censorship regulation
There is nothing new in production for home video.
Disney has been in this market since the '90s.
But Disney can take a $100 million loss on a theatrical feature like Treasure Planet and still remain solvent. The independent who tries direct-to-video with a project as innovative and expensive as Deadwood can sink without a trace.
I don't have a TV. I buy DVDs and watch shows online.
But less than half - perhaps much less than half - of American households have broadband service.
Subtract from that the number - the rather large number, I suspect - who don't have or don't want the "media center PC."
Those who don't want to watch TV on the small-screen PC monitor. Those who don't want to be drawn into the complexities of wired or wireless "slingboxes."
We really should do more about letting people know about non-US repositories like packman.de that include multimedia codecs.
Linspire's customers want the out-of-the-box media experience they can get with Windows or OSX. Walmart won't touch the OEM Linux box that is dependent on gray market codecs.
There are surely immense areas of the US without broadband (like Yellowstone park, say), but what about areas as dense as NYC?
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few.
The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York. New York Underground
they can't get anything but dialup there. They can't even get cable, they have to have a dish. I was actually considering moving in there cuz it was really nice and the price was right but then I heard that and was like forget it. It's not even close to a rural area either. It's like half a mile from one of the biggest malls around here
It could just be that the Internet is not central to their lives. There is so much else that may count for more.
If you had depression and were hospitalized for being potentially suicidal, can you protest if the hospital gives the information to a former spouse who's trying to get child custody?
The kid of course will be in the custody of family services.
It seems well within the right of the hospital to notify the child's next of kin. If a parent's rights have not been extinguished by the court, then his right-to-know that his child may be in danger is not for the hospital to decide.
Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.
That is far, far, too sweeping a statement.
If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded - and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court.
Slashdot Mirror
Uniform standards for phonograph records and players all evolved very late. Disk size. Speed. Composition. The shape of the needle. The Columbia disk - might - be playable on the Victrola. But that did not mean that what you heard would bear listening. The acoustic Victrola was impressive - and expensive - tech for it's day. The Victor-Victrola Page
But what DreamWorks wants from this deal is what every other studio has been looking for and hasn't found: a winning formula for delivering audiences on the scale of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. It's why Warner cut a deal with James Patterson's fiction factory for the rights to When The Wind Blows and Maximum Ride.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV or a postal truck.
which makes my point. Disney has resources that Marvel does not.
It was also because of the land:
Three decades earlier Hollywood had been chosen by the emergent film industry for more than just a balmy climate and abundant sunshine. Within a day's drive from Los Angeles was an astonishing variety of topography. Hitchcock found on a production-office wall a map of California that marked where within the state could be found the Blue Nile, the Swiss Alps, the sands of the Sahara, Sherwood Forest, the rugged coast of Spain, the Siberian snows, the Red Sea, the South African veldt, to say nothing of the mighty Mississippi, the cattle ranches of Wyoming, the horse pastures of Kentucky, and the mountain forests of Vermont. Hitchcock on Location
There were no resellers of used music. The first commercial acoustic recordings were good for about 100 plays. The cylinders were wax. The needles and tone arms steel.
You weren't buying the right to public performance either. Columbia Records has been around since 1888. The coin-the-slot music machine, the carousel band organ, were everywhere in the 1890s.
Let's not forget David Hasselhoff's turn as Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. [1998]
Desilu in it's prime had I Love Lucy and its successors, innovative series like The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek to its credit. But, in the end, it was too small and too fragile to survive as an independent studio.
Disney has a 75 year back list of marketable films, plus revenue streams from cable and broadcast TV, music sales, theme parks, stage productions, publishing, product licensing, etc., etc.
Yet how many times has a string of failures like Treasure Planet brought the studio to edge of bankruptcy?
I would have thought we are likely to have mapped some worthwhile systems for study within this generation. You aren't launching tomorrow, you will have decades, centuries or millenia of deep-space planetary studies to build on.
But do you really need a habitable planet - or simply the understanding and resources to make a planet habitable? Or to sustain a wholly man-made construct, like Ringworld?
When the Puppeteers packed up and left, they took their worlds with them.
In effect, reconstructing their civilization around an immense fleet of sub-light ships. They weren't looking back and they didn't have and they didn't need a particular destination.
So maybe you chose non-biological survival as Arthur Clarke proposed in Rendevouz with Rama - an idea which has made an appearance now and again in Dr. Who. Storing the essentials of your species and culture - perhaps the memories and personalities of individuals - in other ways.
Try again.
Closed Captioning wasn't a market-driven process, it was a social-equity driven process, a government-driven process.
[T]he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1976 set aside line 21 for the transmission of closed captions in the United States. Once the Commission gave its approval, PBS engineers developed the caption editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs, the encoding equipment that broadcasters and others would use to add captions to their programs, and prototype decoders.
Toward the end of the technical development project at PBS, it became clear that in order to get the cooperation of the commercial television networks, it would be necessary to establish a nonprofit, single-purpose organization to perform this captioning. And so in 1979, HEW announced the creation of the National Captioning Institute.
On March 16, 1980, NCI broadcast the first closed-captioned television series. The captions were seen in households that had the first generation of closed caption decoders. A silence had been broken. For the first time ever, deaf people across America could turn on their television sets-with a caption decoder-and finally understand what they had been missing on television.
With this success, it was only natural that captioned television viewers would want more accessible programming like prime-time series, soap operas, talk shows, game shows, sports, children's programming, cartoons, and home videos--the same rich and wide variety of programming that hearing people take for granted. They wanted instant access to live programs such as national and local newscasts. In 1982, NCI developed real-time captioning, a process for captioning newscasts, sports events, specials or other live broadcasts as the events are being televised. In real-time captioning, court reporters who have been trained as real-time captioners type at speeds of over 225 words per minute to give viewers instantaneous access to live news, sports and information. As a result, the viewer at home sees the captions within two to three seconds of the words being spoken.
In addition to a wide variety of captioned TV programs, viewers also can enjoy their favorite releases on home video. In 1980, there were only three-captioned home video titles. Today, deaf viewers can routinely expect new home video releases on VHS and DVD to be captioned.
NCI ensured a bright future for captioned television by partnering with ITT Corporation to develop the first caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television sets at the manufacturing stage. This led to the introduction and subsequent passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990, which mandated that, by mid-1993, all new television sets 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must contain caption-decoding technology. Now, millions of people have access to captions with the push of a button on their remote controls. Also in 1990, The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to ensure equal opportunity for persons with disabilities. The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, State and local government services, businesses that are public accommodations or commercial facilities, and in transportation. Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not movie theaters), provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or slide shows. Captioning is considered one way of making such information available to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Federally funded public service announcements also must be captioned. The U.S. Congress continued to show its support of closed captioning by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996. To implement the closed captioning requirements included in the Act, the FCC established rules and implementation schedules for th
Columbia Records has been in business since 1888.
The Victor Talking Machine Company - "His Master's Voice" - was incorporated in 1901 and was aggressively recruiting artists for exclusive contracts from Day 1. It was - even then - using "loss leaders" to build sales.
Artists became successful on records because they recorded well. The technology has always shaped the industry.
Caruso had a splendid voice for acoustic recording and sold to enormous audiences who knew nothing and cared nothing for Grand Opera. Bing Crosby's career in the vacuum tube era follows a similar arc.
Let's go back in time 100 years. It's 1897.
When the number of American cities with significant concert venues could be numbered on one hand. New York, Chicago, San Francisco... Scott Joplin plays the brothels, Sousa takes his band to the streets.
Your town might rate a one-night stand on the vaudeville circuit. [and if you that was a good living to all but the headliners, you are delusional.] The big money was in sheet music sales for the pianoforte in the front parlour.
While all Pixar offers in return for your $10 ticket is a commitment to the production of films like The Incredibles and Ratatouille - each representing five to ten years of work from concept to theatrical release - full time employment for 400 or so exceptionally gifted artists and technicians, and billions of dollars worth of cultural exports.
An excellent question in itself.
And one the downloader should be asking himself before he pulls this particular excuse out of his ass.
The truth is that the geek wants his pop culture fix without paying the price of entry - even when that price is nothing more than a four block walk to his nearest public library.
So you talk to legal aid, your church, your school. The EFF and others. Someone who can point you in the right direction.
The man just said that the evidence accepted by the court was false.
The judge - no, two judges, didn't believe him. Some people lie - even posters to Slashdot.
Which the Supreme Court is as likely to grant as I am to win the Tri-State Lottery.
Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices have to agree that there is a clearly defined legal question - a federal constitutional question - here that urgently needs to be resolved.
This happens no more than 100-200 times a year depending on how comfortable the justices are with their case load.
There is nothing new in production for home video.
Disney has been in this market since the '90s.
But Disney can take a $100 million loss on a theatrical feature like Treasure Planet and still remain solvent. The independent who tries direct-to-video with a project as innovative and expensive as Deadwood can sink without a trace.
But less than half - perhaps much less than half - of American households have broadband service.
Subtract from that the number - the rather large number, I suspect - who don't have or don't want the "media center PC."
Those who don't want to watch TV on the small-screen PC monitor. Those who don't want to be drawn into the complexities of wired or wireless "slingboxes."
Linspire's customers want the out-of-the-box media experience they can get with Windows or OSX. Walmart won't touch the OEM Linux box that is dependent on gray market codecs.
Perhaps because the Slashdot Geek isn't their market.
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few.
The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York. New York Underground
It could just be that the Internet is not central to their lives. There is so much else that may count for more.
The kid of course will be in the custody of family services.
It seems well within the right of the hospital to notify the child's next of kin. If a parent's rights have not been extinguished by the court, then his right-to-know that his child may be in danger is not for the hospital to decide.
Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.
That is far, far, too sweeping a statement.
If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded - and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court.