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and the Oscar goes to….
The Departed – for best picture. I stayed up, so I figured I’d blog it. The movie also won Scorcese his first Oscar.
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Movies pirated by the Movie Industry itself!
Despite what the MPAA claims, it’s not us consumers who need to be restrained by DRM, but their own people. This website demonstrates how movies are pirated by the movie companies and members of the Oscar committee. Here are some key quotes: For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered…
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Democracy Player…post 1
Democracy player is an interesting new type of video software which allows the user to subscribe to video feeds and have them automatically downloaded. One way to think of it is like a TiVo for internet videos. I’ll post some more after I get some experience with it, but if you want to go ahead…
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The Paradox of Free and Fair Elections
This morning I watch the Diebold documentary, “Hacking Democray”, on HBO or one of its affiliate networks. The basic information in the documentary was not news to me. Since I currently live in Maryland, the news that Johns Hopkins had obtained the source code to the voting machines was all over the place. I knew,…
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You can’t talk about Jesus here! It’s a Christmas festival!
Apparently showing a trailer for a movie about Christ at a Christmas festival is too much for Chicago officials. Although Fox was prepared to pay $12 000 to the festival if the trailer for “The Nativity Story” would be shown throughout the festival. Sorry, said the Political Correctness Police, we can’t appear to be endorsing…
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Finally, some rulings that make sense!
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example,…
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IF you like/love Star Wars, you MUST see this!
A group has redone the entire Star Wars Episode 4 in ascii art. You can see the javascript version of Star Wars Ascii Art here. Or, if you don’t have javascript, just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl. The website is a better experience because it comes in a little faster and you can fast forward and skip…
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Why No Apologies for the Asians?
I am against censorship. The recent news that Tom and Jerry will be edited in Europe to remove smoking scenes is absurd! So it’s not ok for Tom to smoke, but it’s ok for Jerry to electrocute him, chop him up, and all the other behaviours kids may imitate from watching cartoons. Even racist stuff…
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Bollywood Fight Club!
Want to crack up? Want to see the movie sure to be so cheesy it MUST be watched, then check out Fight Club: Members Only. A Bollywood remake of the Ed Norton and Brad Pitt movie.
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Superman is back
As you doubtless know, the Superman franchise is coming back. After a false start in the 90s where Superman was going to go crazy (inspiring the song Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down), they are actually working on this one. It’s supposed to fit in the timeline after Superman II with Christopher Reeves and is titled…
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HD DVD To to leave Early HD Adopters High and Dry
Leave it to content providers to mess everyone up. Slashdot reports that, in an effort to stop piracy, the HD signal in the component jacks of HD DVD players will be down-sampled because it’s analog and letting it come out at normal quality would allow pirates to get around their copyright protections. This is BS!…
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First Impression: Theora
On the face of things, Theora seems to be a better codec simply based upon the fact that the OGG file is 50 MB compared to the 185 MB MPEG file. I still have to do some tests to see if this comes at the cost of worse quality in the picture or sound, but…
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Free Video
To encode your video in a free codec (ie not proprietary), use Theora from Xiph.org. This codec is still in ALPHA stage (as in, not even beta!) so don’t use it for mission critical stuff just yet. However, xine and mplayer already play the codec. If you try to convert an avi to theora (using…
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Rent Movie Review
The movie was great and a faithful adaptation of the play. There were only a few differences I didn’t like as much. ————— Warning: Spoiler ——————— A lot of the smaller singing parts were converted into speaking parts and that kinda ruined some parts for me. For example, when Angel saves Tom Collins and they…
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Rent
Rent comes out tomorrow! Ever since I saw the play in NYC I thought about what it would be like as a movie. Tomorrow I’ll get to find out and I’ll let you all know what I thought.