is it better or worse...does it keep the cinema alive or shatter it, that the studio did this?
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| Cinema Magic or Fantasy Shattering Illusion? (via Imgur) |
Showing posts with label interesting info. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interesting info. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Who is the real Iron Man?
If a guy with some (ok a lot of time on his hands) can build the suit for real...
is it better or worse...does it keep the cinema alive or shatter it, that the studio did this?
is it better or worse...does it keep the cinema alive or shatter it, that the studio did this?
Monday, August 15, 2011
Why the Government Won't Protect You from Getting Screwed by Your Cable Company
Read the original here.
You hate your cable company, right? Seems like everyone does. Cable television routinely scores lower in customer satisfaction than just about anything else—including congress. So why don't you just switch providers? Oh yeah, you can't. You're so screwed!
The sad truth is, most Americans don't have a choice of cable providers. Sure, there are a lot of cable companies out there, but odds are there's only one you can use. While no one cable company dominates the nation, there are a lot of regional cable fiefdoms. Live in San Francisco? It's Comcast for you. New York City? Time Warner. That matters because it translates into high prices and crummy service.
Nationally speaking, there's plenty of competition. But locally, that's just not true. For the overwhelming majority of us it's the local cable-opoly, or get bent. Which means we pay exorbitant bills, suffer four hour install time windows, and just suck it up when our cable provider throttles our download speeds or caps our bandwidth.
The only way this changes is with competition. When a competing cable company is present, your cable bill typically goes down by 15-percent, and service generally improves. But almost nobody has a competing cable company.
Simply put, you're paying way too much for Nickelodeon.
The cable industry is a patchwork of micro-monopolies. Or more accurately, natural monopolies: situations of little or no competition that doesn't break enough laws to get regulated. A natural monopoly occurs when it's so expensive to enter a market that it doesn't make sense for a competitors to come in. With cable TV, there's a massive fixed cost to enter a new market—putting in new cable lines. So, basically, whoever showed up first—or the company that bought them—has the legacy right of being the local cable company.
For decades, cable operators were allowed to set up exclusive regional franchises. A cable company would come into an area, and more or less tell the municipal area in charge of franchising that it needed an exclusive for the next, say, 12-15 years if it was going to build out lines. That ended in 1992 with the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, but the damage was done.
Cable companies had already divided up the nation like Europe colonizing Africa. By the time regulation arrived, the land grab was already over.
The last reliable statistic shows that a mere 2-percent of American markets had a choice of cable providers. That's from 2003, the last time the FCC produced a statistic. (At least that they could supply us with.) You may be surprised to learn that the FCC doesn't have anything to do with cable franchising. Nor does the FTC. An FTC spokesman told Gizmodo that "we don't look at industries considered common carriers, like airlines, phone companies and utilities."
Throughout most of cable's history, it's been regulated at the local level. Counties and cities were the agencies responsible for allowing cable franchises. That is changing, slightly. More than 20 states now have franchise authority, due largely to intensive lobbying by telcos like Verizon and AT&T.
You know you're fucked when you're relying on AT&T to make things better.
Ultimately, this patchwork of local regulation means cable companies themselves are often more powerful than the body overseeing them. And as long as none of the micro-monopolies grows too large nationally, it can continue to control the local weather.
But what about those second cable companies that some people have? They're typically overbuilders, a company that builds new lines in an area where one cable company already exists. They tend to be quite small. The best known, for example, is probably WideOpenWest Networks, or WOW. WOW has just 410,000 subscribers. And that's because it's really, really hard for a second company to come into an existing market.
While everyone has a right to access the poles, the same isn't true of the wires that hang from them. In short, if you're an upstart cable company coming into a new area, you have to run your own lines. It's very expensive, and it also means you can easily be crushed by the existing monopoly.
One cable industry insider, who would only speak on background, explained how it works:
First you have to overcome a mishmash of local regulations. You have to get a permit to come in, which can be a legal hassle, with a wait time of many months just to get approval. Then its time to build.
To build a new network and make it price-competitive, you have to reach 100-percent of customers in that area. Which means building an extensive network of lines, all the way to the door. If you're very lucky you may capture 10 to 20-percent of the market. You do that by offering steep discounts on bundled services. This gets you new customers, but at a loss.
Then, Comcast, or Cablevision, or Time Warner—or whichever provider is dominant in the area—comes along behind you with sweetheart deals for any of its customers who were leaving. They offer discounted packages and teaser rates. Poof. They're gone. That's five percent of the market. Now you've spent a fortune on new lines and infrastructure, for very few new customers.
So there's very little financial incentive for a competitor to try to build. It's just too damn hard to build a customer base. To do that, you need to be a giant company to begin with. Like, say, a telco.
If you're lucky, you may have the option for Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse. But probably not. Verizon only passes (cable lingo for is available at) 15 million premises nationwide, and has just 3.7 million video subscribers. AT&T is even smaller, at 3.2 million. Comcast, by comparison, has 22 million video subscribers.
What's more, there's no evidence that telcos are having a positive effect on pricing. In fact, in some areas where AT&T managed to get the laws changed, like Michigan, prices have gone up.
But wait! What about satellite? Doesn't satellite fix everything? No.
According to the Government Accountability Office, satellite services have little-to-no effect on cable prices. (And besides, satellite service is terrible. Who doesn't want to watch TV when it's overcast outside?)
Ultimately what all of this means is that consumers are left with little recourse. Because there's plenty of competition nationally, nobody is looking out for you locally.
Except us.
All this week, Gizmodo is going to take a long-hard look at the cable industry, and how to improve it. We want to fix cable, and we need your help to make it happen.
We want to hear your horror stories of bad cable experiences, and your ideas of how to make things better. We'll collect the best of these and publish them on Friday. Tweet us with the hashtag#fixcable, email us at tips@gizmodo.com with #fixcable in the subject line, or just fill in the form at the bottom of this page.
Come on. We are totally going to do this thing.You can keep up with Mat Honan, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+
You hate your cable company, right? Seems like everyone does. Cable television routinely scores lower in customer satisfaction than just about anything else—including congress. So why don't you just switch providers? Oh yeah, you can't. You're so screwed!
The sad truth is, most Americans don't have a choice of cable providers. Sure, there are a lot of cable companies out there, but odds are there's only one you can use. While no one cable company dominates the nation, there are a lot of regional cable fiefdoms. Live in San Francisco? It's Comcast for you. New York City? Time Warner. That matters because it translates into high prices and crummy service.
Nationally speaking, there's plenty of competition. But locally, that's just not true. For the overwhelming majority of us it's the local cable-opoly, or get bent. Which means we pay exorbitant bills, suffer four hour install time windows, and just suck it up when our cable provider throttles our download speeds or caps our bandwidth.
The only way this changes is with competition. When a competing cable company is present, your cable bill typically goes down by 15-percent, and service generally improves. But almost nobody has a competing cable company.
Simply put, you're paying way too much for Nickelodeon.
The cable industry is a patchwork of micro-monopolies. Or more accurately, natural monopolies: situations of little or no competition that doesn't break enough laws to get regulated. A natural monopoly occurs when it's so expensive to enter a market that it doesn't make sense for a competitors to come in. With cable TV, there's a massive fixed cost to enter a new market—putting in new cable lines. So, basically, whoever showed up first—or the company that bought them—has the legacy right of being the local cable company.
For decades, cable operators were allowed to set up exclusive regional franchises. A cable company would come into an area, and more or less tell the municipal area in charge of franchising that it needed an exclusive for the next, say, 12-15 years if it was going to build out lines. That ended in 1992 with the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, but the damage was done.
Cable companies had already divided up the nation like Europe colonizing Africa. By the time regulation arrived, the land grab was already over.
The last reliable statistic shows that a mere 2-percent of American markets had a choice of cable providers. That's from 2003, the last time the FCC produced a statistic. (At least that they could supply us with.) You may be surprised to learn that the FCC doesn't have anything to do with cable franchising. Nor does the FTC. An FTC spokesman told Gizmodo that "we don't look at industries considered common carriers, like airlines, phone companies and utilities."
Throughout most of cable's history, it's been regulated at the local level. Counties and cities were the agencies responsible for allowing cable franchises. That is changing, slightly. More than 20 states now have franchise authority, due largely to intensive lobbying by telcos like Verizon and AT&T.
You know you're fucked when you're relying on AT&T to make things better.
Ultimately, this patchwork of local regulation means cable companies themselves are often more powerful than the body overseeing them. And as long as none of the micro-monopolies grows too large nationally, it can continue to control the local weather.
But what about those second cable companies that some people have? They're typically overbuilders, a company that builds new lines in an area where one cable company already exists. They tend to be quite small. The best known, for example, is probably WideOpenWest Networks, or WOW. WOW has just 410,000 subscribers. And that's because it's really, really hard for a second company to come into an existing market.
While everyone has a right to access the poles, the same isn't true of the wires that hang from them. In short, if you're an upstart cable company coming into a new area, you have to run your own lines. It's very expensive, and it also means you can easily be crushed by the existing monopoly.
One cable industry insider, who would only speak on background, explained how it works:
First you have to overcome a mishmash of local regulations. You have to get a permit to come in, which can be a legal hassle, with a wait time of many months just to get approval. Then its time to build.
To build a new network and make it price-competitive, you have to reach 100-percent of customers in that area. Which means building an extensive network of lines, all the way to the door. If you're very lucky you may capture 10 to 20-percent of the market. You do that by offering steep discounts on bundled services. This gets you new customers, but at a loss.
Then, Comcast, or Cablevision, or Time Warner—or whichever provider is dominant in the area—comes along behind you with sweetheart deals for any of its customers who were leaving. They offer discounted packages and teaser rates. Poof. They're gone. That's five percent of the market. Now you've spent a fortune on new lines and infrastructure, for very few new customers.
So there's very little financial incentive for a competitor to try to build. It's just too damn hard to build a customer base. To do that, you need to be a giant company to begin with. Like, say, a telco.
If you're lucky, you may have the option for Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse. But probably not. Verizon only passes (cable lingo for is available at) 15 million premises nationwide, and has just 3.7 million video subscribers. AT&T is even smaller, at 3.2 million. Comcast, by comparison, has 22 million video subscribers.
What's more, there's no evidence that telcos are having a positive effect on pricing. In fact, in some areas where AT&T managed to get the laws changed, like Michigan, prices have gone up.
But wait! What about satellite? Doesn't satellite fix everything? No.
According to the Government Accountability Office, satellite services have little-to-no effect on cable prices. (And besides, satellite service is terrible. Who doesn't want to watch TV when it's overcast outside?)
Ultimately what all of this means is that consumers are left with little recourse. Because there's plenty of competition nationally, nobody is looking out for you locally.
Except us.
All this week, Gizmodo is going to take a long-hard look at the cable industry, and how to improve it. We want to fix cable, and we need your help to make it happen.
We want to hear your horror stories of bad cable experiences, and your ideas of how to make things better. We'll collect the best of these and publish them on Friday. Tweet us with the hashtag#fixcable, email us at tips@gizmodo.com with #fixcable in the subject line, or just fill in the form at the bottom of this page.
Come on. We are totally going to do this thing.You can keep up with Mat Honan, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Wolverine gets a director...
Not a bad choice....his pedigree is fairly good. Read the original here.
Fox Chooses James Mangold On ‘Wolverine’ – Deadline.Com
By MIKE FLEMING | Wednesday June 15, 2011 @ 9:26pm EDT
EXCLUSIVE: James Mangold is 20th Century Fox's and star Hugh Jackman's choice to direct The Wolverine, ending one of the most competitive contests among directors for a major studio film. Negotiations are about to get underway, but I'm told that Mangold will take the helming job on the sequel to the X-Men spinoff film, a post that became vacant when Darren Aronofskydropped[1] out of the film in March.
I'd heard that Mangold was on a very short list coming into this week, along with Warrior director Gavin O'Connor and Brooklyn's Finest helmer Antoine Fuqua. I've heard that Fox will look to start principal photography in the fall. Scripted by Christopher McQuarrie, The Wolverine takes place mostly in Japan. Mangold most recently directed the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz starrer Knight and Day for Fox, and before that 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line. Mangold's repped by WME and Management 360.
Click Here[2] for Deadline Email News Alerts - Subscribe Today!
References
^ dropped (www.deadline.com)
^ Here (www.deadline.com)
Fox Chooses James Mangold On ‘Wolverine’ – Deadline.Com
By MIKE FLEMING | Wednesday June 15, 2011 @ 9:26pm EDT
EXCLUSIVE: James Mangold is 20th Century Fox's and star Hugh Jackman's choice to direct The Wolverine, ending one of the most competitive contests among directors for a major studio film. Negotiations are about to get underway, but I'm told that Mangold will take the helming job on the sequel to the X-Men spinoff film, a post that became vacant when Darren Aronofskydropped[1] out of the film in March.
I'd heard that Mangold was on a very short list coming into this week, along with Warrior director Gavin O'Connor and Brooklyn's Finest helmer Antoine Fuqua. I've heard that Fox will look to start principal photography in the fall. Scripted by Christopher McQuarrie, The Wolverine takes place mostly in Japan. Mangold most recently directed the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz starrer Knight and Day for Fox, and before that 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line. Mangold's repped by WME and Management 360.
Click Here[2] for Deadline Email News Alerts - Subscribe Today!
References
^ dropped (www.deadline.com)
^ Here (www.deadline.com)
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Why there's no Star Trek on TV
Read the original here via AICN.
X-MEN’s Bryan Singer Pitched A STAR TREK TV Series??!!
Published on: Apr 09, 2011 4:34:02 AM CDT
I am Hercules!!
Jonathan Frakes was talking to UGO to promote something he directed called “Bar Karma,” and there was an interesting bit buried deep in the interview:
UGO: It’s been a few years since Star Trek's been on TV. How much longer do you think until it makes the leap back to the medium it started on?
Frakes: I had a Star Trek that I developed for TV, and we were told in no uncertain terms that they said no to a Bryan Singer television Star Trek, they said no to a William Shatner television Star Trek. They feel at CBS Paramount that they don’t want to make the same mistake that’s been made before, which was watering down the brand by having a TV show and a movie. That’s what happened with Star Trek: Nemesis, and that’s why I think Star Trek: Enterprise didn’t last the way they expected to. It was the classic corporate greed of “we've got something good, so let’s continue to milk it” and we milked it so dry that the fans had no appetite for a movie. So I think what they’ve done by taking time off before the Abrams Star Trek, and they're doing it again because they haven’t even begun to shoot the second one, is a much smarter business plan. Much to my chagrin! Not that I wouldn’t love the Titan, or the Rikers in Space, or any of those shows on the air.
Bryan Singer is the guy who directed “X-Men” and “Superman Returns” and has been trying to get a “Battlestar Galactica” project off the ground for more than a decade (never mind that Ronald D. Moore just finished doing that). Singer’s no stranger to TV -- he had a hand in the creation of “House” and “Dirty Sexy Money” -- but I think this is the first I’m hearing of Singer’s interest in Star Trek.
Could Frakes be talking about Bryan Fuller (creator of “Dead Like Me” and “Pushing Daisies”)? Because I know Fuller, a veteran of “Voyager,” has long been public about his desire to launch a post-Abrams “Trek” TV series.
If anybody out there gets a chance to talk to Frakes, Shatner or Singer, kindly ask what kinds of shows they were pitching.
Was Frakes pitching a series based on the “Star Trek: Titan” novels
centered on Captain Will Riker?
Was Shatner pitching a series based on his novels about a resurrected James Kirk?
Find all of UGO’s interview with Frakes here.
X-MEN’s Bryan Singer Pitched A STAR TREK TV Series??!!
Published on: Apr 09, 2011 4:34:02 AM CDT
I am Hercules!!
Jonathan Frakes was talking to UGO to promote something he directed called “Bar Karma,” and there was an interesting bit buried deep in the interview:
UGO: It’s been a few years since Star Trek's been on TV. How much longer do you think until it makes the leap back to the medium it started on?
Frakes: I had a Star Trek that I developed for TV, and we were told in no uncertain terms that they said no to a Bryan Singer television Star Trek, they said no to a William Shatner television Star Trek. They feel at CBS Paramount that they don’t want to make the same mistake that’s been made before, which was watering down the brand by having a TV show and a movie. That’s what happened with Star Trek: Nemesis, and that’s why I think Star Trek: Enterprise didn’t last the way they expected to. It was the classic corporate greed of “we've got something good, so let’s continue to milk it” and we milked it so dry that the fans had no appetite for a movie. So I think what they’ve done by taking time off before the Abrams Star Trek, and they're doing it again because they haven’t even begun to shoot the second one, is a much smarter business plan. Much to my chagrin! Not that I wouldn’t love the Titan, or the Rikers in Space, or any of those shows on the air.
Bryan Singer is the guy who directed “X-Men” and “Superman Returns” and has been trying to get a “Battlestar Galactica” project off the ground for more than a decade (never mind that Ronald D. Moore just finished doing that). Singer’s no stranger to TV -- he had a hand in the creation of “House” and “Dirty Sexy Money” -- but I think this is the first I’m hearing of Singer’s interest in Star Trek.
Could Frakes be talking about Bryan Fuller (creator of “Dead Like Me” and “Pushing Daisies”)? Because I know Fuller, a veteran of “Voyager,” has long been public about his desire to launch a post-Abrams “Trek” TV series.
If anybody out there gets a chance to talk to Frakes, Shatner or Singer, kindly ask what kinds of shows they were pitching.
Was Frakes pitching a series based on the “Star Trek: Titan” novels
centered on Captain Will Riker?Was Shatner pitching a series based on his novels about a resurrected James Kirk?
Find all of UGO’s interview with Frakes here.
Monday, April 11, 2011
What's your email signature like?
Read the original here.
Legal Disclaimers: Spare Us The E-Mail Yada-Yada
“IF THIS e-mail is received in error, notify the sender immediately.” “This e-mail does not create an attorney-client relationship.” “Any tax advice in this e-mail is not intended to be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.” Many firms—The Economist included—automatically append these sorts of disclaimers to every message sent from their e-mail servers, no matter how brief and trivial the message itself might be.
E-mail disclaimers are one of the minor nuisances of modern office life, along with fire drills, annual appraisals and colleagues who keep sneezing loudly. Just think of all the extra waste paper generated when messages containing such waffle are printed. They are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.
Many disclaimers are, in effect, seeking to impose a contractual obligation unilaterally, and thus are probably unenforceable. This is clear in Europe, where a directive from the European Commission tells the courts to strike out any unreasonable contractual obligation on a consumer if he has not freely negotiated it. And a footer stating that nothing in the e-mail should be used to break the law would be of no protection to a lawyer or financial adviser sending a message that did suggest something illegal.
So why are the disclaimers there? Company lawyers often insist on them because they see others using them. As with Latin vocabulary and judges’ robes, once something has become a legal habit it has a tendency to stick. Might they at least remind people to behave sensibly? Michael Overly, a lawyer for Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles, thinks not: the proliferation of predictable yada-yada at the bottom of messages means that people have long since stopped paying any attention to it.
Legal Disclaimers: Spare Us The E-Mail Yada-Yada
“IF THIS e-mail is received in error, notify the sender immediately.” “This e-mail does not create an attorney-client relationship.” “Any tax advice in this e-mail is not intended to be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code.” Many firms—The Economist included—automatically append these sorts of disclaimers to every message sent from their e-mail servers, no matter how brief and trivial the message itself might be.
E-mail disclaimers are one of the minor nuisances of modern office life, along with fire drills, annual appraisals and colleagues who keep sneezing loudly. Just think of all the extra waste paper generated when messages containing such waffle are printed. They are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.
Many disclaimers are, in effect, seeking to impose a contractual obligation unilaterally, and thus are probably unenforceable. This is clear in Europe, where a directive from the European Commission tells the courts to strike out any unreasonable contractual obligation on a consumer if he has not freely negotiated it. And a footer stating that nothing in the e-mail should be used to break the law would be of no protection to a lawyer or financial adviser sending a message that did suggest something illegal.
So why are the disclaimers there? Company lawyers often insist on them because they see others using them. As with Latin vocabulary and judges’ robes, once something has become a legal habit it has a tendency to stick. Might they at least remind people to behave sensibly? Michael Overly, a lawyer for Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles, thinks not: the proliferation of predictable yada-yada at the bottom of messages means that people have long since stopped paying any attention to it.
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