A banner hanging in United Record Pressing‘s shipping room gives a peek at what the Nashville company hopes for its future: Vinyl Rules! Pure analogue, anti-digital revolution
Take a tour of London Underground stations that have been abandoned during the more than a century history of the commuter system. It’s all very Neverwhere
Jules Verne anticipated man’s first trip to the moon in his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Arthur C Clarke foresaw space stations and sentient computers in his classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ray Bradbury wrote about extraterrestrial civilisation in The Martian Chronicles decades before NASA’s Mars Rover surveyed the planet. These accounts, written before space travel was possible, have inspired generations of space scientists and explorers. Now, the European Space Agency hopes to recognise young writers and inspire future astrophysicists and astronauts by sponsoring the Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition — via Wired
Brian Thomas, a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University, has done an ecological analysis of humans and vampires in Sunnydale, the home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He took some initial assumptions on rates of population growth, vampire feeding, etc and plugged them into a differential equations model. What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable. His conclusion was that even though the show’s designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense — via Slashdot
Phil Lelyveld, a Vice President for Disney, has written to the FCC to tell them to ignore Digital Consumer‘s comments on the Broadcast Flag issue. The Broadcast Flag is an inter-industry conspiracy to turn over the keys to general-purpose computing to Hollywood studio execs — under this proposal, no one will be able to ship digital television technology (like DVD recorders and FireWire) without Hollywood’s permission. Lelyveld wrote to the FCC — who are taking comments on the proposal — without mentioning his day-job, to tell them that Digital Consumer, a civil liberties groups with more than 40,000 members, is nothing more than a two dot.com millionaires
working to create a world where we are all artist/waiters
— via Slashdot
The Japanese consumers in the Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures of Japan have filed a lawsuit against Walt Disney Japan over the red tint on the Japanese DVD release of Spirited Away. Japanese consumers who purchased the Spirited Away DVD were very disappointed when they discovered a red tint to the film. A hundred thousand consumers complained, but Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan, a subsidiary of Walt Disney, pretended nothing was wrong with the disc
If you’re tired of your television set looking like a lump of black plastic, then Predicta have the telly for you. Or maybe a Hellraiser puzzle box PC is more to your liking
Richard Gere has won the unwelcome accolade of being declared the year’s worst celebrity waffler by Britain’s Plain English Campaign. And British author Wendy Perriam won the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Prize with her description of a patient fantasising about her foot surgeon in the darkly comic novel Tread Softly
321 Studios has released DVD X Copy, a US$99 program that is the first to let users create a mirror image of an entire DVD on a second blank DVD. The copy even includes menus, special features and enhanced audio
Brazilian company, Tec Toy, is releasing a new version of the venerable Sega Master System, dubbed the Sega Master System III, it will include 74 games built-in
Students are devising increasingly sophisticated countermeasures to protect their free supply of copyrighted entertainment
If you’ve ever been pigeonholed by TiVo and Amazon’s automatic customer profiling, spare a thought for the guy the machine labelled as a pregnant gay man
The microphone-shaped Karaoke TV Star, from IVL Technologies, answers the impossible dream of enthusiastic shower singers everywhere: Being able to belt out a song without scaring the pets or small children
According to the Australian Consumers’ Association, selling music CDs that cannot be copied digitally is a bad move by an industry that seems to be intent on self-destruction
Oscar-winning actor James Coburn, famed for his action roles and poignant characterisations in a career spanning more than 40 years, died of a heart attack on Monday
When Kathleen Bannon and Joseph Bannon, unrepentant spammers, struck the Film Threat e-mail list last week they picked the wrong man to piss off. Chris Gore does not take spam lying down
The BBC have announced they will be showing a new version of a Dr Who episode originally written by Douglas Adams and that was never shown after industrial action halted the original production in 1979. Shada
will star Paul McGann as the Doctor
Technology that renders optical media useless after a short lifespan will soon find its way into stores in the form of perishable DVDs
A medieval fresco featuring a rodent with an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse has been uncovered in an Austrian church. Disney has refused to comment
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