Given "The Two Towers: The Battle For Helm's Deep - A Love Story", I sincerely doubt the Battle of Five Armies is going to get cut. It's all the stuff about a ring and stuff that's going to get cut instead, and replaced with a few love interests and extra footage of the Battle of Five Armies. The extended version might add back in a few piffling details, like Gollum and the Ring, etc..

I'm very much looking forward to The Hobbit done as a movie, I'm sure it'll be very good (especially considering the previous attempts to film The Hobbit, but you could watch Silent Running and call it a remake of The Hobbit and it would work better than the previous attempts), but I share your irkage in Jackson's selection of scenes. I just think his focus is going to be the opposite of what you suggest - the violent bits will certainly be taking center stage.

It depends. I have service with AT&T and we bought an unlocked phone because her original AT&T-issued phone just wasn't to her liking. We simply took the GSM chip out of her old phone, plugged it into her new phone, and Bob's your uncle. Worked great. No need to contact AT&T, and no need for a data plan at all since the unlocked phone has WiFi and AT&T can't stop us from using it (and my wife is OK with only having data at home and saving $25+ a month).

Of course, we still don't get a discount, but at least once her contract is up we'll go month-to-month (and you can do that from the get-go with "bring your own device").

It's even got a slot for a second SIM chip should we ever decide to get a data plan elsewhere.

You CAN separate the carrier from the phone, if you buy the phone first and choose a carrier that allows

StraightTalk does not, no. And it's unfortunate, because their pricing is actually relatively good, but you're locked into their (relatively limited) selection of phones. My father signed up for them last month, and other than a few minor quibbles he's saving a good chunk of money on his cell plan, and has more minutes and data than he knows what to do with. And if he gets sick of them, he's not under a contract (of course, he's paid basically retail for the phone, so there's no reason for him to be under contract - he basically paid the ETF up front).

I'm still looking for a "bring your own phone" GSM plan with good pricing. I had hopes for StraightTalk, but they don't do bring-your-own.

My wife's AT&T plan is up soon, and we're already using an unlocked Nokia MusicExpress on her plan because her original phone didn't meet her needs. Her parents, on the same plan, were forced into buying new phones two months ago when AT&T made a service change that rendered their 18-month-old phones (that AT&T provided) incompatible with AT&T's towers. AT&T tried to get them to sign up for an additional two years in return for free phones, but I bought them both unlocked $40 GSM handsets to avoid the forced renewal.

So we're all done with subsidized phones, they aren't worth it.

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is a great story, but I'm struggling with how well it would translate into anything resembling an interesting movie that people would actually pay to watch, and still be the slightest bit true to a story about a computer becoming self-aware while outcasts are trying to split from their oppressive overlords. There are scenes that would translate well (bombing the Earth with rocks), but Hollywood would latch on to those scenes and you'd end up with something akin to "The Two Towers" becoming "The Battle for Helms Deep: A Love Story".

Ringworld, on the other hand, is a special-effects masterpiece waiting to happen. The storyline is simple, the beauty of the story is visualizing the engineering involved, and that would translate with really good (but horribly expensive) visual effects. I don't know if you'd ever get enough viewership to justify effects at that scope, though.

Yes, let's drop these silly regulations like the law of gravity and let the free market decide what the gravitational pull should be!

How? If the copyright holder is releasing it for redistribution, then I fail to see how redistribution under their terms could be considered unauthorized, unless the DVD is higher quality and someone rips that and torrents it, in which case Paramount will have a legitimate case since they only authorized the lower-quality version for torrent distribution.

I think their goal on this is simple. I suspect Paramount wants this movie to have absolutely abysmal DVD sales. That way, they can point at the sales figures and say "see? (very_high_percentage) of people will not buy something if it's available for free!" I also bet the DVD will be expensive to make sure this happens.

Either that, or Paramount is truly trying to see how well .torrents do for distribution (maybe the .torrent will be a lower-resolution version with a quick splash screen saying "if you want this in higher quality, please buy the DVD!").

One interesting business model might be to charge some very nominal fee (say $1-2) for a copy of the .torrent file. Their distribution costs are near zero, so any sales that way are pretty much pure profit. This dovetails in with the "lower the price, reduce piracy" discussion from the other day, and gives would-be pirates a way to go legit while building collections of movies.

There will certainly be some (maybe a lot, hard to say) redistribution of the .torrent file, but it'd be interesting to see what would happen with something like this. Would you sell enough zero-overhead copies of the movie at a buck a pop to make up for your $10 per-unit profit on the DVD release? I have exactly 10 movies in my DVD collection, but if you offered me movies at $1-2 a pop I'd probably own several hundred. They'd be impulse purchases, and I wouldn't think twice about buying a movie to watch once.

I think they'd make some good money on it. Especially with older movies that already sell for a few bucks on the bent can rack at Wally World, most of which has to be eaten up by distribution and materials costs. If you didn't care about liner art and packaging, would you pirate it or cough up 75 cents for the .torrent file and a legit license to it?

I think there's some interesting possibilities in this business model. I don't pirate, but I also don't buy a lot of music because it's overpriced in my opinion. I might buy 30 bucks (2-3 albums) in music a year.

When "all of mp3" came out, I bought TONS of music at about 25 cents a song. I probably dropped $150 in the first year. Many turned out to be music I didn't like, but at 25 cents a song I'll take that risk and work on building collections, because it's easier to download a bunch of stuff and spend a little money than wasting my time picking out individual songs to save money. I'd also spend 10 cents each to download a few sample songs for an artist in 128k, then turn around a day later and spend another 25 cents a song on their entire collection at a decent bitrate if I liked the samples.

OpenSignal shows no coverage anywhere near my house for any carrier, and the nearest AT&T signal is several counties away.

I'd download their app to contribute data, but I don't have an Android and they don't support anything else. It looks like the one guy in my state who downloaded it for his droid used it 3-4 times, tops.

Neat idea, though.

There are already websites that track what are called "Iridium Flares" where the sun reflects off one of the boxy, shiny AT&T Iridium satellites. Focus the beam a little more and you could accomplish some fairly serious eye damage. However, aiming such a thing at a specific target for any length of time would be damned near impossible.

If you wanted to truly permanently blind a populace, issue each of your people a 1kw aiming laser for their rifles. If you want to temporarily blind them, set up a couple of powerful spotlights on a tall building or helicopter. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable.

Not for... (sticks pinky finger to mouth)... One MILLion dollars!