The MPAA can bully small independent theaters like that. I'd be surprised if they weren't. But too much of their revenue comes from AMC, Regal, Century, and the other megachains for them to make changes that big and expensive by fiat. It'd be like a wholesaler trying to make demands of Walmart. Their realistic choices were to help pay for the transition (which was discussed, but I don't know to what extent it's actually happening) or to create audience demand.
I'm a projectionist at a 24-screen theater that's about half 35mm, half digital. What I'm about to say, I know first-hand to be factual:
The industry's push for 3D is the ONLY reason you have the choice of 2D digital projection at all. Digital projectors are orders of magnitude more expensive, less reliable, and more labor-intensive to operate and maintain than 35mm projectors--even in areas where a single theater chain's monopoly means they don't have to be replaced with newer models every few years. But the studios love them because it is cheaper to ship 5-pound USB hard drives than 50-pound 35mm prints to theaters.
So, the MPAA announced about seven or eight years ago that they were going to start making a lot of 3D films, meaning theaters had to install digital projectors capable of playing them. For the first few years, until approximately 2007, most theaters only had one or two digital projectors, so 3D films were only released at a rate of one every four to six months. The rest of the time, those few digital projectors showed 2D movies. Once it was clear that audiences would actually pay for 3D, the MPAA started ramping up production and speeding up the release cycle to force theaters to convert more and more auditoriums to digital. Today, there are always at least two or three different 3D movies in wide release at a time. So if the theaters near you don't have very many digital screens, most of them will be taken up by 3D films most of the time. I'm sure this is the source of your misconception--a higher percentage of digital showtimes were 2D in the early days of digital, so it's perfectly reasonable to guess that 2D digital is being displaced by the 3D fad. But the phenomenon is really nothing more than an accidental side-effect of theaters trying to stay a step ahead of audience and studio demand for 3D.
In ten years or so, digital will be dominant enough that studios will be able to stop 35mm distribution entirely. No longer needing 3D to be a Trojan horse for cheap digital distribution, the fad will simply die down with no fanfare or public explanation, and you'll have your ubiquitous digital 2D. But make no mistake--if not for the 3D push, digital projectors would be a novelty item, only in huge, popular multiplexes in NYC and LA, and even there only on one or two screens.
As I said,
Disclaimer: I haven't done the research to be 100% sure the story is true, but all the elements make sense. Wikipedia mentions it but seems doubtful.
Please finish reading my post before arguing with it.
In most of Europe, the new year once began on April 1, at the beginning of spring--a time of rebirth and renewal. But as Christianity took over the continent, the Church decreed that it should be January 1, right after Christmas. The last few holdouts to continue celebrating in the spring were derided as April Fools, and it became fashionable to play pranks on them. This is the origin of April Fools Day.
Like everyone else in the world, I date.year++ on January 1, but don't do much in the way of celebrating--generally I watch football all day. But on April 1, I go around wishing everybody a happy new year and telling the April Fools story.
Disclaimer: I haven't done the research to be 100% sure the story is true, but all the elements make sense. Wikipedia mentions it but seems doubtful.
"Selling you ROMs" and "a license to use them" are mutually exclusive. You don't need a license to use your own property. You're either being sold a ROM that becomes your property (in which case you can use it however you like) OR you're being sold a license to access a ROM that remains the licensor's property (in which case you can use it in the ways permitted by the terms of the license).
Hopefully I'm just being pessimistic.
I hereby present you with the Best Thing Said On The Internet Today award for 8-25-2011.
It used to be that, in the past, magazines and newspapers and other "common-man" publications would have essays about heady topics.
Yes, very very rarely. Just like today.
Now you just get articles about how to get rich quick, how some superstar or politician has done something, or some other essentially mundane topic.
Just as it's always been--we only remember the occasional exceptions because they're the only things worth remembering.
Even the "debates" on economics, social norms, climate change, or intellectual property are very sparse on respectful discourse and are instead filled with emotional responses.
Andrew Jackson. Aaron Burr. Adolph Hitler. Eisenhower-Stephenson. McCarthy. As bad as it is now--and it is pretty bad--it was ten times worse in antebellum America, and even that was a dramatic improvement over any previous civilization in the history of the world.
Normally, I would ignore anyone who didn't realize that a comment modded +5 Funny was in fact a joke, not intended as a literally true statement. But first, you're wrong in interesting ways. I mean that as a compliment--people who are right or wrong in uninteresting ways are so boring as to be de facto nonentities, and people who are right in interesting ways are exceedingly rare. Second, you express yourself coherently. I therefore deem you to be worth talking to.
Let's deconstruct my joke. In actual fact, France's influence is larger but declining, while Twitbook's is smaller but increasing. Claiming, facetiously, that those trends have gone so far that the situation has reversed emphasizes the trends themselves. It's a statement which is literally false, but in a way that highlights something true. That's something I (and apparently several people with mod points) find funny.
But we do actually disagree--you think I was overstating the influence of social networking, but I was actually understating the influence of France. Social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are a much bigger deal than you claim they are. Point by point:
It doesn't really alter people's values
There has been much discussion, including here on Slashdot, about the effect cable television and the internet are having on people's political views. We can, more and more easily, choose to avoid exposure to differing viewpoints. This positive feedback loop seems to be leading us to hold more and more strongly to more and more extreme positions. I'd call that an alteration of our values. Social networking is not the driving force of that change, but it's certainly a factor.
Just as widely discussed is the rapid, universal devaluation of privacy--primarily and directly due to social networking. Whether that's a good or bad thing is far from clear, but it's definitely a big thing.
it doesn't lead people to do anything new
... it's a different way of doing the same thing
The big new thing that Facebook does is that we no longer have to consciously choose to keep in touch with casual friends--we have to consciously choose not to. I'm Facebook-friends with dozens of people I went to high school or college with but haven't seen since graduation, former coworkers, siblings of friends, etc. These continuing relationships are not a big part of my day to day life, but any of them could be rekindled--if we move to the same city, or one of us posts about a common interest we didn't know we shared. That's something that was never possible before, even with earlier social networking sites. Nothing before Facebook had a large enough userbase to have that effect.
You can break all forms of communication down into four categories: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. A conversation in person, or a personal letter, is one-to-one. The written (published) word (or television or pretty much any form of artistic expression) is one-to-many. Democracy is a kind of many-to-one communication, as is survey-based research. But many-to-many communication never existed before the internet, and you could almost use it as the primary distinguishing characteristic of social networking. Social networking is the subset of internet activity that is not just a faster version of traditional one-to-one or one-to-many communication. The major breakthroughs of the other three categories are language, democracy, and the printing press--it's an understatement to call them world-changers. We may not know yet HOW many-to-many communication will change the world, but there's no doubt that it's going to. Check out the last three paragraphs of this speech by Douglas Adams for a somewhat more in-depth discussion of this idea.
Twitter is drastically different from anything else that exists on- or offline, including other social networks. All other forms of socialization can be modeled by simple graphs--individuals are vertices, with an edge between people who know each other. Twitter is a directed graph--Alice can follow Bob, Bob can follow Alice, or Alice and Bob can mutually follow each other. This is a radically new idea.
it has influence only on individual small groups
... I realize there are a hundred million of such small groups, but they don't represent one gigantic culture
Yes, they do. By definition. The thing you're missing is that those groups overlap--you can play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to connect any two people. Alice knows Bob, Bob knows Carol, Carol knows Dave, Dave knows Elizabeth, and Elizabeth knows Frank. Even though Alice has never even heard of Frank, they're part of the same culture because of that chain of connections. There's nothing more to culture than the cumulative behavior and communication of an interconnected web of individuals. You basically just said "(definition of term), but that's not (term)."
Wow, that was hilarious, thanks for posting it. I feel for the guy--orchestral trombone parts (I'm a trombonist) are all like that.
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
