Top Gear themed rides? Well, I suppose it gives an excuse to be a little shit. The "Be a Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car" roller coaster: not quite as fast or thrilling as the "Ferraris" at other theme parks....

Which leads to an interesting question -- why limit it to BBC? Alice in Wonderland is out of copyright, and the Disney production borrowed its aesthetic very heavily from the original illustrations. Why not be some kind of "Britainland" for American tourists?

BBC Worldwide is a commercial entity that gets money by reselling BBC content oversees. It gets no part of the license fee or any other public funding. It is arguable that it has unfair advantage in that the production costs of most of its assets were covered by the BBC; however, it's a fair stretch to say that the public will be paying for this theme park, particularly given that they're looking to outside investors to fund it.

I'd like to point out that almost certainly the smoke seen on screen would have been CGI. Bans on smoking in public places and workplaces typically extend to TV studios. Furthermore, if there's children in shot, there's no way they'd have real smoke.

The main difference, though, isn't about equipment quality, it's about art and craft, and getting it right first time. Digital makes it too easy to "fix it in the mix", and therefore encourages too much fiddling with the recording after the fact. Also, any amateur recorders now expect the equipment to do the job, but never learn how to use the equipment properly.

Except that recent Beatles rereleases have been remastered with extra compression. In fact, I read an article once on "the compression wars" which compared multiple releases of Beatles (or was it Rolling Stones...?) recordings to chart the phenomenon.

The UK's Daily Mail has taken casual "soft" content to the extreme. Their website is like a gossip mag and nothing like their print edition.

Sounds like a win-win. The big problem all news houses have is that if they step out of Google News individually, it doesn't change the market, and they just end up with a smaller audience share. If they all step out together, there will be cries of "collusion" and "cartels". But the legislation gave Google a choice: if Google News was important to them, they would have paid; but it wasn't, so they switched off. Now it is possible for Spanish news outlets to build their own audience again, and even if overall eyeballs decrease, the value of individual ads will increase again, because they have their own demographic to market to.

Unfortunately, one of the big drivers for the drop in journalistic quality is the lack of money coming in. The quality of journalism ten to twenty years ago didn't stop the decline in revenues, so reintroducing similar quality won't magically bring the money back either.

Ah yes. Spend more money, and put less advertising on the site. That's obviously going to work.

True fact.

True fact.

Untrue conjecture.

Replace the word "captive" with "specific", and you have the truth.

The problem isn't just about location, but about wider demographics. By virtue of having a particular voluntary readership (whether that readership is "locals", or "geeks", or "conservatives", or "working-class people"), the newspaper had a premium product for the advertisers -- it was a form of targeted advertising in and of itself. It also associated the product with the newspaper brand, for extra positive effect.

A link from Google News does nothing to build up a demographic, or to build up the brand. A link from Google News is a low value proposition for advertisers, and the newspapers need a high value proposition.

Google News is not good news for the newspapers.

Yes, but the value of each page impression in advertising in print media comes from knowing the demographic that you're selling to. The only really successful virtual newspaper I know of is The Register, and they can handle their own advertising content precisely because they have a specific demographic. Their readership consists mainly of tech professionals with geeky hobbies, and there are multiple big sponsors looking to get the attention of that audience -- whether it's IT vendors like Citrix or Cisco, or the studio behind Transformers trying to sell robot nostalgia to the children of the 80s. But if you don't have a demographic, you're left scraping the same barrel as the lowliest bloggers, getting an ad aggregator to pay you fractions of a cent for impressions.

The problem for newspaper is precisely that -- that they're in the advertising business, and the advertising model isn't working for them. Getting off the aggregators is a way to rebuild that idea of having a "readership", a particular group that come to you for the stories; but it doesn't work if only some of the newspapers do it.

...and the downscaled, recompressed version will probably be the only version kept in the archive.

The iPad's sound chip has phenomenal fidelity, as does most digital hardware. (Although laptops often suffer signal noise due to unshielded signal lines outside the chip.) If he thinks we're getting poorer quality than in the 60s, he's mad. An iPad can produce a higher quality recording than anything the Beatles ever produced.

On the other hand, if he's talking about his recent material, sound quality is meaningless if the song is unlistenably crap.

Except that this was reputedly the original, but the song was proposed by a band member who was completely off his face and slurring his speech, and the slurred version stuck.