"Booth Sweet" is not a player in this game...you seem to be thinking of Jason Sweet and Dan Booth, the lawyers who unraveled the finances of John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, and Paul Duffy.

The artist, Kimiko Ishizaka, is easily at-or-above par with Juilliard students. The producer, Anne-Marie Sylvestre, is A-OK at what she does. The studio and staff are top-notch. The instrument will be kick-ass. Etc.

And, there's a track record for this project -- the Goldberg Variations recordings they've already done are fine.

Maybe you have an axe to grind with Drupal geeks? ;-)

I no longer have to go all the way up to Freeside just to let my friendly neighborhood AI shake the Turing cops off my tail.

Could we build it? Sure, but I'd rather hold out for a Ring World.

Hope you've got some supplies laid in for "holding out" -- Ringworld was 600 million miles long, 1 million miles wide, with sidewalls 1000 miles tall; might take awhile to procure the materials. (And that's using magical scrith to build the ring...at that size, scrith needs to have a tensile strength on the order of the strong nuclear force.)

And then there's the need for energy to spin that massive puppy up. And finding enough gasses to provide atmosphere....something like 20 billion cubic miles. And finding enough dirt to build a floor. And figuring out how to wrangle a comet or two for the water....

Seems like you could build a handful of Elysium-like Stanford Toruses for the budget of a single shadow square.

Step One for humans building a Ringworld: locate some Tree of Life virus....

Not even Postel could forgive failures such as: "As salacious as every page of this book is..."

"Yeah. Look," Harvey said, "can you name one newsman who lost his reputation because of Kahoutek?" He nodded at the puzzled look that got. "Right. None. No chance. The public blamed the astronomers for blowing it all out of proportion. Nobody blamed the news people."

"Why should they? You were quoting the astronomers."

"Half the time," Harvey agreed. "But we quoted the ones who said exciting things. Two interviews. One man says Kahoutek is going to be the Big Christmas Comet. Another says, well, it's going to be a comet, but you might not see it without field glasses. Guess which tape gets shown on the six o'clock news?"

--Lucifer's Hammer; Niven & Pournelle, 1977

I have two recollections of the San Diego Zoo, despite never having been there: the first is of Joan Embry, on Carson; the other is Jerry Pournelle, speaking as the character "Nat Reynolds," giving a shout-out to his brother George in the pages of Footfall -- George had some rhinos to house at the zoo, but he didn't know what temperature they needed their water at. So, he threw a gradient across the pool and let them figure it out.

Unfortunately, to avoid an Off-Topic mod, I don't know how many commas he mis-used in making that happen...

Maybe someone didn't get the memo -- after you build a NuPenny store you're not supposed to open the doors ;-)

Those slots are made available to operators and affiliates (such as Dish, or a cable company) to fill with whatever they can sell. If the operator can't sell that time, then the network's ad appears onscreen. Same kind of setup with OTA TV networks and local affiliates. Same kind of setup with NPR and local broadcasters (except the time is for local announcements and promotions, not ads). Same kind of setup that pretty much everybody uses; nothing to see.

(This is one of the reasons cable operators hate to hear about a la carte cable -- most of the cable channels are part of "networks" of cable channels, and the more channels you carry from the same network, the better your ad insert deals become.)

From TFA: As part of the deal, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington will oversee a new group responsible for bringing together all editorial content from both companies including news, technology, music and local media websites.

Does this mean we can look forward to the editorial equivalent of a Celebrity Death Match between Ms. Huffington and Mike Arrington?

I think you've missed the point of what a "long take" is; ultimately its charm/value lies in the fact that it's a meat-world, real-time thing. Collaborative groups -- the film's director and ADs, cinematographer and assts, lighting director and assts, set designers and assts, scriptwriters, actors, and myriad workers -- all have to coordinate exquisitely to push beyond their normal boundaries of time (and usually of space). In one regard that work is similar to the coordination needed to efficiently produce a CGI sequence, but the big difference is that, as you noted, when the mountain isn't quite in the right place/shape, the CGI-er can "back up a few frames" and grow a notch in the mountain. In a meat-world long take where the mountain is out of place/shape, you have to reset the whole scene. There's some "making of" dox about the OK Go "This Too Shall Pass" viddy that illustrate this very well.

Missing from TFA are two of the most landmark uses of long takes in modern cinema: Hitchcock's Rope and Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Rope -- which is nothing but long takes, 10 IIRC -- stresses the actors: each shot was basically as long as the film in the camera magazine (10 minutes), forcing the actors to summon their best "stage play" skills while still accommodating cinematic conventions. The Ambersons' most noteworthy long take, the ballroom scene, stresses the various directors and crew with an extended backtracking shot through four rooms of the Amberson mansion (following the action through a set of French doors was considered a technical tour de force in its day).

And, of course, there's the matter af art. The Genesis sequence in Khan is hardly art; it portrays nothing that couldn't be replaced by a few seconds of explication (indeed, I would say that in its context that CGI sequence is merely the 23nd century equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation), does little to drive the story forward, and carries no emotional impact (unless your emotions are driven by your CGI-detecting circuits ;-).

What do an extended CGI sequence and parking lot surveillance footage have in common? Neither qualifies as a "long take".

No problem with the number of hands; you've just got to employ the correct terminology: "On the one hand...", "on the other hand...", "and the gripping hand is..."

"Of course in this case I don't see a link to the offending recipe, so there's no way for me to know whether it is subject to copyright or not."

Yeah, this was a tough one: it required actually reading the first paragraph of the first linked article. Here's Ms. Gaudio's original article. Sorry you did all that typing for nothing, but thanks for playing. Better luck next time!