8:00 PM
Apr 7, Sat
Venue TBA
Boston, MA
With: Supercommuter, JoCo, Paul & Storm
Cover: Free w/ PAX badge
Date confirmed (and switched to Saturday)
January 27, 2012
Gig announcement: Sat Apr 07 at Venue TBA – Boston, MA
January 20, 2012
News: 01.20.2012
Front and bandmates are in Utica, NY for a SUNY/IT show on Sunday night. They’d love to invite you, but it’s a closed-campus show. So you still have part of the afternoon left to enroll, and/or photoshop yourself a student ID.
Dorknote: The Plot Summary Of The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Posted to Bootleg Review by MC Frontalot.
This is not technically a bootleg review since I paid for a 48-hour rental on Amazon, but I did watch it at like 480p blown up to fullscreen so it was pretty similar to watching it embedded on a russian pharmacy affiliate link traffic funnel page.
This plot summary is written in tribute to Gabe’s ‘The Hunt For The Worst Movie Of All Time‘ while that feature is on hiatus.
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Poor James Franco. His dad John Lithgow has a disease. It is called THE DISEASE throughout but also at some point accidentally called Alzheimer’s, and obviously it’s Alzheimer’s because when it’s acting up John Lithgow can’t play piano excellently or hold his fork the right direction. So obviously James Franco is devoting his life to developing and testing a new ANTI THE DISEASE drug called one-twelve. One-twelve has no side effects. Except that it makes test chimps into noble revolutionaries. Oops!
Our man’s reporting his success to a group of people in business suits that is both the governing body of the drug company and a set of potential investors(?) when his powerpoint presentation goes so poorly that testing is discontinued and all the apes are put to death. Doctor(?) Franco heads home in defeat, pausing only to adopt a newborn chimp who’s already received ape-smartening chemicals prenatally. Oh, right! One-twelve! He takes some of that home too in case he wants to give it to his dying father. After three years he figures, sure. Why not.
His dad has an immediate total recovery! But our boy is cagey, and keeps this wildly exciting CURE FOR ALZHEIMER’S a secret. Perhaps he is hardened by years of subterfuge — his grim duty of protecting and hiding the stolen chimp Caesar. Caesar of course is the smartest ape on the planet, wears clothes, enjoys a gym at home but prefers trips to the redwoods, is protective of John Lithgow, pummels a neighbor, and winds up in an intensely implausible ape prison in San Bruno.
Sure, it’s posh upstairs, but down on the cell block it is all cruel guards and corrupt wardens. You get mush and hay and if you complain you get the hose. Caesar leans his head against his drawing of a window and dreams of home.
Instead of rescuing his chimp son, James Franco reports to his mean boss that one-twelve made his dad smarter than HE EVEN WAS BEFORE HE HAD ALZHEIMER’S, which means obviously that research is back on and it’s time to load up on chimps. Some of these are deliveries from the same ape jail where Caesar lives, so apparently it is an ape jail SLASH test monkey emporium, but when James Franco comes to bail him out, Caesar opts to remain. He would rather escape on his own, steal smart drugs from the fridge, break BACK into ape jail, dose up an army of supergenius ape guerrillas, liberate the drug lab, liberate the zoo (though only the primate exhibit? why not share your smart gas, ape dicks?), and then lead his cohort toward primatey paradise (Sausalito, I think).
It’s a panic on the Golden Gate! The apes whoop ass on the police, mercilessly killing the mean boss from the drug company (who’s helping shoot at them from a helicopter for some reason), then trundle off into freedom’s bosom.
James Franco is only momentarily confused when, in the sun-dappled glade of their final farewell, Caesar speaks English. "This film is terrible and I have not looked like a real living creature for even one frame of it, but I’d like you to trust that all of us CGI apes belong here, in Sausalito, and not in your attic."
James Franco makes a few more hilarious acting faces and they part in peace. Except: his recent upgrade of the Alzheimer’s cure ALSO escaped the lab and is super poisonous and now the whole human race will be wiped out in several weeks. Oops again! Cue credits.
January 18, 2012
Google Says Piracy Bills Puts U.S. Censorship On Par With China
NPR
Google’s Brin Says Piracy Bills Puts U.S. Censorship On Par With China
December 15, 2011
by EYDER PERALTA
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin unleashed perhaps the most stinging criticism of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act that is working its way through Congress.
In a Google+ post, Brin said if the U.S. passed either SOPA, the House version of the bill, or the Protect IP Act, the Senate version, it would put the country in same league as China and Iran as far as Internet censorship is concerned. Brin said the bills were a “threat to free speech.”
Brin writes:
“Two bills currently making their way through congress — SOPA and PIPA — give the US government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial). While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.”
As we’ve reported, the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are behind the legislation, which would create an Internet blacklist and they say control piracy.
Today, a group of technology A-listers, including Brin, sent an open letter to Washington stating why they oppose to the bill. The first one listed is the legislation’s mandate that web services monitor “what users link to, or upload.”
“This would have a chilling effect on innovation,” the letter reads.
The Internet moguls also say the legislation would change the “basic structure of the Internet,” and “deny website owners the right to due process of law.”
The letter is signed by some of the founders of eBay, Craigslist, Paypal, Twitter, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Flickr, Mozilla, YouTube and others.
CBS News reports that “the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is meeting today to determine if a slightly, though still controversial, version of SOPA will move onto the House for a vote.”
Hollywood Tries to Wash the Web with SOPA
Bloomberg Businessweek
CONGRESS December 15, 2011, 4:30 PM EST
Hollywood Tries to Wash the Web with SOPA
The Stop Online Piracy Act aims to stop illegal streaming. It won’t
In the spring of 1982 a House of Representatives subcommittee decamped to Los Angeles to hold hearings about a new gadget called the VCR. Movie studios believed home viewing of feature films would destroy theaters and, ultimately, their entire industry, and they wanted Congress to do something to stop it. The late Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, warned the committee, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Home video is now Hollywood’s most profitable business.
Nearly 30 years later, movie industry executives flew back East to warn of a new threat: online subscription services that stream movies. Early this month, members of the MPAA met in Washington with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, Vice-President Joe Biden, and members of Congress to promote a bill—now in the House—that will attempt to shut down illegal streaming sites.
The studio heads have grudgingly come to accept free peer-to-peer file sharing. “Yes, you’ll have people who want to camcord the movie, be the hero in their mother’s basement,” says Jim Gianopulos, head of Fox Filmed Entertainment (NWS). “And yes, we live with that.” It’s the infringing for-profit services Gianopulos and his colleagues are after. Hollywood is no longer just worried about theft. It’s worried about competition.
The Stop Online Piracy Act—SOPA—introduced in October by Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has broad support in both parties. If it becomes law, it would authorize the Justice Dept., with a court order, to direct U.S. companies to stop hosting or providing payment services to foreign sites that illegally stream American content. It could tell search engines to stop listing those sites and instruct domain-name registrars—the companies that ensure when you type in “jeffbridges.com,” you reach The Dude—to direct traffic elsewhere. Studio executives insist the bill targets foreign sites, but it also allows copyright holders to obtain a court injunction that would hit domestic sites in some of the same ways. The studios point to an appeals process, yet offenders would have to fight a court battle to prove their innocence after they’d already been disappeared from the Internet. A similar bill, called the Protect IP Act, is moving through the Senate.
As with many fights about the Internet, this one pits Google (GOOG) and much of Silicon Valley, which have a financial interest in keeping the Web open, against Hollywood, record labels, and software companies, which have an interest in keeping it closed. In a Jan. 12 speech in Washington, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said Smith’s bill would “criminalize the intermediaries” (like Google). Barry Meyer, head of Warner Bros. Entertainment (TWX), claims the studios are being “death-paneled” by the bill’s opponents.
The two sides are having an argument about the bill’s unintended negative effects, but there isn’t much to suggest there will be intended, positive ones. In a 400-page survey of piracy in emerging markets published in January, the Social Science Research Council, a New York think tank, discovered little evidence that enforcement efforts had “any impact whatsoever” on the supply of pirated goods. What worked, it concluded, are “firms that actively compete on price and services for local customers.” At least one studio has recognized this. In June, Warner Bros. announced a deal with You On Demand Holdings (CBBD) to stream movies in China, where piracy has eroded sales.
This may make sense in the American market, too. Joe Karaganis edited the emerging markets study, and now works on digital issues for the American Assembly, a research institute at Columbia University. In an August poll, he found that of the 30 percent of Americans who have illegally downloaded videos, 40 percent say the emergence of legal streaming services has made them less likely to do so. (Google funded the study.) As the studios point out, foreign websites charge Americans $40 for unlimited, illegal streaming of new releases. Hollywood sees these sites as an affront. Eventually—if the history of the VCR is any lesson—it will come to see them as a business model.
The bottom line: Among Americans who have illegally downloaded movies, 40 percent say they now do so less, because of legal streaming services.
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/hollywood-tries-to-wash-the-web-with-sopa-12152011.html
Rupert Murdoch Lobbies Congress To Restrict Internet
The Huffington Post
Rupert Murdoch Lobbies Congress To Restrict Internet
First Posted: 12/ 7/11 08:26 PM ET Updated: 12/ 8/11 08:32 AM ET
WASHINGTON — News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch threw his weight behind Congress’ attempt to restrict the Internet, personally lobbying leaders on Capitol Hill Wednesday for two measures that purport to combat piracy.
Murdoch’s media empire is among some 350 large corporations that have come out in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, as well as the Protect IP Act in the Senate.
Both measures would require Internet operators to police activity online, and would mandate Internet giants like Google and AOL (the parent company of The Huffington Post and an opponent of the bills) and credit card companies to take down sites that have content deemed to be in violation of copyright rules.
The battle has pitted huge content generators like Disney and the motion picture industry against their online competitors, with each side reportedly spending some $90 million on lobbying efforts.
Supporters say the measures will help curb theft and preserve the integrity of the Internet. Opponents charge that the measures amount to censorship that will stifle innovation and impose higher costs on consumers.
News Corp. owns 20th Century Fox films and many television franchises such as “The Simpsons.” The firm has long lobbied on the issue, donating to members on both sides of the aisle.
The personal intervention of Murdoch shows how high the stakes are. Sources confirmed to HuffPost that the media magnate was pushing for the two bills, and that he met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Murdoch’s presence comes as high-profile opponents, such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, have been ramping up their public efforts to kill the bills.
Additional reporting by Zach Carter
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/rupert-murdoch-stop-online-piracy-act_n_1135452.html
