Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Bush Wants to Revive Digital TV Fees  President Bush is attempting to revive a plan that would require broadcasters to pay a $500 million fee for use of their current analog TV channels in 2007. 9:57:43 PM

Google Maps. Beta map service unveiled. Google today unveiled the beta for Google Maps, a new map service dedicated towards competing with larger players like Mapquest. The service offers a fairly clean interface and works with IE and Mozilla/Firefox, with Safari and Opera support looming. 9:55:54 PM

8,500 RIAA Lawsuits. And the pressure to settle pre-trial. Something overlooked (but not by p2pnet) is that not one of the nearly 8,500 cases lodged by the RIAA against on-line file traders has actually reached a court. 9:55:30 PM

Ditching Your Landline. Serious jump in users cutting the copper. Techdirt points to new statistics that show the number of PC-using homes without a standard landline increased 60% since 2002 (from 2 to 3.2 million). 9:55:04 PM

Robo-DJs make the world go around. Call it the Auto Decks, the Robo Technics, the Mech Turntablist, the Real Wheels of Steel, or the RoboTT, but if you haven't already figured it out, robots can be programmed to do anything humans can, only better - even music. MIDI is so old school, but robots that use MIDI to play instruments? That's the hook up right there. And don't even  get us started on robot turntables that will parse an email and use its text as scratch-entropy, and then email you back the very same output scratches. Our only real fear is that between robo-drums, guitar, and turntables, we're only one Fred Durst-automaton away from mecha-Limp Bizkit. 9:52:53 PM

The Birth of Electronic Music. fm6 writes "NPR has a story up about the first musicians to compose electronic music. In 1947, Louis and Bebe Barron received an early tape recorder as a wedding present. About the same time, Louis Barron became interested in Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics and its thesis of common elements in living and artificial systems. This led the Barrons to create a new kind of music using electronic circuits and painstakingly edited magnetic tapes. The Barrons music was featured in various avant-garde records and movies, and finally reached a mass audience in the Science Fiction classic Forbidden Planet." 9:51:24 PM

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