Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

PBS has been airing a thought provoking nightly series of programs, “AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS.” Much of the series goes into depth and detail not normally covered in mainstream media, including daring film and video footage shot while bombs and mortars are exploding on the streets of Baghdad. A surprise segment is Richard Perle’s “The Case for War: In Defense pf Freedom.” To Perle’s credit, he opens up the debate over America’s foreign policy, and exposes himself as a stubborn believer of his distorted views which I’ll name, PerleVision.

Unfortunately for those of us effected by his powerful abilities to lobby and pursuade US government policy officials, PerleVision pushes the simplistic and jingoistic Reagan ideals that America can run around the planet saving everybody with an aerosol spray can of All American happy dust, and a fresh paint job of red, white and blue stars and stripes forever.
The crossroads America stands at is whether or not to continue playing at the old Superpower game. The concept of Superpowers has been somehow accepted as reality, based on the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA. Today we see many more nuclear players and ever more growing economies. The playing field is gradually being leveled. Americans need to clean out their closets and discard their old Superhero costumes. In PerleVision to clean up your own house and restore it in order is to do nothing. Tell that to New Orleans, and the rest of the country’s tightened budgets.

The voices at home are speaking louder and clearer than ever for cleaning up American’s own house. Such is the case at the citizen built Lafayette Iraq War Memorial where we recently videotaped and interviewed volunteers for the project. Politicians and policy pushers such as Perle should take notice. See the video.

Wha? This is no outer space language, it’s VUZE the new name for the Azureus website distributing long-form, high quality video. Many of the videos available on Vuze are HD resolution 1280 720p widescreen formats.

Azureus engineering has been busy at work on this major upgrade since early 2007.  The site has many new Channels of content to browse, and the Azureus client application has undergone a major upgrade as well.

The company has recently announced content partnerships with Showtime Networks, BBC Worldwide, Bennett Media Worldwide, G4, A&E Networks (including A&E, History, and Biography channels), National Geographic, and Starz Media.

Azureus Inc. is the provider of the most popular P2P application for the transfer of large media files. With more than three years of technology innovation, proven robustness, and more than 140 million downloads of its application, Azureus users connect with one another from more than 100 countries and 40 languages.

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Last summer a Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, fumbled through his description of the Internet as a “series of tubes.” His simplification was a clumsy adaptation to what telecom folks colorfully refer as “pipes”, network bandwidth such as fiber optical cables providing faster transmission speeds and therefore a “fat pipe.” In 3 to 5 years IBM promises we will have much, much fatter pipes. (Link to full story.)

“We have worked out a way to ship almost inconceivable quantities of data at extremely low power,” said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for International Business Machines Corp.

Imagine 160 Gigabytes of data or an entire HD movie being downloaded to your computer or DVR box in one second! The implications of this new chip are staggering. Codecs, audio and video compression technologies, such as MPEG used in mp3, DivX and all the rest will no longer be necessary. Larger hard drives and bigger memory storage devices to collection your new tidal wave of data will be necessary. Online video web sites will contain larger, higher resolution clips which will certainly compete with traditional television broadcasting stations to a larger extent than they do now. Peer-to-peer networking schemes will be more important for sharing vast storage resources than bandwidth itself. Networked games will become higher resolution and more interactive. I can imagine two remotely located Nintendo Wii users playing a lifesized game of tennis through the network. My mind is on fire with ideas, get me a VC quick!

The Wisconsin Alumni magazine On Wisconsin has published an outstandingly detailed article tracking the formative days of the comedy group who later went on to produce Airplane!, Naked Gun and many other movie hits. I arrived in Madison after the Kentucky Fried Theater had ended its run and moved to Hollywood, but I had seen Kentucky Fried Movie, which back in the mid 70’s was a counter culture hit along with The Groove Tube. These anti-establishment films were predecessors to Saturday Night Live and irreverent comedy trends more common today. If you are a fan of the work of the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams, or are an aspiring writer/fimmaker, you will enjoy this interesting read by Rich Markey.

Scott aka Spot Draves has been developing an open source network rendered screensaver, Electric Sheep for over 10 years. The project has grown in size and capability, and Spot is receiving recognition within the computer art world and the fine art gallery scene as well. Spot stopped by the Tubular TV studio and we videotaped an artist’s statement as well as an informal interview. See it over at my videoblog, Tubular TV.

Since posting this episode on our video web host, blip.tv, they have cited it on their home page as one of their “Hot Episodes.”  Thank you blip.tv, we think you’re hot too.