Warner Bros. So Thrilled With Netflix 28-Day Delays, It Wants To Have Longer Delays

from the driving-fans-to-piracy dept

Hollywood continues to seek new and ever-more creative ways to shoot itself in the foot and drive movie fans to unauthorized copies of movies. Earlier this year, Warner Bros. studios was successful in pressuring Netflix and Redbox to delay rental releases by 28-days, with the hope that people who couldn’t rent the movie would buy it. Warner Bros. has been claiming this strategy succeeded and that they’ve sold more DVDs because of it. I would doubt that it’s the delay that’s increasing sales, and it seems like a pretty short-sighted strategy to look to increase sales of a format like DVD right now. Either way, Warner Bros. is now claiming it may try to increase the window over 28-days. It’s as if they want to drive more people to get the movie from unauthorized providers. Making it more difficult to let people watch movies the way they want to isn’t a solution that will work long-term. Read more at www.techdirt.com

Kanye’s Phoenix-Sex Cover Not Actually Banned

By: Nate Jones

Who would have thought that Kanye West was the type to exaggerate things?

Kanye West needs to take his own advice and start tweeting like he has some type of respect for himself.

Yesterday, the rapper/exemplar of our age took to Twitter to make an important announcement: The artwork for his upcoming album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, had been banned. Or, spoken in the unique authorial voice West uses on the Internet, “Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!!! Ima tweet it in a few…”

Once West did tweet the album cover, the issue became clear: the proposed artwork was a bizarre oil painting depicting a human man engaged in intercourse with a nude winged creature. (Or, again in Kanye-speak, “They don’t want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!” What can we say? We love Kanye-speak.)

West’s followers were soon inundated with a classic Kanye Twitter rant:

—”In the 70s album covers had actual nudity… It’s so funny that people forget that… Everything has been so commercialized now.”

—”I wanna sell albums but not at the expense of my true creativity.”

—”So Nirvana can have a naked human being on they cover but I can’t have a PAINTING of a monster with no arms and a polka dot tail and wings.”

The only problem, it turns out, is that the cover was not actually banned. In an awesome bit of reporting, the LA Times spoke to people at West’s record label and learned that the issue wasn’t as black-and-white as it would first appear. As the paper found, “West was strongly urged to use alternate art, [a] source conceded, but added that West ‘was told if he wanted to do it, the label would stand behind him.’”

The issue, of course, was the danger of family-friendly big-box retailers refusing to carry the album, which could result in a 10% drop in album sales. Though some of Kanye’s tweets would seem to belie the point, he appears to have bowed to commercial pressure. It’s a sad day when you learn that your loud-mouthed self-aggrandizing emperors have no clothes. Still, at least we got an awesome Twitter hashtag out of it. #Kanyeshrug.

(via The A.V. Club, where the commenters uickly broke out the perfect Spinal Tap quote for this situation: “It’s such a thin line between clever and stupid.”) Read more at newsfeed.time.com

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In New Study, Babies Think A Silvery Robot Is Human, As Long As It Acts Friendly

In New Study, Babies Think A Silvery Robot Is Human, As Long As It Acts Friendly

Want to know what makes us human? Ask a baby

Andrew Meltzoff, Morphy the Robot, and Rajesh Rao University of Washington

At 18 months old, babies have begun to make conscious delineations between sentient beings and inanimate objects. But as robots get more and more advanced, those decisions may become harder to make. What causes a baby to decide a robot is more than bits of metal? As it turns out, it takes more than humanoid looks—babies rely on social interaction to make that call.

A study at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences took a sample of 64 18-month-old babies, who were all tested individually. The experimental test had the babies sit on their parents’ laps, facing a remote-controlled humanoid robot. Sitting next to the robot was Rechele Brooks, one of the researchers on the study. Brooks and the robot (controlled remotely by an unseen researcher) would then engage in a 90-second skit, in which Brooks interacted with the robot as if it was a child, asking questions like “Where is your tummy?” and “Where is your head?” The robot would in turn point to its different parts. The robot would also imitate a few arm movements, like waving back and forth.

The babies who watched this skit looked back and forth between the robot and Brooks as if “at a ping-pong match,” said Brooks. After the skit, Brooks left the room, leaving the baby and the robot alone (well, along with the baby’s parent—this probably isn’t a punching or stabbing robot, but there’s no harm in being extra safe). The robot would then beep and shift slightly to get the baby’s attention, and then turn to look at a nearby toy.

In 13 out of 16 cases, the baby would follow the robot’s gaze, suggesting that the baby sees the robot as a sentient being, that what the robot looks at might be of interest to the baby as well. Babies at that age distinguish between, say, a swivel chair’s movement and a person’s movement, and will only follow the person. But in following the robot, the study suggests that the baby has decided that robot is a human being.

The control experiment is very similar, except the 90-second skit is omitted. The baby is familiarized with the robot, but does not see it interact with a third party. In this situation, the baby only followed the robot’s line of sight in three out of 16 instances, which is a big enough difference to suggest that socialization plays a major part in the baby’s decision to treat a robot like a being.

It’s a really interesting idea: What makes a baby decide that something is a being is not necessarily that thing’s visual similarity to a person. Appearance isn’t everything—babies recognize the ability to interact socially as a human trait. From the mouths of babes, sort of. Read more at www.popsci.com

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