Firefly, Sci-Fi, and The Inside

Friday, July 22, Firefly is returning to TV (well, cable actually). They haven't produced any more episodes but the Sci-Fi Channel is doing it Joss's way this time. It's kind of like the Director's Cut. Sci-Fi plans to show all of the episodes (includes the 3 that the Fox TV network didn't get around to airing) and even in the right order. First, they'll start with the 2-hour original pilot. Then, they'll show the "second pilot" (which Fox showed first). And so on in the order that the writers intended. In case you haven't guessed, I think it's a great plan! (This was first officially announced with a Sci-Fi wire entry in June. I actually heard about it before then, but I was afraid it was too good to be true. It should be a terrific way to promote the Serenity movie that extends the story of the Firefly universe).

In other TV news, it's all new episodes of Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica tomorrow. It's been a while since there were new episodes. I hope I remember who all of the characters are. ;)

Also, apparently Fox has pretty much cancelled another cool show before it had a chance to shine. I wasn't so sure about The Inside after the first couple episodes, but I thought it was pretty interesting to begin with and it just keeps getting better. The episode yesterday was pretty awesome. It's not that I care about the gory stuff in the show for myself (e.g., I can continue eating dinner while they show an autopsy scene), but it might cause some people to tune out. So I wonder if the sure might have a little better chance to succeed if they had dialed down the grossness factor.

Oh, well, I guess they'll air some more of the episodes and then release The Inside Complete Series on DVD that'd include some un-aired episodes, too. I guess I'll look for it at the store. If it's a good price, it might buy it. I've already missed one of the episodes (I forgot it was on). Maybe they'll even re-run that episode. Anything could even happen (but it'd be very unlikely that Fox renews the show).

Flat Tax vs. National Sales Tax

I find the current income tax system to be an utter waste of time. I've heard of more than one drastic proposal that I think would be better than the current system. My favorite is replacing the entire income tax system with a national sales tax (it's called the "FairTax" by Americans for Fair Taxation). So I was sad to read Dick Armey being unfair to the idea of a national sales tax in his testimony to before the President’s Commission on Tax Reform:

Of the proposals for reform, the flat tax best meets these goals. While other proposals, such as the national sales tax, may be efficient tax collecting mechanisms, we should not introduce such a powerful tax collecting regime on the country until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution is repealed—otherwise, we will then have both a national sales tax and a federal income tax, a regime very similar to the dangerous combination of taxing powers that has enabled European governments to grow so large. Repealing constitutional amendments has been very difficult historically. In the mean time, those in favor of scrapping the current code should work toward enacting the flat tax.

Who's saying that we should have both a national sales tax and an income tax? If we couldn't get rid of the income tax, I wouldn't favor enacting a sales tax. Who has come out in favor of such a plan? That wouldn't make any sense to me. On the other hand, I don't see how the flat tax is any safer from the possibility that it rolls back into a labyrinth of special loopholes for political favors.

If you want to criticize the FairTax, please use economics rather than politics. Politics is the problem with the current system. The biggest hurdle to implementing either the flat tax or the national sales tax are all of the special interests that are paid off in the current tax code.

The best thing would be to scrap the income tax and use the FairTax instead. If we have to settle for a flat income tax, that'd still be a tremendous improvement over that current monstrosity known as the tax code. But I'd rather aim for the skies. There's no legal reason why Congress can't end the income tax right away. I see the need to wait 20 years until the 16th Amendment is repealed. It's not like Congress even waited for the 16th Amendment to tax the income of Americans in the first place.

The official Serenity trailer was released!

I've already blogged on Serenity, but that was before Universal Studios released a trailer this week. Wow! I imagined it would be terrific, but it was better than expected! It looks like science fiction set 500 years from now with Western action, Chinese culture, mystery, poignant characters, and humor all wrapped into one fantastic package. It worked so well in the TV show that I know it'll work in the feature film.

Having this much anticipation, I'm going to have a hard time waiting until September for the real thing. I read a rumor that Firefly TV show DVD sales just jumped this week by about 150 place on Amazon (to #27). I wouldn't be surprised. I already have a complete series boxset, and I'm tempted to buy another.

28,984 Browncoats and counting: become one today.

I'm a RedStater now.

A few months ago I stumbled upon RedState, a Republican/conservative community blog. There's a lot of interesting topics being discussed there. Every member gets a diary. The most interesting diary entries get promoted to a story.

I haven't posted many entries in my diary yet since I've been wanting to get a feel for what the community is interested in before I get too many people ticked off with obnoxious entries. But I have been reading RedState a lot and commenting on some of the other people's posts.

I still plan to post non-political entries here at Technocracy Unleashed, but I'll probably be posting most of my political thoughts in my RedState diary.

Why restaurant staff usually don't sing "Happy Birthday to You"

Have you been in a restaurant when someone is celebrating a birthday and noticed that instead of singing the popular "Happy Birthday to You", they sing some chant like "Happy, happy birthday, hope you dreams come true, ..." instead? Ever wonder why that is? It's probably due to copyright law.

Sure it's possible that the waiters and waitresses can't carry a tune. But it's much more likely that the management realizes that "Happy Birthday to You" is still under copyright (until 2030) and they'd rather sing (or chant) something else than worry about paying royalties for the modern classic "Happy Birthday to You".

According to snopes.com:

Does this mean that everyone who warbles "Happy Birthday to You" to family members at birthday parties is engaging in copyright infringement if they fail to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the song's publisher? No. Royalties are due, of course, for commercial uses of the song, such as playing or singing it for profit, using it in movies, television programs, and stage shows, or incorporating it into musical products such as watches and greeting cards; as well, royalties are due for public performance, defined by copyright law as performances which occur "at a place open to the public, or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered." So, crooning "Happy Birthday to You" to family members and friends at home is fine, but performing a copyrighted work in a public setting such as a restaurant or a sports arena technically requires a license from ASCAP or the Harry Fox Agency (although such infringements are rarely prosecuted).

ABC Music Notation File Format

Just the other day, I became aware of a terrific music file format called ABC. Apparently, it's been around for a many years, but I didn't even realize it existed. I haven't spent a lot of time using it, but so far it seems pretty cool.

It reminds me of GWBASIC/QBASIC's PLAY command, but ABC is much more powerful. Apparently, it was originally created to describe traditional music (melody-only). Fortunately for piano and ensemble enthusiasts, extentions have been added to allow polyphonic harmony.

There are various freeware and Open Source programs out there that support ABC. Many of them haven't been updated recently, but I've found that they still work pretty well (some patience and trial-and-error is required, though). The open-source program iabc tries to bring together many functions under one roof, but I had trouble getting it to work right. There are some shareware and commercial programs that allude to fancy GUI editors and integrated approaches, but I haven't checked them out yet.

Home Pages

• ABC Sourceforge project
• New home of old ABC home page
• Old ABC home page

Command-line program websites:

• abcMIDI: converts ABC Music (.abc) into MIDI Music (.mid) files
• abcm2ps: converts ABC Music (.abc) into a PostScript (.ps) document
• Ghostscript: converts PostScript (.ps) into Portable Document Format (.pdf)

John Chambers' tutorial:

• Primer
• Voices
• Site Map

Steve Mansfield's tutorial:

• Notation
• Notation, part 2
• Extentions

BarFly's comparison of multivoice extentions

Sample Windows batch file to produce a MIDI and a .ps file:

set abcfile=i:\media\midi\mysong
erase %abcfile%.mid
cd \prgfiles\abc\abcm2ps
abcm2ps.exe %abcfile%.abc
copy out.ps %abcfile%.ps
cd \prgfiles\abc\abcmidi
abc2midi.exe %abcfile%.abc -o %abcfile%.mid
pause