2000 A.D. 2000 Convergence of telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing Digital technologies are used to combine previously separated communication and media systems such as telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing to new services and technologies, thus forming extensions of existing communication systems and resulting in fundamentally new communication systems. This is what is meant by today's new buzzwords "multimedia" and "convergence". Classical dichotomies as the one of computing and telephony and traditional categorizations no longer apply, because these new services no longer fit traditional categories. Convergence and Regulatory Institutions Digital technology permits the integration of telecommunications with computing and audiovisual technologies. New services that extend existing communication systems emerge. The convergence of communication and media systems corresponds to a convergence of corporations. Recently, America Online, the world's largest online service provider, merged with Time Warner, the world's largest media corporation. For such corporations the classical approach to regulation - separate institutions regulate separate markets - is no longer appropriate, because the institutions' activities necessarily overlap. The current challenges posed to these institutions are not solely due to the convergence of communication and media systems made possible by digital technologies; they are also due to the liberalization and internationalization of the electronic communications sector. For regulation to be successful, new categorizations and supranational agreements are needed. For further information on this issue see Natascha Just and Michael Latzer, The European Policy Response to Convergence with Special Consideration of Competition Policy and Market Power Control, http://www.soe.oeaw.ac.at/workpap.htm or http://www.soe.oeaw.ac.at/WP01JustLatzer.doc.

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Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s -1994 Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion. 1995 Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion. The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion. In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library. 1996 Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations. Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group. Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios. 1997 Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States. Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source. Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group. Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge. 1998 Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations. 1999 AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.

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The 17th Century: The Invention of the First "Computers" The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather calculators than the sophisticated combination of hard- and software we call computers today. In 1642 Blaise Pascal, the son of a French tax collector, developed a device to perform additions. His numerical wheel calculator was a brass rectangular box and used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Designed to help his father with his duties, the big disadvantage of the Pascaline was its limitation to addition. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, in 1694 improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. As its predecessor Leibniz's mechanical multiplier likewise worked by a system of gears and dials. Leibniz also formulated a model that may be considered the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers. In De Arte Combinatoria (1666) Leibniz argued that all reasoning, all discover, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, colors, or sounds. Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.

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Economic rights The economic rights (besides moral rights and in some cases also neighboring rights) granted to the owners of copyright usually include 1) copying or reproducing a work, 2) performing a work in public, 3) making a sound recording of a work, 4) making a motion picture of a work, 5) broadcasting a work, 6) translating a work and 7) adapting a work. Under certain national laws some of these rights are not exclusive rights of authorization but in specific cases, merely rights to remuneration.

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Nadia Thalman Nadia Thalman is director of MIRAlab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Thalmann has become known as the creator of "virtual Marylyn", an installation which allowed visitors to literally to slip into Marylyn's shoes. Thalman's work is located at interface between science and art. It is about modelling human bodies for science and creative purposes, e.g. as virtual actors in movies. Thalman insists that artificial beings must be beautiful, in addition to being useful, as we will be living with them at close quarters.

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Royalties Royalties refer to the payment made to the owners of certain types of rights by those who are permitted by the owners to exercise the rights. The rights concerned are literary, musical, and artistic copyright and patent rights in inventions and designs (as well as rights in mineral deposits, including oil and natural gas). The term originated from the fact that in Great Britain for centuries gold and silver mines were the property of the crown and such "royal" metals could be mined only if a payment ("royalty") were made to the crown.

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show The story of Frank-N-furter, Brad and Janet ... Don't dream it, be it! http://www.rockyhorrorpictureshow.com/

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