Audio

Audio may refer to:

Sound

Entertainment

Computing

See also

Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts is a stop motion clay animation comedy mockumentary franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film later became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the UK electricity boards, and in 2003 a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made.

The original film

The original Creature Comforts short film was five minutes long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews. It was produced as part of a series called Lip Synch for Channel 4. The film won Nick Park the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990.

The film shows various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions. These include a depressed gorilla, a Brazilian puma and a young hippopotamus who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom. By contrast, a tarsier and an armadillo praise their enclosures for the comfort and security they bring, and a family of polar bears talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of zoos for the welfare of animals. Rather than the subject being one-sided or biased towards one view-point, there is a strong balance of opinions in the film, with some interviewees who are happy with their living situation, some who are not, and some who have a neutral opinion.

Point of no return

The point of no return is the point beyond which one must continue on one's current course of action because turning back is physically impossible, prohibitively expensive, or dangerous. A particular irreversible action (e.g., setting off an explosion or signing a contract) can be a point of no return, but the point of no return can also be a calculated point during a continuous action (such as in aviation).

Origins and spread of the expression

The term PNR—"point of no return," more often referred to by pilots as the "Radius of Action formula" — originated, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a technical term in air navigation to refer to the point on a flight at which, due to fuel consumption, a plane is no longer capable of returning to the airfield from which it took off.

The first major metaphorical use of the term in popular culture was in the 1947 novel Point of No Return by John P. Marquand. It inspired a 1951 Broadway play of the same name by Paul Osborn. The novel and play concern a pivotal period in the life of a New York City banker. In the course of the story, the character faces two "point of no return" realities: First, that his quest for a big promotion will mean either triumph or a dead end to his career, and second, that he can never go back to the small-town life he abandoned as a young man.

All rights reserved

"All rights reserved" is a phrase that originated in copyright law as a formal requirement for copyright notice. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law under one specific copyright treaty.

Origins

The phrase appears to have originated as a result of the Buenos Aires Convention of 1910. Article 3 of the Convention granted copyright in all signatory countries to a work registered in any signatory country, as long as a statement "that indicates the reservation of the property right" (emphasis added) appeared in the work. The phrase "all rights reserved" was not specified in the text, but met this requirement.

Other international copyright treaties did not require this formality. For example, the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), adopted in 1952, adopted the © symbol as an indicator of protection. (The symbol had been introduced in the US by a 1954 amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909.) The Berne Convention rejected formalities altogether in Article 4 of the 1908 revision, so authors seeking to protect their works in countries that had signed on to the Berne Convention were also not required to use the "all rights reserved" formulation. However, because not all Buenos Aires signatories were members of Berne or the UCC, and in particular the United States did not join UCC until 1955, a publisher in a Buenos Aires signatory seeking to protect a work in the greatest number of countries between 1910 and 1952 would have used both the phrase "all rights reserved" and the copyright symbol.