Tivo Plans Commercials On Demand

MCSqrd writes "News.com reports that Tivo will soon feature interactive ads that apparently link from ordinary television commercials. Viewers can activate the link and view extended, interactive content about the product being advertised. Tivo hopes to 'tune in' to a way to keep advertisers on their side since the idea of TV commercials being made obsolete because of PVRs has made them an enemy to marketing departments everywhere. Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"

Comments

Re:No not Max Headroom!

[orthogonal]

The way things are going it will be more like Starship Troopers...

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TheOnePath (757382), I am sure there's something you hold dear to your heart.

Perhaps it's Jesus Christ, maybe it's The Hobbit, perhaps it's a particular tentacle-rape hentai scene. But whatever it is, you value it, you treasure it, it hold a deep and abiding meaning for you.

I have been a fan of Robert Heinlein all my life.

Robert Heinlein wrote the novel Starship Troopers, and while interpretation of the novel remains controversial -- in particular, the continuing debate over the form of government featured in the novel, its moral-philosophic underpinnings, and what, if anything, it reveals about Robert Heinlein -- the novel, as written broaches these questions honestly and discusses them fairly and with some thoroughness for what is, after all, a novel.

While the society in the novel grants the franchise -- that is, voting rights-- only to those who have completed a term of civil or military service, and while it features rather harsh corporal punishment for crimes, at no point does Heinlein claim it to feature Big Brother-style surveillance or and mandatory militarism beyond high-school classes in "Moral Philosophy". Indeed, at the outset of the novel, Heinlein makes it clear that the main character's family has for several generations done quite well by itself without any of its members joining the military or voting.

The film Starship Troopers, on the other hand, rips off some superficial aspects of the novel, ignores Heinlein's honest philosophical questions about freedom and responsibility in a civil society, and recasts the characters and the society depicted -- and by extension, Mr. Heinlein -- as purely Fascistic, warmed-over cardboard-cutout sadistic Nazis.

To put it more succinctly: the film is an abominable piece of shit which is wholly unlike the novel and which besmirches the reputation of the novel's author.

The film is neither faithful to the original novel, nor in any way fair to Robert Heinlein or his beliefs.

Please keep in mind, the next time that you want to refer to Paul Verhoeven's bastardized abortion of a film version of Starship Troopers as the real article, that to real fans of Robert Heinlein that is as offensive as would be as would be an "adaptation" of Jesus's life in which Jesus crucifies small animals while shooting heroin and bullying children, or an "adaptation" of The Hobbit in which Gandalf buggers Bilbo and the dwarves join in on it to make it a gang-rape.