You're entirely right. With that kind of cash at your disposal, there's really no excuse for not making a good game. If I was going to invest that kind of money into something, I'd do a whole lot of research and whatnot before hand to the point where I'd be damn sure that I'd get good results.
I just don't understand where all that money goes. There's truckloads of young programmers and artists out there who would love to get involved in the games industry. It's not like there are only six guys in the world who know how to texture 3d models, and who command outrageous salaries. A license for the Unreal 2 engine runs about $350,000 according to my 15 seconds of research. That's a sizeable number, but not much when you're talking about a $20mil budget.
I dunno, I'm not a game designer, so maybe there's some huge hurdle that I don't understand. I'd love to be educated about it though.
So are you implying that 2 Fast 2 Furious beat out some other potential racing movies and won the right to appear in the theater? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of low budget-indy movies out there that are just as much crap as the worst that hollywood shovels out to us, but come on; with a budget of $100 million dollars+, there's no good excuse for everything that comes out in theaters not being totally awesome.
I'm not involved in the games industry other than being a mildly interested consumer, so maybe this theory is all wrong, but here it is anyways.
I'm guessing that since you basically have to license your games with the console manufacturer, you're likely to get a lot of pressure from them to include all the eye candy that can be crammed in there. While gameplay is certainly the most important piece of the puzzle, you can be darn sure that MS doesn't want some crappy looking screenshots from an Xbox360 game published in any magazines. Along those same lines, none of the magazines or websites or whatever are going to be terribly interested in putting unimpressive pictures on their pages. Everyone knows that the gameplay is what matters the most, but that's the hardest part to effectively advertise.
That's not to say that it's impossible. Katamari Damacy or however it's spelled has fairly simple graphics and it did well once word of mouth got around. Hell, Snood is a hideously ugly game, but the guy who wrote it has done very well with it because the gameplay was so addicting.
Because when you're rushing a console release, it's a whole lot easier for the devs to kick out a bunch of clones then produce some brand new quality titles?
I'm not saying that the reality is a good thing, just that it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at all.
While the selection of games available for the original Gameboy may not have been that impressive, they had one particular game that made all the difference in the world. Bundling Tetris with the gameboy was a move of pure genius, and probably one of the smartest business decisions ever.
I still think that the DS should've shipped with minesweeper and solitaire built in. I still play those games from time to time.
One thing to consider however, is that real land, on the planet Earth, is not all created equal. There are a lot of different factors that make different places more or less desirable for different purposes. I'd gladly give up my 21 acres of nevada desert for a half acre of temperate forest on rolling hills or something. People do generally congregate, but there's usually a reason that people ended up in a particular area in the first place. That spot/area/climate/whatever had some sort of appeal. And it's usually not economically or technically feasible to convert much land into another arbitrary type and replicate that appeal.
In a virtual world, it's technically possible to manipulate the land in just about any way. Not only can we have infinite land area, but we could have infinite coastline. Or as many islands as we need. Or as many extinct volcano craters as we can use. Your parent post mentioned the game Second Life, which I am familiar with. In that game, the land masses are generally laid out by the developers. And coastal land tends to sell for more than inland properties. The amount of land in that game is artificially limited, probably because it's a big driver of the economy. This has led to a handful of land barons that make the game suck a bit more for people less serious about it, but that's a discussion for another time.
That may be true initially, cause there's plenty of free crap out there, but once word of mouth gets around from the people bored enough to try it, wouldn't that make the difference? Add in a decent marketing campaign, and I don't think there'd be much of a problem if the game itself was free.
I played Puzzle Pirates for over a year at around $10 per month because I could download it for free, and even try it for a week at no charge. And that's a fairly unusual MMOG, which at first glance seems rather childish and dumb. I never would have tried it and completely forgotten about it if they expected me to give them some money just to try it out.
I think their quoted market research and studies are just an excuse for trying to get more money out of people. But if it works, which it seems to be doing, then good for them. I wouldn't have thought that creating artificial shortages of a new product would be a particularly effective way to sell a product, but apparently it works. People are weird I guess.
Nintendo will do just fine with the Revolution. One of the great mysteries to me is how, with very similar worldwide sales numbers, the Xbox is considered such a success, while the GC is considered a failure. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that Nintendo's marketshare has historically had nowhere to go but down, while MS could only go up.
But really, both companies have the ultimate goal of making money by selling video games, and Nintendo is certainly very good at that. They've been doing it pretty consistently with the GC, and I see no good reason to believe otherwise. It might be too little too late to win over the hardcore young adult gamer crowd, but I think Nintendo has proved already that they can make plenty of profit without them.
Nintendo will never regain a huge dominate marketshare. I don't think we'll have that sort of monopoly over the console market ever again. Sony and MS will most likely battle it out to pretty much a draw, and the only unknown is where Nintendo will end up compared to them in marketshare. But I think we can say with a good bit of confidence that Nintendo will continue to make money. Even if they didn't manage to grow their market, they've already got a pretty good hold on their current customers, and nothing MS or Sony are doing appears to threaten that in any significant way. The worst I can imagine Nintendo doing is pretty much a repeat of GC sales levels, and Nintendo's bank account would be fine with that.
No, they don't need as much imagination as me, they just need some imagination period. If you're a gamer and you're not fascinated by the possibilities of the Revolution controller, then there's something wrong with you. I'm not bouncing off the walls with anticipation or anything, but I fail to see what either of the other two consoles are offering beyond more of the same at higher prices.
If you haven't been involved in the past generation of consoles, it's getting to be a good time to check it out. Forget spending your money on a 360 and trying to pick out the couple of good games out of the launch titles. Instead, get a plain ol' Xbox, and you'll have a huge library of games available right away. And the best part, it'll all be dirt cheap compared to the 360 stuff. There's plenty of great stuff for the PS2 and the Gamecube as well.
I just got an Xbox about a year ago, and I had a few years of games to pick from. If I haven't played it before, it's new to me, regardless of the release date or how many sequels have already been released. All the consoles have a $20 best sellers category, you can't go wrong with that.
Well, one problem right now is that Nintendo has told us basically nothing about the Revolution's game line up. That makes it hard for some people to get excited about it. On the other hand, many of us have reasonably active imaginations, and when we combine what we know about the new controller with a bunch of franchises that we've grown up with, we can understand a lot of potential and get pumped up about that. Sadly, many individuals choose to only utilize screenshots, E3 demos, and marketing hype to influence their expectations. I'm afraid that that crowd will constantly be under-whelmed by Nintendo, and probably miss out on some excellent games.
We aren't experiencing any of those bad things in the console market. I've been a mac fanboy for over a decade, so I've got no love for MS, but I can't see anything that they've done to hurt gaming as a whole. The only move they've made that's even upset me a little was buying bungie, because I was looking forwards to seeing Halo on the Mac. But I'm over that.
The Xbox has kept sony from completely dominating the market. It's given Nintendo some more room to maneuver. MS has created a quality benchmark for how online console gaming might work.. And in the upcoming generation, we're going to be able to buy some ridiculously high powered hardware for ridiculously low prices. The gaming market continues to quickly grow, there's tons of games on the shelves. What exactly has MS done that is so detrimental to gaming?
The gaming industry has its share of problems, but I hardly think MS deserves any more of the blame than anyone else.
Oh good god, when I moved into my new house, it took the cable company almost two weeks to get out here and hook up the cable so i could get some internet. I hardly spent anytime at all on the computer during those two weeks. I started doing online stuff when I was maybe 14 or 15, but I spent a whole lot of time on a computer before that. I can't remember what I was doing with all that time. Probably mostly compressing files and juggling disk space trying to cram more crap onto a 40MB harddrive.
The only big mistake in the GC design was the original color. It just looked silly. A black GC looks fairly sleek and cool. I'm not entirely sure who that pastel purple was supposed to resonate with.
It's also a useful way to split up information from time to time. As much as a love my scroll wheel, I do appreciate not having to spend 10 seconds going back to the top of a page to look at a navigation menu or something that I remembered seeing up there.
Perhaps you'd find slashdot more enjoyable if they just put put the full text and every comment from all the articles on one big page. Then you wouldn't have to see any more of those ads that help support all this content that so many people participate in for free.
Damn some of you people are cynical sometimes. If IGO had put each and every one of their bullet points on a separate page, then your whining would make some sense. As it is, you're being way more childish than insightful, regardless of what some moderates may have thought.
A lot of products take a while to end up being profitable for a company, it's a fact of business. You gotta spend money to make money. Sometimes the profits come a ways down the line, that's the way it works. It's kind of crazy in this case, because the gaming market is such a huge entity, and you really need a significant presence to stand a chance. So MS has had to spend a whole lot of money to get into the game. I don't think they're really doing anything illegal, immoral, or even unusual with the Xbox, they're just doing it at a scale that we're not used to seeing.
Why should he have? To prove a point to the man for you? Maybe he's not interested in that. Maybe he doesn't want to deal with all of that stuff anymore.
He didn't sell out his employees. He's not some outside CEO who wrecked a company and then snuck out with a boatload of cash. He's built firaxis through his own hard work, and if he thinks this is the best move for either the company or himself, he should rightfully feel free to do it. And if his employees don't like it, they're free to leave.
Businesses being businesses is not necessarily evil.
It's not entirely different, but it's still interesting. Partially because a lot of people are running IM clients. Also interesting is the fact that an IM client generally has a built in list of other vulnerable machines, via a buddy list. Having this list of people could be pretty handy if the worm can manage to spread through the IM protocols themselves, since it could allow infections to spread without relying on sending out masses of random traffic looking for vulnerable machines. That could just make this sort of thing that much more efficient and harder to detect, because the offending traffic might not look all that different than normal IM chatter.
But then again, I don't know much specific about how this all is supposed to work, so I may be wrong.
The question is, do google's satellite images provide any useful information that would be impossible to otherwise obtain? What does an old satellite photo of an urban area provide for a terrorist? The location of certain buildings? You can find that easily enough plenty of ways, one of which being drive down the street and look out the window. Like you said, buildings don't tend to move all that often. They're also usually rather large and visible. It's not hard to find one, even without satellite images. The only place in which sensitive information might be revealed is over big restricted areas out in nevada or whatever, but those aren't really realistic terrorist targets anyways.
Realtime satellite video feeds, that *might* be useful to a terrorist activity, but to obtain and make use of that information, the terrorists would have to be working with resources and training well beyond anything they've done so far. I don't think any terrorist group has even one satellite up in orbit quite yet, so I'm not too worried about that.
Re:Can't blame technology for Terrorism.
on
Google Terror Threat
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yeah, but could you seriously expect to take over a plane with them? If you took someone by surprise, you could probably get their throat pretty easily, but not if they're aware and defending themselves. Then take into account that there were just a few hijackers per plane, compared to a hundred+ passengers/crew. If the crew/passengers had resisted from the very beginning, the chances of any of those hijackings succeeding would have been slim/none. A box cutter will do you very little good against a gangrush of a dozen guys. Even if you get lucky and take out one or two, you'd end up tackled in the isle pretty quickly.
The box cutters only worked on 9/11 because the "scripted" response to a hijacking was to be quiet and cooperative while the terrorists make their demands, and then they'll let you go when they've gotten what they want. Sadly, that tactic isn't very promising when the terrorists' goal is the fly the plane into a building, but I doubt they made their hostages aware of that fact.
I don't think we'll see anyone hijacking a plane with box cutters again, no matter how many they manage to sneak aboard.
"Killing something dead" is completely redundant. That's one of the things that makes it such a great slogan for advertisments.
But overall, you're definitely right. My old roommate would eat just about anything off the floor, and our kitchen floor was not anything resembling clean. It was pretty gross to watch him eat that stuff, but his immune system must be close to bulletproof by now. He and his girlfriend had their house flooded during Katrina. When they went in to check it out, the house was trashed, mold everywhere, etc. Every time they've gone there since the flooding, the girlfriend has spent the next couple days sick as all hell, while he was no worse for wear.
Although it's easy to take it too far, the saying "whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" has some truth in it.
They don't. And I'm ok with that. I want to pay for my content directly. I don't watch 99% of what the cable company sends me, but I have to pay for it anyways. I'd much rather just pay for individual episodes of some of my favorite shows, and maybe subscribe to a few of the less predictable channels (news, sports, etc).
If things go this way, there will be plenty of free content. How else would you get someone hooked on one of your shows so that they'll buy more episodes? So I can download the first couple episodes of some new sci-fi show for free, and if I liked it, then I'll pay for the rest of the episodes when I have time to watch them. Ads make sense with the broadcast model of television. With cable, they make less sense, since I'm already paying a tidy sum, but I guess that ad revenue helps subsidize more shows/channels. With video on demand, and a pay per show model, ads don't belong. And notice I said pay-per-show. If I pay to watch all the episodes in season 7 of Stargate Atlantis, I want to be able to watch it again later without paying for it again, or at least be permitted to record it.
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You're entirely right. With that kind of cash at your disposal, there's really no excuse for not making a good game. If I was going to invest that kind of money into something, I'd do a whole lot of research and whatnot before hand to the point where I'd be damn sure that I'd get good results.
I just don't understand where all that money goes. There's truckloads of young programmers and artists out there who would love to get involved in the games industry. It's not like there are only six guys in the world who know how to texture 3d models, and who command outrageous salaries. A license for the Unreal 2 engine runs about $350,000 according to my 15 seconds of research. That's a sizeable number, but not much when you're talking about a $20mil budget.
I dunno, I'm not a game designer, so maybe there's some huge hurdle that I don't understand. I'd love to be educated about it though.
So are you implying that 2 Fast 2 Furious beat out some other potential racing movies and won the right to appear in the theater? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of low budget-indy movies out there that are just as much crap as the worst that hollywood shovels out to us, but come on; with a budget of $100 million dollars+, there's no good excuse for everything that comes out in theaters not being totally awesome.
I'm not involved in the games industry other than being a mildly interested consumer, so maybe this theory is all wrong, but here it is anyways.
I'm guessing that since you basically have to license your games with the console manufacturer, you're likely to get a lot of pressure from them to include all the eye candy that can be crammed in there. While gameplay is certainly the most important piece of the puzzle, you can be darn sure that MS doesn't want some crappy looking screenshots from an Xbox360 game published in any magazines. Along those same lines, none of the magazines or websites or whatever are going to be terribly interested in putting unimpressive pictures on their pages. Everyone knows that the gameplay is what matters the most, but that's the hardest part to effectively advertise.
That's not to say that it's impossible. Katamari Damacy or however it's spelled has fairly simple graphics and it did well once word of mouth got around. Hell, Snood is a hideously ugly game, but the guy who wrote it has done very well with it because the gameplay was so addicting.
Because when you're rushing a console release, it's a whole lot easier for the devs to kick out a bunch of clones then produce some brand new quality titles?
I'm not saying that the reality is a good thing, just that it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at all.
While the selection of games available for the original Gameboy may not have been that impressive, they had one particular game that made all the difference in the world. Bundling Tetris with the gameboy was a move of pure genius, and probably one of the smartest business decisions ever.
I still think that the DS should've shipped with minesweeper and solitaire built in. I still play those games from time to time.
One thing to consider however, is that real land, on the planet Earth, is not all created equal. There are a lot of different factors that make different places more or less desirable for different purposes. I'd gladly give up my 21 acres of nevada desert for a half acre of temperate forest on rolling hills or something. People do generally congregate, but there's usually a reason that people ended up in a particular area in the first place. That spot/area/climate/whatever had some sort of appeal. And it's usually not economically or technically feasible to convert much land into another arbitrary type and replicate that appeal.
In a virtual world, it's technically possible to manipulate the land in just about any way. Not only can we have infinite land area, but we could have infinite coastline. Or as many islands as we need. Or as many extinct volcano craters as we can use. Your parent post mentioned the game Second Life, which I am familiar with. In that game, the land masses are generally laid out by the developers. And coastal land tends to sell for more than inland properties. The amount of land in that game is artificially limited, probably because it's a big driver of the economy. This has led to a handful of land barons that make the game suck a bit more for people less serious about it, but that's a discussion for another time.
That may be true initially, cause there's plenty of free crap out there, but once word of mouth gets around from the people bored enough to try it, wouldn't that make the difference? Add in a decent marketing campaign, and I don't think there'd be much of a problem if the game itself was free.
I played Puzzle Pirates for over a year at around $10 per month because I could download it for free, and even try it for a week at no charge. And that's a fairly unusual MMOG, which at first glance seems rather childish and dumb. I never would have tried it and completely forgotten about it if they expected me to give them some money just to try it out.
I think their quoted market research and studies are just an excuse for trying to get more money out of people. But if it works, which it seems to be doing, then good for them. I wouldn't have thought that creating artificial shortages of a new product would be a particularly effective way to sell a product, but apparently it works. People are weird I guess.
Nintendo will do just fine with the Revolution. One of the great mysteries to me is how, with very similar worldwide sales numbers, the Xbox is considered such a success, while the GC is considered a failure. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that Nintendo's marketshare has historically had nowhere to go but down, while MS could only go up.
But really, both companies have the ultimate goal of making money by selling video games, and Nintendo is certainly very good at that. They've been doing it pretty consistently with the GC, and I see no good reason to believe otherwise. It might be too little too late to win over the hardcore young adult gamer crowd, but I think Nintendo has proved already that they can make plenty of profit without them.
Nintendo will never regain a huge dominate marketshare. I don't think we'll have that sort of monopoly over the console market ever again. Sony and MS will most likely battle it out to pretty much a draw, and the only unknown is where Nintendo will end up compared to them in marketshare. But I think we can say with a good bit of confidence that Nintendo will continue to make money. Even if they didn't manage to grow their market, they've already got a pretty good hold on their current customers, and nothing MS or Sony are doing appears to threaten that in any significant way. The worst I can imagine Nintendo doing is pretty much a repeat of GC sales levels, and Nintendo's bank account would be fine with that.
No, they don't need as much imagination as me, they just need some imagination period. If you're a gamer and you're not fascinated by the possibilities of the Revolution controller, then there's something wrong with you. I'm not bouncing off the walls with anticipation or anything, but I fail to see what either of the other two consoles are offering beyond more of the same at higher prices.
If you haven't been involved in the past generation of consoles, it's getting to be a good time to check it out. Forget spending your money on a 360 and trying to pick out the couple of good games out of the launch titles. Instead, get a plain ol' Xbox, and you'll have a huge library of games available right away. And the best part, it'll all be dirt cheap compared to the 360 stuff. There's plenty of great stuff for the PS2 and the Gamecube as well.
I just got an Xbox about a year ago, and I had a few years of games to pick from. If I haven't played it before, it's new to me, regardless of the release date or how many sequels have already been released. All the consoles have a $20 best sellers category, you can't go wrong with that.
Well, one problem right now is that Nintendo has told us basically nothing about the Revolution's game line up. That makes it hard for some people to get excited about it. On the other hand, many of us have reasonably active imaginations, and when we combine what we know about the new controller with a bunch of franchises that we've grown up with, we can understand a lot of potential and get pumped up about that. Sadly, many individuals choose to only utilize screenshots, E3 demos, and marketing hype to influence their expectations. I'm afraid that that crowd will constantly be under-whelmed by Nintendo, and probably miss out on some excellent games.
We aren't experiencing any of those bad things in the console market. I've been a mac fanboy for over a decade, so I've got no love for MS, but I can't see anything that they've done to hurt gaming as a whole. The only move they've made that's even upset me a little was buying bungie, because I was looking forwards to seeing Halo on the Mac. But I'm over that.
The Xbox has kept sony from completely dominating the market. It's given Nintendo some more room to maneuver. MS has created a quality benchmark for how online console gaming might work.. And in the upcoming generation, we're going to be able to buy some ridiculously high powered hardware for ridiculously low prices. The gaming market continues to quickly grow, there's tons of games on the shelves. What exactly has MS done that is so detrimental to gaming?
The gaming industry has its share of problems, but I hardly think MS deserves any more of the blame than anyone else.
Oh good god, when I moved into my new house, it took the cable company almost two weeks to get out here and hook up the cable so i could get some internet. I hardly spent anytime at all on the computer during those two weeks. I started doing online stuff when I was maybe 14 or 15, but I spent a whole lot of time on a computer before that. I can't remember what I was doing with all that time. Probably mostly compressing files and juggling disk space trying to cram more crap onto a 40MB harddrive.
The only big mistake in the GC design was the original color. It just looked silly. A black GC looks fairly sleek and cool. I'm not entirely sure who that pastel purple was supposed to resonate with.
It's also a useful way to split up information from time to time. As much as a love my scroll wheel, I do appreciate not having to spend 10 seconds going back to the top of a page to look at a navigation menu or something that I remembered seeing up there.
Perhaps you'd find slashdot more enjoyable if they just put put the full text and every comment from all the articles on one big page. Then you wouldn't have to see any more of those ads that help support all this content that so many people participate in for free.
Damn some of you people are cynical sometimes. If IGO had put each and every one of their bullet points on a separate page, then your whining would make some sense. As it is, you're being way more childish than insightful, regardless of what some moderates may have thought.
A lot of products take a while to end up being profitable for a company, it's a fact of business. You gotta spend money to make money. Sometimes the profits come a ways down the line, that's the way it works. It's kind of crazy in this case, because the gaming market is such a huge entity, and you really need a significant presence to stand a chance. So MS has had to spend a whole lot of money to get into the game. I don't think they're really doing anything illegal, immoral, or even unusual with the Xbox, they're just doing it at a scale that we're not used to seeing.
Why should he have? To prove a point to the man for you? Maybe he's not interested in that. Maybe he doesn't want to deal with all of that stuff anymore.
He didn't sell out his employees. He's not some outside CEO who wrecked a company and then snuck out with a boatload of cash. He's built firaxis through his own hard work, and if he thinks this is the best move for either the company or himself, he should rightfully feel free to do it. And if his employees don't like it, they're free to leave.
Businesses being businesses is not necessarily evil.
My mom, my girlfriend, my girlfriend's mom, all their female friends and family, they all love Donkey Konga. Get that for them.
It's not entirely different, but it's still interesting. Partially because a lot of people are running IM clients. Also interesting is the fact that an IM client generally has a built in list of other vulnerable machines, via a buddy list. Having this list of people could be pretty handy if the worm can manage to spread through the IM protocols themselves, since it could allow infections to spread without relying on sending out masses of random traffic looking for vulnerable machines. That could just make this sort of thing that much more efficient and harder to detect, because the offending traffic might not look all that different than normal IM chatter.
But then again, I don't know much specific about how this all is supposed to work, so I may be wrong.
Thanks for only reading the first sentence of my post and then ignoring the rest. That made your response very informative and helpful.
The question is, do google's satellite images provide any useful information that would be impossible to otherwise obtain? What does an old satellite photo of an urban area provide for a terrorist? The location of certain buildings? You can find that easily enough plenty of ways, one of which being drive down the street and look out the window. Like you said, buildings don't tend to move all that often. They're also usually rather large and visible. It's not hard to find one, even without satellite images. The only place in which sensitive information might be revealed is over big restricted areas out in nevada or whatever, but those aren't really realistic terrorist targets anyways.
Realtime satellite video feeds, that *might* be useful to a terrorist activity, but to obtain and make use of that information, the terrorists would have to be working with resources and training well beyond anything they've done so far. I don't think any terrorist group has even one satellite up in orbit quite yet, so I'm not too worried about that.
Yeah, but could you seriously expect to take over a plane with them? If you took someone by surprise, you could probably get their throat pretty easily, but not if they're aware and defending themselves. Then take into account that there were just a few hijackers per plane, compared to a hundred+ passengers/crew. If the crew/passengers had resisted from the very beginning, the chances of any of those hijackings succeeding would have been slim/none. A box cutter will do you very little good against a gangrush of a dozen guys. Even if you get lucky and take out one or two, you'd end up tackled in the isle pretty quickly.
The box cutters only worked on 9/11 because the "scripted" response to a hijacking was to be quiet and cooperative while the terrorists make their demands, and then they'll let you go when they've gotten what they want. Sadly, that tactic isn't very promising when the terrorists' goal is the fly the plane into a building, but I doubt they made their hostages aware of that fact.
I don't think we'll see anyone hijacking a plane with box cutters again, no matter how many they manage to sneak aboard.
"Killing something dead" is completely redundant. That's one of the things that makes it such a great slogan for advertisments.
But overall, you're definitely right. My old roommate would eat just about anything off the floor, and our kitchen floor was not anything resembling clean. It was pretty gross to watch him eat that stuff, but his immune system must be close to bulletproof by now. He and his girlfriend had their house flooded during Katrina. When they went in to check it out, the house was trashed, mold everywhere, etc. Every time they've gone there since the flooding, the girlfriend has spent the next couple days sick as all hell, while he was no worse for wear.
Although it's easy to take it too far, the saying "whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" has some truth in it.
Yes, and those long earth nights are almost always accompanied by a planet-wide cloudless sky.
They don't. And I'm ok with that. I want to pay for my content directly. I don't watch 99% of what the cable company sends me, but I have to pay for it anyways. I'd much rather just pay for individual episodes of some of my favorite shows, and maybe subscribe to a few of the less predictable channels (news, sports, etc).
If things go this way, there will be plenty of free content. How else would you get someone hooked on one of your shows so that they'll buy more episodes? So I can download the first couple episodes of some new sci-fi show for free, and if I liked it, then I'll pay for the rest of the episodes when I have time to watch them. Ads make sense with the broadcast model of television. With cable, they make less sense, since I'm already paying a tidy sum, but I guess that ad revenue helps subsidize more shows/channels. With video on demand, and a pay per show model, ads don't belong. And notice I said pay-per-show. If I pay to watch all the episodes in season 7 of Stargate Atlantis, I want to be able to watch it again later without paying for it again, or at least be permitted to record it.