"your cable bill compensates AOL while your watching commercials compensates the station."
I'll spare you the rude "Bzzzzt!" here.
Sponsors (the entities who buy ad time) compensate the station. Not eyeballs. That money is in the station's hands before the ads air. Thus they are pre-compensated, and the notion that we must watch ads or they will starve is bunk.
Sponsors take a gamble in advertising. They assume a certain number of eyeballs per paid spot, and on the basis of that assumption, they figure how much they're willing to wager (i.e., how much they'll pay the station to run the spot). If their assumptions are incorrect, resulting in fewer eyeballs, they may not get the return they hoped for on their gamble. Their loss. They are free to not advertise on TV if they don't accept the risk of a gamble biting them in the ass. Just as we're free to skip the damned ads on the assumption that sponsors' insatiable need for self-promotion will keep their ad dollars flowing to stations anyway and thus keep those stations in the business of beaming "Buffy" into my living room, ads viewed or not. It's a gamble.
Or, on the cynical view, your spare CPU cycles are being used by some other faceless corporation to make money in a different field (i.e., medical research). Given that this is the field I work in, I feel comforable in asserting that "curing cancer" is the last thing on the pharmco investors' Borg-like mind. Finding new treatments... that's where the money is. Find the cure and the revenue stream dries up. This is the problem with research now being undertaken mostly by those with a stake in seeing that it never fully succeeds.
Anyway, I've drifted way offtopic here with my personal biases. The long story short part is that you shouldn't assume any more pure motive on the part of the people sucking your spare bandwidth "to cure cancer" than the people parasitically draining Kazaa users' bandwidth "to make money." The latter may just be more honest.
Setting yourself up for the Darwin. Frog baseball requires a "chaser" to make the frog jump to within the strike box. The position of "chaser" is incredibly dangerous given the bat swinging just inches away (hopefully). Frog golf is a much better option, IMO.
Why is the guy above with the ostensibly anti-religion comment "flamebait" and this isn't? If you're gonna fault people for expressing their views in their posts, at least fault the nutjobs equally.
"I'm sure you understand that it's your watching of commercials that pays for the content."
This is so wrong. It's the commercial interests actually giving money to the networks that pays for the content. All of the "contract" stuff goes on in the media whore black box before a signal gets to my house. By the time whatever signal they send reaches my TV, it's bought and paid for, no matter how much they want me to believe I have further obligations. Once a signal is sent to my home, all the money transactions have happened, and all the commercial interests can do is sit back and see if their gamble pays off like they thought it would when they bought the commercial slot.
McDonalds buying an ad for $1,000,000 in the middle of "Syphilis Island" does not guarantee that McDonalds will sell any number of burgers based on that ad. Hence the gamble, and hence the "quit whining, fatcat bitches!" when they sometimes lose.
But then we couldn't have each of our insipid "friends" raking in a million bucks per episode of the sitcom drivel in which they wallow about. And it's already likely we won't have Peter Jennings around next year because his corporate masters have told him to take a 40% pay cut or take a hike. You know what that amounts to in Mr. Jennings' case? $6 million a year instead of $10 million. Frankly, his services aren't worth $6 million to me, and I can't imagine they are for anyone else, either. His livelihood consists of reading from a frikkin' teleprompter and smiling for the damned camera. And some kind of weird hair thing. I'd pay him maybe $250,000. Maybe.
So in the end, we have the corporate greed, exemplified by Mr. Rectum Helmet from TW, which turns out to be driven, at least partially, by the on-air personality greed, exemplified by Peter Jennings and the cast of "Friends." And what drives their greed, their craving to compile ever more and more cash in their mink-lined titanium piggy banks?
Agreed 100% on G the B. No single sitcom line ever summed up memories of childhood friendships as well as, "We used to hang out... we used to melt stuff!" Now If only I can find out when the damned thing airs.
It'd give him a wider something. [insert traumatic goat sex guy image here]
Re:Disclaimer?
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From the Best Buy disclaimer: "Notification will be sent to the e-mail and/or billing address provided should such change occur."
Anybody know if they sent notification to these people as stated (by e-mail or postal mail)? I would think that a nail in the disclaimer's coffin if they didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and isn't MSFT that guy with the liquid theme?
GD
Granted. It's the getting up and going to the bathroom that MPAA resents.
I'll spare you the rude "Bzzzzt!" here.
Sponsors (the entities who buy ad time) compensate the station. Not eyeballs. That money is in the station's hands before the ads air. Thus they are pre-compensated, and the notion that we must watch ads or they will starve is bunk.
Sponsors take a gamble in advertising. They assume a certain number of eyeballs per paid spot, and on the basis of that assumption, they figure how much they're willing to wager (i.e., how much they'll pay the station to run the spot). If their assumptions are incorrect, resulting in fewer eyeballs, they may not get the return they hoped for on their gamble. Their loss. They are free to not advertise on TV if they don't accept the risk of a gamble biting them in the ass. Just as we're free to skip the damned ads on the assumption that sponsors' insatiable need for self-promotion will keep their ad dollars flowing to stations anyway and thus keep those stations in the business of beaming "Buffy" into my living room, ads viewed or not. It's a gamble.
Anyway, I've drifted way offtopic here with my personal biases. The long story short part is that you shouldn't assume any more pure motive on the part of the people sucking your spare bandwidth "to cure cancer" than the people parasitically draining Kazaa users' bandwidth "to make money." The latter may just be more honest.
Nah, he was right the first time - all movies are best viewed with a little Mary Jane.
As opposed to a pain in the side or front arse? First it was new math, now it's new anatomy...
This is so wrong. It's the commercial interests actually giving money to the networks that pays for the content. All of the "contract" stuff goes on in the media whore black box before a signal gets to my house. By the time whatever signal they send reaches my TV, it's bought and paid for, no matter how much they want me to believe I have further obligations. Once a signal is sent to my home, all the money transactions have happened, and all the commercial interests can do is sit back and see if their gamble pays off like they thought it would when they bought the commercial slot.
McDonalds buying an ad for $1,000,000 in the middle of "Syphilis Island" does not guarantee that McDonalds will sell any number of burgers based on that ad. Hence the gamble, and hence the "quit whining, fatcat bitches!" when they sometimes lose.
But then we couldn't have each of our insipid "friends" raking in a million bucks per episode of the sitcom drivel in which they wallow about. And it's already likely we won't have Peter Jennings around next year because his corporate masters have told him to take a 40% pay cut or take a hike. You know what that amounts to in Mr. Jennings' case? $6 million a year instead of $10 million. Frankly, his services aren't worth $6 million to me, and I can't imagine they are for anyone else, either. His livelihood consists of reading from a frikkin' teleprompter and smiling for the damned camera. And some kind of weird hair thing. I'd pay him maybe $250,000. Maybe.
So in the end, we have the corporate greed, exemplified by Mr. Rectum Helmet from TW, which turns out to be driven, at least partially, by the on-air personality greed, exemplified by Peter Jennings and the cast of "Friends." And what drives their greed, their craving to compile ever more and more cash in their mink-lined titanium piggy banks?
Probably $cientology.
Figures. Damned cosmetologists.
And if you can find any executives who got bonuses, flog 'em mercilessly until you feel like you've gotten half your salary's worth.
OK, scott1853. That tears it! I'm gonna Linux you but good! Say it again and I'll Be you, for jibbity's sake!
C'mon, be realistic. How far are you really gonna get burning those?
"I don't think congressmen was ever meant to be a career... I'm sure that's not what the founding fathers had in mind"
begs the $10,000,000 question - why did the founding fathers fail to put what you're sure they had in mind down on paper?
Anybody know if they sent notification to these people as stated (by e-mail or postal mail)? I would think that a nail in the disclaimer's coffin if they didn't.