Sure GM gets something out of it. They own, or are partially invested in all of the resale chain. Their dealerships who get you financing through GMAC, it subsidizes their dealerships to sell you other cars. And they get to keep selling you DLC, I'm sorry, spare parts after the fact.
GM goes to great lengths to make their cars completely unservicable without special tools and equipment, computerization has been the greatest thing ever for them. Now they can have all sorts of legally locked down codes (and training manuals), the more of their cars are on the road the more money they get from people who want to be mechanics, auto shops, replacements parts (which, if possible are a PCB that can't be fixed but has to to be completely replaced). etc.
As one of those independents: We live on government subsidies and hope for a magica or minecraft, but usually end up with what my friends at Silicon Knights produced, which was an X-men game regularly topping worst of the year lists. At least they get government subsidies. Oh and EA and Ubisoft are all getting government subsidies too (Montreal and Toronto, the areas I'm most familiar with are 50% or 40% respectively subsidies on developer salaries, EA austin, which is the giant money pit for the old republic is 40% as well I believe, although now that they launched I'm sure it's not so bad. 400 people at 12k/month in churn is a LOT of cash though, so getting back even 25 or 30% of that total makes a huge difference). Everyone in this business knows those subsidies cannot last. They can't even last at their currently ludicrous rate. So we need to start making money on our own, fast, and without the government chipping in to keep the industry alive.
And you're missing the point. People *are* buying the games. They're just not buying it from me, they're buying it from gamestop used, so I get paid once for 1 buyer and 2 or 3 future users. So one way or another my goal is to monetize those 2 or 3 used buyers to give me money to make the next game. Which is why the industry is a giant sequelfest right now. There's an established brand (less advertising outlays), and that's it. They aren't even bad games, but it's still all about the marketing money.
So no, we aren't making a lot of real money (valve is a special case because of steam), we're making a lot of money backed up by governments who aren't going to keep this going forever. Yes, the guys who did minecraft made real money. But just about everyone else is lucky to meet payroll month to month.
Exactly, and that is why long games have lost out. People on average enjoy much more carefully tuned narrative experiences than long random wandering ones, for that they have MMO's. The 'global achievement' tracking feature in steam is wonderfully illustrative. In Skyrim ~12% of the playerbase reach level 50, about 25% ever advance the civil war to conclusion etc. Only about half the people who bought the game even get to the point of knowing about dragons returning.
In other words half the people who bought the game aren't enjoying past the first 20 or so hours. Only 27% of the people (who bought the game on steam) have got "dragonslayer" which is sort of the last direct plot quest I think there's an achievement for. And that's Skyrim for god sakes.
Even Portal 2 only has a 40 odd percent completion of the single player rate (and it's only 7 hours or so).
Unfortunately I don't have stats for Uncharted 3 handy, but generally, consumers buy a game, play it for 5-10 hours, and are done with it - even something that's obviously deeply involved like skyrim only about 2/3rds of players even get to having empowered a shout up 3 steps (which really doesn't take very long). Or even the sort of obviously fun "absorb 20 dragon souls" (which is kinda the point of the game) is only 33 percent or so.
(Obviously with all achiement tracking there's a bit of a skew effect. Only about 85% of skyrim players ever make it to level 5, so presumably the other 15% hated the game from the get go or couldn't play it and summarily quit, and saying they didn't complete anything else is sort of a given, but every game has that to some degree).
You're making the classic mistake of using introspection as a source of data about how people consume content. I'm looking at how people *actually* consume content, and I'm dismayed by it, because it makes my job as a designer much much harder. It's very hard to make any money if you make a game for people to put 80 hours into, even if as a games expert I think people would love to spend 80 hours on some great game the way I spent (probably well over 80 hours) on master of orion, xcom, civilization, privateer, the X series, Hearts of Iron/vicky/EU and even skyrim etc. etc. etc.. If you're bethesda or Bioware and can spend 200 million dollars sure, but most of us can't do that (and even if you *can* you're taking one hell of a risk).
In the end you're selling a player an experience, that might have narrative (CoD, Uncharted, Batman) it might have nifty mechanics (think minecraft), it might just be a neat world (skyrim). But you have to realize how much time they're actually going to put into it to make it good. If odds are they're only going to spend 5-10 hours on your game they better be a damn good 5 -10 hours, or they won't buy the next one, and they'll tell their friends not to buy the first one either. But to make an awesome 5-10 hour experience is *really* hard, and then it tends to become practically impossible to keep that level of production quality for another 20 hours. About the only people who try that are in the MMO business, and remember what I said about competing for time? If you're going to spend 100 hours one LodeRunner or WoW or whatever, I need to find something you want to play that you can fit on top of that other game you're playing. And if it takes too much time from something else you aren't going to enjoy whatever I sell you.
The length of a game has to work with its narrative though. Portal (1 or 2) are fun in part because they can meaningfully tell a story in that time, and you can only spend so much time on the same basic puzzle. 80 hours of random levels, which would be 12 or 13x as much content as they currently have wouldn't make for a better game.
Uncharted is a long interactive movie. But that means that for the astronomical production costs they have they can hand do the facial animations for speach and so on. And you have time to play uncharted, infamous, batman and portal in the time it takes you to play one skyrim. Aside from spending 4x as much money you've also seen 4x as many stories, and gaming is now much more about storytelling than it is about mechanics that go on for ever (Which in Skyrim is killing dragons basically).
And as I said, there is a place for some big epic games. But relatively few of them, and the people who try and make them usually lose a pile of money (or are living on government subsidies anyway and hope to barely keep in business).
Uncharted 3 I think is the most resold game I know of right now, I picked it specifically along with portal and COD because they're much harder to resell (but previous versions were quite popular in the resale market).
It's attempting to bypass the existing business model, which has failed. You may not like what they're doing, but we're going to see a lot of failed attempts at new business models.
As to world of tanks specifically: You can buy with real money what you can earn in game through playing. You may not have been steamrolled, but you're there to make the experience enjoyable for someone who bought their tank. That's kinda how the entire game works. That doesn't mean it isn't fun.
Um... you do know what the F2p model is right? it's a giant DLC farm (if you want anything good you pay for it), and if you're only there for free you exists as a product to keep some other sucker paying 100 dollars a month for the game. That's what F2P is. Free to play is in no way free. They're going to try and hook you into 'well I spend 10 dollars, what's 10 more?" or "well I could spend 15 dollars a month on WoW, why not 15 dollars for that new Tank or gold to buy tanks or whatever. If there isn't one person paying 150 dollars for every 9 people who pay nothing they're going out of business as would Blizzard if they had no subscription revenue. If you aren't the sucker paying 150 dollars a month then their goal is to make you into that sucker, or you to die for that sucker to feel good about his 150 dollars a month.
Which works remarkably well at generating revenue, and is a perfectly valid business model. But one should be under no illusion what they're doing.
Which puts about as much money in my pocket as a developer as buying it new on a shelf for 60 bucks, and gives me infinitely more (and costs me less) than if you bought it used. So that's a workable model. If you want it RIGHT NOW pay full price right now. (and accept that the infrastructure for someone like valve to deliver 2 or 3 million copies of skyrim all at once can be astronomical).
Though steam are sort of bastards on the backend about sales (they don't tell you when they're doing sales, so they can run out of keys, then they delist your game for a random amount of time, even if you get them more keys in an hour or two, and you don't really want a pile of valid keys sitting with steam in case a keygen comes out or the like, no offence to Valve on that one).
Not every game wants to be that epic. In this day and age you're competing as much for time as for money. If people can't pick up your game and be done with it in a week (when they buy the next big game) you might not sell very many - because if you aren't Skyrim you're better to be Portal than Divinity 2: Ego Draconis or the First templar . "Long" is not a selling point anymore and nor is "50 hour experience" or "70 hour experience".
Want to know why? Because the people who have money to game all have their original copies of chrono cross and star ocean too, and guess what, those people all have (or are trying to get) jobs, and families and stuff now, and spending 70 or 80 hours on one game doesn't have the appeal it did when they were younger. People *might* want a few games a year that are big epics, but most of the time they want portal, uncharted 3, call of duty or any collection of other 'short' games interspersed amongst their skyrims and WoW/SWTOR time.
Or they will make more money this route, baring used game sales, and not go out of business. You are assuming wrongly that they want you to give them 50 bucks and then have that copy resold 4 times during the rest of the month. They would rather cut the total number of copies sold in half and get paid for all of them than get paid for 20% of them.
How is it wrong to raise the price? This game is not that previous game you bought for the same price. In the same way Harry Potter is not star wars. They may come on DVD's but they are in no way the same movie.
And in short: you're going to go without. Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy. That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
That goes to my point about laws though. I agree, the information is valuable, but if Germany france and the UK, US, canada, Overall EU, middle east, india, china japan, etc. all come up with different rules about what Facebook can, and cannot do with that harvested data all those users suddenly become worth a lot less, and the regulatory compliance costs skyrocket.
Then you get into the problem of valuing what a user actually is worth. Lots of facebook users are a casual page and then they check their newsfeed, they're worth nothing (and cost next to nothing). That's fine to pad your subscriber numbers, but in practice you may not have enough to monetize them in anyway, and my suspicion is that represents a huge portion of their userbase. It's like saying "I have a billion users, but 300 million of them are in india (so worth next to nothing no matter what), 300 million are locked down to regulatory requirements and of the remaining 400 million, 300 million do next to nothing on our service so we aren't sure what they're worth, and 100 million are actually worth something. But not 750 dollars something.
Facebooks bit statistical value is large sample size. But what is the significance of a self selected sample size of 10 million vs a phone survey of 10 000? Sure it's probably better. But not a lot better.
This is where facebook could pull an amazon or a google. Sure they're a webpage company. Maybe they could make that infrastructure available to businesses like amazon's cloud services. Or maybe they'll pull out a whole trans-formative technology, 'tv while you chat' and get a legitimate TV in the web or something. Or phone services or the like (and believe, if you've ever tried to call actual people in india, any way to do that which doesn't involve dealing with the phone company is going to be glorious because phone numbers keep getting reassigned randomly).
I'd compare to Skype. Skype had 500 million accounts, of which about 50 million were regularly active. That put them for sale at 8 billion dollars. I bet Facebook, without some other secret up its sleeve, is 1 billion users, with about 100 million meaningfully active, but a lot of them are worthless (young people in 3rd world countries basically). So sure, they're worth a lot of money, but 75 billion seems like a stretch unless there's something else going on, which, given the number of my former students and colleagues they've been hiring, I'm guessing there is.
Well but now you're talking just 'carriers' and not 'supercarriers'. The chinese have one old refurbed soviet carrier. That is basically on par with what the US calls 'amphibious assault ships' (which are still big carriers, just not as big as the nimitz/ford/enterprise).
And your allies may have a few ships as well....
The US navy is so astronomically bigger than potentially hostile counterparts it wouldn't meaningfully hurt overall us capabilities to shrink down a bit. Yes, the Chinese plan 3 carriers. But given that they have no f'n clue what they're doing expect them to be of dubious quality to start, and by the time those 3 exist we're looking at 2020, which is a long enough ways off you can worry about very different budget problems then, and maybe by then the US will come to the realization that no matter how much you try, the chinese outnumber you 4:1, it's simply not possible to keep up with them if they really want to pull ahead, and trying is a waste of money.
You're missing an important one, and the one that eventually caught up to microsoft. If you're using stock options as a form of compensation you eventually have to go public, because the company cannot have more than some number of shareholders and be considered private.
Facebook may need to expand, a lot. Who knows what their plan is? They may need a massive infrastructure investment to support higher bandwidth in system applications (videos, 3d games, who knows), and they may need a massive investment to hire a large number of staff to start running revenue generating activities, along with a building full of lawyers to go with it all (advertising sales teams mostly). If they're serious about making facebook into a platform rather than just a webpage there's a lot of time and money that could be thrown into basically writing a giant web OS.
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd (admittedly, not 75/year, but even at 7.5/year you're pushing your luck, that requires a lot of suckers giving you 75/year for each user who contributes nothing). Right now they sell facebook points, which is all well and good, but 3rd parties take I think 70% of that. So again, you need to be moving a LOT of money per user.
So how else do you get money? Well advertising. And again, what is a user worth on facebook to an advertiser? My Facebook experience is going to be different than in the US, because they feed different ads to canada, but right now the ads they feed me are for very sketchy (not necessarily illegal, just not really serious big businesses). Valuing a facebook user might be like trying to value television viewers, but 10x harder.
Or you can sell your data to companies. Which is where this whole thing starts to fall apart fast. Facebook is now big enough that they're going to get buried in Laws from every country in the world (see the Twitter story that just got to the front page for another example). Some of those rules are going to be 'no selling data, anonymized or not, without explicit consent' and suddenly your whole revenue stream is first a legal quagmire, and second very very limited. And laws may be written about targeted ads (see previous paragraph), ads to under 13's and compliance...
So yes, the existing owners want to cash out, and I'm sure a lot of them are looking to jump ship ASAP. But google started as just a search engine, and now they have more products than I can keep track of and billions in revenue (and profits), so you never know. I would not be surprised if Facebook has a lot of thought going into what their future will look like and the manpower and infrastructure to support that gets expensive fast (when you're funded by private capital anyway).
The US government is running about a 30% of budget deficit, (which is about 10% of gdp). If you cut the budget by 10% you're down to ~20% of budget deficit, and 7% of GDP. Add in a bit of economic growth (say 3%, including pop growth) and that's actually 4% of gdp and well... suddenly things don't look so bad do they? Oh and if you have any economic growth the budget deficit will shrink (increased tax revenue), how that exactly factors in is a bit more complicated than trivial math, since you are shifting some people off unemployment and 'dependent' roles and onto contributing roles on the ledger, and if there's growth it might mean a lot more companies and people have even a little bit more to chip into the public coffers.
Don't get me wrong, the US situation isn't spectacular, but it's not really all that bad given the growing population (total GDP) and that it is on the bouncing back part of an an economic meltdown. Cutting too quickly (even defence) hurts the recovery, but in the long run you'll want to shrink the military as a percentage of GDP, however you go about that.
That's why the UK and france signed a joint air group operations agreement. By the time the 2 QE class ships are built in the UK The french CDG will be getting old, so between them they will be lucky to have 1 at sea, one ready, one training and one in maintenance. It's relatively rare to have more than 1/3rd of a fleet operational at any given time no matter what.
The US likes to use aircraft carriers because it has them. Not because it needs to use them*. Why is there an aircraft carrier in the perisian/arab gulf when you have land bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi? The only reason to put a carrier there is that you have one, it's tour rotation is up and may as well use it for something and put it somewhere action might happen. You could just as well base aircraft on land, and sure, you have marginally longer flying distances, but you wouldn't need to pay for a carrier.
*I don't mean everywhere. There's a legitimate reason to position them next to say, a Chinese carrier or russian forces and so on. There are still big oceans. But even if the US active selection of ships was reduced from 4 to 3, and then 2 in reserve and 4 in various states of repair and refueling hat would not meaningfully impact the US's strategic operational capability - the navy sure, but not the overall US capability. If you're going to go to war with a country that has more than one carrier, you're going to get more than 2 weeks notice. Even Iraq, the first or second time, you had several months of buildup time (and could have arbitrarily taken longer if you wanted it). If you need 4 aircraft carriers to go after al qaeda in afghanistan they're winning and you're throwing money away like well, drunken sailors.
Just because it was off the regular budget doesn't mean it wasn't in the overall budget or included in the US total debt (which is not exactly accurate because the gov't borrows money in blocks, but spends it continuously so there's some disconnect there).
In terms of how much it saves, well that's harder to say. How many global hawks would they have bought, what's the operating cost per year (assuming they filled the same roles as the U2's) etc. If you trim the budget by 10% that goes a long way to eating up the existing US deficit, but finding 10% in cuts is going to make a lot of campaign donors unhappy.
The overall plan for the debt though, is the same as everyone else does. You creep your deficit down, grow the economy, which shrinks the relative value of the debt and just keep servicing the interest and hope it shrinks to relative unimportance.
It's not like they couldn't get some global hawks (or similar) but maybe... not so many? It's like aircraft carriers. Ok so you have 11 supercarriers, (+ 2 under construction). Would US standing in the world be significantly harmed if you only ran 9 or 10 for a few years? Or just 9 or 10 permanently. Given that the only other big carriers in existence or under construction are french and british, and they'll have a total of 4 between them, it seems unlikely that the US is in a serious risk for say, the next decade.
The U2 is still in business because it's cheap, and gets the job done against enemies who can't or don't care to fight back. So trying to decide on a replacement is a difficult exercise in knowing the future. The chinese and russians can (and have) shot them down, but they're more big scale satellite intelligence operations anyway. Day to day movement of chinese or russian forces is mostly low priority because they aren't about to shoot at you, and if they do, using 10 year old global hawks might not be any better a plan than 50 year old U2's.
And libya happens to be big enough and have enough regional divide that there was a clear 'this team that team' scenario, rather than, what is in Syria a more layered insurgency/battle for the streets thing.
Gaddhafis regime, like happens in pakistan and Iraq under Hussein, benefited one particular group. In pakistan elections change who's looting the public coffers this week, but the other places there's a very clear power grab. In Saudi and bahrain, and Syria it's very much an upper class vs lower classes situation, whereas in iraq and Libya it was a region vs region thing. We (in the west) naturally understand region vs region better, and are better able to inject our actions into it.
Libya is also on the doorstep of europe, and whatever you may think of Assad, Gaddhafi was crazier. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory (which, in the end, he didn't) he could have started shooting at a lot of things very much in other peoples interests. Syria... not so much, the east side of the med certainly would impact israel, but not so much Europe, and turkey and israel are big enough to deal with syria on their own if things go badly.
Is general chat in world of warcraft (or the old republic) 'social media'? How about guild chat? How about voice chat on xbox live? Is/.?
If you're on an important enough case you have to be sequestered - fair enough. But the vast majority of cases are completely unimportant to the broader national or international interest. We *could* sequester juries for everything, but that significantly drives up costs, and gets you what? More reason for people to try and dodge jury duty? I don't think that helps anything.
In the real world people use the tools they have to communicate. I don't control if (and when) my work department sends out a notice that one of our profs passed away via facebook rather than e-mail, but that's the sort of thing I'd kind of like to know (and just happened, which is why I thought of it). Do you want to say people can't get e-mail via yahoo, because yahoo might expose them to a newsfeed when they're trying to get e-mail? How do you even try and enforce rules like that? Who are you to judge those 'tools' that use telephones rather than have their butler deliver messages? Technology just is, you may, in your self righteous way not like a particular product, and, facebook deserves a lot of hate, but the problem applies far more broadly than facebook. As the world, and entertainment in general become much more socially connected and web enabled experiences this becomes a much, much more difficult problem to disconnect someone from media that *might* say something about a topic, and enforce that disconnect while still letting them be home.
The question goes to the heart of the argument. If the average driver has a 1.5% chance of causing a collision, but an automated on 1% then clearly the automated vehicle is preferable (to over simplify somewhat). However if the 'designers' at GM are responsible for 20 million cars then they have no incentive to ever try and work, because merely by law of averages they're going to get screwed selling millions of cars a year.
A couple of months ago the brakes failed on my car and I narrowly avoided hitting two people. Now the thing is, my car had been at the shop to get the brakes checked and repaired about 3 weeks before that. Who is really at fault? In 3 weeks the auto shop can't really be liable for anything that happened to the brakes, but I had no indication there was a problem until I had a loud thunking sound, and no braking action (go go emergency brakes). Had I been a fraction of a second slower realizing what just happened, well, the law would have held me liable for hitting two people. Even though I would attempt to argue that I did due diligence on the brakes, and was braking from a safe distance (but when you're going 60 Km/h and your brakes fail it takes a moment to process what happened and what your solutions are,and what your fall back scenarios are going to be if the emergency brake doesn't work, and even then you're guessing just how quickly the emergency brake will stop you).
In your case, you're saying what we all know. All data is dirty, and no one thing is 100% tolerant of all possible input cases from the dirty data (in addition to all other failures that can happen on a device). Our legal systems don't really play nice with the real world statistical probabilities of random failures, or how you ascribe blame to something that isn't intentional. It would be most unfortunate if a data entry clerk from 20 years ago is held liable because they typed a speed limit into a database as 80kph rather than the intended 60.
I suppose in some ways it is similar to a national healthcare and medical malpractice problem. People die, all of us. Just as mechanical devices will eventually fail. If you individually mandate responsibility to service providers (drivers, mechanics, doctors) you end up with a much different system than if you collectivize the risk (think NHS in the UK). If the goal is a system that in general reduces accidents you need to move away from trying to assign blame on a case by case basis, and providers who consistently make mistakes can be dealt with internally- but you'll have to accept some sort of shared insurance system for the fact that accidents will happen. Whether that's manufacturers or operators who pay into it (or the government or points of sale or....) I don't know.
That becomes harder with facebook though. If you're on a jury, but not sequestered, and go to a party and people start talking about the case you're on, are you prejudicing yourself? On facebook that's sort of the same problem, I don't control what my friends choose to post, but it's still there in front of me, whether I want it or not. You could bar people from all social media, but with facebook that's a bit like saying 'don't answer the telephone' - a lot of peoples lives are connected via facebook messages rather than e-mail or the like.
But I agree, it's sort of obvious that this is a natural extension of the existing rules. There are just some subtleties to be worked out still.
You gotta figure Facebook is between a rock and a hard place on this one. They have to retain material 'deleted' for a while, in case someone shows up with a warrant demanding they produce this information (otherwise wouldn't you just delete anything from facebook that might be inconvenient in a divorce or the like). But they can't retain it too long because then you're into a privacy violation, nor can you necessarily manually asses anything before deleting it because of the sheer scale and lack of context would make that impossible even if it wasn't a gross violation of privacy.
Also, they'll be subject to data retention laws based on where the person accesses from, and or where the data is stored, so they might have a complex web of rules.
What they mean is that the media jobs are being run by foreigners, exposing us to their values (violence good, boobs bad!) and not reflecting existing canadian values or diversity. Even if those things are produced in canada, to reflect the character of this country (natives, the french, the diversities of english canada), there's no mechanism to actually distribute it.
We are becoming as ignorant of our own country as americans are, we are now in a situation where even content produced by canadians, in canada (say video games) are set up to sound like they are american, they use US spellings, US pronunciations, US units of measure etc.
The last school I was at used to run a course on technology and culture (for CS students). You have to start by defining what is culture, fairly casually it is "values, institutions, norms and artefacts". On values we are very different than our southern neighbours (we were/are much more inclusive, supportive of other canadians, even if we don't know them, boobs good, guns bad, that sort of thing, essentially we're half way between europe and the US). Institutions isn't so much a specific things as, for example our (continually failing) efforts at bilingualism, national healthcare, our legal system, that sort of thing. Norms, how do you speak to people, the fact that we don't have army recruiters in front of all our shopping malls, our marginally more civil discourse. Artefacts you can't really transplant, it's just, well stuff (CN tower for example).
It's a bad sign for the identify of canada when people won't go to the doctor because they're afraid they'll have to pay for it, a product of too much US TV. It's a bad sign when our own citizens don't know the difference between prime minister, president, governor general and the sovereign (or at least the Queen, given that she's been the sovereign for 60 years), and I mean the difference in roles, not the difference in who the people are. It doesn't take a genius to recognize stephen harper and barack obama are different people. But our culture is splitting somewhat, quebec which works very hard to retain their own identity are less connected with the rest of canada, and more exposed to French media (from France specifically I mean), whereas English canada we basically get swamped with US media, and that's leading to a diverging set of values, and a very confused quebec. About all thats left that does both english and french in canada for canadians is the CBC, and well, the harper government plans to be rid of them. Without the CRTC to make anyone else who sets up shop here serve both markets we're going to end up with european quebec and american english canada.
It was never that we didn't, sort of obviously, get buried in US media to some degree. All of the big movie studios, most of the TV was always done in the US. When you're outnumbered 9:1 you accept that. But you want maybe 1/10th of your media to have been made by canadians, in canada, reflecting what canada is, and how we do things. Failing some direct setup (where on TV and Radio you have rules about making sure canadian done work gets some guaranteed air time), you could inject canadian ads (we had, or maybe have, I don't watch TV on TV anymore), "heritage minutes" which where short little snippets of canadian history, produced in canada. Online news has negated the 'canadian angle' on stories, which in a way served us better, because we always saw the 'US angle' on stories from their media, the canadian angle from our own, and the british angle from the BBC and you can fairly quickly separate what is talking heads getting paid and what is actually going on.
Rest assured, we are very inclusive of other cultures. That's not the same as only seeing someone else's view of culture. Most of us don't want our country to be the US. But when you have to tell someone there's no 'primary' for prime minister and they get all confused, you worry about the future of this country. 90% of us are immigrants or decendents of immigrants, from
They were in bed with the police in the UK. They might have liked the idea elsewhere, but you need to find a police force that will knowingly go along with it, and that might be harder to find.
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Sure GM gets something out of it. They own, or are partially invested in all of the resale chain. Their dealerships who get you financing through GMAC, it subsidizes their dealerships to sell you other cars. And they get to keep selling you DLC, I'm sorry, spare parts after the fact.
GM goes to great lengths to make their cars completely unservicable without special tools and equipment, computerization has been the greatest thing ever for them. Now they can have all sorts of legally locked down codes (and training manuals), the more of their cars are on the road the more money they get from people who want to be mechanics, auto shops, replacements parts (which, if possible are a PCB that can't be fixed but has to to be completely replaced). etc.
Ask THQ how that's been working out.
As one of those independents: We live on government subsidies and hope for a magica or minecraft, but usually end up with what my friends at Silicon Knights produced, which was an X-men game regularly topping worst of the year lists. At least they get government subsidies. Oh and EA and Ubisoft are all getting government subsidies too (Montreal and Toronto, the areas I'm most familiar with are 50% or 40% respectively subsidies on developer salaries, EA austin, which is the giant money pit for the old republic is 40% as well I believe, although now that they launched I'm sure it's not so bad. 400 people at 12k/month in churn is a LOT of cash though, so getting back even 25 or 30% of that total makes a huge difference). Everyone in this business knows those subsidies cannot last. They can't even last at their currently ludicrous rate. So we need to start making money on our own, fast, and without the government chipping in to keep the industry alive.
And you're missing the point. People *are* buying the games. They're just not buying it from me, they're buying it from gamestop used, so I get paid once for 1 buyer and 2 or 3 future users. So one way or another my goal is to monetize those 2 or 3 used buyers to give me money to make the next game. Which is why the industry is a giant sequelfest right now. There's an established brand (less advertising outlays), and that's it. They aren't even bad games, but it's still all about the marketing money.
So no, we aren't making a lot of real money (valve is a special case because of steam), we're making a lot of money backed up by governments who aren't going to keep this going forever. Yes, the guys who did minecraft made real money. But just about everyone else is lucky to meet payroll month to month.
Exactly, and that is why long games have lost out. People on average enjoy much more carefully tuned narrative experiences than long random wandering ones, for that they have MMO's. The 'global achievement' tracking feature in steam is wonderfully illustrative. In Skyrim ~12% of the playerbase reach level 50, about 25% ever advance the civil war to conclusion etc. Only about half the people who bought the game even get to the point of knowing about dragons returning.
In other words half the people who bought the game aren't enjoying past the first 20 or so hours. Only 27% of the people (who bought the game on steam) have got "dragonslayer" which is sort of the last direct plot quest I think there's an achievement for. And that's Skyrim for god sakes.
Even Portal 2 only has a 40 odd percent completion of the single player rate (and it's only 7 hours or so).
Unfortunately I don't have stats for Uncharted 3 handy, but generally, consumers buy a game, play it for 5-10 hours, and are done with it - even something that's obviously deeply involved like skyrim only about 2/3rds of players even get to having empowered a shout up 3 steps (which really doesn't take very long). Or even the sort of obviously fun "absorb 20 dragon souls" (which is kinda the point of the game) is only 33 percent or so.
(Obviously with all achiement tracking there's a bit of a skew effect. Only about 85% of skyrim players ever make it to level 5, so presumably the other 15% hated the game from the get go or couldn't play it and summarily quit, and saying they didn't complete anything else is sort of a given, but every game has that to some degree).
You're making the classic mistake of using introspection as a source of data about how people consume content. I'm looking at how people *actually* consume content, and I'm dismayed by it, because it makes my job as a designer much much harder. It's very hard to make any money if you make a game for people to put 80 hours into, even if as a games expert I think people would love to spend 80 hours on some great game the way I spent (probably well over 80 hours) on master of orion, xcom, civilization, privateer, the X series, Hearts of Iron/vicky/EU and even skyrim etc. etc. etc.. If you're bethesda or Bioware and can spend 200 million dollars sure, but most of us can't do that (and even if you *can* you're taking one hell of a risk).
In the end you're selling a player an experience, that might have narrative (CoD, Uncharted, Batman) it might have nifty mechanics (think minecraft), it might just be a neat world (skyrim). But you have to realize how much time they're actually going to put into it to make it good. If odds are they're only going to spend 5-10 hours on your game they better be a damn good 5 -10 hours, or they won't buy the next one, and they'll tell their friends not to buy the first one either. But to make an awesome 5-10 hour experience is *really* hard, and then it tends to become practically impossible to keep that level of production quality for another 20 hours. About the only people who try that are in the MMO business, and remember what I said about competing for time? If you're going to spend 100 hours one LodeRunner or WoW or whatever, I need to find something you want to play that you can fit on top of that other game you're playing. And if it takes too much time from something else you aren't going to enjoy whatever I sell you.
The length of a game has to work with its narrative though. Portal (1 or 2) are fun in part because they can meaningfully tell a story in that time, and you can only spend so much time on the same basic puzzle. 80 hours of random levels, which would be 12 or 13x as much content as they currently have wouldn't make for a better game.
Uncharted is a long interactive movie. But that means that for the astronomical production costs they have they can hand do the facial animations for speach and so on. And you have time to play uncharted, infamous, batman and portal in the time it takes you to play one skyrim. Aside from spending 4x as much money you've also seen 4x as many stories, and gaming is now much more about storytelling than it is about mechanics that go on for ever (Which in Skyrim is killing dragons basically).
And as I said, there is a place for some big epic games. But relatively few of them, and the people who try and make them usually lose a pile of money (or are living on government subsidies anyway and hope to barely keep in business).
Uncharted 3 I think is the most resold game I know of right now, I picked it specifically along with portal and COD because they're much harder to resell (but previous versions were quite popular in the resale market).
It's attempting to bypass the existing business model, which has failed. You may not like what they're doing, but we're going to see a lot of failed attempts at new business models.
As to world of tanks specifically: You can buy with real money what you can earn in game through playing. You may not have been steamrolled, but you're there to make the experience enjoyable for someone who bought their tank. That's kinda how the entire game works. That doesn't mean it isn't fun.
Um... you do know what the F2p model is right? it's a giant DLC farm (if you want anything good you pay for it), and if you're only there for free you exists as a product to keep some other sucker paying 100 dollars a month for the game. That's what F2P is. Free to play is in no way free. They're going to try and hook you into 'well I spend 10 dollars, what's 10 more?" or "well I could spend 15 dollars a month on WoW, why not 15 dollars for that new Tank or gold to buy tanks or whatever. If there isn't one person paying 150 dollars for every 9 people who pay nothing they're going out of business as would Blizzard if they had no subscription revenue. If you aren't the sucker paying 150 dollars a month then their goal is to make you into that sucker, or you to die for that sucker to feel good about his 150 dollars a month.
Which works remarkably well at generating revenue, and is a perfectly valid business model. But one should be under no illusion what they're doing.
Which puts about as much money in my pocket as a developer as buying it new on a shelf for 60 bucks, and gives me infinitely more (and costs me less) than if you bought it used. So that's a workable model. If you want it RIGHT NOW pay full price right now. (and accept that the infrastructure for someone like valve to deliver 2 or 3 million copies of skyrim all at once can be astronomical).
Though steam are sort of bastards on the backend about sales (they don't tell you when they're doing sales, so they can run out of keys, then they delist your game for a random amount of time, even if you get them more keys in an hour or two, and you don't really want a pile of valid keys sitting with steam in case a keygen comes out or the like, no offence to Valve on that one).
Not every game wants to be that epic. In this day and age you're competing as much for time as for money. If people can't pick up your game and be done with it in a week (when they buy the next big game) you might not sell very many - because if you aren't Skyrim you're better to be Portal than Divinity 2: Ego Draconis or the First templar . "Long" is not a selling point anymore and nor is "50 hour experience" or "70 hour experience".
Want to know why? Because the people who have money to game all have their original copies of chrono cross and star ocean too, and guess what, those people all have (or are trying to get) jobs, and families and stuff now, and spending 70 or 80 hours on one game doesn't have the appeal it did when they were younger. People *might* want a few games a year that are big epics, but most of the time they want portal, uncharted 3, call of duty or any collection of other 'short' games interspersed amongst their skyrims and WoW/SWTOR time.
Or they will make more money this route, baring used game sales, and not go out of business. You are assuming wrongly that they want you to give them 50 bucks and then have that copy resold 4 times during the rest of the month. They would rather cut the total number of copies sold in half and get paid for all of them than get paid for 20% of them.
How is it wrong to raise the price? This game is not that previous game you bought for the same price. In the same way Harry Potter is not star wars. They may come on DVD's but they are in no way the same movie.
And in short: you're going to go without. Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy. That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
That goes to my point about laws though. I agree, the information is valuable, but if Germany france and the UK, US, canada, Overall EU, middle east, india, china japan, etc. all come up with different rules about what Facebook can, and cannot do with that harvested data all those users suddenly become worth a lot less, and the regulatory compliance costs skyrocket.
Then you get into the problem of valuing what a user actually is worth. Lots of facebook users are a casual page and then they check their newsfeed, they're worth nothing (and cost next to nothing). That's fine to pad your subscriber numbers, but in practice you may not have enough to monetize them in anyway, and my suspicion is that represents a huge portion of their userbase. It's like saying "I have a billion users, but 300 million of them are in india (so worth next to nothing no matter what), 300 million are locked down to regulatory requirements and of the remaining 400 million, 300 million do next to nothing on our service so we aren't sure what they're worth, and 100 million are actually worth something. But not 750 dollars something.
Facebooks bit statistical value is large sample size. But what is the significance of a self selected sample size of 10 million vs a phone survey of 10 000? Sure it's probably better. But not a lot better.
This is where facebook could pull an amazon or a google. Sure they're a webpage company. Maybe they could make that infrastructure available to businesses like amazon's cloud services. Or maybe they'll pull out a whole trans-formative technology, 'tv while you chat' and get a legitimate TV in the web or something. Or phone services or the like (and believe, if you've ever tried to call actual people in india, any way to do that which doesn't involve dealing with the phone company is going to be glorious because phone numbers keep getting reassigned randomly).
I'd compare to Skype. Skype had 500 million accounts, of which about 50 million were regularly active. That put them for sale at 8 billion dollars. I bet Facebook, without some other secret up its sleeve, is 1 billion users, with about 100 million meaningfully active, but a lot of them are worthless (young people in 3rd world countries basically). So sure, they're worth a lot of money, but 75 billion seems like a stretch unless there's something else going on, which, given the number of my former students and colleagues they've been hiring, I'm guessing there is.
Well but now you're talking just 'carriers' and not 'supercarriers'. The chinese have one old refurbed soviet carrier. That is basically on par with what the US calls 'amphibious assault ships' (which are still big carriers, just not as big as the nimitz/ford/enterprise).
And your allies may have a few ships as well....
The US navy is so astronomically bigger than potentially hostile counterparts it wouldn't meaningfully hurt overall us capabilities to shrink down a bit. Yes, the Chinese plan 3 carriers. But given that they have no f'n clue what they're doing expect them to be of dubious quality to start, and by the time those 3 exist we're looking at 2020, which is a long enough ways off you can worry about very different budget problems then, and maybe by then the US will come to the realization that no matter how much you try, the chinese outnumber you 4:1, it's simply not possible to keep up with them if they really want to pull ahead, and trying is a waste of money.
You're missing an important one, and the one that eventually caught up to microsoft. If you're using stock options as a form of compensation you eventually have to go public, because the company cannot have more than some number of shareholders and be considered private.
Facebook may need to expand, a lot. Who knows what their plan is? They may need a massive infrastructure investment to support higher bandwidth in system applications (videos, 3d games, who knows), and they may need a massive investment to hire a large number of staff to start running revenue generating activities, along with a building full of lawyers to go with it all (advertising sales teams mostly). If they're serious about making facebook into a platform rather than just a webpage there's a lot of time and money that could be thrown into basically writing a giant web OS.
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd (admittedly, not 75/year, but even at 7.5/year you're pushing your luck, that requires a lot of suckers giving you 75/year for each user who contributes nothing). Right now they sell facebook points, which is all well and good, but 3rd parties take I think 70% of that. So again, you need to be moving a LOT of money per user.
So how else do you get money? Well advertising. And again, what is a user worth on facebook to an advertiser? My Facebook experience is going to be different than in the US, because they feed different ads to canada, but right now the ads they feed me are for very sketchy (not necessarily illegal, just not really serious big businesses). Valuing a facebook user might be like trying to value television viewers, but 10x harder.
Or you can sell your data to companies. Which is where this whole thing starts to fall apart fast. Facebook is now big enough that they're going to get buried in Laws from every country in the world (see the Twitter story that just got to the front page for another example). Some of those rules are going to be 'no selling data, anonymized or not, without explicit consent' and suddenly your whole revenue stream is first a legal quagmire, and second very very limited. And laws may be written about targeted ads (see previous paragraph), ads to under 13's and compliance...
So yes, the existing owners want to cash out, and I'm sure a lot of them are looking to jump ship ASAP. But google started as just a search engine, and now they have more products than I can keep track of and billions in revenue (and profits), so you never know. I would not be surprised if Facebook has a lot of thought going into what their future will look like and the manpower and infrastructure to support that gets expensive fast (when you're funded by private capital anyway).
Where does your figure of 800% come from?
The US government is running about a 30% of budget deficit, (which is about 10% of gdp). If you cut the budget by 10% you're down to ~20% of budget deficit, and 7% of GDP. Add in a bit of economic growth (say 3%, including pop growth) and that's actually 4% of gdp and well... suddenly things don't look so bad do they? Oh and if you have any economic growth the budget deficit will shrink (increased tax revenue), how that exactly factors in is a bit more complicated than trivial math, since you are shifting some people off unemployment and 'dependent' roles and onto contributing roles on the ledger, and if there's growth it might mean a lot more companies and people have even a little bit more to chip into the public coffers.
Don't get me wrong, the US situation isn't spectacular, but it's not really all that bad given the growing population (total GDP) and that it is on the bouncing back part of an an economic meltdown. Cutting too quickly (even defence) hurts the recovery, but in the long run you'll want to shrink the military as a percentage of GDP, however you go about that.
And that's different for everyone else how?
That's why the UK and france signed a joint air group operations agreement. By the time the 2 QE class ships are built in the UK The french CDG will be getting old, so between them they will be lucky to have 1 at sea, one ready, one training and one in maintenance. It's relatively rare to have more than 1/3rd of a fleet operational at any given time no matter what.
The US likes to use aircraft carriers because it has them. Not because it needs to use them*. Why is there an aircraft carrier in the perisian/arab gulf when you have land bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi? The only reason to put a carrier there is that you have one, it's tour rotation is up and may as well use it for something and put it somewhere action might happen. You could just as well base aircraft on land, and sure, you have marginally longer flying distances, but you wouldn't need to pay for a carrier.
*I don't mean everywhere. There's a legitimate reason to position them next to say, a Chinese carrier or russian forces and so on. There are still big oceans. But even if the US active selection of ships was reduced from 4 to 3, and then 2 in reserve and 4 in various states of repair and refueling hat would not meaningfully impact the US's strategic operational capability - the navy sure, but not the overall US capability. If you're going to go to war with a country that has more than one carrier, you're going to get more than 2 weeks notice. Even Iraq, the first or second time, you had several months of buildup time (and could have arbitrarily taken longer if you wanted it). If you need 4 aircraft carriers to go after al qaeda in afghanistan they're winning and you're throwing money away like well, drunken sailors.
Just because it was off the regular budget doesn't mean it wasn't in the overall budget or included in the US total debt (which is not exactly accurate because the gov't borrows money in blocks, but spends it continuously so there's some disconnect there).
In terms of how much it saves, well that's harder to say. How many global hawks would they have bought, what's the operating cost per year (assuming they filled the same roles as the U2's) etc. If you trim the budget by 10% that goes a long way to eating up the existing US deficit, but finding 10% in cuts is going to make a lot of campaign donors unhappy.
The overall plan for the debt though, is the same as everyone else does. You creep your deficit down, grow the economy, which shrinks the relative value of the debt and just keep servicing the interest and hope it shrinks to relative unimportance.
It's not like they couldn't get some global hawks (or similar) but maybe... not so many? It's like aircraft carriers. Ok so you have 11 supercarriers, (+ 2 under construction). Would US standing in the world be significantly harmed if you only ran 9 or 10 for a few years? Or just 9 or 10 permanently. Given that the only other big carriers in existence or under construction are french and british, and they'll have a total of 4 between them, it seems unlikely that the US is in a serious risk for say, the next decade.
The U2 is still in business because it's cheap, and gets the job done against enemies who can't or don't care to fight back. So trying to decide on a replacement is a difficult exercise in knowing the future. The chinese and russians can (and have) shot them down, but they're more big scale satellite intelligence operations anyway. Day to day movement of chinese or russian forces is mostly low priority because they aren't about to shoot at you, and if they do, using 10 year old global hawks might not be any better a plan than 50 year old U2's.
And libya happens to be big enough and have enough regional divide that there was a clear 'this team that team' scenario, rather than, what is in Syria a more layered insurgency/battle for the streets thing.
Gaddhafis regime, like happens in pakistan and Iraq under Hussein, benefited one particular group. In pakistan elections change who's looting the public coffers this week, but the other places there's a very clear power grab. In Saudi and bahrain, and Syria it's very much an upper class vs lower classes situation, whereas in iraq and Libya it was a region vs region thing. We (in the west) naturally understand region vs region better, and are better able to inject our actions into it.
Libya is also on the doorstep of europe, and whatever you may think of Assad, Gaddhafi was crazier. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory (which, in the end, he didn't) he could have started shooting at a lot of things very much in other peoples interests. Syria... not so much, the east side of the med certainly would impact israel, but not so much Europe, and turkey and israel are big enough to deal with syria on their own if things go badly.
Is general chat in world of warcraft (or the old republic) 'social media'? How about guild chat? How about voice chat on xbox live? Is /.?
If you're on an important enough case you have to be sequestered - fair enough. But the vast majority of cases are completely unimportant to the broader national or international interest. We *could* sequester juries for everything, but that significantly drives up costs, and gets you what? More reason for people to try and dodge jury duty? I don't think that helps anything.
In the real world people use the tools they have to communicate. I don't control if (and when) my work department sends out a notice that one of our profs passed away via facebook rather than e-mail, but that's the sort of thing I'd kind of like to know (and just happened, which is why I thought of it). Do you want to say people can't get e-mail via yahoo, because yahoo might expose them to a newsfeed when they're trying to get e-mail? How do you even try and enforce rules like that? Who are you to judge those 'tools' that use telephones rather than have their butler deliver messages? Technology just is, you may, in your self righteous way not like a particular product, and, facebook deserves a lot of hate, but the problem applies far more broadly than facebook. As the world, and entertainment in general become much more socially connected and web enabled experiences this becomes a much, much more difficult problem to disconnect someone from media that *might* say something about a topic, and enforce that disconnect while still letting them be home.
The question goes to the heart of the argument. If the average driver has a 1.5% chance of causing a collision, but an automated on 1% then clearly the automated vehicle is preferable (to over simplify somewhat). However if the 'designers' at GM are responsible for 20 million cars then they have no incentive to ever try and work, because merely by law of averages they're going to get screwed selling millions of cars a year.
A couple of months ago the brakes failed on my car and I narrowly avoided hitting two people. Now the thing is, my car had been at the shop to get the brakes checked and repaired about 3 weeks before that. Who is really at fault? In 3 weeks the auto shop can't really be liable for anything that happened to the brakes, but I had no indication there was a problem until I had a loud thunking sound, and no braking action (go go emergency brakes). Had I been a fraction of a second slower realizing what just happened, well, the law would have held me liable for hitting two people. Even though I would attempt to argue that I did due diligence on the brakes, and was braking from a safe distance (but when you're going 60 Km/h and your brakes fail it takes a moment to process what happened and what your solutions are,and what your fall back scenarios are going to be if the emergency brake doesn't work, and even then you're guessing just how quickly the emergency brake will stop you).
In your case, you're saying what we all know. All data is dirty, and no one thing is 100% tolerant of all possible input cases from the dirty data (in addition to all other failures that can happen on a device). Our legal systems don't really play nice with the real world statistical probabilities of random failures, or how you ascribe blame to something that isn't intentional. It would be most unfortunate if a data entry clerk from 20 years ago is held liable because they typed a speed limit into a database as 80kph rather than the intended 60.
I suppose in some ways it is similar to a national healthcare and medical malpractice problem. People die, all of us. Just as mechanical devices will eventually fail. If you individually mandate responsibility to service providers (drivers, mechanics, doctors) you end up with a much different system than if you collectivize the risk (think NHS in the UK). If the goal is a system that in general reduces accidents you need to move away from trying to assign blame on a case by case basis, and providers who consistently make mistakes can be dealt with internally- but you'll have to accept some sort of shared insurance system for the fact that accidents will happen. Whether that's manufacturers or operators who pay into it (or the government or points of sale or....) I don't know.
That becomes harder with facebook though. If you're on a jury, but not sequestered, and go to a party and people start talking about the case you're on, are you prejudicing yourself? On facebook that's sort of the same problem, I don't control what my friends choose to post, but it's still there in front of me, whether I want it or not. You could bar people from all social media, but with facebook that's a bit like saying 'don't answer the telephone' - a lot of peoples lives are connected via facebook messages rather than e-mail or the like.
But I agree, it's sort of obvious that this is a natural extension of the existing rules. There are just some subtleties to be worked out still.
You gotta figure Facebook is between a rock and a hard place on this one. They have to retain material 'deleted' for a while, in case someone shows up with a warrant demanding they produce this information (otherwise wouldn't you just delete anything from facebook that might be inconvenient in a divorce or the like). But they can't retain it too long because then you're into a privacy violation, nor can you necessarily manually asses anything before deleting it because of the sheer scale and lack of context would make that impossible even if it wasn't a gross violation of privacy.
Also, they'll be subject to data retention laws based on where the person accesses from, and or where the data is stored, so they might have a complex web of rules.
What they mean is that the media jobs are being run by foreigners, exposing us to their values (violence good, boobs bad!) and not reflecting existing canadian values or diversity. Even if those things are produced in canada, to reflect the character of this country (natives, the french, the diversities of english canada), there's no mechanism to actually distribute it.
We are becoming as ignorant of our own country as americans are, we are now in a situation where even content produced by canadians, in canada (say video games) are set up to sound like they are american, they use US spellings, US pronunciations, US units of measure etc.
The last school I was at used to run a course on technology and culture (for CS students). You have to start by defining what is culture, fairly casually it is "values, institutions, norms and artefacts". On values we are very different than our southern neighbours (we were/are much more inclusive, supportive of other canadians, even if we don't know them, boobs good, guns bad, that sort of thing, essentially we're half way between europe and the US). Institutions isn't so much a specific things as, for example our (continually failing) efforts at bilingualism, national healthcare, our legal system, that sort of thing. Norms, how do you speak to people, the fact that we don't have army recruiters in front of all our shopping malls, our marginally more civil discourse. Artefacts you can't really transplant, it's just, well stuff (CN tower for example).
It's a bad sign for the identify of canada when people won't go to the doctor because they're afraid they'll have to pay for it, a product of too much US TV. It's a bad sign when our own citizens don't know the difference between prime minister, president, governor general and the sovereign (or at least the Queen, given that she's been the sovereign for 60 years), and I mean the difference in roles, not the difference in who the people are. It doesn't take a genius to recognize stephen harper and barack obama are different people. But our culture is splitting somewhat, quebec which works very hard to retain their own identity are less connected with the rest of canada, and more exposed to French media (from France specifically I mean), whereas English canada we basically get swamped with US media, and that's leading to a diverging set of values, and a very confused quebec. About all thats left that does both english and french in canada for canadians is the CBC, and well, the harper government plans to be rid of them. Without the CRTC to make anyone else who sets up shop here serve both markets we're going to end up with european quebec and american english canada.
It was never that we didn't, sort of obviously, get buried in US media to some degree. All of the big movie studios, most of the TV was always done in the US. When you're outnumbered 9:1 you accept that. But you want maybe 1/10th of your media to have been made by canadians, in canada, reflecting what canada is, and how we do things. Failing some direct setup (where on TV and Radio you have rules about making sure canadian done work gets some guaranteed air time), you could inject canadian ads (we had, or maybe have, I don't watch TV on TV anymore), "heritage minutes" which where short little snippets of canadian history, produced in canada. Online news has negated the 'canadian angle' on stories, which in a way served us better, because we always saw the 'US angle' on stories from their media, the canadian angle from our own, and the british angle from the BBC and you can fairly quickly separate what is talking heads getting paid and what is actually going on.
Rest assured, we are very inclusive of other cultures. That's not the same as only seeing someone else's view of culture. Most of us don't want our country to be the US. But when you have to tell someone there's no 'primary' for prime minister and they get all confused, you worry about the future of this country. 90% of us are immigrants or decendents of immigrants, from
They were in bed with the police in the UK. They might have liked the idea elsewhere, but you need to find a police force that will knowingly go along with it, and that might be harder to find.