Good job quoting out-of-context to support your contrarian post. I'm sure a good proportion of readers here won't have read the rest of that sentence in the article and won't know that you're trolling until they get to the third or fourth line in your post.
Refusing arguments by analogy is absurd. Analogy is the only way to compare what we know and have experience with to new situations. The vary basis of language is analogy and categorization -- we come to a common agreement on what constitutes "yellow" and treat all things of that class the same way even though it's unlikely that your yellow schoolbus is the the same color as my yellow lemon.
Argument by analogy is incomplete, in that there are differences between the actual point of contention and the analogous situation, and those differences might make a particular analog inapplicable to a particular situation, but dismissing analogy as an invalid tool for legal or other argument is just silly.
The category of "things protected by IP laws that you can modify aftermarket" seems like a pretty relevant place to start comparison. If you want to object to the analogy based on some specific difference between cars and game consoles feel free, but don't try to dismiss the comparison out of hand.
Also note that "street legal" is an irrelevant comparison for game consoles, as their operation is not regulated by the state, nor is the case at hand about the operation of the modified device -- which the defendant did not do -- only the modification itself and the sale thereof.
Yes. Offsite at a necessarily public URL on a system that, for administrative ease, is configured identically. That will definately be worth the effort.
And if it's not identically configured you're looking at a lot of extra expense to provide platform diversity for a file that A) most users (particularly those interested in downloading an FTP server) will never use and B) still doesn't provide any reliable guarantee that the hash wasn't regenerated as part of the attack.
Cryptographic signatures from keys not available on the distribution server would be useful. Hashes are better than nothing, but they're much better at protecting against random download errors than a knowledgable attacker.
A device that provides more communication tools inhibits social development? Does that apply to telephones too, or only to computers? Should we not let children use the phone?
A device that requires fine motor control and hand-eye coordination to operate -- not to mention the muscle memory developed by typing -- inhibits coordination?
The mastery of a tool used for both work and entertainment by adults around the world is detrimental to a child's sense of self?
It's also silly to compare yourself to today's 4-year-old -- unless you're 16 your peers mostly had the same exposure to computers that you did. But today computers are significantly more prevalent and today's 4-year-old will have peers that all lived in homes with computer since birth. That might be good or bad, but whatever the outcome it will by typical and expected among his peers.
/ Wishes you would take a look at what people who grew up without TV said about children watching TV.
I have no hate for baseballs. I just don't see how they're better than computers, while the GP apparently does.
It's also silly to talk about today's business/political leaders in a discussion about how computers might affect a 4-year-old -- virtually none of today's leaders had computers when they were 4 -- they're too old -- so there's no way to compare outcomes with and without.
Exactly. We all know that no useful work has ever been accomplished with a computer, and since they weren't around when I was 4 it's safe to assume that there's no use a 4-year-old could ever have for a device that can facilitate communication, entertainment, computation, artwork, reading, document creation, or access to the outside world. Clearly a round, static object is a more useful learning tool -- if you let him read the Interwebs he might learn about gravity from other people's work, rather than spending half his life trying to derive the laws of motion on his own -- a task for which the baseball is a nearly ideal tool.
I agree, complying with a bad process is often worse than not having a defined process. And it's a trap that a lot of businesses fall into.
But you don't have to adjust your workflow to match the process -- you could adjust the process to match your workflow. The auditors couldn't care less which adjustment you make, so long as at the end the documentation and the actual workflow match.
Isn't finding some specific person to hold responsible after a failure an example of butt covering? You aren't giving an example of how tracability actually prevented a failure, or improved quality or efficiency, just how we could use it to blame a specific low-level person instead of the team as a whole or the managers responsible for the project.
Tracing errors is useful because you can improve your process next time around, but it will do nothing to improve the current project, and it can be easily abused to find a scapegoat and ignore the process flaws that lead to the problem in the first place.
Apparently it's inconcievable in your world for your fridge to scan the UPC to determine the content of the container and assume a typical expiry period based on the product type and an assumption that the first time it is scanned is within the first day or three of the product's life.
As for tracking, things with UPCs could be easily tracked with no modification of user behavior. Even things that lose their UPC with use could be tracked -- cheese is scanned when first put into fridge with intact UPC. Cheese is removed, item with no UPC but with similar but slightly less weight and size is replaced in the next couple of minutes, assume it's the same item even without a scan unless there's conflicting data. And the inventory system doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful -- as long as you're aware that it can only reliably track things with UPCs you will know to only ask it about such things.
Your lack of imagination also shows in control automation. There are lots of things you could do to automatically optimize energy usage/etc. well beyond what it possible with a passive feedback loop without any manual intervention on the part of the user. You could also provide a degree of control to someone who is interested in managing your fridge -- the power company for example. You might let them adjust your regulation setpoint up a few degrees on high-load days in exchange for a better energy rate. Or they could lower the setpoint a few degrees overnight when more energy is available in preparation of an expected high-usage day -- having a lower morning temperature means you fridge would run less during the day. Or if you're running on solar or battery or some other limited-power system you could have the fridge coordinate with other appliances to ensure your instantanious load is not too high without the need to manually coordinate all the different devices in your home.
It's frankly absurd to extend your viewpoint to "all reasonable people" just because you can't be bothered to imagine uses for products beyond your traditional experience. People had exactly the same arguments against cars and electricity -- they couldn't immediately understand how it would fit into their existing lifestyle, so they dismissed it as useless and impractical technology of the sake of technology. Don't be that guy. Particularly not in writing on a technology forum.
We don't need networked kitchen appliances. But we don't need trains either. That doesn't mean there's no practical use for them.
Instead couldn't you have a network-connected clock that didn't need setting? And now that you've got a network connection, wouldn't it be handy to leave a roast in the oven and turn it on an hour before you head home from work? Or to have your desktop notice that your phone is out-of-range and put the entire kitchen in "away" mode to ensure you didn't leave the stove or coffee pot on? Or to have your freezer scan the UPC of the pizza you're removing and signal the oven with the correct temperature and cooking duration, so you can just hit "start" instead of manually entering the data? Or have the oven reduce the cooling sensitivity of the local climate control system to avoid over-cooling while it's throwing out heat?
"Simple" is a matter of perspective. Today you've got a whole slew of manual steps that could be completed automated. The devices would be more complicated internally, but most people would consider them easier to use once they got used to the transition. Consider today's cars vs. those from the 70s. Today's cars are certainly more complicated, but they also go longer between regular maintinance, have more and better failsafe/limp-home modes, and provide significantly more self-diagnostic information to facilitate repairs. Which version better adheres to the KISS principal?
Horseless carriages are more complicated, more expensive, and for the kinds of transport people were already doing with horses, typically not any better.
You're letting your lack of imagination get the better of you. Currently your fridge doesn't do anything except regulate the interior to some specific temperature. But imagine any of these improvements, which didn't take me 3 whole minutes to concoct, and which are entirely within the limits of current, consumer-priced electronics and computing capabilities:
A) Better energy efficiency by tracking usage patterns and adjusting the cooling cycles to match -- if it's 5 PM and nearing the setpoint maybe we let it warm up another 4 degrees because you're likely to open the door in the next 30 minutes. Maybe at night we run longer, more widely spaced cooling cycles because we know the door rarely opens to lose our cold air. Maybe we coordinate with the A/C to not run at the same time to limit overall household current draw. Or any of 45 other improvements related just to when and how you do cooling control that are impractical with simplistic control mechanisms.
B) How about version 2.0 of this that includes a handful of force gauges on the shelves. Now I can take out some food and have the fridge automatically track my serving size, emailing it to my desktop for us in tracking my diet. Or the next version after that, that integrates a camera so I can read UPCs and track weights. And now that I know what items are in the fridge and how quickly they're being used, I can let the fridge build a shopping list. Or I can connect to it from the office and ask it if there's any milk left.
A) Many modern fridges do have software, they just don't have much of a GUI. It's cheaper, more durable, and more energy efficient to build real controls instead of thermo-electro-mechanical systems. B) You have to control the fridge with something. If you don't use software you need to use some equivalent piece of hardware that can break in new and exciting ways and is subject to the same sorts of design flaws. Plus it's really hard to apply a patch to your mechanical thermostat if it does turn out of to be flawed.
I've never been able to figure out how non-authenticated encryption like those offered for most "HIPAA-compliant email" (including most if not all implementations of Ironport) is good for anyone. If you're worried about people intercepting your regular email why are you not also worried about them intercepting the account-setup/password-reset email that is delivered in exactly the same way? What's to prevent an attacker with access to your incoming email from doing the same account setup/reset steps that happen when the legitimate user wants to access the message?
I know it's a hassle to exchange a key out-of-band, but it's not clear what real protection you're buying if you don't do some sort of authentication when issuing keys.
I guess it protects against passive eavesdropping coupled with significantly-after-the-fact analysis, but that's a pretty low threshold. Simply requiring you to access the documents via unauthenticated HTTPS would provide exactly the same protection (and probably less hassle all around).
They are different codecs, just like Word 97 and Word 2007 are different file formats. They're related and often interoperable, but they're quite distinct and it's not unreasonable to address them as individual formats no matter their common naming or heritage.
I'll give you that storage is cheap. But bandwidth is definitely not, at least not where latency is concerned. If you're willing to say "I want to watch this video in 12+ hours" then bandwidth is cheap, but if you say "I want to start watching this video within 15 seconds and never stop to buffer again before the end" then bandwidth is a huge cost, and improving encoding efficiency 10% could have a significant practical difference.
"Immediately after first airing" assumes near real-time encoding and 0 download time. In my experience neither of those are true. If you want and SD rip it might pop up shortly after the episode airs, but HD rips are rarely that fast. And even if it's available 30 seconds after the episode airs it's still likely an hour or better before you can actually watch it since at the end of airing there are exactly 0 bytes on the network for that torrent.
The fact that networks broadcast at different times in different regions is merely an artifact of traditional broadcast technologies. Given the Internet that fact is irrelevant -- there's no reason for the official download to delay for different regions.
I agree that, given today's attitude toward video sharing, it's unlikely for any network to release a useful, torrent-based video distribution system. My point was they *could*, without any DRM/etc., and most people would still watch (or at least have to intentionally skip) the ads even in spite of a player that forces such things, which would be more or less the same as what they get with traditional broadcast/cable TV.
Even assuming that release groups are capturing an east-coast feed and encoding in near real time and release a high-def rip as the first available version, you'd be hard-pressed to get a copy downloaded less than an hour after it aired. The fact the you live on the west coast might be handy in that respect, but it's hardly the rule -- the people who live on the east coast are still waiting at least a couple of hours to get their show, and they won't know if it's a decent copy until they've downloaded a significant portion.
You're also missing the main point -- wouldn't you accept commercials in the stream and/or some reasonable payment for the episode to get it 2+ hours earlier from an official source of known good quality?
Spyware, maybe, depending on your definition. They'd definitely track your downloads and/or viewing depending what you do in the program. Most people would consider that fairly reasonable tracking. It's possible they'd try to track other things, but I'd be surprised that if that was greater risk than spyware/virus/etc. from the average torrent source.
And if they were running torrents you wouldn't be required to use their program to grab the files, it would just be an option that 90% of the population would use and that would benefit even the 10% who wanted to avoid the official app.
First, some of use consider "SD" to be similar to the web from 1996 -- if that's all you an do I guess it's okay, but it's not the preferred format.
Second, while it's possible to get many show from reliable trackers/release groups it's not possible to get *all* shows from those sorts or sources. Pretending that fakes/viruses/low-quality/missing-subtitles/etc. aren't a problem with the general torrent population is like pretending that the problems don't exist on the web at large -- yes, they can be avoided, but unless you're willing to greatly restrict your intake the average person would have trouble getting what the want without running into at least some undesirable files.
Removable media should always be mounted with the "user=xxx" option. You generally can't expect the permissions on removable media to be relevant, and the OS has provisions for just that eventuality.
I've been saying this for years -- would you rather download the known-good episode at high quality directly from the virus-free source immediately when the episode is broadcast via traditional channels, with a few commercials, or download a possibly fake, possible virus-ridden, unknown-quality/language/subtitles copy 2-12 hours later without commercials?
I'm sure some people would still pirate things, but if you gave people an "ABC.com downloader" app that did bittorrent from your own commercial-filled seeds 90% of users would never try anything else. I'd certainly be willing to hit "30 second skip" a few times per episode to have known-good, on-time releases.
I know QuickTime doesn't have the best history (though neither does any other commercial A/V system), but it's now *the* standard for MP4 A/V wrappers and supports the same sorts of features that the built-in video systems on all other platforms do including a wide variety of easy-to-install open-source codecs an an extensible codec/wrapper framework. While it would be nice if there was one universal A/V system such a thing does not exist, and on supported platforms QuickTime is not such a terrible choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you considered finding a laptop manufactured after 1984? Mine runs for more than a week in suspend mode.
Good job quoting out-of-context to support your contrarian post. I'm sure a good proportion of readers here won't have read the rest of that sentence in the article and won't know that you're trolling until they get to the third or fourth line in your post.
At least here on earth, beings with copper-based oxygen transport (hemocyanin) have blue blood.
Refusing arguments by analogy is absurd. Analogy is the only way to compare what we know and have experience with to new situations. The vary basis of language is analogy and categorization -- we come to a common agreement on what constitutes "yellow" and treat all things of that class the same way even though it's unlikely that your yellow schoolbus is the the same color as my yellow lemon.
Argument by analogy is incomplete, in that there are differences between the actual point of contention and the analogous situation, and those differences might make a particular analog inapplicable to a particular situation, but dismissing analogy as an invalid tool for legal or other argument is just silly.
The category of "things protected by IP laws that you can modify aftermarket" seems like a pretty relevant place to start comparison. If you want to object to the analogy based on some specific difference between cars and game consoles feel free, but don't try to dismiss the comparison out of hand.
Also note that "street legal" is an irrelevant comparison for game consoles, as their operation is not regulated by the state, nor is the case at hand about the operation of the modified device -- which the defendant did not do -- only the modification itself and the sale thereof.
Yes. Offsite at a necessarily public URL on a system that, for administrative ease, is configured identically. That will definately be worth the effort.
And if it's not identically configured you're looking at a lot of extra expense to provide platform diversity for a file that A) most users (particularly those interested in downloading an FTP server) will never use and B) still doesn't provide any reliable guarantee that the hash wasn't regenerated as part of the attack.
Cryptographic signatures from keys not available on the distribution server would be useful. Hashes are better than nothing, but they're much better at protecting against random download errors than a knowledgable attacker.
What kind of computer have you been using?
A device that provides more communication tools inhibits social development? Does that apply to telephones too, or only to computers? Should we not let children use the phone?
A device that requires fine motor control and hand-eye coordination to operate -- not to mention the muscle memory developed by typing -- inhibits coordination?
The mastery of a tool used for both work and entertainment by adults around the world is detrimental to a child's sense of self?
It's also silly to compare yourself to today's 4-year-old -- unless you're 16 your peers mostly had the same exposure to computers that you did. But today computers are significantly more prevalent and today's 4-year-old will have peers that all lived in homes with computer since birth. That might be good or bad, but whatever the outcome it will by typical and expected among his peers.
/ Wishes you would take a look at what people who grew up without TV said about children watching TV.
I have no hate for baseballs. I just don't see how they're better than computers, while the GP apparently does.
It's also silly to talk about today's business/political leaders in a discussion about how computers might affect a 4-year-old -- virtually none of today's leaders had computers when they were 4 -- they're too old -- so there's no way to compare outcomes with and without.
Exactly. We all know that no useful work has ever been accomplished with a computer, and since they weren't around when I was 4 it's safe to assume that there's no use a 4-year-old could ever have for a device that can facilitate communication, entertainment, computation, artwork, reading, document creation, or access to the outside world. Clearly a round, static object is a more useful learning tool -- if you let him read the Interwebs he might learn about gravity from other people's work, rather than spending half his life trying to derive the laws of motion on his own -- a task for which the baseball is a nearly ideal tool.
I agree, complying with a bad process is often worse than not having a defined process. And it's a trap that a lot of businesses fall into.
But you don't have to adjust your workflow to match the process -- you could adjust the process to match your workflow. The auditors couldn't care less which adjustment you make, so long as at the end the documentation and the actual workflow match.
Isn't finding some specific person to hold responsible after a failure an example of butt covering? You aren't giving an example of how tracability actually prevented a failure, or improved quality or efficiency, just how we could use it to blame a specific low-level person instead of the team as a whole or the managers responsible for the project.
Tracing errors is useful because you can improve your process next time around, but it will do nothing to improve the current project, and it can be easily abused to find a scapegoat and ignore the process flaws that lead to the problem in the first place.
Apparently it's inconcievable in your world for your fridge to scan the UPC to determine the content of the container and assume a typical expiry period based on the product type and an assumption that the first time it is scanned is within the first day or three of the product's life.
As for tracking, things with UPCs could be easily tracked with no modification of user behavior. Even things that lose their UPC with use could be tracked -- cheese is scanned when first put into fridge with intact UPC. Cheese is removed, item with no UPC but with similar but slightly less weight and size is replaced in the next couple of minutes, assume it's the same item even without a scan unless there's conflicting data. And the inventory system doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful -- as long as you're aware that it can only reliably track things with UPCs you will know to only ask it about such things.
Your lack of imagination also shows in control automation. There are lots of things you could do to automatically optimize energy usage/etc. well beyond what it possible with a passive feedback loop without any manual intervention on the part of the user. You could also provide a degree of control to someone who is interested in managing your fridge -- the power company for example. You might let them adjust your regulation setpoint up a few degrees on high-load days in exchange for a better energy rate. Or they could lower the setpoint a few degrees overnight when more energy is available in preparation of an expected high-usage day -- having a lower morning temperature means you fridge would run less during the day. Or if you're running on solar or battery or some other limited-power system you could have the fridge coordinate with other appliances to ensure your instantanious load is not too high without the need to manually coordinate all the different devices in your home.
It's frankly absurd to extend your viewpoint to "all reasonable people" just because you can't be bothered to imagine uses for products beyond your traditional experience. People had exactly the same arguments against cars and electricity -- they couldn't immediately understand how it would fit into their existing lifestyle, so they dismissed it as useless and impractical technology of the sake of technology. Don't be that guy. Particularly not in writing on a technology forum.
We don't need networked kitchen appliances. But we don't need trains either. That doesn't mean there's no practical use for them.
Instead couldn't you have a network-connected clock that didn't need setting? And now that you've got a network connection, wouldn't it be handy to leave a roast in the oven and turn it on an hour before you head home from work? Or to have your desktop notice that your phone is out-of-range and put the entire kitchen in "away" mode to ensure you didn't leave the stove or coffee pot on? Or to have your freezer scan the UPC of the pizza you're removing and signal the oven with the correct temperature and cooking duration, so you can just hit "start" instead of manually entering the data? Or have the oven reduce the cooling sensitivity of the local climate control system to avoid over-cooling while it's throwing out heat?
"Simple" is a matter of perspective. Today you've got a whole slew of manual steps that could be completed automated. The devices would be more complicated internally, but most people would consider them easier to use once they got used to the transition. Consider today's cars vs. those from the 70s. Today's cars are certainly more complicated, but they also go longer between regular maintinance, have more and better failsafe/limp-home modes, and provide significantly more self-diagnostic information to facilitate repairs. Which version better adheres to the KISS principal?
Horseless carriages are more complicated, more expensive, and for the kinds of transport people were already doing with horses, typically not any better.
You're letting your lack of imagination get the better of you. Currently your fridge doesn't do anything except regulate the interior to some specific temperature. But imagine any of these improvements, which didn't take me 3 whole minutes to concoct, and which are entirely within the limits of current, consumer-priced electronics and computing capabilities:
A) Better energy efficiency by tracking usage patterns and adjusting the cooling cycles to match -- if it's 5 PM and nearing the setpoint maybe we let it warm up another 4 degrees because you're likely to open the door in the next 30 minutes. Maybe at night we run longer, more widely spaced cooling cycles because we know the door rarely opens to lose our cold air. Maybe we coordinate with the A/C to not run at the same time to limit overall household current draw. Or any of 45 other improvements related just to when and how you do cooling control that are impractical with simplistic control mechanisms.
B) How about version 2.0 of this that includes a handful of force gauges on the shelves. Now I can take out some food and have the fridge automatically track my serving size, emailing it to my desktop for us in tracking my diet. Or the next version after that, that integrates a camera so I can read UPCs and track weights. And now that I know what items are in the fridge and how quickly they're being used, I can let the fridge build a shopping list. Or I can connect to it from the office and ask it if there's any milk left.
A) Many modern fridges do have software, they just don't have much of a GUI. It's cheaper, more durable, and more energy efficient to build real controls instead of thermo-electro-mechanical systems.
B) You have to control the fridge with something. If you don't use software you need to use some equivalent piece of hardware that can break in new and exciting ways and is subject to the same sorts of design flaws. Plus it's really hard to apply a patch to your mechanical thermostat if it does turn out of to be flawed.
I've never been able to figure out how non-authenticated encryption like those offered for most "HIPAA-compliant email" (including most if not all implementations of Ironport) is good for anyone. If you're worried about people intercepting your regular email why are you not also worried about them intercepting the account-setup/password-reset email that is delivered in exactly the same way? What's to prevent an attacker with access to your incoming email from doing the same account setup/reset steps that happen when the legitimate user wants to access the message?
I know it's a hassle to exchange a key out-of-band, but it's not clear what real protection you're buying if you don't do some sort of authentication when issuing keys.
I guess it protects against passive eavesdropping coupled with significantly-after-the-fact analysis, but that's a pretty low threshold. Simply requiring you to access the documents via unauthenticated HTTPS would provide exactly the same protection (and probably less hassle all around).
They are different codecs, just like Word 97 and Word 2007 are different file formats. They're related and often interoperable, but they're quite distinct and it's not unreasonable to address them as individual formats no matter their common naming or heritage.
wrapper != codec
I'll give you that storage is cheap. But bandwidth is definitely not, at least not where latency is concerned. If you're willing to say "I want to watch this video in 12+ hours" then bandwidth is cheap, but if you say "I want to start watching this video within 15 seconds and never stop to buffer again before the end" then bandwidth is a huge cost, and improving encoding efficiency 10% could have a significant practical difference.
"Immediately after first airing" assumes near real-time encoding and 0 download time. In my experience neither of those are true. If you want and SD rip it might pop up shortly after the episode airs, but HD rips are rarely that fast. And even if it's available 30 seconds after the episode airs it's still likely an hour or better before you can actually watch it since at the end of airing there are exactly 0 bytes on the network for that torrent.
The fact that networks broadcast at different times in different regions is merely an artifact of traditional broadcast technologies. Given the Internet that fact is irrelevant -- there's no reason for the official download to delay for different regions.
I agree that, given today's attitude toward video sharing, it's unlikely for any network to release a useful, torrent-based video distribution system. My point was they *could*, without any DRM/etc., and most people would still watch (or at least have to intentionally skip) the ads even in spite of a player that forces such things, which would be more or less the same as what they get with traditional broadcast/cable TV.
Even assuming that release groups are capturing an east-coast feed and encoding in near real time and release a high-def rip as the first available version, you'd be hard-pressed to get a copy downloaded less than an hour after it aired. The fact the you live on the west coast might be handy in that respect, but it's hardly the rule -- the people who live on the east coast are still waiting at least a couple of hours to get their show, and they won't know if it's a decent copy until they've downloaded a significant portion.
You're also missing the main point -- wouldn't you accept commercials in the stream and/or some reasonable payment for the episode to get it 2+ hours earlier from an official source of known good quality?
Spyware, maybe, depending on your definition. They'd definitely track your downloads and/or viewing depending what you do in the program. Most people would consider that fairly reasonable tracking. It's possible they'd try to track other things, but I'd be surprised that if that was greater risk than spyware/virus/etc. from the average torrent source.
And if they were running torrents you wouldn't be required to use their program to grab the files, it would just be an option that 90% of the population would use and that would benefit even the 10% who wanted to avoid the official app.
First, some of use consider "SD" to be similar to the web from 1996 -- if that's all you an do I guess it's okay, but it's not the preferred format.
Second, while it's possible to get many show from reliable trackers/release groups it's not possible to get *all* shows from those sorts or sources. Pretending that fakes/viruses/low-quality/missing-subtitles/etc. aren't a problem with the general torrent population is like pretending that the problems don't exist on the web at large -- yes, they can be avoided, but unless you're willing to greatly restrict your intake the average person would have trouble getting what the want without running into at least some undesirable files.
Removable media should always be mounted with the "user=xxx" option. You generally can't expect the permissions on removable media to be relevant, and the OS has provisions for just that eventuality.
I've been saying this for years -- would you rather download the known-good episode at high quality directly from the virus-free source immediately when the episode is broadcast via traditional channels, with a few commercials, or download a possibly fake, possible virus-ridden, unknown-quality/language/subtitles copy 2-12 hours later without commercials?
I'm sure some people would still pirate things, but if you gave people an "ABC.com downloader" app that did bittorrent from your own commercial-filled seeds 90% of users would never try anything else. I'd certainly be willing to hit "30 second skip" a few times per episode to have known-good, on-time releases.
I know QuickTime doesn't have the best history (though neither does any other commercial A/V system), but it's now *the* standard for MP4 A/V wrappers and supports the same sorts of features that the built-in video systems on all other platforms do including a wide variety of easy-to-install open-source codecs an an extensible codec/wrapper framework. While it would be nice if there was one universal A/V system such a thing does not exist, and on supported platforms QuickTime is not such a terrible choice.