Re:Why do we still have commercials anyway?
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
You made the distinction yourself: Service vs. Content.
The commercials are there to pay the producers, actors, cameramen, etc., and to pay for your local TV station to maintain their antenna to send the signal, free of charge to you, to your television.
My local cable company, though, must pay to maintain the lines they put down throughout the city, not to mention the recent upgrade to fibre optics, and they must pay the local stations and other cable-only stations for the right to rebroadcast their signals. They don't see a cent of the money paid by advertisers, so they must generate their revenue from somewhere else, and the would be the monthly cable service fee. For this (albiet high) fee, I get many times the stations I would be able to receive otherwise via over-the-air methods, better picture quality, and other options not available otherwise, such as pay-per-view availability.
Liken this to your internet service. I pay a monthly fee to be able to connect to the internet. I also have to look at banner ads on the pages that I view which website operators place to help pay for their pages. Am I paying twice for the same thing here? I don't think so.
The obvious response would be to say that if you really feel that you're being ripped off, then cancel your DirecTV service and simply watch television over the air for free. What you really need to learn is that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and that if you want better service that what is traditionaly free, you're going to have to pay for it.
(BTW, none of this precludes the fact that Dvorak is still an idiot.)
"The thing that really upsets me is that little quote, "We anticipate the images also will be of interest to parents and employers." That is awful. And I feel that it probably accounts to blackmail. It might as well say, "Students, if you join in a celebration, or wander outside to see whats going on, we'll blacklist you." "
Except they weren't celebration. They were rioting after Purdue lost to Notre Dame. Just another case of "our team lost, so let's set the town on fire" that seems to be the trend lately across all levels of sports.
Oh I could just see the wireless speaker system now...
During the parade, some smartass with a laptop and a wireless connection taps in, and all of a sudden the parade watchers are listening to:
ALL YOUR MOUSE ARE BELONG TO US!
Junkmail Telemarketing
on
Paper Phones
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· Score: 1
I can see it now. Eventually these will be cheap enough to insert into magazines or into junk mail. Then, just as you're about to yank it out and throw it away, the phone autodials a telemarketer to sell you something. Ugh.
True, there is no "giving to the poor" here, but that's not quite the argument. It that Robin Hood was breaking the law by stealing from the righ to give to the poor, but one can argue that even though it was technically illegal, it was considered a noble thing to do, and was relatively harmless. I don't recall ol' Robin ever killing anyone, and I'm sure that the money a traveling nobleman lost was just a small dent in his fortune. And all this was done to protest the high taxes imposed on the people of England.
In the case of crackers, defacing a website is relatively harmless, and just mildly irritating to a big corporation as they may lose a few hours worth of sales while their IT people plug up the holes and fix the site.
Where I thing this falls apart, though, is that there really is no noble cause here that I can see. I think that most crackers do it just for the thrill or to see if they can, not because they have any real cause to support.
I read this somewhere. MacCentral, maybe? It mentioned that with the new multitasking features of OSX, the DVD player can't get as much processor time as it needs for adequate playback quality. Which sounds like it means that a DVD player does exist, it's just not ready for primetime yet.
I wouldn't have missed it anyway. That's what I've got a real DVD player for, and as a backup, a PSX2.
Giving someone a ticket for reckless driving won't be much of a comfort to me if I'm sitting in the hospital in traction because I just got run off the road by some jerk checking their email while driving.
I do agree that this is probably something that most of us just don't need. The people that think that they can't live without something like that are probably the same people that shouldn't be driving cars anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
You made the distinction yourself: Service vs. Content.
The commercials are there to pay the producers, actors, cameramen, etc., and to pay for your local TV station to maintain their antenna to send the signal, free of charge to you, to your television.
My local cable company, though, must pay to maintain the lines they put down throughout the city, not to mention the recent upgrade to fibre optics, and they must pay the local stations and other cable-only stations for the right to rebroadcast their signals. They don't see a cent of the money paid by advertisers, so they must generate their revenue from somewhere else, and the would be the monthly cable service fee. For this (albiet high) fee, I get many times the stations I would be able to receive otherwise via over-the-air methods, better picture quality, and other options not available otherwise, such as pay-per-view availability.
Liken this to your internet service. I pay a monthly fee to be able to connect to the internet. I also have to look at banner ads on the pages that I view which website operators place to help pay for their pages. Am I paying twice for the same thing here? I don't think so.
The obvious response would be to say that if you really feel that you're being ripped off, then cancel your DirecTV service and simply watch television over the air for free. What you really need to learn is that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and that if you want better service that what is traditionaly free, you're going to have to pay for it.
(BTW, none of this precludes the fact that Dvorak is still an idiot.)
"The thing that really upsets me is that little quote, "We anticipate the images also will be of interest to parents and employers." That is awful. And I feel that it probably accounts to blackmail. It might as well say, "Students, if you join in a celebration, or wander outside to see whats going on, we'll blacklist you." " Except they weren't celebration. They were rioting after Purdue lost to Notre Dame. Just another case of "our team lost, so let's set the town on fire" that seems to be the trend lately across all levels of sports.
Oh I could just see the wireless speaker system now... During the parade, some smartass with a laptop and a wireless connection taps in, and all of a sudden the parade watchers are listening to: ALL YOUR MOUSE ARE BELONG TO US!
I can see it now. Eventually these will be cheap enough to insert into magazines or into junk mail. Then, just as you're about to yank it out and throw it away, the phone autodials a telemarketer to sell you something. Ugh.
True, there is no "giving to the poor" here, but that's not quite the argument. It that Robin Hood was breaking the law by stealing from the righ to give to the poor, but one can argue that even though it was technically illegal, it was considered a noble thing to do, and was relatively harmless. I don't recall ol' Robin ever killing anyone, and I'm sure that the money a traveling nobleman lost was just a small dent in his fortune. And all this was done to protest the high taxes imposed on the people of England. In the case of crackers, defacing a website is relatively harmless, and just mildly irritating to a big corporation as they may lose a few hours worth of sales while their IT people plug up the holes and fix the site. Where I thing this falls apart, though, is that there really is no noble cause here that I can see. I think that most crackers do it just for the thrill or to see if they can, not because they have any real cause to support.
I read this somewhere. MacCentral, maybe? It mentioned that with the new multitasking features of OSX, the DVD player can't get as much processor time as it needs for adequate playback quality. Which sounds like it means that a DVD player does exist, it's just not ready for primetime yet. I wouldn't have missed it anyway. That's what I've got a real DVD player for, and as a backup, a PSX2.
Isthay isay absolutelyay illarioushay! Onglay ivelay Apsternay!
Giving someone a ticket for reckless driving won't be much of a comfort to me if I'm sitting in the hospital in traction because I just got run off the road by some jerk checking their email while driving. I do agree that this is probably something that most of us just don't need. The people that think that they can't live without something like that are probably the same people that shouldn't be driving cars anyway.