Stop advertising of all forms, read Consumer Reports instead. Slash marketing budgets of all major companies, lower prices on retail products. Consumer has more personal wealth, consumer then gives said wealth to the Media company in exchange for hassle-free entertainment.
This could very easily kill off broadcast television for drama. Because viewers would only want to pay for what they actually wanted to watch and probably prefer to pay the production company for a download/DVD/video tape subscription. You'd then get episodes as they were complete. So that they could watch it when they wanted to watch, rather than having to wait for a local broadcaster to be bothered to show it.
If you make it too good as content, the message is lost (there's a lovely commercial on UK TV just now featuring cat herding as a metaphor for some service, but I'm damned if I know what service, or who it's for).
There is also the BT ad featuring a singing telephone, which isn't what the ad is selling, but quite a few people would probably want to buy one.
However, if they ran six different commercials, even cheesy ones, you get some novelty value. Twist endings, different tunes, even the same scene but with different actors, anything to make you go "Hey! That's not the same as the last one!"
This is sometimes done, but usually with only 2-3 different edits and/or actors.
Or even (gasp) live commercials. What, we don't have the technology to do that any more?
Another possibility would be some kind of interactive advert. Instant feedback on how many people have actually watched it and an incentive for viewers to want to see the next part.
Bollocks, we just don't want to do it, because it cuts out the dickweeds in Armani suits who have to run it past focus groups and debate endlessly on whether it's "on message" or not, all the time missing (or avoiding, rather) the point that we just don't want to watch the same advert more than once.
Maybe they could take a hint from The Simpsons/Futurama where every title sequence is different.
Im not going to buy anything which capt. Archer or "Tucker" is promoting. T'pal on the other hand...
Presumably T'Pol, though there is still the issue of why you'd want something endorsed by an alien.
i don't think advertising will make the show any worse. but hey it's ST and and a bad script is required, and amusing.
Especially if end up with them using warp cores provided by Enron. Sticking the names of real companies and products into drama can make it look very dated, especially if those companies or products cease to exist (including simply through changing their name). You also limit this to trans-national companies who use the same trading name world wide and call their products the same thing everywhere.
Think of what they could do by going to letterbox format and then using "banner advertisements" in the bands above and/or below.
Then they will moan when someone starts selling devices to simply mask off parts of the picture. Or even more low tech, sticks a piece of card over the front of their TV.
Networks are *STUPID*. If viewers can skip commercials, who cares? More people will watch TV, so ratings will increase and that's what network wants.
Because what they charge the advertisers is based around ratings, knowing that the ads are unlikely to be seen means that the advertisers would not want to pay as much money. Why they have kicked up such a fuss about this, when people have been using fast forward on VCRs for years, let alone chenging channels, getting drinks, going to the toilet, etc is anyone's guess. Maybe because it's "digital" or some such nonsense.
Advertisement blocks can be replaced by advertising during a show. In a show, the actors could wear certain clothing, use certain cars, eat certain foods.
There are plenty of things you cannot do with product placement. Especially if you have something set in the past or future. Let alone that you cannot advertise specific promotions and if your sponsor goes the way of Pan Am you have no revenue from repeat showings. The advantage of advertisments which are not part of the actual programme is that they can always be current when the broadcast is made. Even if the programme itself is decades old (or was made several thousand miles away). This is also one problem broadcasters have with programmes being recorded let alone transfered around the planet by the time things get watched the advertising may be either out of date or utterly irrelevent (viewer could not buy the product or service even if they wanted to.) Also product placement will only even make sense to large (especially trans-national) business. By using it broadcasters have just thrown away most of their potential advertisers... What's needed is some kind of system where the PVR never records adverts in the first place. But can generate its own ad breaks, pulling material either from an online source or ads only broadcast channel. Where each ad comes with some kind of header which specifies start and end dates for running the advert, metrics for running the ad including what type of programme is being watched and current location of the PVR.
The point here is that these *aren't* CD's. It may look like a CD, smell like a CD, and quack like a CD, but these -things- don't conform to the Compact Disc standard. If they're still putting a Compact Disc logo on these things, I think consumers have a right to be torqued.
Or, regardless of the logo, if retailers are selling them as regular CDs or even intermingled with CDs.
Seriously, though, you're right... this is just crappy firmware. Either that or somebody is deliberately leaving security holes. I don't know which is worse.
This isn't that different from Microsoft producting software which is "virus friendly". Even though they wrote Outlook Express to work that way the actions of virus writers are not dismissed out of hand. Another analogy would be the likes of "Code Red" crashing Cisco routers. But we are probably going to see another round of double standards with the record companies avoiding being treated the same was as "evil hackers".
If some iMac owner accidently puts one of these CD's in the drive and send the thing to kingdom come, didn't Sony just damage their computer with malicious intent? C'mon, Sony has to know that the CD's are going to do this. Can we say class action lawsuit?
I though such lawsuits were only applicable to civil matters. Whereas interfering with operation of computers is in many places a criminal matter. This isn't veru different from a virus which spreads through MS Outlook (Express). Even though the user may have done something silly that does not exclude the author of the malware.
Difference being that the CD(tm) has a defined format, a CD reader is as designed to read other similar discs as much as it's designed to read a cheddar cheese slice inserted to it. And if I insert cheddar cheese, I don't really expect the CD player to come up with a nice little box telling me it can 't read cheddar cheese.
Except that a slice of cheese does not have the same physical properties as a CD. A better question would be "does it lock up if you insert a DVD?"
Police states are generally bad because of the baggage that comes along with them. Abuse of power, lack of freedoms, what not. They aren't bad because of the two words "police state".
There is the fundermental problem of "who watches the watchers?" It would be utterly incredible for corruption not to appear very rapidly in such a situation. About the only credible way to avoid this is something like David Brin's idea where information about anybody is available to anyone. Anyone can become a "watcher", but there is no special watcher class immune from being watched over.
Um, no, sorry. All of formula 1 has been using 'semi-automatic' transmissions (those wheel mounted shifters) for quite a while. Now they are moving to fully automatic transmissions, with some teams (like ferrari) already using them.
Assuming FIA will allow them to use it. They have been know to change the rules if they don't feel the balance between the cars and driver skill is right.
They mention that in 1953, the BWM 502 had 26 control and indicator functions. In the late 90's, the 7-series had over 70 functions, with as many indicators, and over 35 control elements (buttons, etc.)
Something *had* to be done to reduce the complexity of the cockpit.
Problem is that this kind of interface dosn't make the interface simpler, if anything it makes it more confusing.
While driving down the road you do not want the person in the car next to you trying to figure out which of the 40 buttons on the dash controls what.
Would you prefer them messing with some kind of hierarchical GUI first trying to find if the control they want even exists?
Now about the only thing I didn't like was the stinking iDrive system. It just plain sucks!! It way to hard to control things that I used to be able to push a button and do. Like surfing through three levels of menus just to turn on the defroster. Stupid.
This was already mentioned in Risks digest a couple of months back. It appears to follow the same idea as computer monitors, that of avoiding having many controls with a single obvious purpose in favour of a few controls with indeterminate purpose.
Luckily this thing controls non-critical functions, I could see lawsuits brought if it controlled the gear selection or traction system.
This type of interface has been used for controlling critical functions. Not in a car, but in an airliner cockpit. Resulted in a plane crashing because the pilot missed the indicator to tell if the numbers ment "descend at X thousand feet per minute" or "descend at an angle of X degrees".
That's funny. Market forces are the reason so much mass-market software is crap now. Customers preferred more features, mostly idiotic bells and whistles, and the illusion of tech support, to product quality. OK, now that there's a monopoly situation, it's not just the market in the driver's seat anymore, at least on the desktop.
Specifically in a monopoly situation the customer is not in the driving seat at all!
But it was still a relatively free market when consumers had the choice between feature-laden dreck and more tightly-focused products with better quality.
When was this time? That certainly hasn't been for several years.
You're pretty much on target here. The people McCarthy was hounding were communists. They supported a brutal and murderous regime in the USSR and later China.
Problem is that plenty of people in the US have supported all sorts of brutal, murderous and undemocratic regimes, with out any similar kind of fuss being made about their views. This support includes several billion US dollers per year. AFAIK US communists were never in any kind of position to provide meaningful funding to the USSR and China.
McCarthy's open attacks on Constitution protections is enough to make me oppose him an his methods.
Who said America was a Democracy? Last time I checked, it was a Republic. The Will of the people decides what is right and wrong in a Republic with strong Democratic ties. If the majority of the public finds that there is no place for Communism in America, then policy should be made on that Will.
The US is a constitutional federal republic, with a written constitution. That written constitution, explicitally prevents the state rendering any minority opinion against the law. The only thing which can mean "there is no place for Communism in America" is a constitutional ammendment.
Of course people are free to hold their political opinions. However the Communist Party in the USA was not a legitimate political organization in the 1930's - 1950's since it received secret funding from the USSR.
And we all know the US would never consider anything similar... Let alone have a US funded entity overthrow a democratic government.
A majority of the people accused by McCarthy of Communism were in fact registered, card-carrying Communists.
So what? These people had every right to do so. The real irony is that McCarthy attacked people for being "unamerican" by himself attacking the US Consitution. Similarly whilst Hoover was having the FBI indulge his paranoia organised crime bosses were laughing.
The biggest reason I can see is to help cut down on spam. If people try spamming through RR, the recipient will KNOW it came from a RR server, and know where to complain.
But they could just as easily add something like "X-Complaints-To:" or "X-ISP:", etc. Rather than deciding that RFC 850 dosn't quite apply to them. The header is for identification of the poster's organisation. Rather than whatever ISP their employer may use...
Actually, they considered that. After doing research into the meanings of the Skull and Crossbones is that of Adam's body (Adam and Eve/Christanity).
It originally meant peace. The crossbones were recently turned (1500's) to the X it is now. Before they were the "t" (aka cross).
Another symbol where the meaning has changed very recently is the swastika.
If you think about it, using OSS doesn't guarantee that nobody is cheating. Sure, you have the sources, but how do you know that the sources you have are the ones actually running on the machine?
Because "you" (being the candidate, the press or any other interested party) can feed the data into a copy of the program. This isn't a program to count ballots it's to assign seats using a proportional representation algorithm. In order to skew the actual count itself would need a massive conspiracy amongst the counters.
I would argue quite the contary. If the software is open source, it is all the easier for the corrupt to modify the software in their favor, and never release the changes to the public.
In which case it isn't really "open source" in the first place. Anyway elections, at least in democratic parts of the world, often go to great pains to minimise the number of people who have a direct interest in the results conducting the count and to ensure that the entire process is open to the scruitiny of any interested party.
The rest of the world would be looking at the original source, while the corrupt code is running on the server.
Any interested party can quite easily feed the data into their copy of the program. If you have a situation where every candidate and the press get result A and the "official" version comes up with result B then it will be rather obvious what is going on.
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Stop advertising of all forms, read Consumer Reports instead. Slash marketing budgets of all major companies, lower prices on retail products. Consumer has more personal wealth, consumer then gives said wealth to the Media company in exchange for hassle-free entertainment.
This could very easily kill off broadcast television for drama. Because viewers would only want to pay for what they actually wanted to watch and probably prefer to pay the production company for a download/DVD/video tape subscription. You'd then get episodes as they were complete. So that they could watch it when they wanted to watch, rather than having to wait for a local broadcaster to be bothered to show it.
If you make it too good as content, the message is lost (there's a lovely commercial on UK TV just now featuring cat herding as a metaphor for some service, but I'm damned if I know what service, or who it's for).
There is also the BT ad featuring a singing telephone, which isn't what the ad is selling, but quite a few people would probably want to buy one.
However, if they ran six different commercials, even cheesy ones, you get some novelty value. Twist endings, different tunes, even the same scene but with different actors, anything to make you go "Hey! That's not the same as the last one!"
This is sometimes done, but usually with only 2-3 different edits and/or actors.
Or even (gasp) live commercials. What, we don't have the technology to do that any more?
Another possibility would be some kind of interactive advert. Instant feedback on how many people have actually watched it and an incentive for viewers to want to see the next part.
Bollocks, we just don't want to do it, because it cuts out the dickweeds in Armani suits who have to run it past focus groups and debate endlessly on whether it's "on message" or not, all the time missing (or avoiding, rather) the point that we just don't want to watch the same advert more than once.
Maybe they could take a hint from The Simpsons/Futurama where every title sequence is different.
Im not going to buy anything which capt. Archer or "Tucker" is promoting. T'pal on the other hand...
Presumably T'Pol, though there is still the issue of why you'd want something endorsed by an alien.
i don't think advertising will make the show any worse. but hey it's ST and and a bad script is required, and amusing.
Especially if end up with them using warp cores provided by Enron.
Sticking the names of real companies and products into drama can make it look very dated, especially if those companies or products cease to exist (including simply through changing their name). You also limit this to trans-national companies who use the same trading name world wide and call their products the same thing everywhere.
Think of what they could do by going to letterbox format and then using "banner advertisements" in the bands above and/or below.
Then they will moan when someone starts selling devices to simply mask off parts of the picture. Or even more low tech, sticks a piece of card over the front of their TV.
Networks are *STUPID*. If viewers can skip commercials, who cares? More people will watch TV, so ratings will increase and that's what network wants.
Because what they charge the advertisers is based around ratings, knowing that the ads are unlikely to be seen means that the advertisers would not want to pay as much money.
Why they have kicked up such a fuss about this, when people have been using fast forward on VCRs for years, let alone chenging channels, getting drinks, going to the toilet, etc is anyone's guess. Maybe because it's "digital" or some such nonsense.
Advertisement blocks can be replaced by advertising during a show. In a show, the actors could wear certain clothing, use certain cars, eat certain foods.
There are plenty of things you cannot do with product placement. Especially if you have something set in the past or future. Let alone that you cannot advertise specific promotions and if your sponsor goes the way of Pan Am you have no revenue from repeat showings.
The advantage of advertisments which are not part of the actual programme is that they can always be current when the broadcast is made. Even if the programme itself is decades old (or was made several thousand miles away). This is also one problem broadcasters have with programmes being recorded let alone transfered around the planet by the time things get watched the advertising may be either out of date or utterly irrelevent (viewer could not buy the product or service even if they wanted to.)
Also product placement will only even make sense to large (especially trans-national) business. By using it broadcasters have just thrown away most of their potential advertisers...
What's needed is some kind of system where the PVR never records adverts in the first place. But can generate its own ad breaks, pulling material either from an online source or ads only broadcast channel. Where each ad comes with some kind of header which specifies start and end dates for running the advert, metrics for running the ad including what type of programme is being watched and current location of the PVR.
The point here is that these *aren't* CD's. It may look like a CD, smell like a CD, and quack like a CD, but these -things- don't conform to the Compact Disc standard. If they're still putting a Compact Disc logo on these things, I think consumers have a right to be torqued.
Or, regardless of the logo, if retailers are selling them as regular CDs or even intermingled with CDs.
Seriously, though, you're right... this is just crappy firmware. Either that or somebody is deliberately leaving security holes. I don't know which is worse.
This isn't that different from Microsoft producting software which is "virus friendly". Even though they wrote Outlook Express to work that way the actions of virus writers are not dismissed out of hand.
Another analogy would be the likes of "Code Red" crashing Cisco routers.
But we are probably going to see another round of double standards with the record companies avoiding being treated the same was as "evil hackers".
If some iMac owner accidently puts one of these CD's in the drive and send the thing to kingdom come, didn't Sony just damage their computer with malicious intent? C'mon, Sony has to know that the CD's are going to do this. Can we say class action lawsuit?
I though such lawsuits were only applicable to civil matters. Whereas interfering with operation of computers is in many places a criminal matter. This isn't veru different from a virus which spreads through MS Outlook (Express). Even though the user may have done something silly that does not exclude the author of the malware.
Difference being that the CD(tm) has a defined format, a CD reader is as designed to read other similar discs as much as it's designed to read a cheddar cheese slice inserted to it. And if I insert cheddar cheese, I don't really expect the CD player to come up with a nice little box telling me it can 't read cheddar cheese.
Except that a slice of cheese does not have the same physical properties as a CD. A better question would be "does it lock up if you insert a DVD?"
Police states are generally bad because of the baggage that comes along with them. Abuse of power, lack of freedoms, what not. They aren't bad because of the two words "police state".
There is the fundermental problem of "who watches the watchers?" It would be utterly incredible for corruption not to appear very rapidly in such a situation. About the only credible way to avoid this is something like David Brin's idea where information about anybody is available to anyone. Anyone can become a "watcher", but there is no special watcher class immune from being watched over.
Um, no, sorry. All of formula 1 has been using 'semi-automatic' transmissions (those wheel mounted shifters) for quite a while. Now they are moving to fully automatic transmissions, with some teams (like ferrari) already using them.
Assuming FIA will allow them to use it. They have been know to change the rules if they don't feel the balance between the cars and driver skill is right.
They mention that in 1953, the BWM 502 had 26 control and indicator functions. In the late 90's, the 7-series had over 70 functions, with as many indicators, and over 35 control elements (buttons, etc.)
Something *had* to be done to reduce the complexity of the cockpit.
Problem is that this kind of interface dosn't make the interface simpler, if anything it makes it more confusing.
While driving down the road you do not want the person in the car next to you trying to figure out which of the 40 buttons on the dash controls what.
Would you prefer them messing with some kind of hierarchical GUI first trying to find if the control they want even exists?
Now about the only thing I didn't like was the stinking iDrive system. It just plain sucks!! It way to hard to control things that I used to be able to push a button and do. Like surfing through three levels of menus just to turn on the defroster. Stupid.
This was already mentioned in Risks digest a couple of months back. It appears to follow the same idea as computer monitors, that of avoiding having many controls with a single obvious purpose in favour of a few controls with indeterminate purpose.
Luckily this thing controls non-critical functions, I could see lawsuits brought if it controlled the gear selection or traction system.
This type of interface has been used for controlling critical functions. Not in a car, but in an airliner cockpit. Resulted in a plane crashing because the pilot missed the indicator to tell if the numbers ment "descend at X thousand feet per minute" or "descend at an angle of X degrees".
That's funny. Market forces are the reason so much mass-market software is crap now. Customers preferred more features, mostly idiotic bells and whistles, and the illusion of tech support, to product quality.
OK, now that there's a monopoly situation, it's not just the market in the driver's seat anymore, at least on the desktop.
Specifically in a monopoly situation the customer is not in the driving seat at all!
But it was still a relatively free market when consumers had the choice between feature-laden dreck and more tightly-focused products with better quality.
When was this time? That certainly hasn't been for several years.
But it is quite characteristic of those who oppose Open Source to label all supporting evidence as "anecdotal" and pooh-pooh it.
Quite possibly at the same time as using anecdotal "evidence" to show the merits of some proprietary platform or other.
You're pretty much on target here. The people McCarthy was hounding were communists. They supported a brutal and murderous regime in the USSR and later China.
Problem is that plenty of people in the US have supported all sorts of brutal, murderous and undemocratic regimes, with out any similar kind of fuss being made about their views. This support includes several billion US dollers per year. AFAIK US communists were never in any kind of position to provide meaningful funding to the USSR and China.
McCarthy's open attacks on Constitution protections is enough to make me oppose him an his methods.
You don't defend something by destroying it.
Who said America was a Democracy? Last time I checked, it was a Republic. The Will of the people decides what is right and wrong in a Republic with strong Democratic ties. If the majority of the public finds that there is no place for Communism in America, then policy should be made on that Will.
The US is a constitutional federal republic, with a written constitution. That written constitution, explicitally prevents the state rendering any minority opinion against the law. The only thing which can mean "there is no place for Communism in America" is a constitutional ammendment.
Of course people are free to hold their political opinions. However the Communist Party in the USA was not a legitimate political organization in the 1930's - 1950's since it received secret funding from the USSR.
And we all know the US would never consider anything similar...
Let alone have a US funded entity overthrow a democratic government.
A majority of the people accused by McCarthy of Communism were in fact registered, card-carrying Communists.
So what? These people had every right to do so. The real irony is that McCarthy attacked people for being "unamerican" by himself attacking the US Consitution.
Similarly whilst Hoover was having the FBI indulge his paranoia organised crime bosses were laughing.
The biggest reason I can see is to help cut down on spam. If people try spamming through RR, the recipient will KNOW it came from a RR server, and know where to complain.
But they could just as easily add something like "X-Complaints-To:" or "X-ISP:", etc. Rather than deciding that RFC 850 dosn't quite apply to them. The header is for identification of the poster's organisation. Rather than whatever ISP their employer may use...
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this a perfectly correct implementation of organization? Whose NNTP server was used?
This header predates NNTP
Actually, they considered that. After doing research into the meanings of the Skull and Crossbones is that of Adam's body (Adam and Eve/Christanity).
It originally meant peace. The crossbones were recently turned (1500's) to the X it is now. Before they were the "t" (aka cross).
Another symbol where the meaning has changed very recently is the swastika.
If you think about it, using OSS doesn't guarantee that nobody is cheating. Sure, you have the sources, but how do you know that the sources you have are the ones actually running on the machine?
Because "you" (being the candidate, the press or any other interested party) can feed the data into a copy of the program. This isn't a program to count ballots it's to assign seats using a proportional representation algorithm. In order to skew the actual count itself would need a massive conspiracy amongst the counters.
I would argue quite the contary. If the software is open source, it is all the easier for the corrupt to modify the software in their favor, and never release the changes to the public.
In which case it isn't really "open source" in the first place. Anyway elections, at least in democratic parts of the world, often go to great pains to minimise the number of people who have a direct interest in the results conducting the count and to ensure that the entire process is open to the scruitiny of any interested party.
The rest of the world would be looking at the original source, while the corrupt code is running on the server.
Any interested party can quite easily feed the data into their copy of the program. If you have a situation where every candidate and the press get result A and the "official" version comes up with result B then it will be rather obvious what is going on.