This is how any free movies will be shown, in order to give the consumer more incentive to subscribe to a premium channel or to order the movie through pay per view.
Remind me again why it's in a broadcast network's interest to encourage its viewers to subscribe to HBO and Showtime?
People probably won't be willing to pay for most of the crap out there once its shown in the theater and everyone realizes it sucks.
Yeah, 'cause look at what a horrible failure movies on videotape and DVD have been. Nobody is willing to pay for that crap.
You don't count. When it's all said and done, you simply don't count.
Not true. If there's another discrepancy between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the electoral vote, the hue and cry to change the electoral college system will be a lot louder than it was in 2000. Your vote still counts toward your favored candidate's overall popular vote total, whether or not it makes any difference to your state's selection of electors.
That's why I voted for one of the major candidates instead of a third-party candidate this year like I have in the past -- I'd much rather have the one I voted for win the popular vote, even if he loses the electoral one.
There is a risk and either the company has to allocate money to a risk fund or acquire insurance to cover defective products.
Or change their manufacturing techniques to make the products less likely to break in the first two years. That's more the point of minimum-warranty laws. The cost will certainly affect the company's bottom line and will be reflected in prices, yes, but it's not a sure thing that the cost will exceed the cost that would have been paid by the company's customers if the law weren't there. (If one out of two widgets breaks, and it raises prices by 5% to change that failure rate to one out of a hundred, then you could argue it's a win for the public.)
I happen to agree that it's better to let people choose their risk level -- if they have ready access to all the pertinent information about the reliability of products from different manufacturers. But companies are not always forthcoming about their products' problems (big surprise) and for a lot of purchases, it's simply not practical to scour the library and/or the Internet doing extensive background research to make a perfectly informed choice.
Even with the law in place, consumers in Europe are free to purchase extended warranties or not, and they're responsible for gathering information about what they're about to buy. Some products are still much better than others. The law simply raises the minimum standard that's expected of companies. It says when you buy a product, you're going to get what you think you're getting, not a piece of junk that'll fall apart as soon as you pull it out of the box.
And even the US has product safety laws, which are really just another aspect of the same thing -- a way of relieving the public as a whole of the requirement to be walking encyclopedias of product knowledge just to function in day-to-day life.
By the middle of the film you see something funny but are so desensitized that it's tough to muster another laugh
I wasn't desensitized; I just thought the first half of the movie was funnier than the second half. There were some good moments here and there later in the movie, but the first half had the whole audience laughing hysterically at least once a minute.
(Slight spoiler, I guess...) I think they overestimated the staying power of the "Hollywood stars are actually conniving villains" joke. The incongruity was funny at first, but the film repeated the same basic gag over and over with only slight variations and it got tiresome.
However, I'm glad I stayed till the end of the credits.
I can only vote for or against the Republicans one day out of the year. The other 364, all I can do about it is talk. Easier doesn't enter into it when it's not election day.
A few dedicated volunteers can produce a news commentary show or a talk show or maybe even a low-rent reality show out of pocket. This is potentially a great way for that kind of content to get distributed -- content that costs basically nothing to create, and that the creators are doing as a labor of love rather than as their day jobs.
Now show me how you'd make "Farscape" or "The Practice" or "Survivor" with this kind of distribution model, where the very nature of the model (the content is available because it doesn't cost lots of people anything to grab it and keep it sitting around on their hard disks) means you have to resort to in-show product placements or "please send us money" captions to recoup any of your production costs. Worse, every one of your legitimate viewers is required to have, and know how to use, the exact tool that enables them to easily get a pirated copy of your show!
In addition, even if you pay for your production with a loan or an investor or whatever, you have to have a heck of a lot of viewers paying you before you can break even. Even at the ridiculously high price of $10 an episode, you'd need over 100,000 paying customers to pay for any but the cheapest modern science-fiction shows -- and you'd need to get them quickly enough so as not to run out of money making new episodes before reaching critical mass. That's a pretty sizable marketing challenge, to say the least, especially when you're competing for that $10 with twenty other shows!
You might conceivably be able to make this work with some kind of subscription model that covers multiple shows, a la HBO, if you had strong enough DRM to keep people from converting your content to DiVX and posting it to Suprnova ten minutes after you released it. But HBO didn't start producing original content in any significant quantity until it had been around for a while and had already built up a sizable customer base. They also have a lineup of content (movies) to keep people sending them money when they aren't showing their original stuff.
I hope I'm wrong! I'd love to be able to vote with my wallet. I buy shows on DVD and I'd be perfectly willing -- eager, even -- to spend the same amount of money on DVDs of brand-new episodes instead of old ones. But I just don't see how you get the initial critical mass you need to make it pay for itself.
As energy storage, maybe. But right now it takes millions of times more energy to produce a unit of antimatter than you get by annihilating that unit afterwards.
Egad. I'm 45 minutes into that video and there is no sign of Cobb or Badnarik yet. But I've learned a lot about how wonderful Freemarketnews.com is, and how awful it is that they aren't on stage with Bush and Kerry.
No, that's not the point of copyright law. Protecting artists is a means, not an end, much as the RIAA might wish otherwise. The point of American copyright laws -- as stated quite unambiguously in the US Constitution -- is to encourage the creation of new work. To achieve that goal, the framers of the Constitution envisioned a bargain between creators and everyone else: creators get the exclusive right to make copies of their work for a limited time, after which the work becomes the property of society as a whole (public domain) and thus available as a starting point for the next generation of artists and authors.
There is no law of nature that stops an idea from spreading from one person to another, even if the idea is in the form of a catchy tune or a long set of words that make up a novel. Copyright law is therefore a restriction of the people's freedom, and it's not in the spirit of the Constitution to restrict the people's freedom without giving them some benefit in return. The "limited time" concept is that benefit: by giving creators extra incentive to create, it says to the people, "Hold off spreading new ideas around for a little while, and there will be more of them for you to play with later." Without the second part of that sentence, the law is simply a restriction of freedom with very little public benefit to make up for it.
That's the theory, anyway. In my opinion current copyright law is already excessive in that a work created the day you're born will not be available to you to build upon until you're on your deathbed.
It is worth observing that the people who argue most strenuously for infinite copyright terms are very rarely the creators of copyrighted works -- they're the publishers of those works. Listen to what the actual artists say and you'll hear a different tune: artists realize that they stand on the shoulders of giants, and that everything they create is based on what's come before. Without that cultural heritage to freely draw upon, creators suffer just as much as everyone else.
People would be forced to think for themselves or find alternative methods of moral guidance. Church congregations of all religions and denominations would increase.
I think I'd rather live in a TV-controlled society than a church-controlled one.
I'm curious how many people who make TV you've actually met. None of the ones I know seem terribly concerned about controlling anyone (well, okay, the directors want to control the actors sometimes.) But maybe I've just met the wrong ones.
What did we do before there was Medicaid and Medicare?
We died younger. Pretty easy to take care of the elderly population without government intervention when there are hardly any old people. Are you suggesting we return to the good old days?
"Line of sight" - a line along which you can see (i.e., an unobstructed line.)
"Line of site" - evidence that what you've written matters so little to you that it's not worth the effort to proofread. You don't care; why should we?
I've just recently seen a situation where a system like this would be a big help, specifically the "users shouldn't have to be root to connect common hardware" part.
My girlfriend has a laptop from work, a large company that enforces a "users don't get admin access to their machines" policy. Fine and dandy, until she brings the laptop over to my house and wants to print something on my printer. Whoops! No device driver for that particular kind of printer in the standard corporate install, and even though I have a CD with the driver sitting right there, we can't install it. So instead she gets to file a request with her company's IT department. It's low priority, so maybe a month from now they'll get around to loading the driver on her machine. (And we'll just keep our fingers crossed that they install the right driver and configure it correctly.)
That won't help you if you're infected by this worm, which does keystroke logging. You can encrypt your password six ways from Sunday and it will still have been intercepted before it ever reaches your encryption software.
Not that I'm against encryption or anything. But it won't necessarily stop your passwords from being stolen.
It's just that there have been made so many "crappy" science fiction movies lately
That's so true. I want to return to the 1930s, when all the science fiction on the big screen was much less crappy. I mean, Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. Intellectually fulfilling stuff, that -- the men were men, the alien women were knockouts, and the bad guys were Chinese.
Well, okay, maybe the 1940s. Yeah. "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "The Invisible Woman." "One Million B.C." That's more like it.
No? How about the 1950s, which gave us dozens of cinematic classics about giant ants/scorpions/spiders on a rampage, along with "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," "Devil Girl From Mars," "Jungle Moon Men," "The Man From Planet X," and "Monster From the Ocean Floor?" (Everyone's from somewhere!)
But surely the 1960s are the good old days. I mean, hey, "Barbarella" -- no cheese there. "Gill Women of Venus." "How To Make a Doll." "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster."
Well, okay. The 1970s gave us "Star Wars," so that's gotta be the oasis in the cinematic desert. Surely that outweighs "Meteor," "Starcrash," "The Giant Spider Invasion," "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," and "Dracula Versus Frankenstein" (damn that Mary Shelley and her interminable sequels!)
The 1980s certainly produced a lot more science fiction movies than earlier decades, thanks to "Star Wars." But were they good movies? Some were. But I also remember "Interface." "Alien From L.A." "Space Raiders." And the inimitable Scott Baio's "Zapped!" -- what a masterpiece that one was.
Then we get to the 1990s. Surely the advent of really good special effects must have led to an explosion of quality in science-fiction filmmaking. But no -- in fact all of your examples of crappy films are from the 1990s.
So when did "lately" start again?
Sturgeon's Law doesn't have an expiration date or a start date, I'm afraid.
Not my experience. I've been a Netflix subscriber since 1999 and, aside from the fact that they removed the "I've sent this movie back, send me the next one now" button, I haven't seen their turnaround time getting any better or worse over the last five years. If I put a movie in my mailbox on Monday morning, I nearly always have the next one in hand on Thursday or Friday.
It's just like the RIAA and the MPAA - when new technology comes out that creates competition for their current business model, they're more inclined to fight the technology, rather than embrace it
Then explain to me why the solar panels on my roof are made by British Petroleum.
The RIAA and MPAA aren't selling a product whose source will eventually run out.
Oil people might differ on when it'll happen, but every oil company CEO knows that eventually we'll run out of easy-to-reach oil and the rest will cost so much to pump out of the ground that it'll be economically impossible to use as a commonplace energy source.
Any oil companies that haven't diversified into other, more sustainable businesses when that happens will be toast, no matter how much lobbying money they spend.
Don't get me wrong, they'll fiercely defend their current business for as long as it's profitable! But there's a limited amount of life left in that business, and they all know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. If there's another discrepancy between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the electoral vote, the hue and cry to change the electoral college system will be a lot louder than it was in 2000. Your vote still counts toward your favored candidate's overall popular vote total, whether or not it makes any difference to your state's selection of electors.
That's why I voted for one of the major candidates instead of a third-party candidate this year like I have in the past -- I'd much rather have the one I voted for win the popular vote, even if he loses the electoral one.
Or change their manufacturing techniques to make the products less likely to break in the first two years. That's more the point of minimum-warranty laws. The cost will certainly affect the company's bottom line and will be reflected in prices, yes, but it's not a sure thing that the cost will exceed the cost that would have been paid by the company's customers if the law weren't there. (If one out of two widgets breaks, and it raises prices by 5% to change that failure rate to one out of a hundred, then you could argue it's a win for the public.)
I happen to agree that it's better to let people choose their risk level -- if they have ready access to all the pertinent information about the reliability of products from different manufacturers. But companies are not always forthcoming about their products' problems (big surprise) and for a lot of purchases, it's simply not practical to scour the library and/or the Internet doing extensive background research to make a perfectly informed choice.
Even with the law in place, consumers in Europe are free to purchase extended warranties or not, and they're responsible for gathering information about what they're about to buy. Some products are still much better than others. The law simply raises the minimum standard that's expected of companies. It says when you buy a product, you're going to get what you think you're getting, not a piece of junk that'll fall apart as soon as you pull it out of the box.
And even the US has product safety laws, which are really just another aspect of the same thing -- a way of relieving the public as a whole of the requirement to be walking encyclopedias of product knowledge just to function in day-to-day life.
I wasn't desensitized; I just thought the first half of the movie was funnier than the second half. There were some good moments here and there later in the movie, but the first half had the whole audience laughing hysterically at least once a minute.
(Slight spoiler, I guess...) I think they overestimated the staying power of the "Hollywood stars are actually conniving villains" joke. The incongruity was funny at first, but the film repeated the same basic gag over and over with only slight variations and it got tiresome.
However, I'm glad I stayed till the end of the credits.
I can only vote for or against the Republicans one day out of the year. The other 364, all I can do about it is talk. Easier doesn't enter into it when it's not election day.
Now show me how you'd make "Farscape" or "The Practice" or "Survivor" with this kind of distribution model, where the very nature of the model (the content is available because it doesn't cost lots of people anything to grab it and keep it sitting around on their hard disks) means you have to resort to in-show product placements or "please send us money" captions to recoup any of your production costs. Worse, every one of your legitimate viewers is required to have, and know how to use, the exact tool that enables them to easily get a pirated copy of your show!
In addition, even if you pay for your production with a loan or an investor or whatever, you have to have a heck of a lot of viewers paying you before you can break even. Even at the ridiculously high price of $10 an episode, you'd need over 100,000 paying customers to pay for any but the cheapest modern science-fiction shows -- and you'd need to get them quickly enough so as not to run out of money making new episodes before reaching critical mass. That's a pretty sizable marketing challenge, to say the least, especially when you're competing for that $10 with twenty other shows!
You might conceivably be able to make this work with some kind of subscription model that covers multiple shows, a la HBO, if you had strong enough DRM to keep people from converting your content to DiVX and posting it to Suprnova ten minutes after you released it. But HBO didn't start producing original content in any significant quantity until it had been around for a while and had already built up a sizable customer base. They also have a lineup of content (movies) to keep people sending them money when they aren't showing their original stuff.
I hope I'm wrong! I'd love to be able to vote with my wallet. I buy shows on DVD and I'd be perfectly willing -- eager, even -- to spend the same amount of money on DVDs of brand-new episodes instead of old ones. But I just don't see how you get the initial critical mass you need to make it pay for itself.
Maybe you shouldn't be wishing for a dimensional rift in the same paragraph you mention Doom 3.
As energy storage, maybe. But right now it takes millions of times more energy to produce a unit of antimatter than you get by annihilating that unit afterwards.
Skip to 48:00 for the actual event.
Yeah right, as if the Democrats could plan that far ahead.
Wrong rodents, but still, gotta hand it to Disney for preparing us for the world to come.
There is no law of nature that stops an idea from spreading from one person to another, even if the idea is in the form of a catchy tune or a long set of words that make up a novel. Copyright law is therefore a restriction of the people's freedom, and it's not in the spirit of the Constitution to restrict the people's freedom without giving them some benefit in return. The "limited time" concept is that benefit: by giving creators extra incentive to create, it says to the people, "Hold off spreading new ideas around for a little while, and there will be more of them for you to play with later." Without the second part of that sentence, the law is simply a restriction of freedom with very little public benefit to make up for it.
That's the theory, anyway. In my opinion current copyright law is already excessive in that a work created the day you're born will not be available to you to build upon until you're on your deathbed.
It is worth observing that the people who argue most strenuously for infinite copyright terms are very rarely the creators of copyrighted works -- they're the publishers of those works. Listen to what the actual artists say and you'll hear a different tune: artists realize that they stand on the shoulders of giants, and that everything they create is based on what's come before. Without that cultural heritage to freely draw upon, creators suffer just as much as everyone else.
I think I'd rather live in a TV-controlled society than a church-controlled one.
I'm curious how many people who make TV you've actually met. None of the ones I know seem terribly concerned about controlling anyone (well, okay, the directors want to control the actors sometimes.) But maybe I've just met the wrong ones.
So they'll save lots of money on aftershave and electric razors.
All hail our new cleanshaven robot masters.
So "G" is the new "Mc"?
We died younger. Pretty easy to take care of the elderly population without government intervention when there are hardly any old people. Are you suggesting we return to the good old days?
Coming next presidential term: "The Axis of Spam." You heard it here first.
"Site" - a location.
"Sight" - something visual.
"Line of sight" - a line along which you can see (i.e., an unobstructed line.)
"Line of site" - evidence that what you've written matters so little to you that it's not worth the effort to proofread. You don't care; why should we?
My girlfriend has a laptop from work, a large company that enforces a "users don't get admin access to their machines" policy. Fine and dandy, until she brings the laptop over to my house and wants to print something on my printer. Whoops! No device driver for that particular kind of printer in the standard corporate install, and even though I have a CD with the driver sitting right there, we can't install it. So instead she gets to file a request with her company's IT department. It's low priority, so maybe a month from now they'll get around to loading the driver on her machine. (And we'll just keep our fingers crossed that they install the right driver and configure it correctly.)
Not that I'm against encryption or anything. But it won't necessarily stop your passwords from being stolen.
That's so true. I want to return to the 1930s, when all the science fiction on the big screen was much less crappy. I mean, Flash Gordon. Buck Rogers. Intellectually fulfilling stuff, that -- the men were men, the alien women were knockouts, and the bad guys were Chinese.
Well, okay, maybe the 1940s. Yeah. "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "The Invisible Woman." "One Million B.C." That's more like it.
No? How about the 1950s, which gave us dozens of cinematic classics about giant ants/scorpions/spiders on a rampage, along with "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," "Devil Girl From Mars," "Jungle Moon Men," "The Man From Planet X," and "Monster From the Ocean Floor?" (Everyone's from somewhere!)
But surely the 1960s are the good old days. I mean, hey, "Barbarella" -- no cheese there. "Gill Women of Venus." "How To Make a Doll." "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster."
Well, okay. The 1970s gave us "Star Wars," so that's gotta be the oasis in the cinematic desert. Surely that outweighs "Meteor," "Starcrash," "The Giant Spider Invasion," "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," and "Dracula Versus Frankenstein" (damn that Mary Shelley and her interminable sequels!)
The 1980s certainly produced a lot more science fiction movies than earlier decades, thanks to "Star Wars." But were they good movies? Some were. But I also remember "Interface." "Alien From L.A." "Space Raiders." And the inimitable Scott Baio's "Zapped!" -- what a masterpiece that one was.
Then we get to the 1990s. Surely the advent of really good special effects must have led to an explosion of quality in science-fiction filmmaking. But no -- in fact all of your examples of crappy films are from the 1990s.
So when did "lately" start again?
Sturgeon's Law doesn't have an expiration date or a start date, I'm afraid.
Not my experience. I've been a Netflix subscriber since 1999 and, aside from the fact that they removed the "I've sent this movie back, send me the next one now" button, I haven't seen their turnaround time getting any better or worse over the last five years. If I put a movie in my mailbox on Monday morning, I nearly always have the next one in hand on Thursday or Friday.
Dammit, now my keyboard is all sticky.
Then explain to me why the solar panels on my roof are made by British Petroleum.
The RIAA and MPAA aren't selling a product whose source will eventually run out.
Oil people might differ on when it'll happen, but every oil company CEO knows that eventually we'll run out of easy-to-reach oil and the rest will cost so much to pump out of the ground that it'll be economically impossible to use as a commonplace energy source.
Any oil companies that haven't diversified into other, more sustainable businesses when that happens will be toast, no matter how much lobbying money they spend.
Don't get me wrong, they'll fiercely defend their current business for as long as it's profitable! But there's a limited amount of life left in that business, and they all know it.