You may well think that's a troll, but it's a pretty good idea, and in fact we do that (except that we just put the flyers out instead of handing them out), along with libraries and arts centers. And I use postcards rather than flyers; they're more expensive but they look more professional.
I think that's actually the real point of this overall thread: how do you find places where you can reach your target market, and just your target market? People don't object (for the most part) to the sort of visual clutter the world gets from me dropping my flyers off in places (where I ask permission to do so). All of that is better than telemarketing.
But it requires a lot of money, effort, and creativity. I spend about a quarter on each postcard. If I don't get a response rate of at least 1 in 400, I've lost money on the printing.
We have a web site, but I doubt that everybody who could be interested has seen it. Nobody says, "Gee, I'd like to see if anybody is performing Richard III in the area". Or even, "Hey, I'd like to do something other than watch videotapes tonight. What shall I do?" Most probably never consider live theater, and I'd dearly love to be able to talk to them just at that moment when they're interested. If they choose to look for us, we're easy to find, but many of them wouldn't consider looking for us without a nudge.
Telemarketing might raise their awareness of such things, at least put it on their radar. There are other, better, less annoying techniques, but in general I challenge the assumption that just because you put it in the Yellow Pages or on the internet, those who are interested will come in droves.
I'd be only too happy to have www.rudemechanicals.com slashdotted. Give it a try. I'd love to be in a position to turn slashdotters away from a performance.
Clearly word-of-mouth is most effective, but just as clearly if I weren't subsidizing this business, we'd never support ourselves long enough for word-of-mouth to function.
There are other techniques, and it is unfortunate that some of those that should be available to me simply aren't effective right where I am. The local newspaper doesn't seem to have any interest in theater, and people don't read it anyway. Too bad, and it means I just need to get more creative. Besides, although a local newspaper should review theater, many other businesses don't get even that much free advertising.
Many slashdotters seem to consider advertising-free TV to be their right as well.
Consent is part of it, but most people seem to find that there's some sort of trade-off. Most people accept the fact that their snail mail is subsidized by the bulk mailers, and are willing to sort through junk mail because there's relatively little of it. I get more junk mail than real mail every day, but it's not swamped like spam. And it's not as irritating as a phone call because the phone call, unlike spam and junk mail, demands my attention *right now*.
That's the reason I prefer my friends email me rather than call me most of the time. Do you really need my immediate attention, or can it wait?
Many spammers are clearly fraudulent and an obvious waste of time. If you have to disguise what you're advertising to slip it in past my spam filter, it's clear that you are violating the intent of the laws, and it's only a matter of time before the laws change to exclude what you do (if they haven't already).
Many telemarketers are in the same category, but not all. I wonder if people would object to spam and telemarketing as much if they were more targeted and less fraudulent. As it is, the clearly fraudulent and the potentially useful are just as irritating, and therefore just as well disposed of.
I mostly support you on this, but not quite completely. I am the owner of two small businesses, and a small business finds it very hard to get the word out about its existence. If you don't know it's out there, you won't go looking for it.
Everybody knows AT&T, and as far as I'm concerned they should pay the maximum penalty plus an idiot tax for doing precisely what they've been told not to do. But I wish I could find a way to get in contact with the many people who would probably come see the plays that my theater troupe puts on if they only knew it existed.
I'm not trying to claim that I'm going to try telemarketing for that; I wouldn't even if it would be cost-effective. I'm not even proposing that telemarketing should be allowed at all. It's an obvious violation of privacy, as well as being obnoxious, and if obnoxious is all you've got, give up. I'm just challenging one of your assumptions, that "I'll come to you to find out what you have to offer."
For myself, I'll keep trying the old-fashioned way: putting on good theater and hoping that eventually positive word of mouth will bring people out to see it, and being grateful that I'm not expecting to make a living off of it.
(And passing up the crass opportunity to get myself modded down by putting the URL for my theater group on Slashdot. Not that I won't get modded down anyway for explaining, if not excusing, some telemarketers.)
Anti-competetive, pretty much, yeah. I don't think that any lawyers would disagree with you there. Copyright is a monopoly, by definition.
The intent of copyright is to grant a monopoly to encourage people to create and innovate. Whether that's a good idea, and whether the implementation of that idea in US law is effective, I'll leave to the many other discussions already on slashdot.
Anti-capitalist I'd disagree with. Copyright favors those with capital. Again, that may be self-defeating, but the intent is certainly to reward those who create intellectual property (= capital).
Today, a basic TV-over-computer setup costs at least $600 for a 17" "TV". It takes a long time to boot up, is fairly noisy, and pretty unreliable.
For $100 you can buy a real TV of the same size that boots nearly instantly and never crashes. It doesn't require a noisy fan and is trivial to configure.
I think that there will probably be a market for specialized equpment, even for houses that already have a computer in the office.
Hey, I'd love to buy a digital tuner. I'm in pretty much the same boat as the original poster. I'd happily pay $100 for a digital tuner right now; I live in DC and all of the major stations are already sending out digital signals.
Sadly, the price is more like $250 to $300 right now. I'm hoping that this ruling will encourage manufacturers to start making inexpensive down-converters.
I don't need 1080p; I just want to hook it up to my 27" NTSC tube. But I would like to get digital signals, which are more reliable than rabbit ears. I currently pay for minimum cable because of that, just the broadcast stations, which is cheaper than "basic" cable but still more than I really want to pay for the convenience of not having to fiddle with rabbit ears.
I assume that it's at least partly punitive, and to make up for the fact that you'll be nailed for only a tiny fraction of the spams you send. Whether that's valid legal reasoning I'll leave to the lawyers.
Because it's a perfect case, it will be a nice precedent if it is appealed. I'd hate to have one of these appealed to the Supreme Court (on, say, free speech grounds) only to have it knocked back on some sort of technicality due to juridication.
I do hope they appeal it, and that the Supreme Court affirms it. That will provide a basis for future laws testing out exactly what can and can't be banned.
I consider spam to be more a case of impoliteness taken to the point of being criminal. Sending one unsolicited email to one person (say, fan mail) is generally considered OK, if impolite; sending billions of commercial ones is not. The courts have a delicate balance to draw, and I think the best way may be to solidify the clear-cut cases before trying to tackle the hard problems.
As far as I can tell, they're taking just the hemoglobin from outdated blood, and then wrapping it up in a deliverable form. So it's made from blood, but they've stripped out anything that could cause rejection, along with viruses and other nasty things.
The article says that they could do it from any mammalian blood, but use human blood for "ethical reasons". PETA members, perhaps? It makes sense that this procedure could use any hemoglobin source, as all mammals are pretty much identical from that standpoint.
Personally, I'd prefer that they take the bazillions of gallons of cows' blood that are produced anyway and use it to save lives. It's not currently wasted, as it's used for a variety of agricultural and industrial uses, but it could save lives more directly by making blood substitutes cheaper.
I guess some people would REALLY prefer not to get animal blood, no matter how vigorously processed, just from the squick factor.
I know a guy who used to have the job of emptying the lavatories from commercial airplanes, and he tells me that certain...accidents get you the rest of the day off work.
But at least he wasn't forced to use IE. My sympathies.
This may well further the adoption of HDTV. HDTV isn't catching on yet because the TVs are expensive. The TVs are expensive because not a lot of people want them. Not a lot of people want them because there isn't a whole lot of good content for it yet. There isn't a lot of good content because the studios are reluctant to go to the expense of converting without some reason to believe that they're going to get paid by advertisers. Advertisers won't pay until there's some sort of protection for them.
Also, TV shows are expensive to produce. The cast of Friends each gets something on the order of a million bucks an episode just to show up. That has to be paid for, and it's paid for by the advertisers.
So this will help protect advertisers, and protect the value to the studio's content, which bumps up the line to reasonably-priced HDTV equipment. (I personally would love to receive the existing HDTV signals, just to play on my old TV, but the cheapest equipment is close to $300.) Reasonably priced HDTV equipment will further the adoption of HDTV, and with a bit of luck the eventual abandonment of their existing bandwidth.
One could well argue that they're already getting their bandwidth for free, and if they can't make a profit on that without extreme DRM they should abandon their bandwidth and let somebody else have a try. I'm all for that. Plenty of people would love to broadcast for free.
There's also the fact that at present they are perfectly content to have extra bandwidth (their old stuff plus the new stuff for HDTV), and the greedy bastards won't relinquish either until its pried from them. That also makes them content to leave the HDTV equipment expensive. That can't be fixed without government regulation, and the regulation says they can't be compelled to give up the bandwidth until X% of people have the equipment.
I'd love to see somebody set themselves up making cut-rate HDTV equipment, on which I suspect there is a slim but real profit. That, I think, would help more than anything.
The problem is that a standard DVD doesn't contain enough bits to hold a high-definition movie. It's a technical problem, not a legal one. They could put their stuff out in lower resolution, and in fact that's exactly what happens right now: TV shows like Alias are filmed in high-defintion and then downcoverted for the mass market broadcast.
There will be a new standard (called "blue-ray"). I'm sure blue-ray DVD players will play your existing DVDs, but if you want to see HD movies on DVD, you'll have to buy a blue-ray DVD, and a blue-ray DVD player to watch it.
Those features could be broken out and released as point-releases to XP. That might be smarter for them.
People buy new machines every few years, partly to keep up with operating systems changes and to get faster hardware. But the hardware has gotten "fast enough" for most users, whereas everybody believes that each new OS version will have improvements over the last one. (Read: each user knows their OS is broken and tolerates it only because they believe it will improve.)
If Microsoft is still selling Windows XP in late 2005, while Apple is continually advertising newer-faster-better, Microsoft may lose a lot of the lock-in they have. That lock-in is their #1 business asset. That may only increase Apple's market share to 10% or even 15%, and perhaps Linux-on-the-desktop to the same amount, but such is enough to deprive Microsoft of the near-totality most people perceive. That near-totality is enough for most people to continue to buy the only OS they are 100% sure will be supported by friends and IT departments. Lose it, and MS market share may decline a lot faster.
So I think you are right, but I think Microsoft would be smart to roll out most of them as "XP 2004" or something before Longhorn comes out.
Apple, I think, had a longer way to go, and so it's less surprising that they have released so many new versions of the OS. In many ways OS X was version 1.0, and they've spent 3 years playing catchup to a lot of features they had in OS 9, while simultaneously exploring the extensions they could make. To put it another way, they got faster because they hadn't made the optimizations Microsoft had already made.
I expect Apple to eventually slow down the pace of innovation as the low-hanging fruit gets eaten. The difference is that in Microsoft's case, people keep waiting for them to fix serious bugs and misfeatures (especially in Office and IE, and to a lesser extent in the OS), whereas Apple seems to have gotten it more or less right (thanks in part to the Unix heritage), and can spend its time exploring the implications of the design they've created.
Despite plenty of examples, I'm always surprised by people who are both good scientists and firm believers in creationism.
Creationism, at least some forms of it, are deliberately anti-scientific and anti-rationalistic. It proposes non-falsifiable hypotheses with zero explanatory power. At least according to the link, this guy appears to be of that sort.
Plenty of people have a casual belief in a Higher Power that comforts them and (while they're at it) also fills in some of the gaps in origins theories. For the most part this sort of belief doesn't conflict with being rational.
But this guy apparently believes that the account of creation in the Bible is literally true, which seems manifestly false. The argument isn't worth getting into in this forum, but I think many will agree that it hypothesizes an unnecessary and rather arbitrary influence of a deity who also promulgates moral codes which you _must_ follow, and the false concept that belief in one aspect necessitates belief in the other.
I think of people who believe and insist on manifestly false, or at least arguable, things as unlikely to have the sort of intellectual discipline it takes to be a good scientist. Experiment will test and reject any false beliefs you have, and it's the ultimate check on you. If you believe one false thing, I keep expecting you to believe a lot of other false things, which will hamper your productivity substantially.
And yet there are still plenty of good, productive scientists who believe in creationism. I suppose they are capable of walling off the irrational and rational parts of their brains, successfully. I have no problem with that, at least until your irrational beliefs decide that I need to die for my sins, as seems to happen too often in history. But this guy doesn't seem to be that sort, and is a useful, productive scientist to boot. Yay, I guess.
Actually, I believe that Macrovision costs only around US$.05 per DVD, or thereabouts, hardly a signficant contribution to the purchase price, and not a vast amount of the production price. Source: San Jose Mercury News.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. That's why I didn't put the URL in the parent post until requested.
Best of luck on your goth site, though. Lots of goths in theater.
Actually, that's a good idea. Thanks. (It may also help search engines find us a bit better.)
You may well think that's a troll, but it's a pretty good idea, and in fact we do that (except that we just put the flyers out instead of handing them out), along with libraries and arts centers. And I use postcards rather than flyers; they're more expensive but they look more professional.
I think that's actually the real point of this overall thread: how do you find places where you can reach your target market, and just your target market? People don't object (for the most part) to the sort of visual clutter the world gets from me dropping my flyers off in places (where I ask permission to do so). All of that is better than telemarketing.
But it requires a lot of money, effort, and creativity. I spend about a quarter on each postcard. If I don't get a response rate of at least 1 in 400, I've lost money on the printing.
We have a web site, but I doubt that everybody who could be interested has seen it. Nobody says, "Gee, I'd like to see if anybody is performing Richard III in the area". Or even, "Hey, I'd like to do something other than watch videotapes tonight. What shall I do?" Most probably never consider live theater, and I'd dearly love to be able to talk to them just at that moment when they're interested. If they choose to look for us, we're easy to find, but many of them wouldn't consider looking for us without a nudge.
Telemarketing might raise their awareness of such things, at least put it on their radar. There are other, better, less annoying techniques, but in general I challenge the assumption that just because you put it in the Yellow Pages or on the internet, those who are interested will come in droves.
I'd be only too happy to have www.rudemechanicals.com slashdotted. Give it a try. I'd love to be in a position to turn slashdotters away from a performance.
Clearly word-of-mouth is most effective, but just as clearly if I weren't subsidizing this business, we'd never support ourselves long enough for word-of-mouth to function.
There are other techniques, and it is unfortunate that some of those that should be available to me simply aren't effective right where I am. The local newspaper doesn't seem to have any interest in theater, and people don't read it anyway. Too bad, and it means I just need to get more creative. Besides, although a local newspaper should review theater, many other businesses don't get even that much free advertising.
Many slashdotters seem to consider advertising-free TV to be their right as well.
Consent is part of it, but most people seem to find that there's some sort of trade-off. Most people accept the fact that their snail mail is subsidized by the bulk mailers, and are willing to sort through junk mail because there's relatively little of it. I get more junk mail than real mail every day, but it's not swamped like spam. And it's not as irritating as a phone call because the phone call, unlike spam and junk mail, demands my attention *right now*.
That's the reason I prefer my friends email me rather than call me most of the time. Do you really need my immediate attention, or can it wait?
Many spammers are clearly fraudulent and an obvious waste of time. If you have to disguise what you're advertising to slip it in past my spam filter, it's clear that you are violating the intent of the laws, and it's only a matter of time before the laws change to exclude what you do (if they haven't already).
Many telemarketers are in the same category, but not all. I wonder if people would object to spam and telemarketing as much if they were more targeted and less fraudulent. As it is, the clearly fraudulent and the potentially useful are just as irritating, and therefore just as well disposed of.
I mostly support you on this, but not quite completely. I am the owner of two small businesses, and a small business finds it very hard to get the word out about its existence. If you don't know it's out there, you won't go looking for it.
Everybody knows AT&T, and as far as I'm concerned they should pay the maximum penalty plus an idiot tax for doing precisely what they've been told not to do. But I wish I could find a way to get in contact with the many people who would probably come see the plays that my theater troupe puts on if they only knew it existed.
I'm not trying to claim that I'm going to try telemarketing for that; I wouldn't even if it would be cost-effective. I'm not even proposing that telemarketing should be allowed at all. It's an obvious violation of privacy, as well as being obnoxious, and if obnoxious is all you've got, give up. I'm just challenging one of your assumptions, that "I'll come to you to find out what you have to offer."
For myself, I'll keep trying the old-fashioned way: putting on good theater and hoping that eventually positive word of mouth will bring people out to see it, and being grateful that I'm not expecting to make a living off of it.
(And passing up the crass opportunity to get myself modded down by putting the URL for my theater group on Slashdot. Not that I won't get modded down anyway for explaining, if not excusing, some telemarketers.)
Anti-competetive, pretty much, yeah. I don't think that any lawyers would disagree with you there. Copyright is a monopoly, by definition.
The intent of copyright is to grant a monopoly to encourage people to create and innovate. Whether that's a good idea, and whether the implementation of that idea in US law is effective, I'll leave to the many other discussions already on slashdot.
Anti-capitalist I'd disagree with. Copyright favors those with capital. Again, that may be self-defeating, but the intent is certainly to reward those who create intellectual property (= capital).
Today, a basic TV-over-computer setup costs at least $600 for a 17" "TV". It takes a long time to boot up, is fairly noisy, and pretty unreliable.
For $100 you can buy a real TV of the same size that boots nearly instantly and never crashes. It doesn't require a noisy fan and is trivial to configure.
I think that there will probably be a market for specialized equpment, even for houses that already have a computer in the office.
Hey, I'd love to buy a digital tuner. I'm in pretty much the same boat as the original poster. I'd happily pay $100 for a digital tuner right now; I live in DC and all of the major stations are already sending out digital signals.
Sadly, the price is more like $250 to $300 right now. I'm hoping that this ruling will encourage manufacturers to start making inexpensive down-converters.
I don't need 1080p; I just want to hook it up to my 27" NTSC tube. But I would like to get digital signals, which are more reliable than rabbit ears. I currently pay for minimum cable because of that, just the broadcast stations, which is cheaper than "basic" cable but still more than I really want to pay for the convenience of not having to fiddle with rabbit ears.
Attention Mr. Jager, paging Mr. Peter de Jager:
Your fifteen minutes of fame have expired. Please report to the dustbin of history at your earliest convenience.
What a day to have no mod points. Huge find, dude.
I assume that it's at least partly punitive, and to make up for the fact that you'll be nailed for only a tiny fraction of the spams you send. Whether that's valid legal reasoning I'll leave to the lawyers.
Because it's a perfect case, it will be a nice precedent if it is appealed. I'd hate to have one of these appealed to the Supreme Court (on, say, free speech grounds) only to have it knocked back on some sort of technicality due to juridication.
I do hope they appeal it, and that the Supreme Court affirms it. That will provide a basis for future laws testing out exactly what can and can't be banned.
I consider spam to be more a case of impoliteness taken to the point of being criminal. Sending one unsolicited email to one person (say, fan mail) is generally considered OK, if impolite; sending billions of commercial ones is not. The courts have a delicate balance to draw, and I think the best way may be to solidify the clear-cut cases before trying to tackle the hard problems.
As far as I can tell, they're taking just the hemoglobin from outdated blood, and then wrapping it up in a deliverable form. So it's made from blood, but they've stripped out anything that could cause rejection, along with viruses and other nasty things.
The article says that they could do it from any mammalian blood, but use human blood for "ethical reasons". PETA members, perhaps? It makes sense that this procedure could use any hemoglobin source, as all mammals are pretty much identical from that standpoint.
Personally, I'd prefer that they take the bazillions of gallons of cows' blood that are produced anyway and use it to save lives. It's not currently wasted, as it's used for a variety of agricultural and industrial uses, but it could save lives more directly by making blood substitutes cheaper.
I guess some people would REALLY prefer not to get animal blood, no matter how vigorously processed, just from the squick factor.
I know a guy who used to have the job of emptying the lavatories from commercial airplanes, and he tells me that certain...accidents get you the rest of the day off work.
But at least he wasn't forced to use IE. My sympathies.
This may well further the adoption of HDTV. HDTV isn't catching on yet because the TVs are expensive. The TVs are expensive because not a lot of people want them. Not a lot of people want them because there isn't a whole lot of good content for it yet. There isn't a lot of good content because the studios are reluctant to go to the expense of converting without some reason to believe that they're going to get paid by advertisers. Advertisers won't pay until there's some sort of protection for them.
Also, TV shows are expensive to produce. The cast of Friends each gets something on the order of a million bucks an episode just to show up. That has to be paid for, and it's paid for by the advertisers.
So this will help protect advertisers, and protect the value to the studio's content, which bumps up the line to reasonably-priced HDTV equipment. (I personally would love to receive the existing HDTV signals, just to play on my old TV, but the cheapest equipment is close to $300.) Reasonably priced HDTV equipment will further the adoption of HDTV, and with a bit of luck the eventual abandonment of their existing bandwidth.
One could well argue that they're already getting their bandwidth for free, and if they can't make a profit on that without extreme DRM they should abandon their bandwidth and let somebody else have a try. I'm all for that. Plenty of people would love to broadcast for free.
There's also the fact that at present they are perfectly content to have extra bandwidth (their old stuff plus the new stuff for HDTV), and the greedy bastards won't relinquish either until its pried from them. That also makes them content to leave the HDTV equipment expensive. That can't be fixed without government regulation, and the regulation says they can't be compelled to give up the bandwidth until X% of people have the equipment.
I'd love to see somebody set themselves up making cut-rate HDTV equipment, on which I suspect there is a slim but real profit. That, I think, would help more than anything.
The problem is that a standard DVD doesn't contain enough bits to hold a high-definition movie. It's a technical problem, not a legal one. They could put their stuff out in lower resolution, and in fact that's exactly what happens right now: TV shows like Alias are filmed in high-defintion and then downcoverted for the mass market broadcast.
There will be a new standard (called "blue-ray"). I'm sure blue-ray DVD players will play your existing DVDs, but if you want to see HD movies on DVD, you'll have to buy a blue-ray DVD, and a blue-ray DVD player to watch it.
Dude, you have GOT to get a real browser. I'd completely forgotten about the existence X-10 and pop-unders until I saw this Slashdot article.
Firebird, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, ANYTHING is better than IE or years-old versions of Netscape. Pop-unders are a bug, not a feature.
Better not be there when they RAID your 420.
Those features could be broken out and released as point-releases to XP. That might be smarter for them.
People buy new machines every few years, partly to keep up with operating systems changes and to get faster hardware. But the hardware has gotten "fast enough" for most users, whereas everybody believes that each new OS version will have improvements over the last one. (Read: each user knows their OS is broken and tolerates it only because they believe it will improve.)
If Microsoft is still selling Windows XP in late 2005, while Apple is continually advertising newer-faster-better, Microsoft may lose a lot of the lock-in they have. That lock-in is their #1 business asset. That may only increase Apple's market share to 10% or even 15%, and perhaps Linux-on-the-desktop to the same amount, but such is enough to deprive Microsoft of the near-totality most people perceive. That near-totality is enough for most people to continue to buy the only OS they are 100% sure will be supported by friends and IT departments. Lose it, and MS market share may decline a lot faster.
So I think you are right, but I think Microsoft would be smart to roll out most of them as "XP 2004" or something before Longhorn comes out.
Apple, I think, had a longer way to go, and so it's less surprising that they have released so many new versions of the OS. In many ways OS X was version 1.0, and they've spent 3 years playing catchup to a lot of features they had in OS 9, while simultaneously exploring the extensions they could make. To put it another way, they got faster because they hadn't made the optimizations Microsoft had already made.
I expect Apple to eventually slow down the pace of innovation as the low-hanging fruit gets eaten. The difference is that in Microsoft's case, people keep waiting for them to fix serious bugs and misfeatures (especially in Office and IE, and to a lesser extent in the OS), whereas Apple seems to have gotten it more or less right (thanks in part to the Unix heritage), and can spend its time exploring the implications of the design they've created.
Despite plenty of examples, I'm always surprised by people who are both good scientists and firm believers in creationism.
Creationism, at least some forms of it, are deliberately anti-scientific and anti-rationalistic. It proposes non-falsifiable hypotheses with zero explanatory power. At least according to the link, this guy appears to be of that sort.
Plenty of people have a casual belief in a Higher Power that comforts them and (while they're at it) also fills in some of the gaps in origins theories. For the most part this sort of belief doesn't conflict with being rational.
But this guy apparently believes that the account of creation in the Bible is literally true, which seems manifestly false. The argument isn't worth getting into in this forum, but I think many will agree that it hypothesizes an unnecessary and rather arbitrary influence of a deity who also promulgates moral codes which you _must_ follow, and the false concept that belief in one aspect necessitates belief in the other.
I think of people who believe and insist on manifestly false, or at least arguable, things as unlikely to have the sort of intellectual discipline it takes to be a good scientist. Experiment will test and reject any false beliefs you have, and it's the ultimate check on you. If you believe one false thing, I keep expecting you to believe a lot of other false things, which will hamper your productivity substantially.
And yet there are still plenty of good, productive scientists who believe in creationism. I suppose they are capable of walling off the irrational and rational parts of their brains, successfully. I have no problem with that, at least until your irrational beliefs decide that I need to die for my sins, as seems to happen too often in history. But this guy doesn't seem to be that sort, and is a useful, productive scientist to boot. Yay, I guess.
Yeah. A long time ago. They use a primer that physically holds on to micro-scratches in the surface. Marginally more details from The Straight Dope.
Actually, I believe that Macrovision costs only around US$.05 per DVD, or thereabouts, hardly a signficant contribution to the purchase price, and not a vast amount of the production price. Source: San Jose Mercury News.