Ten seconds of play-time and it's pretty damn weak. It spends a good deal of time in miscellaneous flash-intro-junk before turning into a quiz.
The first question was, "I just moved to the area, and think you're really good looking. R U dating anyone?" For which it dinged me for accepting the IM. Hey, letting them know my dating status is not doing anybody any harm. Sure, I'd be dubious about giving any actual data about myself after that, but the question itself is not a problem. Intrusive, but innocuous by itself.
The second question was, "Hi, remember me... [lots of details ending with a name]"? For which the correct answer was "accept", "assuming you actually were in Ms. Newman's drama class with someone named Juan Delgado." What the hell kind of a question is that? I wasn't in that class and I don't know anybody named Juan Delgado, and I'd assume this was an idiot. They want you to think of it as a hypothetical, but that's not at all clear from the context. The sixth question does the same sort of thing, presenting you with highly specific data and assuming you know that they meant "highly specific data, in a hypothetical kind of way".
The third question ("I'd luv 2 C what U look like! Let's meet in person!" is an obvious Mark Foley troll, but at least it's the first question with an answer I don't find stupid. The fourth question is similar.
The fifth question is vaguely interesting, asking for a birthday and address. It's not immediately obvious that those are private information, especially the birthday. (And it's intolerably weak that some companies actually use knowledge of your birthday as proof of identity, but that's a whole separate set of idiots.)
That's the end of round one, and this quiz (I wouldn't call it a game) is far too stupid to ponder any further. If they'd wanted to put any actual effort into it they'd have made up a AI system to interact with you and try to elicit personal data from you, then ding you when you did. But that would be work, whereas just banging out a flash quiz lets you pretend you've done something while still making it home in time for dinner. Hell, making it home in time for lunch.
And as long as that remains a secret, the networks won't much care. Yeah, it represents lost money to them, but it's lost in the same noise that swallows up commercials that go unwatched because you're in the bathroom. Effectively, it's like sharing the video with a few of your friends: not the network's favorite solution, but not intolerable.
When any alias convention becomes well-known enough that anybody can download any TV show they want to, then it becomes big enough for them to issue a blanket request to YouTube/Google to take the video off. By the time it becomes public knowledge to you, it's public knowledge to them.
Their goal is to make it easier for you to watch the show their way than via YouTube. If they can take away the current system, where one guy records and posts it and everybody in the universe downloads it, they'll consider that a pretty big win. You can keep shifting, but if they're right behind you, many people would find it more aggravating than just watching it their way.
That's a hell of a question. Kim is only 65, and he's got years left in him. So as far as I can tell, the Chinese are content to leave him there until he dies and not try to come up with a strategy for an event ten years or more off. In all likelihood he's got an equally egomaniacal successor in the wings.
Presumably they have an emergency plan should he die sooner (or perhaps if they find he should need to die sooner), but they're content with the status quo. Kim pisses off the US but costs China very little. They have no interest in reforming him.
A nuclear North Korea shifts the balance in a way that the Chinese probably won't like (since it makes an already twitchy US more likely to invade, forcibly reuinfiying Korea and giving the US a firmer base on China's doorstep). So China wants to get the North Koreans back to the six-party talks, which is exactly where things have been for a decade.
What _was_ the point of the xxx domain? It didn't help filtering, since they weren't planning to get rid of porn in dot-com. It doesn't help you find porn, since you sure don't need help for that. It doesn't open up the domain name space, because allowing anybody but the owners of foo.com to own foo.xxx is going to be confusing, if not outrightly fraudulent.
It's not just the big companies who own the dot-com domains who'd feel pressured to buy the corresponding xxx domains. Any dot-com owner risks having their name used by somebody else, possibly solely for the extortion value.
The reasons the US opposed the domain were stupid ones; permitting xxx wouldn't have expanded porn or given anybody reason to believe it was officially approved. But just because their puritanical reasons for opposing it were stupid doesn't make it a good idea.
Some women take contraceptive pills to make their periods more predictable, and sometimes easier, even in the absence of the chance of getting pregnant. (I've even known lesbians who take the pill for exactly those reasons.) Presumably they find it worth the risk of issues later in life.
The male pill probably doesn't offer the same kind of additional benefits, so I can see some couples deciding that if it's going to be one or the other it should be her.
But then, I'm paranoid, and I can see having both of us on contraceptive pills. And even at that I'm not sure I'd be comfortable without the barrier method (i.e. condoms) as well.
I have a hard time thinking of Whistler as a killer app, since it would be better tightly integrated to Garage Band. For me Garage Band is the killer app; it takes something I'd like to do (make music) but don't really have the technical skills for.
IANAL, but I suspect that if somebody can make a charge of encouraging copyright infringement stick, then they'll be liable. A lawyer could claim that they should reasonably have known that a significant amount of illegal activity (copyright infringement) was being done through their site, in which they were a considerably active participant.
Google, of course, will claim it's all just bits and that they remove stuff when notified, but if the lawyers can convince the courts that they should have known better, then they're an accessory. You could consult a lawyer and get better details, and you could consult a second lawyer and get a second, conflicting set of details, so I have a feeling that the final result would have to be settled in court.
It's a well-known song by a well-released artist. Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.
What the major labels provide to an artist is massive promotion, and this artist has already been promoted. If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the money for radio air play, posters in Virgin Megastores, etc.
There's a difference between the people clicking on spam emails and people clicking on online ads.
If you're buying stuff from spam, then you're intolerably stupid. There's certainly good money to be made from marketing to the intolerably stupid, but that money isn't supporting anyhing I care about.
Online advertising, on the other hand, often supports web sites that are providing value to you. There are all sorts of reasons for non-stupid people to click on them.
* Clicking provides financial support to a web site (like Slashdot) that you like.
* Because the ads are targeted to a subject you are interested in (because you visited the web site), there's at least a chance you want the product. It may be a wine press advertised on a wine-brewing web site, or a new bit of hardware on Slashdot, but the link is in front of you and it's easier to click on the thing than to go search for it. (Even if you don't click, you've now heard of it, and when you decide to spend some money it'll be one of the things in your mind.)
* More recently, they have ways of advertising geographically. If it's a restaurant you might like or a shoe store, you'd have to find out where it is, and you might as well click through the link. Again, it's faster than a separate search, and better targeted than spam.
Obviously this isn't an immense boon, but it is a small one, and if the ads themselves aren't obnoxious, it doesn't hurt to encourage it. I'd never, ever, ever click on a Flash ad or an animated-gif ad, because I don't want to encourage it. But if a polite text ad helps keep some site up and running, it costs me nothing and profits both the web site and the store.
Yeah, it's a joke. Specifically, it's from So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish. That's the fourth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. It's really not the best book in the series, but you really should read the first one (at least enough of it to know if you like the style of humor or not). It's kind of required reading for Slashdot. From the book:
Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked 'Mode Execute Ready' instead of the now old-fashioned 'Access Standby' which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged 'Off'.
True, but you usually have to materialize that money first. Capital gains aren't taxed until you sell the object. (That's for income taxes; property taxes are different.)
I can see the IRS taxing the income when you convert quatloos or whatever into dollars and have them transferred into a bank account, but trying to tax virtual money sounds like an administrative nightmare.
In theory one can use the barter system and step into massive gray area with the IRS. They usually ignore it simply because it would be too much work. Trading virtual goods for virtual dollars would probably be treated as barter, on which you DO owe taxes (under schedule C, business income).
Actually, I'd say Google models this pretty well. Products with a real current functionality, like GMail and Google Maps, succeed despite pushing the technological envelope. Products which push the envelope too hard, like their office suite, fail to catch fire. They keep looking for the boundary between "functional" and "futuristic", but there's almost always a market for the things (especially at the $0 price they charge for it) they make when they work.
Either way, Google is all about pushing the "constantly refine it" part. Web apps make for instantaneous, compatible upgrades.
Actually, I do find paper easier to read than a TFT LCD. It's a question of DPI: 600 on a page vs. 70-100 on a screen. It's also a question of total surface area: at a comfortable font size (to compensate for that low resolution) you have to scroll a screen, where you can just scan a sheet of paper.
Like you, I only hand-write or print every few weeks. I won't print off a web site to read it, but I will for papers published in PDF, which have a paper-oriented bias. I'll stop doing that, too, when screen resolutions double.
I know you're mostly joking, but just for completeness: yeah, green peppers (including chiles) are botanically fruits: the swollen ovary from the flower, containing the seeds.
Slip a few habaneros into your next fruit salad and watch the fun.
(Actually, that's not a bad idea, used judiciously.)
The tomato is botanically a fruit, since it contains the seeds. But fruits are taxed differently from vegetables, and since the tomato is treated more like a vegetable than a fruit in cooking, it took the Supreme Court to decide that this fruit was in fact a vegetable. (Presumably the same applies to squash, which are nearly identical to watermelons botanically; the latter is eaten as a fruit and the former as a vegetable.)
But if we genetically engineer them to put the RSA code on them, then I guess they'd be a munition. They're also good for throwing at bad actors.
I don't know the technical details of the spamhaus setup, but removing www.spamhaus.org, could stil cause problems: if the client software is pointed to that precise domain, it would be the burden of every single administrator to change the config or download new software.
I also don't know if that technical trick would earn somebody a contempt-of-court order. The judge is clearly not particularly skilled, and taking him for the letter of his order rather than the spirit might bring down some wrath. On the other hand, it's extremely disturbing that the judge would be making orders that he doesn't understand.
Given that the black hole is a few zillion light-years from earth, I don't think that this satellite is much closer to it than anything ground-based. But the satellite has a much clearer view of the black hole (or at least, of its event horizon) without the atmosphere in the way, and that's what the press release means by "closer to the edge".
Yesterday's slashdot article and the original source claim that the judge is to order ICANN to remove the domain, not just ordering Spamhaus to de-list itself.
There's yet another player, the actual registrar:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was created through a Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN to transition management of the Domain Name System (DNS) from the U.S. government to the global community, and/or Tucows, Inc., ICANN's accredited registrar for www.spamhaus.org, is hereby ordered to suspend or place a client hold on www.Spamhaus.org until such time as they receive a further order from this Court that such suspension or client hold be lifted.
I'm not entirely certain where an Illinois District Court gets the authority to order either Tucows or ICANN to do anything, especially since neither is a party to this suit. But I get the impression that the judge does not understand how DNS works. What does it mean for "ICANN and/or Tucows" to "suspend or place a client hold"?
Really? IANAL, but generally it's the executive branch, rather than the judicial branch, that has to enforce laws. Judges only make decisions. They impose sentences, but they turn them over to the executive branch to execute them.
Which is why I'm trying to figure out where the judge gets the authority to order ICANN to do anything. ICANN does ultimately report to the US Government, but not to a district court judge.
Well, given that something like a half-billion PCs are sold each year, that's a bit like asking, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
They'll also sell a lot of Vista licenses to offices whose IT shops want to maintain only a single platform. Once they start having to buy new PCs with Vista, they'll want to upgrade the entire shop. The larger the ratio of users to IT, the more they're going to standardize their systems. It's a convenience for them, like replacing the lightbulbs all at once rather than waiting for them to burn out.
Individual users will continue to use their XP installations for perhaps 3-5 years. Over time bits of hardware fail and it's easier for many to replace the entire thing, especially when that elderly PC starts to feel pokey in comparison to the new computers; the new software will find ways to use the extra CPU power. And with a Windows installation, it may not be an illusion of contrast: between registry/DLL bloat in legal software, and the many users who will be infected with malware, it may actually be slower. Cleaning the OS and replacing components gradually becomes less efficient than just buying a shiny new one.
You still need the advertisers because iTunes as a venue works only when they have commercials for the shows they're selling. If the show isn't broadcast on TV, plus the myriad commercials advertising it on the other shows, they'll get far fewer downloads.
Attention is still the most valuable commodity on the Internet: the user's time is the limiting factor in everything you want to sell. TV shows are expensive, and they are only profitable if they get many, many viewers. Music can be made on the cheap, with only a few hundred in equipment plus the band and producer, and it can be done in a garage. TV shows require sets (hard to build in your back yard), plus makeup artists/gaffers/standby carpenters/etc.
This may all shift, slowly, if people start to lose their tolerance for commercials. There's a big discontinuity in the shift, for the first TV show advertised on broadcast TV but available only via iTunes. Meantime, there will be TV, and there will be advertisers, and there will be Nielsens. I'm glad the Nielsen corporation is cowering though. I can't wait until we can reclaim that bandwidth (I mean the stuff allocated for HDTV) from those useless bastards at the network affiliates.
Slashdot Mirror
The required juju is Flash.
Ten seconds of play-time and it's pretty damn weak. It spends a good deal of time in miscellaneous flash-intro-junk before turning into a quiz.
The first question was, "I just moved to the area, and think you're really good looking. R U dating anyone?" For which it dinged me for accepting the IM. Hey, letting them know my dating status is not doing anybody any harm. Sure, I'd be dubious about giving any actual data about myself after that, but the question itself is not a problem. Intrusive, but innocuous by itself.
The second question was, "Hi, remember me... [lots of details ending with a name]"? For which the correct answer was "accept", "assuming you actually were in Ms. Newman's drama class with someone named Juan Delgado." What the hell kind of a question is that? I wasn't in that class and I don't know anybody named Juan Delgado, and I'd assume this was an idiot. They want you to think of it as a hypothetical, but that's not at all clear from the context. The sixth question does the same sort of thing, presenting you with highly specific data and assuming you know that they meant "highly specific data, in a hypothetical kind of way".
The third question ("I'd luv 2 C what U look like! Let's meet in person!" is an obvious Mark Foley troll, but at least it's the first question with an answer I don't find stupid. The fourth question is similar.
The fifth question is vaguely interesting, asking for a birthday and address. It's not immediately obvious that those are private information, especially the birthday. (And it's intolerably weak that some companies actually use knowledge of your birthday as proof of identity, but that's a whole separate set of idiots.)
That's the end of round one, and this quiz (I wouldn't call it a game) is far too stupid to ponder any further. If they'd wanted to put any actual effort into it they'd have made up a AI system to interact with you and try to elicit personal data from you, then ding you when you did. But that would be work, whereas just banging out a flash quiz lets you pretend you've done something while still making it home in time for dinner. Hell, making it home in time for lunch.
And as long as that remains a secret, the networks won't much care. Yeah, it represents lost money to them, but it's lost in the same noise that swallows up commercials that go unwatched because you're in the bathroom. Effectively, it's like sharing the video with a few of your friends: not the network's favorite solution, but not intolerable.
When any alias convention becomes well-known enough that anybody can download any TV show they want to, then it becomes big enough for them to issue a blanket request to YouTube/Google to take the video off. By the time it becomes public knowledge to you, it's public knowledge to them.
Their goal is to make it easier for you to watch the show their way than via YouTube. If they can take away the current system, where one guy records and posts it and everybody in the universe downloads it, they'll consider that a pretty big win. You can keep shifting, but if they're right behind you, many people would find it more aggravating than just watching it their way.
That's a hell of a question. Kim is only 65, and he's got years left in him. So as far as I can tell, the Chinese are content to leave him there until he dies and not try to come up with a strategy for an event ten years or more off. In all likelihood he's got an equally egomaniacal successor in the wings.
Presumably they have an emergency plan should he die sooner (or perhaps if they find he should need to die sooner), but they're content with the status quo. Kim pisses off the US but costs China very little. They have no interest in reforming him.
A nuclear North Korea shifts the balance in a way that the Chinese probably won't like (since it makes an already twitchy US more likely to invade, forcibly reuinfiying Korea and giving the US a firmer base on China's doorstep). So China wants to get the North Koreans back to the six-party talks, which is exactly where things have been for a decade.
What _was_ the point of the xxx domain? It didn't help filtering, since they weren't planning to get rid of porn in dot-com. It doesn't help you find porn, since you sure don't need help for that. It doesn't open up the domain name space, because allowing anybody but the owners of foo.com to own foo.xxx is going to be confusing, if not outrightly fraudulent.
It's not just the big companies who own the dot-com domains who'd feel pressured to buy the corresponding xxx domains. Any dot-com owner risks having their name used by somebody else, possibly solely for the extortion value.
The reasons the US opposed the domain were stupid ones; permitting xxx wouldn't have expanded porn or given anybody reason to believe it was officially approved. But just because their puritanical reasons for opposing it were stupid doesn't make it a good idea.
Some women take contraceptive pills to make their periods more predictable, and sometimes easier, even in the absence of the chance of getting pregnant. (I've even known lesbians who take the pill for exactly those reasons.) Presumably they find it worth the risk of issues later in life.
The male pill probably doesn't offer the same kind of additional benefits, so I can see some couples deciding that if it's going to be one or the other it should be her.
But then, I'm paranoid, and I can see having both of us on contraceptive pills. And even at that I'm not sure I'd be comfortable without the barrier method (i.e. condoms) as well.
Please do not feed the trolls.
I have a hard time thinking of Whistler as a killer app, since it would be better tightly integrated to Garage Band. For me Garage Band is the killer app; it takes something I'd like to do (make music) but don't really have the technical skills for.
IANAL, but I suspect that if somebody can make a charge of encouraging copyright infringement stick, then they'll be liable. A lawyer could claim that they should reasonably have known that a significant amount of illegal activity (copyright infringement) was being done through their site, in which they were a considerably active participant.
Google, of course, will claim it's all just bits and that they remove stuff when notified, but if the lawyers can convince the courts that they should have known better, then they're an accessory. You could consult a lawyer and get better details, and you could consult a second lawyer and get a second, conflicting set of details, so I have a feeling that the final result would have to be settled in court.
It's a well-known song by a well-released artist. Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.
What the major labels provide to an artist is massive promotion, and this artist has already been promoted. If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the money for radio air play, posters in Virgin Megastores, etc.
There's a difference between the people clicking on spam emails and people clicking on online ads.
If you're buying stuff from spam, then you're intolerably stupid. There's certainly good money to be made from marketing to the intolerably stupid, but that money isn't supporting anyhing I care about.
Online advertising, on the other hand, often supports web sites that are providing value to you. There are all sorts of reasons for non-stupid people to click on them.
* Clicking provides financial support to a web site (like Slashdot) that you like.
* Because the ads are targeted to a subject you are interested in (because you visited the web site), there's at least a chance you want the product. It may be a wine press advertised on a wine-brewing web site, or a new bit of hardware on Slashdot, but the link is in front of you and it's easier to click on the thing than to go search for it. (Even if you don't click, you've now heard of it, and when you decide to spend some money it'll be one of the things in your mind.)
* More recently, they have ways of advertising geographically. If it's a restaurant you might like or a shoe store, you'd have to find out where it is, and you might as well click through the link. Again, it's faster than a separate search, and better targeted than spam.
Obviously this isn't an immense boon, but it is a small one, and if the ads themselves aren't obnoxious, it doesn't hurt to encourage it. I'd never, ever, ever click on a Flash ad or an animated-gif ad, because I don't want to encourage it. But if a polite text ad helps keep some site up and running, it costs me nothing and profits both the web site and the store.
True, but you usually have to materialize that money first. Capital gains aren't taxed until you sell the object. (That's for income taxes; property taxes are different.)
I can see the IRS taxing the income when you convert quatloos or whatever into dollars and have them transferred into a bank account, but trying to tax virtual money sounds like an administrative nightmare.
In theory one can use the barter system and step into massive gray area with the IRS. They usually ignore it simply because it would be too much work. Trading virtual goods for virtual dollars would probably be treated as barter, on which you DO owe taxes (under schedule C, business income).
Hey, back before webmail became common, I used to read my mail exactly that way when traveling.
Actually, I'd say Google models this pretty well. Products with a real current functionality, like GMail and Google Maps, succeed despite pushing the technological envelope. Products which push the envelope too hard, like their office suite, fail to catch fire. They keep looking for the boundary between "functional" and "futuristic", but there's almost always a market for the things (especially at the $0 price they charge for it) they make when they work.
Either way, Google is all about pushing the "constantly refine it" part. Web apps make for instantaneous, compatible upgrades.
Actually, I do find paper easier to read than a TFT LCD. It's a question of DPI: 600 on a page vs. 70-100 on a screen. It's also a question of total surface area: at a comfortable font size (to compensate for that low resolution) you have to scroll a screen, where you can just scan a sheet of paper.
Like you, I only hand-write or print every few weeks. I won't print off a web site to read it, but I will for papers published in PDF, which have a paper-oriented bias. I'll stop doing that, too, when screen resolutions double.
Basically, ICANN is saying, "It's not our job to suspend domain registrations; it's the registrar's job. We just coordinate registrars."
That was me.
Today.
I know you're mostly joking, but just for completeness: yeah, green peppers (including chiles) are botanically fruits: the swollen ovary from the flower, containing the seeds.
Slip a few habaneros into your next fruit salad and watch the fun.
(Actually, that's not a bad idea, used judiciously.)
The tomato is botanically a fruit, since it contains the seeds. But fruits are taxed differently from vegetables, and since the tomato is treated more like a vegetable than a fruit in cooking, it took the Supreme Court to decide that this fruit was in fact a vegetable. (Presumably the same applies to squash, which are nearly identical to watermelons botanically; the latter is eaten as a fruit and the former as a vegetable.)
But if we genetically engineer them to put the RSA code on them, then I guess they'd be a munition. They're also good for throwing at bad actors.
That is from the actual text of the order.
I don't know the technical details of the spamhaus setup, but removing www.spamhaus.org, could stil cause problems: if the client software is pointed to that precise domain, it would be the burden of every single administrator to change the config or download new software.
I also don't know if that technical trick would earn somebody a contempt-of-court order. The judge is clearly not particularly skilled, and taking him for the letter of his order rather than the spirit might bring down some wrath. On the other hand, it's extremely disturbing that the judge would be making orders that he doesn't understand.
Given that the black hole is a few zillion light-years from earth, I don't think that this satellite is much closer to it than anything ground-based. But the satellite has a much clearer view of the black hole (or at least, of its event horizon) without the atmosphere in the way, and that's what the press release means by "closer to the edge".
There's yet another player, the actual registrar:
I'm not entirely certain where an Illinois District Court gets the authority to order either Tucows or ICANN to do anything, especially since neither is a party to this suit. But I get the impression that the judge does not understand how DNS works. What does it mean for "ICANN and/or Tucows" to "suspend or place a client hold"?
Really? IANAL, but generally it's the executive branch, rather than the judicial branch, that has to enforce laws. Judges only make decisions. They impose sentences, but they turn them over to the executive branch to execute them.
Which is why I'm trying to figure out where the judge gets the authority to order ICANN to do anything. ICANN does ultimately report to the US Government, but not to a district court judge.
Well, given that something like a half-billion PCs are sold each year, that's a bit like asking, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
They'll also sell a lot of Vista licenses to offices whose IT shops want to maintain only a single platform. Once they start having to buy new PCs with Vista, they'll want to upgrade the entire shop. The larger the ratio of users to IT, the more they're going to standardize their systems. It's a convenience for them, like replacing the lightbulbs all at once rather than waiting for them to burn out.
Individual users will continue to use their XP installations for perhaps 3-5 years. Over time bits of hardware fail and it's easier for many to replace the entire thing, especially when that elderly PC starts to feel pokey in comparison to the new computers; the new software will find ways to use the extra CPU power. And with a Windows installation, it may not be an illusion of contrast: between registry/DLL bloat in legal software, and the many users who will be infected with malware, it may actually be slower. Cleaning the OS and replacing components gradually becomes less efficient than just buying a shiny new one.
You still need the advertisers because iTunes as a venue works only when they have commercials for the shows they're selling. If the show isn't broadcast on TV, plus the myriad commercials advertising it on the other shows, they'll get far fewer downloads.
Attention is still the most valuable commodity on the Internet: the user's time is the limiting factor in everything you want to sell. TV shows are expensive, and they are only profitable if they get many, many viewers. Music can be made on the cheap, with only a few hundred in equipment plus the band and producer, and it can be done in a garage. TV shows require sets (hard to build in your back yard), plus makeup artists/gaffers/standby carpenters/etc.
This may all shift, slowly, if people start to lose their tolerance for commercials. There's a big discontinuity in the shift, for the first TV show advertised on broadcast TV but available only via iTunes. Meantime, there will be TV, and there will be advertisers, and there will be Nielsens. I'm glad the Nielsen corporation is cowering though. I can't wait until we can reclaim that bandwidth (I mean the stuff allocated for HDTV) from those useless bastards at the network affiliates.