How many ads do you see that aren't served from an ad network?
The only ads I see aren't served from the major ad networks.
I still see plenty of ads, though: any e-commerce site I visit is full of "recommendations", reviews often have an "affiliate link" so you can buy the item reviewed and they get a commission (an obvious conflict of interest, but that's another issue), a lot of the niche sites I visit carry their own advertising, social network sites integrate self-hosted ads into their main feeds, and so on.
I don't really find those things annoying myself, precisely because they don't tend to be excessively intrusive.
Sure they will, but some won't, and some of the ones who do will hate you for it every day until they find a plausible alternative.
Adobe got away with Creative Cloud because at the time there wasn't really much competition for Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. There weren't many commercial/closed source alternatives, as Corel and the like are now a shadow of their former selves. This being Slashdot, someone will suggest the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus, and everyone who works with this kind of software professionally will smile kindly and ignore them.
However, within a couple of years, there were already well-regarded and well-featured competing commercial products, available for a tiny fraction of the cost of Creative Cloud, for some of the significant markets that Creative Suite applications used to appeal to. This seems to be particularly true of creating graphics for on-line use rather than traditional photography or print design, and I seem to hear many good things about several of those applications just in general discussions with other people who work in creative fields.
I don't hear many people saying positive things about Adobe's software any more, though. They were never really a well-liked supplier, IME, but now they're just the clingy ex you can't shake until you've obviously settled with someone newer and better.
I can't speak for MS's plan but Adobe CC is far from "wringing even more cash" from their user base.
That depends on your point of view.
We use various parts of Creative Suite occasionally for work, but not as everyday software. We bought a copy of one of the bundle versions more than four years ago, for a one-time price of about £1,250 at the time.
Today, it looks like the closest equivalent UK pricing on Creative Cloud is about £560/year. It would have cost us approximately twice as much so far under the new pricing model, and we'd still be locked into paying forever.
Defenders of the model talk about the benefits of paying a small fee monthly being more manageable, but I'm running a business and can add up, so accounting over the course of a year is hardly a burden.
Defenders of the model also talk about all the improvements Adobe make and the benefits of having the latest software, but if their improvements were worth much to us then we'd have bought an upgrade to CS6 and we never saw anything to justify the cost. I haven't seen much to got me excited in any of the applications we use ever since the move to Creative Cloud either; there's plenty that we would pay for, but either Adobe aren't doing those things or they aren't very good at advertising when they have.
The thing is, even if they did those things now, while we'd have happily paid for the upgrades on a one-time basis, there is zero chance that we're going to commit to unregulated rent-seeking on software we rely on to do our business. We have seriously considered spending significantly more money to get a high-spec Mac just so we can run some of the generation of graphics software that is emerging on that platform, sometimes costing less for a permanent licence that CC does for a single month, yet with a reputation that suggests it would be at least as good for the kind of work we do if not better.
I think our attitude to Windows payments would be similar. Give us decent optional upgrades at sensible intervals and we'll happily pay a reasonable price for that support. Try to lock us in so something we already paid for switches off if we don't keep paying, and we'll never buy Windows again, and just stick with our existing Win7 licenses until we move entirely to Mac and Linux machines.
I'm sorry, I don't rent my operating systems. Or my applications for that matter.
Neither do I. Ticking timebombs are a complete deal-breaker for me.
However, I would seriously consider paying a reasonable recurring fee to fund continued updates for an OS that works well for me after some sensible initial period of free support, so that OS can remain useful for a very long time and continue to support backward-compatible functionality while still keeping up with necessary compatibility and security changes as the environment around it evolves.
Personally, I value stability more than random changes in user interfaces, and nowhere more so than in my operating system. I hate the modern trend of pushing out unreliable compulsory updates every five minutes, which don't just fix bugs or close security holes but also introduce regressions, maybe completely change the UI, or even remove functionality.
Windows has traditionally been a shining contrast to that, and Microsoft have put in a huge amount of effort over the years to support their software for much longer than most projects do. However, it was never really commercially sensible to expect the kind of effort to be made indefinitely by Microsoft when no-one is paying them anything extra for it. The result is turkeys like Vista and Windows 8, when apparently a lot of us were much happier sticking with XP or Windows 7.
So, I'd rather see some open, transparent arrangement where you know how long you get free updates for with the purchase and then there is a straightforward arrangement for funding more, instead of moving to some sort of lock-in/subscription model as promoted by the likes of Adobe or the "your software is more than five minutes old so we won't support you any more" model as promoted by the likes of Apple, Google and Mozilla.
It's worth remembering in these discussions that "advertiser" includes basically every business and for that matter every open social group in the world. It includes the emergency plumber you call when your home is flooding at 2am. It includes the band your kid wants to go see for their birthday. It includes your grandmother's knitting club.
There is nothing inherently evil in these people advertising. Their ads provide a useful social function because other people do want to find them. Of course, they also fund various media, which presumably the viewers/listeners/browsers value or they wouldn't be those things.
What everyone hates is excessive/intrusive advertising, and on the Web also the specific problems of malware/spyware served by ad networks. Those guys can go take a running jump, but let's all try to remember that they represent only a small minority of "advertisers", and they always have (or the Web would have become unusable long ago).
So, how about we stop talking as if we're stupid and think everyone who advertises is some evil demon whose only purpose in life is to frustrate everyone who browses the Web. Nothing useful comes from all the "advertisers should go kill themselves" bull that people who I can only assume are twelve years old post every time this subject comes up.
I run a lot of web sites. Exactly none of them include ads or rely on any advertising network to make money. I just don't think the world owes me everything I ever wanted, on whatever terms I want it, for free.
Right, but if consumers may lawfully crack DRM in order to perform actions that are otherwise legal (under fair use or the equivalent, say) then in practice this is unlikely to be a problem. If it ever is, you just regulate or outright legislate such that anyone selling works in electronic formats for profit with DRM applied must lodge an unrestricted copy in escrow with some official body to ensure that the work can be used as the law otherwise permits once it has been lawfully acquired.
Ultimately, any creative industry has to sell its work to make any money. The general public as audience, via their respective governments, can impose whatever terms they want to ensure fairness and the creative industries will have to comply. This is no different to any other business that is regulated by consumer protection laws, usually because previously someone was exploiting the situation unfairly.
There is really no reason to pander to these industries if they abuse the one-sided power structure that exists today. They have nowhere to go. And I write that as someone who makes a decent living creating works of various kinds, because despite the bleatings of the big content distributors, I am evidently still able to make that decent living without imposing nasty DRM schemes on my clients/customers. If I can do it with my little businesses, I'm pretty sure the guys making programmes and films with multi-million dollar budgets can do it too, without making me sit through an FBI warning that is completely irrelevant in my jurisdiction or stopping me watching something over here even though the discs have been available across the pond for a while.
I think the problem that you're failing to recognize which the OP stated was that yes, I pointed my browser at a website. What I did not point my browser at is the 14 IFRAME ads and analytics hosted by 15 other 3rd party providers.
Can I therefore assume that you also want to be prompted for explicit permission every time a site you visit uses a CDN to serve some static assets, and every time you buy something on-line and the site links to data served by their payment service, and so on? Because I don't think that version of the Web would be an improvement, and I don't see how to distinguish between "desirable" and "undesirable" third party content without downloading it or at least seeing its URL first.
Once you have the URL then of course a browser can choose not to download it, as many of us do with ad blockers today. I don't see anyone here seriously agreeing with the IMHO silly argument by the French publishers in this case; certainly I'm not agreeing with them myself. All I'm saying is that if you run a browser that downloads someone's entire freely offered site, claiming that they should somehow have sought your permission or they're effectively stealing your bandwidth by supplying data your browser explicitly asked their server to supply is nonsense.
However, I don't think anyone can credibly argue today that serving a web site that includes ads (or analytics and the like) is "entirely abnormal". Just the number of sites using Google's ad network and analytics tool would be sufficient to disprove any such argument.
Similarly, there's nothing at all unusual about relying on third-party servers for part of the page. Prohibiting that would break every CDN, most on-line payment schemes, most on-line webfont and video hosting services...
I wrote a post saying that it was absurd to argue that:
1. a website was using a downloader's bandwidth without permission,
2. this was effectively stealing the bandwidth, and
3. courts should force website owners to ask downloaders, who are actively requesting the freely offered content, for permission to use their bandwidth.
As I write this, the parent poster and several others have all replied as if I was somehow supporting the notion that downloaders should therefore be compelled to watch ads. I certainly am not advocating that position, and I don't see how you can even possibly read that into what I wrote before.
I thought [Blu-ray] got lost in the negative gap between DVD and getting stuff over the internet.
On the contrary. I still use Blu-ray because after I've bought a disc it is mine, permanently and unambiguously, and with the full force of my country's consumer protection laws behind me if anyone tries to interfere with my use of it.
I am not vulnerable to an on-line service yanking a series I'm watching from their library when I'm only mid-season. I am not vulnerable to disruption at my ISP interfering with my enjoyment of the film just at the crucial moment. I am not vulnerable to arbitrary price hikes in pay-per-view delivery caused by corporate politics far beyond my level of caring. I just play the disc.
Technically, they could add unskippable content to that disc that would interfere with my enjoyment. Obviously streaming content can carry ads just as easily, but the reality is that Blu-ray is much better than DVDs typically were on that score anyway. Anything that wasn't would just go straight back to the store as unfit for purpose.
Technically, they could also play some funny games that might break my Blu-ray player as part of the DRM scheme. Again, compared to some of the things people have tried to do with on-line DRM schemes, that seems a relatively low risk to me. In any case, it would be a brave vendor who sold a disc that actually did that in my country. If it ever damaged a legitimate customer then the vendor would immediately be on the hook both for the consequential losses (new Blu-ray player, anyone?) and potentially for criminal charges as well.
especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.
That's really the key point. Their own executives reportedly concluded that if they tried to move into the SDN space, they would turn their $43B business into a $21B business, yet they were publicly embarrassed when what was supposed to be a billion dollar deal with Amazon fell through. They are probably contemplating what happens when SDN and open devices are no longer the new kid on the block but an established, mature part of the industry. I don't suppose they much like the conclusions they must surely be reaching right now.
There's been six or seven products I decided not to buy in the past year because the forums don't work if you have that stuff turned on.
Good for you. Just remember that for every one of you -- an exceptionally awkward customer who is probably more trouble than you are worth from a business perspective -- these companies are gaining useful business insights from those tools that will ultimately make them far more money then you would ever be worth to them in a lifetime. You're perfectly entitled to block things and not use their forums and decide not to buy from them, but they are just as perfectly entitled not to care.
They use my bandwidth (without permission) to peddle me ads for things I don't want [...] The courts should be forcing them to ASK me if I want them using my bandwidth if anything as they are effectively stealing it.
That's an absurd argument. They are offering you access to some information, for free. If you choose to point your browser at their site and your browser then requests a download for that information from their server, it is your responsibility and no-one else's. They have no obligation of any kind to help you download any specific thing, and certainly not to actively help you circumvent what might be their preferred method of revenue generation. Get over your entitlement complex already.
This is going to be a battle, and it will absolutely suck for us as a whole, because eventually DRM will won.
I'm not so sure in this case. Most of the web sites I value don't rely on third-party ads for their main or only income. The few that do so are expendable/replaceable. I appreciate having forums like Slashdot to discuss things on-line, but the value of news aggregation/discussion sites is in the consolidation and in the discussions and the communities -- in other words, it all comes from third-party contributions that are given freely, just like my own -- not in the site itself.
And the correct market response to that would have been to call their bluff, and then enjoy the movies from those that survived. The idea that all the studios would have stopped releasing their content anywhere but in theatres is utterly implausible and was never a serious threat.
If no one can make (DVD/Blue ray players/that one tool required to fix your car) EXCEPT them, then they have a strangle hold on the market and can do as they please.
Exactly. It is in no way in my interests as a consumer to have, say, a region-locked DVD player, or a Blu-ray player that won't let me skip to the contents I want to watch instead of sitting through legal notices that don't even apply in my jurisdiction, or a PVR where I can't transfer my HD recordings to a different PVR if the first player is defective and needs to be returned. There is literally no-one who gains from these restrictions, not even the content creators or the manufacturers.
However, the current state of intellectual property laws prevents anyone from (lawfully) competing in that market with a better offering, because patents and anti-circumvention rules make for very good ways to be anti-competitive without actually breaking any laws. And that is in the interests of the organisations that control those rights.
(Seriously, how is that off-topic? It's a reasonable assessment of the current mood in places like Europe, and I personally know people who would be in exactly the position to benefit that I described if the US does stick with the legal position as it apparently stands today and so conveniently removes some of the competition that would otherwise exist for European firms.)
You might consider the possibility that if Arista did charge less for their devices -- maybe much less, if say they were promoting a different business model that wasn't based primarily on very high margins on hardware sales -- then one possible consequence might be that Cisco would be terrified that their goose that lays golden eggs was on its death bed.
Not that I'm in any way claiming that this hypothetical scenario does have anything to do with anything, you understand. It's just a possibility that you might consider.
Well, God help the US IT industry, anyway. Even with the dubious "diplomacy" the US employs when it comes to exporting intellectual property laws, I expect most of the world would see such an obvious and needless barrier to competition and interoperability for what it is. Prohibiting that kind of competition in the US would just be good for... well, everyone who develops software in another jurisdiction, basically, as long as those other jurisdictions don't propagate the mistake.
I can't think of any other democracy who have gone this route though.
Then you're either not trying hard enough or not considering large parts of the Western first world to be democratic. They're pretty much all at it, with or without the meaningful consent or support of their populations. The US just has a bigger budget and a higher profile.
Slashdot Mirror
How many ads do you see that aren't served from an ad network?
The only ads I see aren't served from the major ad networks.
I still see plenty of ads, though: any e-commerce site I visit is full of "recommendations", reviews often have an "affiliate link" so you can buy the item reviewed and they get a commission (an obvious conflict of interest, but that's another issue), a lot of the niche sites I visit carry their own advertising, social network sites integrate self-hosted ads into their main feeds, and so on.
I don't really find those things annoying myself, precisely because they don't tend to be excessively intrusive.
Sure they will, but some won't, and some of the ones who do will hate you for it every day until they find a plausible alternative.
Adobe got away with Creative Cloud because at the time there wasn't really much competition for Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. There weren't many commercial/closed source alternatives, as Corel and the like are now a shadow of their former selves. This being Slashdot, someone will suggest the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus, and everyone who works with this kind of software professionally will smile kindly and ignore them.
However, within a couple of years, there were already well-regarded and well-featured competing commercial products, available for a tiny fraction of the cost of Creative Cloud, for some of the significant markets that Creative Suite applications used to appeal to. This seems to be particularly true of creating graphics for on-line use rather than traditional photography or print design, and I seem to hear many good things about several of those applications just in general discussions with other people who work in creative fields.
I don't hear many people saying positive things about Adobe's software any more, though. They were never really a well-liked supplier, IME, but now they're just the clingy ex you can't shake until you've obviously settled with someone newer and better.
I can't speak for MS's plan but Adobe CC is far from "wringing even more cash" from their user base.
That depends on your point of view.
We use various parts of Creative Suite occasionally for work, but not as everyday software. We bought a copy of one of the bundle versions more than four years ago, for a one-time price of about £1,250 at the time.
Today, it looks like the closest equivalent UK pricing on Creative Cloud is about £560/year. It would have cost us approximately twice as much so far under the new pricing model, and we'd still be locked into paying forever.
Defenders of the model talk about the benefits of paying a small fee monthly being more manageable, but I'm running a business and can add up, so accounting over the course of a year is hardly a burden.
Defenders of the model also talk about all the improvements Adobe make and the benefits of having the latest software, but if their improvements were worth much to us then we'd have bought an upgrade to CS6 and we never saw anything to justify the cost. I haven't seen much to got me excited in any of the applications we use ever since the move to Creative Cloud either; there's plenty that we would pay for, but either Adobe aren't doing those things or they aren't very good at advertising when they have.
The thing is, even if they did those things now, while we'd have happily paid for the upgrades on a one-time basis, there is zero chance that we're going to commit to unregulated rent-seeking on software we rely on to do our business. We have seriously considered spending significantly more money to get a high-spec Mac just so we can run some of the generation of graphics software that is emerging on that platform, sometimes costing less for a permanent licence that CC does for a single month, yet with a reputation that suggests it would be at least as good for the kind of work we do if not better.
I think our attitude to Windows payments would be similar. Give us decent optional upgrades at sensible intervals and we'll happily pay a reasonable price for that support. Try to lock us in so something we already paid for switches off if we don't keep paying, and we'll never buy Windows again, and just stick with our existing Win7 licenses until we move entirely to Mac and Linux machines.
I'm sorry, I don't rent my operating systems. Or my applications for that matter.
Neither do I. Ticking timebombs are a complete deal-breaker for me.
However, I would seriously consider paying a reasonable recurring fee to fund continued updates for an OS that works well for me after some sensible initial period of free support, so that OS can remain useful for a very long time and continue to support backward-compatible functionality while still keeping up with necessary compatibility and security changes as the environment around it evolves.
Personally, I value stability more than random changes in user interfaces, and nowhere more so than in my operating system. I hate the modern trend of pushing out unreliable compulsory updates every five minutes, which don't just fix bugs or close security holes but also introduce regressions, maybe completely change the UI, or even remove functionality.
Windows has traditionally been a shining contrast to that, and Microsoft have put in a huge amount of effort over the years to support their software for much longer than most projects do. However, it was never really commercially sensible to expect the kind of effort to be made indefinitely by Microsoft when no-one is paying them anything extra for it. The result is turkeys like Vista and Windows 8, when apparently a lot of us were much happier sticking with XP or Windows 7.
So, I'd rather see some open, transparent arrangement where you know how long you get free updates for with the purchase and then there is a straightforward arrangement for funding more, instead of moving to some sort of lock-in/subscription model as promoted by the likes of Adobe or the "your software is more than five minutes old so we won't support you any more" model as promoted by the likes of Apple, Google and Mozilla.
Wow. Got a little off your chest there, buddy? :-)
It's worth remembering in these discussions that "advertiser" includes basically every business and for that matter every open social group in the world. It includes the emergency plumber you call when your home is flooding at 2am. It includes the band your kid wants to go see for their birthday. It includes your grandmother's knitting club.
There is nothing inherently evil in these people advertising. Their ads provide a useful social function because other people do want to find them. Of course, they also fund various media, which presumably the viewers/listeners/browsers value or they wouldn't be those things.
What everyone hates is excessive/intrusive advertising, and on the Web also the specific problems of malware/spyware served by ad networks. Those guys can go take a running jump, but let's all try to remember that they represent only a small minority of "advertisers", and they always have (or the Web would have become unusable long ago).
So, how about we stop talking as if we're stupid and think everyone who advertises is some evil demon whose only purpose in life is to frustrate everyone who browses the Web. Nothing useful comes from all the "advertisers should go kill themselves" bull that people who I can only assume are twelve years old post every time this subject comes up.
I don't see anything here that suggests this will employ some form of AI to determine which ads would be annoying and only click on those.
Player's (slightly) less buggy and crash-prone than AMD drivers. ;-)
I run a lot of web sites. Exactly none of them include ads or rely on any advertising network to make money. I just don't think the world owes me everything I ever wanted, on whatever terms I want it, for free.
Right, but if consumers may lawfully crack DRM in order to perform actions that are otherwise legal (under fair use or the equivalent, say) then in practice this is unlikely to be a problem. If it ever is, you just regulate or outright legislate such that anyone selling works in electronic formats for profit with DRM applied must lodge an unrestricted copy in escrow with some official body to ensure that the work can be used as the law otherwise permits once it has been lawfully acquired.
Ultimately, any creative industry has to sell its work to make any money. The general public as audience, via their respective governments, can impose whatever terms they want to ensure fairness and the creative industries will have to comply. This is no different to any other business that is regulated by consumer protection laws, usually because previously someone was exploiting the situation unfairly.
There is really no reason to pander to these industries if they abuse the one-sided power structure that exists today. They have nowhere to go. And I write that as someone who makes a decent living creating works of various kinds, because despite the bleatings of the big content distributors, I am evidently still able to make that decent living without imposing nasty DRM schemes on my clients/customers. If I can do it with my little businesses, I'm pretty sure the guys making programmes and films with multi-million dollar budgets can do it too, without making me sit through an FBI warning that is completely irrelevant in my jurisdiction or stopping me watching something over here even though the discs have been available across the pond for a while.
I think the problem that you're failing to recognize which the OP stated was that yes, I pointed my browser at a website. What I did not point my browser at is the 14 IFRAME ads and analytics hosted by 15 other 3rd party providers.
Can I therefore assume that you also want to be prompted for explicit permission every time a site you visit uses a CDN to serve some static assets, and every time you buy something on-line and the site links to data served by their payment service, and so on? Because I don't think that version of the Web would be an improvement, and I don't see how to distinguish between "desirable" and "undesirable" third party content without downloading it or at least seeing its URL first.
Once you have the URL then of course a browser can choose not to download it, as many of us do with ad blockers today. I don't see anyone here seriously agreeing with the IMHO silly argument by the French publishers in this case; certainly I'm not agreeing with them myself. All I'm saying is that if you run a browser that downloads someone's entire freely offered site, claiming that they should somehow have sought your permission or they're effectively stealing your bandwidth by supplying data your browser explicitly asked their server to supply is nonsense.
That seems reasonable enough.
However, I don't think anyone can credibly argue today that serving a web site that includes ads (or analytics and the like) is "entirely abnormal". Just the number of sites using Google's ad network and analytics tool would be sufficient to disprove any such argument.
Similarly, there's nothing at all unusual about relying on third-party servers for part of the page. Prohibiting that would break every CDN, most on-line payment schemes, most on-line webfont and video hosting services...
I am genuinely confused.
I wrote a post saying that it was absurd to argue that:
1. a website was using a downloader's bandwidth without permission,
2. this was effectively stealing the bandwidth, and
3. courts should force website owners to ask downloaders, who are actively requesting the freely offered content, for permission to use their bandwidth.
As I write this, the parent poster and several others have all replied as if I was somehow supporting the notion that downloaders should therefore be compelled to watch ads. I certainly am not advocating that position, and I don't see how you can even possibly read that into what I wrote before.
I thought [Blu-ray] got lost in the negative gap between DVD and getting stuff over the internet.
On the contrary. I still use Blu-ray because after I've bought a disc it is mine, permanently and unambiguously, and with the full force of my country's consumer protection laws behind me if anyone tries to interfere with my use of it.
I am not vulnerable to an on-line service yanking a series I'm watching from their library when I'm only mid-season. I am not vulnerable to disruption at my ISP interfering with my enjoyment of the film just at the crucial moment. I am not vulnerable to arbitrary price hikes in pay-per-view delivery caused by corporate politics far beyond my level of caring. I just play the disc.
Technically, they could add unskippable content to that disc that would interfere with my enjoyment. Obviously streaming content can carry ads just as easily, but the reality is that Blu-ray is much better than DVDs typically were on that score anyway. Anything that wasn't would just go straight back to the store as unfit for purpose.
Technically, they could also play some funny games that might break my Blu-ray player as part of the DRM scheme. Again, compared to some of the things people have tried to do with on-line DRM schemes, that seems a relatively low risk to me. In any case, it would be a brave vendor who sold a disc that actually did that in my country. If it ever damaged a legitimate customer then the vendor would immediately be on the hook both for the consequential losses (new Blu-ray player, anyone?) and potentially for criminal charges as well.
especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.
That's really the key point. Their own executives reportedly concluded that if they tried to move into the SDN space, they would turn their $43B business into a $21B business, yet they were publicly embarrassed when what was supposed to be a billion dollar deal with Amazon fell through. They are probably contemplating what happens when SDN and open devices are no longer the new kid on the block but an established, mature part of the industry. I don't suppose they much like the conclusions they must surely be reaching right now.
There's been six or seven products I decided not to buy in the past year because the forums don't work if you have that stuff turned on.
Good for you. Just remember that for every one of you -- an exceptionally awkward customer who is probably more trouble than you are worth from a business perspective -- these companies are gaining useful business insights from those tools that will ultimately make them far more money then you would ever be worth to them in a lifetime. You're perfectly entitled to block things and not use their forums and decide not to buy from them, but they are just as perfectly entitled not to care.
They use my bandwidth (without permission) to peddle me ads for things I don't want [...] The courts should be forcing them to ASK me if I want them using my bandwidth if anything as they are effectively stealing it.
That's an absurd argument. They are offering you access to some information, for free. If you choose to point your browser at their site and your browser then requests a download for that information from their server, it is your responsibility and no-one else's. They have no obligation of any kind to help you download any specific thing, and certainly not to actively help you circumvent what might be their preferred method of revenue generation. Get over your entitlement complex already.
Or just use another blocker without the potential conflict of interest, such as Adblock Edge, or your hosts file if you're technical.
This is going to be a battle, and it will absolutely suck for us as a whole, because eventually DRM will won.
I'm not so sure in this case. Most of the web sites I value don't rely on third-party ads for their main or only income. The few that do so are expendable/replaceable. I appreciate having forums like Slashdot to discuss things on-line, but the value of news aggregation/discussion sites is in the consolidation and in the discussions and the communities -- in other words, it all comes from third-party contributions that are given freely, just like my own -- not in the site itself.
And the correct market response to that would have been to call their bluff, and then enjoy the movies from those that survived. The idea that all the studios would have stopped releasing their content anywhere but in theatres is utterly implausible and was never a serious threat.
If no one can make (DVD/Blue ray players/that one tool required to fix your car) EXCEPT them, then they have a strangle hold on the market and can do as they please.
Exactly. It is in no way in my interests as a consumer to have, say, a region-locked DVD player, or a Blu-ray player that won't let me skip to the contents I want to watch instead of sitting through legal notices that don't even apply in my jurisdiction, or a PVR where I can't transfer my HD recordings to a different PVR if the first player is defective and needs to be returned. There is literally no-one who gains from these restrictions, not even the content creators or the manufacturers.
However, the current state of intellectual property laws prevents anyone from (lawfully) competing in that market with a better offering, because patents and anti-circumvention rules make for very good ways to be anti-competitive without actually breaking any laws. And that is in the interests of the organisations that control those rights.
Please tell me someone in his office was then caught downloading something illegally.
(Seriously, how is that off-topic? It's a reasonable assessment of the current mood in places like Europe, and I personally know people who would be in exactly the position to benefit that I described if the US does stick with the legal position as it apparently stands today and so conveniently removes some of the competition that would otherwise exist for European firms.)
You might consider the possibility that if Arista did charge less for their devices -- maybe much less, if say they were promoting a different business model that wasn't based primarily on very high margins on hardware sales -- then one possible consequence might be that Cisco would be terrified that their goose that lays golden eggs was on its death bed.
Not that I'm in any way claiming that this hypothetical scenario does have anything to do with anything, you understand. It's just a possibility that you might consider.
Well, God help the US IT industry, anyway. Even with the dubious "diplomacy" the US employs when it comes to exporting intellectual property laws, I expect most of the world would see such an obvious and needless barrier to competition and interoperability for what it is. Prohibiting that kind of competition in the US would just be good for... well, everyone who develops software in another jurisdiction, basically, as long as those other jurisdictions don't propagate the mistake.
I can't think of any other democracy who have gone this route though.
Then you're either not trying hard enough or not considering large parts of the Western first world to be democratic. They're pretty much all at it, with or without the meaningful consent or support of their populations. The US just has a bigger budget and a higher profile.