Now, we have Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, claiming that using devices such as TiVo to skip commercials should be against the law. In fact, he believes that you should not even be allowed to watch a program unless you also watch the commercials: "Skipping ads is theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He at least concedes: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom (during an ad)." How generous!
We believe these increasingly annoying "big brother" intrusions will only backfire in the end. If not, we may have to start installing TVs in our bathrooms.
also see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A301 63-2002May3.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch. ht m
seems that this appplies not only to natural phenoms (earthquake size X rank ~= constant) but also human activities: city size (#10 has roughly 1/10 pop. as #1, #100 ~= 1/100) and even "corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed".
while i agree that commercial speech is somewhat less protected, i think we have to look at why spam is a problem at all: because the cost is not borne by the sender.
in the real world, junk mail does cost the sender. but the internet essentially recreates a "tragedy of the commons" that has no constraints on abuse.
the solution is _not_ to gut free speech, but to correctly allocate the costs of distribution. isn't sender-pays why wireless is so much more widespread in europe than in the u.s.?
free-lunch advocates should be wary of what they want...they don't like what they get;-}
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perhaps clockwork orange-style attention-assurance technology?
1 63-2002May3.html
from macintouch:
Now, we have Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, claiming that using devices such as TiVo to skip commercials should be against the law. In fact, he believes that you should not even be allowed to watch a program unless you also watch the commercials: "Skipping ads is theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He at least concedes: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom (during an ad)." How generous!
We believe these increasingly annoying "big brother" intrusions will only backfire in the end. If not, we may have to start installing TVs in our bathrooms.
also see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30
i _was_ lucky enough 2 hear the original (u.s.) broadcasts (wduq, pittsburgh:-) and i have the tapes 2 proove it;-)
i just ran across zipf's law in this article:
. ht m
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch
seems that this appplies not only to natural phenoms (earthquake size X rank ~= constant) but also human activities: city size (#10 has roughly 1/10 pop. as #1, #100 ~= 1/100) and even "corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed".
so it's not surprising that the web is zipfian...
while i agree that commercial speech is somewhat less protected, i think we have to look at why spam is a problem at all: because the cost is not borne by the sender.
in the real world, junk mail does cost the sender. but the internet essentially recreates a "tragedy of the commons" that has no constraints on abuse.
the solution is _not_ to gut free speech, but to correctly allocate the costs of distribution. isn't sender-pays why wireless is so much more widespread in europe than in the u.s.?
free-lunch advocates should be wary of what they want...they don't like what they get;-}
as long as most people think less than 6 hrs on a vhs cassette is a waste of tape, hdtv's not gonna fly;-}
so, wshi, whadda ya think about cg kiddie p()rn?