or is it about the UN dismissing the signs of climate change to fit their agenda?
I'm sorry, what? The UN doesn't have an agenda that benefits from dismissing "signs of climate change". How can the smaller countries rake the big developed ones over the coals if the coals aren't creating an impending disaster that the big countries need to give the small ones money to solve?
Of course, not driving on a regular basis will make people really suck at racing.
And at driving, too.
Airplanes have had autopilots for a very long time. There is a reason why the pilot instruction for flying airplanes with autopilots includes rote memorization of not one, not two, not three, but almost always half a dozen or more ways of disabling the autopilot when necessary. Those methods range from "press the disable button on the yolk" through "turn the AP off" and up to "pull the circuit breaker". And that's in a machine that isn't running at 60 or more MPH inches away from concrete and other machines going 60 MPH the opposite direction.
Anyway, how does sending someone to a bad prison that will make them more likely to reoffend protect the victim more than one that will rehabilitate the perpetrator?
I don't believe you will see anything in what I said that says it does. I'm merely pointing out in the statement that we should defend those that most need it we should put victims higher on the list than the people who victimized them. The victims, for the most part, are on the list through no fault of their own; those who put them there made the choices for both themselves and their victims.
As for 16-24 year olds being on the list of victims, the person who thinks that is relevant is apparently assuming that all 16-24 year old people are highly athletic self-defense experts and thus deserving of no protection from violent criminals. I suspect if you look a bit more into the data, you'll find that excepting violence between criminals (a drug deal gone bad, e.g.) most violent criminals target those who aren't likely to defend themselves simply as a means of self-preservation. Why pick hard targets when the easy ones are so... easy?
We're talking about the original promise of cable TV. Cable TV is not just "cable stations", whatever you define those to be. If I understand what you think you mean by that phrase, I'll still point out that ads have always played a part, because two of the first satellite-distributed content services were WTBS and WGN, both "cable stations" and both advertiser supported. And many of the other "cable stations" have carried ads from day one. (Was there, saw "Video Killed the Radio Star" on MTV on day one. Also saw the ads.) Maybe they just weren't let in on the secret promise that "cable TV means 'no ads'"?
And anybody who differs from your own experience in your own locality must be wrong?
The genesis of cable tv wasn't something that happened in just my locality. It was at least a US-wide, and more likely a world-wide phenomenon, which was limited in a very large part by the limited technology of the time. There weren't pay channels then; there wasn't a means of distributing that content. Pay channels came later. The channels that were carried on cable systems were the local broadcast channels, and the technology to automatically remove ads did not exist. Today there are systems to replace ads with local ones, but not then. Even today, those systems don't remove ads completely, they replace them with "local avails". That is, advertising space made available by the network provider for local cable systems to insert ads from local advertisers -- a way that local cable companies help fund the cost of the channel. (Comcast is particularly bad as this right now, which makes for some very funny ads. You get five seconds of one ad followed by the rest of another.)
The statement was concerning the original promise of cable TV. The word "original" really does rule out what late-comers to the party did, even systems that carry no ad-funded content like some do today. The original promise was not "no ads", it never was, and thus whining about the recent appearance of ads on cable channels is a bit little, a bit late. Yes, those people who claim the original promise of cable TV was "no ads" based on their experience with modern pay-only cable services are wrong when they talk about the original promise.
And it's not "ebook sales", it should read "ebook rental license" since you don't own the ebook like you do an actual book.
Depends on the book. I have lots of them I own, and many of them and others aren't in readers that the distributor controls, so they can't take them back. Mobiread is one place to get good old books in many formats. Analog Science Fiction, Asimov's, and Ellery Queen are distributed by B&N in non-DRM epub format.
I wonder how much the library loan of ebooks has cut into sales? There are many books I borrow that I might have bought, and some of the ones I borrow I am very glad I borrowed first.
Others have mentioned readability on specific readers or in general. A large drawback I find in ebooks is that the ones that are self-published are often really awful, even beyond the storylines and plots. I've seen some self-published Sci-Fi that was unreadable because of comma-itis and poor grammar. I mean, commas in so many places that it actually made the sentences meaningless. After someone buys a few of these clunkers, they may be hesitant to buy anything more.
You know, we get unskippable FBI warnings on beginning of DVDs, and this is in a country where FBI has no presence, or authority.
What a remarkable juxtaposition, since in a country where there is an FBI presence and authority, I almost never see an FBI warning, and can skip any that I do run across.
It's not about getting HD material, it's about getting any material at all.
Actually, the comment I replied to, which you quoted, is: "See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising." That means what I'm replying to is, indeed, a question of the ads, not just "getting any content at all".
I get interested in some show they are talking about, my only option is piratebay.
No, an alternative option is to not watch the program. There is never a time when your only option is to pirate something.
I'd pay, but nobody wants to take my money.
This implies that your willingness to pay creates a duty for them to provide the content. Not so.
I think you've latched onto the word "cable" and related that to the reticulation of free to air TV signals over a common coaxial cable infrastructure.
Which is the origin of cable TV. Pay channels came later, and only they could claim "no ads" as a draw to paying extra for them. The rest of cable? Same ads as always.
Certainly, Foxtel in Australia used to use no ads as a feature,
I'm going out on a limb here, but considering the name of the company and the fact that the "essentials" contain a lot of "Fox" and "Sky" channels, I'm going to bet that Foxtel is a Rupert Murdoch product, and as such, postdates the origin of cable tv by quite a bit of time. What they claimed upon their inception is hardly what the original cable TV systems were able to claim. Yes, we all know, and I've said repeatedly, pay services can be ad-free because they charge the subscriber (or charge through the cable company), but pay services are not an original feature of cable TV nor are they the sole content on most modern cable systems. I note that there seem to be no local broadcast stations in the "essentials" of Foxtel, so apparently the broadcast stations in Oz didn't manage to get protection.
Umm... How many DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray have you bought?
Lots. Lots and lots. No Blu-ray, but DVD a plenty.
I have purchased well over 500 over the last 15 years and most of them have un-skippable content at the beginning.
"mplayer dvd://1" If that starts playing an ad, I move on to 2, etc. And once I run mencoder over it, the ads are gone forever. I plug my HDMI cable into my XOOM and it's on my main TV, ad free.
You may not be forced to watch them if you are using a PC or one of the few DVD players that does not strictly enforce the DVD command structure.
If you can freely use some tool other than one that tells you what you must watch and in what order, can you really claim you are forced to watch anything?
The comment was that there was no way to get ad-free content other than piracy, and I gave one example that shows that claim to be false.
Well no, there is a prohibition of criticism.... "I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot."
That is not the same as being prohibited from criticizing the government for having such a process, which clearly he does. Whether it is there in so many words or not, the message is clear. What he's prohibited from talking about are the specifics of what happened.
There is a very great difference between "I oppose FISA and everything to do with it and our government should cease" and "I was issued a FISA warrant for email from XYZ and don't want to comply, and I oppose..." The former is criticism of the government, the latter is releasing specific details of an ongoing investigation AND criticism of the government. Notice that the difference is only the details part, and that the criticism is not prohibited in either case.
Now we can all guess, in terms of recent events, what's going on. The NSA has come to him and asked for access to the emails on his server. The only reason we know about this is because of Snowden,
So Snowden has released information about this request that happened after Snowden left a position where he had access to such information? You don't know, you admit it is a guess. Yeah, I'm guessing the same thing. But I won't claim that it is a fact or that Snowden is why we know it is a fact.
We could all guess from events from... how long ago was FISA created?... that long ago what is going on.
If we did not have the "illegal" leak from Snowden, we would not know what this mail provider was talking about,
I'm sorry, but FISA requests have been part of the Patriot Act for many years. Any email provider who says "I am closing and I can't tell you specifics why" could be assumed to have been the subject of a FISA warrant that he doesn't want to submit to. That's long before Snowden released anything.
If we're going to object to something, can we at least not use hyperbole and fear to try to turn it into something else? Is it not bad enough that the FISA system exists, that you have to try to convert it to some massive prohibition against criticism of the government?
Of course local channels carried on cable TV had ads, because they weren't cable-only channels.
The fact that they weren't cable-only is irrelevant. The claim was that the original promise of cable TV was "no ads". That's patent bullshit for exactly the reason you admit. The very first channels carried by cable systems were local broadcast stations and every one of them had advertising. It was only later when the cable systems, combined with increasing availability/lower cost of satellite delivery, created a market for non-broadcast content networks, that some pay services promoted themselves as "no ads". That's not the original intent of cable TV, nor was it how they originally operated, nor is it how they operate today.
Way to deliberately lie
You admit that cable systems have never been "no ads" and could not possibly promise that, and yet I'm the one you call a liar for saying they have always had content with ads and could never have originated as "ad free" systems.
and obfuscate the issue.
Facts aren't a good way to obfuscate anything, and I've given you the facts. CATV was not created with the idea that they could be "no ads"; some of the pay content could do that, but not the cable provider itself.
Because the locals don't appreciate it when it happens with locals. And when it is "consenting" co-members of the military it can often be less than consenting and it creates unnecessary conflict in a unit. When that E2 the E7 is banging depends on the good evaluations from the E7 to be promoted and/or get good assignments, it is a good assumption that there is not a lot of consent. And the other members of the unit may just have a bit of jealousy or disrespect for that E7 for what he's doing.
What, the army of a nation that thinks movies full of violence, gore, and flying body parts is OK,
I'm fascinated. When someone objects to the violence and gore in the popular media they are branded as nutcases and looneys and of course violence in media has no effect on anyone. And now you seem to be implying that violence and gore in movies is a bad thing and that nobody has ever objected to such.
The issue is not movies of body parts that are "procreative", but the actual use of such parts. There's a couple of very good reasons for this to be against the regulations.
We've seen the effect on the country when it happens with little to keep it in check. Unwed mothers with "American" babies in a country where both are scorned and discriminated against. For every honorable soldier in the Korean War who came back with a Korean wife, keep in mind the number who didn't do the honorable thing and left a family behind to fend for themselves.
The potential for blackmail as a lever to coerce dereliction or worse. "Let us run our black market or we'll tell your wife about..."
In my mind, disallowing people from criticizing government actions and government policy is a serious violation of the First Amendment.
It doesn't seem that there has been a prohibition on criticizing policies here. The criticism is pretty clear in the statement quoted in the summary. The criticism is clear in the comments here. What's being limited is commenting on an ongoing investigation, which might cause the person being investigated to flee or destroy evidence.
You can argue whether the latter is acceptable or not, but let's identify the correct issue.
I was around then and there was very definitely a "subscribe to this new thing, CABLE TV! No static, fifty channels, and best of all since you're already paying for it, no commercials!"
That's a patent lie. Those fifty channels consisted in large part of the broadcast services in your local area. And those broadcast services managed to get "must carry" enacted as law, which means that the cable companies could not demand that the stations pay for carriage or choose to exclude them to carry other, more profitable services. Now, a station could refuse to let the cable company carry them, or try to demand money, but if they used the magic words "must carry", then they were on the cable system. And every ad that the broadcast station aired went out over cable, too.
IIRC Ted Turner's TBS was the first to start broadcasting commercials,
You don't recall correctly. TBS began as WTBS, the "superstation" from Atlanta. It was a local independent broadcast station that was Turner's intro into TV and medium to broadcast the Braves baseball games. Other than that they had a lot of reruns and old movies. And they carried exactly the same ads as the broadcast station did for a long time. Eventually they started selling national ads and swapping them in, but they always had ads.
The same is true of WGN. It's an independent broadcast station in Chicago that followed WTBS onto the satellite and onto cable systems. Advertiser supported.
Rural CATV systems might be called "cable TV" but that isn't what we had in the suburbs in the 80s.
The suburbs isn't where CATV originated and you can't claim that what they did has anything to do with the origination of such systems. They followed CATV and MATV, and they've always had advertiser supported content because that was their function.
Not sure how old you are but while there may, or may not, have been a promise, I definitely remember that that is indeed what the deal was.
Given the original cable companies and what services they provided, that certainly was NOT the deal. They couldn't remove the ads from the broadcast stations they carried. They didn't have the technology at the time. In fact, when the local cable company introduced HBO (as "The Q channel") they didn't have any automated equipment to insert information about how to order the service during the free preview and they hired me to sit in the head end watching the movies and then running a video tape and making voice overs.
We never had cable, but I well remember that when I expressed amazement that anyone would pay $ for TV, they'd always shoot back, "But there's no commercials!"
Ignorant people who bought pay services and then told you there were "no commercials" don't define the medium, they are simply telling you about one part of it. If they had any intelligence at all they wouldn't have said "there are no ads", because there certainly were, but that you aren't "pay[ing] $ for TV", you're paying for delivery and the ability to get service without buying an antenna. That's what cable originally was. CATV.
You never had cable. I was involved from the early 80's, was on the local regulatory board, and dealt with people who had been there forever. Some of them were the idealists who pushed for more local origination and public access and despite their idealistic view of cable as a great equalizer in the public debate, they never once claimed that cable TV promised "no ads". In fact, the local origination station that one of them ran and was then converted to public access failed because they could not find enough advertisers. That would be a funny way to fail if they never intended to have advertisers. I'd say if you are trying to promise "no ads" then a failure to get people to buy ad time would be spectacular success.
The network feeds were the only exception.
So there were ads, and there were no promises of "no ads" possible, and you know it. Like I said, I think Disney started out without ads, because they had a high per-sub fee that the cable companies paid, but most of the non-pay services have always had ads.
Later, I watched as more and more commercials crept in,
Yes, the percentage of ad time has gone up, but the line does not have an intercept of zero, and nobody ever promised it would.
Originally, cable TV promised no advertisements for a small fee,
I don't know why this canard keeps popping up, but it's simply not true.
Cable TV started as MATV -- master antenna TV, or CATV -- community antenna TV. Communities (or apartment buildings) that had poor reception (or didn't allow antennas in the case of apartments) put up a central antenna and fed the received broadcast signals to the users via cable. That's the "original" cable TV, and there was NEVER a promise of "no ads". It was simply broadcast TV with an antenna better than any one individual had.
Cable companies started popping up to provide this service. Why should an apartment manager deal with this when he can hire someone to do it for him? One big tower with a lot of antennas and one cable distribution plant is more cost effective than every building with one. Early cable companies provided up to 12 channels of service, using the VHF tuners in the customer's own TV. Those channels were what the head end antennas picked up OTA. With ads. For a fee.
The next step was the "pay TV" side of cable, now that you had a system to distribute the signals and control who got them. (A short-lived encrypted-via-broadcast system appeared, but this was expensive and died out.) Those pay services made the promise of "no ads" because they were subscriber supported and could afford it. HBO was a premiere player here. But alongside the pay services were the newly forming cable-only networks, distributed by the same satellite systems that the big pay services were using, and those have (almost) always had ads. (It was so uncommon that I cannot recall which ones were ad-free to start with, but I'm thinking Disney was.)
So no, there was never a promise of "no ads" by cable TV companies. That's just ridiculous. They formed to carry the broadcast signals originally, and those broadcast signals have always had ads. The pay services distributed by cable may promise "no ads" but cable as a whole has never ever ever made that promise. It can't. The promise cable made was diversity by being able to carry more networks than OTA ever coould. The secondary promise, now often forgot, is the ability of cable to carry local origination -- channels specific to each community, at a finer grained level than broadcast has. PEG -- public, education, and government -- access is the result of that.
But over time, advertising crept in.
That 'over time' period was at the beginning of TV itself, which followed the appearance of ads on radio.
Piracy, on the other hand, has no advertising. It has cut away all the bullshit and serves you just what you want to see, and only that. No mandatory trailers. No unskippable advertisements. No FBI warnings. Just the content, nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.
The only DVDs for which this hasn't been true have been the very few cheap crap DVDs from Alpha that aren't rippable. Otherwise, I've yet to be forced to watch trailers or ads. The trailers and ads are different titles from the content on every DVD I've seen.
See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising.
I'm watching Curse of the Pink Panther as I write this, in HD, from a DVD I bought from the local grocery store for $3. No ads. No FBI warnings. They aren't pirated, even though they look very much like it. They're "pre-watched". For a few dollars more I could buy the official DVD and still have no ads. Piracy may be one means of achieving this, but it certainly isn't the only means.
Considering we've had the technology to do this since the mid-80s, that says a lot about the mentality of content providers.
Yes. They want money to pay for providing programming, and instead of charging you by view they're charging advertisers. Now, many of the on-demand programs I watch allow fast forwarding through the ads, and many of them have a lot fewer ads to start with. Some annoying ones do disable the fast forward and even have the same ads as the original distribution, but that's a relatively new thing from what I've seen.
Yet another reason to provide a good enough service at a reasonable price from the very beginning, so that people never have a reason to explore illegal avenues.
Those who pirated the episode due to the "blackout" apparently thought that the Time Warner price was reasonable, since they were getting the program via cable prior.
If you are referring to CBS providing the program for a reasonable price, then you need to remember that it is one person (Time Warner) making that decision, not the market as a whole.
Perhaps what we should take from this is that CBS is cutting its own throat by making their product more expensive. The drop in ratings will convert to a drop in ad revenue, which CBS can keep higher by having more eyeballs viewing the ads. In this sense, cable is doing CBS a service and shouldn't have to pay extra.
I wonder if any of the blackout areas have a CBS affiliate that is willing to all for "must carry", which would mean Time Warner doesn't pay for the station and the blackout would be illegal.
Let's see if I understand your universe. I want to mail something in one of those marvelous "all you can put in the box, one price" boxes. I go to the post office and pick up a box so I can take it home to pack it. Is this "mail fraud"?
I get home and find out that what I want to put in that box won't fit. I've already taped the bottom so I can't take it back, so I use a different box. Since it's not an "all you can fit one price" box, I decide to let UPS handle it. Am I now committing mail fraud?
It's interesting that your universe where it is mail fraud to send nothing by the mail seems to have a similar USPS and priority flat rate mail system ours does, with apparently the only difference being the thought crime of mail fraud for thinking about sending something by mail and then not following through.
Extrapolate the same movements to a phone on a string - since it's not spinning on a free axis (like the yoyo), the force at the end of string travel is effectively 0g.
The phone at the end of the string is subjected to much more than 1G as you spin it around. It is that force that is keeping the phone from simply dangling at the end of the string. Why do you think you need to pull back on the string so hard if there is "0g" on the phone at the other end? That pull you exert is the "equal and opposite" part of the laws of motion. It is the same principle that makes centrifuges work; the rotation of the centrifuge creates HIGHER forces (more g's) on the thing being spun, not because it creates a 0g environment.
The rotation of the yoyo is not why there is 1g during "walk the dog". There is 1g experienced by the yoyo because it is subject to the earth's gravitational field and is being prevented from accelerating downward by the carpet/floor it is in contact with. If you simply hang a phone from a piece of string, it will experience 1g because the string will be pulling upwards to keep it from falling to the floor.
My fancy trick yoyo begs to differ - what you've described is, essentially, "walking the dog"
Uhhh, no. The snap of sending the yoyo to the end of the string is a high acceleration, but while it is spinning on the ground it is feeling 1G. It is that 1G that keeps the tiny amount of friction from the string from catching the hub and ending the trick. If the yoyo wasn't pulling against the string it would easily catch and strart to wind back up.
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or is it about the UN dismissing the signs of climate change to fit their agenda?
I'm sorry, what? The UN doesn't have an agenda that benefits from dismissing "signs of climate change". How can the smaller countries rake the big developed ones over the coals if the coals aren't creating an impending disaster that the big countries need to give the small ones money to solve?
Yes, there can be bigger hurricanes and they should have a higher Cat 6 level.
Yes, Cat6. More twists per inch and you can't strip back as far when you punch one down into a patch block.
Of course, not driving on a regular basis will make people really suck at racing.
And at driving, too.
Airplanes have had autopilots for a very long time. There is a reason why the pilot instruction for flying airplanes with autopilots includes rote memorization of not one, not two, not three, but almost always half a dozen or more ways of disabling the autopilot when necessary. Those methods range from "press the disable button on the yolk" through "turn the AP off" and up to "pull the circuit breaker". And that's in a machine that isn't running at 60 or more MPH inches away from concrete and other machines going 60 MPH the opposite direction.
Anyway, how does sending someone to a bad prison that will make them more likely to reoffend protect the victim more than one that will rehabilitate the perpetrator?
I don't believe you will see anything in what I said that says it does. I'm merely pointing out in the statement that we should defend those that most need it we should put victims higher on the list than the people who victimized them. The victims, for the most part, are on the list through no fault of their own; those who put them there made the choices for both themselves and their victims.
As for 16-24 year olds being on the list of victims, the person who thinks that is relevant is apparently assuming that all 16-24 year old people are highly athletic self-defense experts and thus deserving of no protection from violent criminals. I suspect if you look a bit more into the data, you'll find that excepting violence between criminals (a drug deal gone bad, e.g.) most violent criminals target those who aren't likely to defend themselves simply as a means of self-preservation. Why pick hard targets when the easy ones are so ... easy?
If you actually want to help society, you support and protect those that need it the most.
Like victims of criminals, most of whom are victims of violent crime because they are least likely to be able to defend themselves?
We're talking about the original promise of cable TV. Cable TV is not just "cable stations", whatever you define those to be. If I understand what you think you mean by that phrase, I'll still point out that ads have always played a part, because two of the first satellite-distributed content services were WTBS and WGN, both "cable stations" and both advertiser supported. And many of the other "cable stations" have carried ads from day one. (Was there, saw "Video Killed the Radio Star" on MTV on day one. Also saw the ads.) Maybe they just weren't let in on the secret promise that "cable TV means 'no ads'"?
And anybody who differs from your own experience in your own locality must be wrong?
The genesis of cable tv wasn't something that happened in just my locality. It was at least a US-wide, and more likely a world-wide phenomenon, which was limited in a very large part by the limited technology of the time. There weren't pay channels then; there wasn't a means of distributing that content. Pay channels came later. The channels that were carried on cable systems were the local broadcast channels, and the technology to automatically remove ads did not exist. Today there are systems to replace ads with local ones, but not then. Even today, those systems don't remove ads completely, they replace them with "local avails". That is, advertising space made available by the network provider for local cable systems to insert ads from local advertisers -- a way that local cable companies help fund the cost of the channel. (Comcast is particularly bad as this right now, which makes for some very funny ads. You get five seconds of one ad followed by the rest of another.)
The statement was concerning the original promise of cable TV. The word "original" really does rule out what late-comers to the party did, even systems that carry no ad-funded content like some do today. The original promise was not "no ads", it never was, and thus whining about the recent appearance of ads on cable channels is a bit little, a bit late. Yes, those people who claim the original promise of cable TV was "no ads" based on their experience with modern pay-only cable services are wrong when they talk about the original promise.
And it's not "ebook sales", it should read "ebook rental license" since you don't own the ebook like you do an actual book.
Depends on the book. I have lots of them I own, and many of them and others aren't in readers that the distributor controls, so they can't take them back. Mobiread is one place to get good old books in many formats. Analog Science Fiction, Asimov's, and Ellery Queen are distributed by B&N in non-DRM epub format.
I wonder how much the library loan of ebooks has cut into sales? There are many books I borrow that I might have bought, and some of the ones I borrow I am very glad I borrowed first.
Others have mentioned readability on specific readers or in general. A large drawback I find in ebooks is that the ones that are self-published are often really awful, even beyond the storylines and plots. I've seen some self-published Sci-Fi that was unreadable because of comma-itis and poor grammar. I mean, commas in so many places that it actually made the sentences meaningless. After someone buys a few of these clunkers, they may be hesitant to buy anything more.
You know, we get unskippable FBI warnings on beginning of DVDs, and this is in a country where FBI has no presence, or authority.
What a remarkable juxtaposition, since in a country where there is an FBI presence and authority, I almost never see an FBI warning, and can skip any that I do run across.
It's not about getting HD material, it's about getting any material at all.
Actually, the comment I replied to, which you quoted, is: "See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising." That means what I'm replying to is, indeed, a question of the ads, not just "getting any content at all".
I get interested in some show they are talking about, my only option is piratebay.
No, an alternative option is to not watch the program. There is never a time when your only option is to pirate something.
I'd pay, but nobody wants to take my money.
This implies that your willingness to pay creates a duty for them to provide the content. Not so.
I think you've latched onto the word "cable" and related that to the reticulation of free to air TV signals over a common coaxial cable infrastructure.
Which is the origin of cable TV. Pay channels came later, and only they could claim "no ads" as a draw to paying extra for them. The rest of cable? Same ads as always.
Certainly, Foxtel in Australia used to use no ads as a feature,
I'm going out on a limb here, but considering the name of the company and the fact that the "essentials" contain a lot of "Fox" and "Sky" channels, I'm going to bet that Foxtel is a Rupert Murdoch product, and as such, postdates the origin of cable tv by quite a bit of time. What they claimed upon their inception is hardly what the original cable TV systems were able to claim. Yes, we all know, and I've said repeatedly, pay services can be ad-free because they charge the subscriber (or charge through the cable company), but pay services are not an original feature of cable TV nor are they the sole content on most modern cable systems. I note that there seem to be no local broadcast stations in the "essentials" of Foxtel, so apparently the broadcast stations in Oz didn't manage to get protection.
Umm ... How many DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray have you bought?
Lots. Lots and lots. No Blu-ray, but DVD a plenty.
I have purchased well over 500 over the last 15 years and most of them have un-skippable content at the beginning.
"mplayer dvd://1" If that starts playing an ad, I move on to 2, etc. And once I run mencoder over it, the ads are gone forever. I plug my HDMI cable into my XOOM and it's on my main TV, ad free.
You may not be forced to watch them if you are using a PC or one of the few DVD players that does not strictly enforce the DVD command structure.
If you can freely use some tool other than one that tells you what you must watch and in what order, can you really claim you are forced to watch anything?
The comment was that there was no way to get ad-free content other than piracy, and I gave one example that shows that claim to be false.
Well no, there is a prohibition of criticism. ... "I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot."
That is not the same as being prohibited from criticizing the government for having such a process, which clearly he does. Whether it is there in so many words or not, the message is clear. What he's prohibited from talking about are the specifics of what happened.
There is a very great difference between "I oppose FISA and everything to do with it and our government should cease" and "I was issued a FISA warrant for email from XYZ and don't want to comply, and I oppose..." The former is criticism of the government, the latter is releasing specific details of an ongoing investigation AND criticism of the government. Notice that the difference is only the details part, and that the criticism is not prohibited in either case.
Now we can all guess, in terms of recent events, what's going on. The NSA has come to him and asked for access to the emails on his server. The only reason we know about this is because of Snowden,
So Snowden has released information about this request that happened after Snowden left a position where he had access to such information? You don't know, you admit it is a guess. Yeah, I'm guessing the same thing. But I won't claim that it is a fact or that Snowden is why we know it is a fact.
We could all guess from events from ... how long ago was FISA created? ... that long ago what is going on.
If we did not have the "illegal" leak from Snowden, we would not know what this mail provider was talking about,
I'm sorry, but FISA requests have been part of the Patriot Act for many years. Any email provider who says "I am closing and I can't tell you specifics why" could be assumed to have been the subject of a FISA warrant that he doesn't want to submit to. That's long before Snowden released anything.
If we're going to object to something, can we at least not use hyperbole and fear to try to turn it into something else? Is it not bad enough that the FISA system exists, that you have to try to convert it to some massive prohibition against criticism of the government?
Of course local channels carried on cable TV had ads, because they weren't cable-only channels.
The fact that they weren't cable-only is irrelevant. The claim was that the original promise of cable TV was "no ads". That's patent bullshit for exactly the reason you admit. The very first channels carried by cable systems were local broadcast stations and every one of them had advertising. It was only later when the cable systems, combined with increasing availability/lower cost of satellite delivery, created a market for non-broadcast content networks, that some pay services promoted themselves as "no ads". That's not the original intent of cable TV, nor was it how they originally operated, nor is it how they operate today.
Way to deliberately lie
You admit that cable systems have never been "no ads" and could not possibly promise that, and yet I'm the one you call a liar for saying they have always had content with ads and could never have originated as "ad free" systems.
and obfuscate the issue.
Facts aren't a good way to obfuscate anything, and I've given you the facts. CATV was not created with the idea that they could be "no ads"; some of the pay content could do that, but not the cable provider itself.
Um, why do we care this is happening?
Because the locals don't appreciate it when it happens with locals. And when it is "consenting" co-members of the military it can often be less than consenting and it creates unnecessary conflict in a unit. When that E2 the E7 is banging depends on the good evaluations from the E7 to be promoted and/or get good assignments, it is a good assumption that there is not a lot of consent. And the other members of the unit may just have a bit of jealousy or disrespect for that E7 for what he's doing.
What, the army of a nation that thinks movies full of violence, gore, and flying body parts is OK,
I'm fascinated. When someone objects to the violence and gore in the popular media they are branded as nutcases and looneys and of course violence in media has no effect on anyone. And now you seem to be implying that violence and gore in movies is a bad thing and that nobody has ever objected to such.
The issue is not movies of body parts that are "procreative", but the actual use of such parts. There's a couple of very good reasons for this to be against the regulations.
And the military police has jurisdiction over this crime? wtf
For military personnel of course the military police have jurisdiction.
In my mind, disallowing people from criticizing government actions and government policy is a serious violation of the First Amendment.
It doesn't seem that there has been a prohibition on criticizing policies here. The criticism is pretty clear in the statement quoted in the summary. The criticism is clear in the comments here. What's being limited is commenting on an ongoing investigation, which might cause the person being investigated to flee or destroy evidence.
You can argue whether the latter is acceptable or not, but let's identify the correct issue.
Huh? What book did you read this from?
I don't need a book, I was there.
I was around then and there was very definitely a "subscribe to this new thing, CABLE TV! No static, fifty channels, and best of all since you're already paying for it, no commercials!"
That's a patent lie. Those fifty channels consisted in large part of the broadcast services in your local area. And those broadcast services managed to get "must carry" enacted as law, which means that the cable companies could not demand that the stations pay for carriage or choose to exclude them to carry other, more profitable services. Now, a station could refuse to let the cable company carry them, or try to demand money, but if they used the magic words "must carry", then they were on the cable system. And every ad that the broadcast station aired went out over cable, too.
IIRC Ted Turner's TBS was the first to start broadcasting commercials,
You don't recall correctly. TBS began as WTBS, the "superstation" from Atlanta. It was a local independent broadcast station that was Turner's intro into TV and medium to broadcast the Braves baseball games. Other than that they had a lot of reruns and old movies. And they carried exactly the same ads as the broadcast station did for a long time. Eventually they started selling national ads and swapping them in, but they always had ads.
The same is true of WGN. It's an independent broadcast station in Chicago that followed WTBS onto the satellite and onto cable systems. Advertiser supported.
Rural CATV systems might be called "cable TV" but that isn't what we had in the suburbs in the 80s.
The suburbs isn't where CATV originated and you can't claim that what they did has anything to do with the origination of such systems. They followed CATV and MATV, and they've always had advertiser supported content because that was their function.
Not sure how old you are but while there may, or may not, have been a promise, I definitely remember that that is indeed what the deal was.
Given the original cable companies and what services they provided, that certainly was NOT the deal. They couldn't remove the ads from the broadcast stations they carried. They didn't have the technology at the time. In fact, when the local cable company introduced HBO (as "The Q channel") they didn't have any automated equipment to insert information about how to order the service during the free preview and they hired me to sit in the head end watching the movies and then running a video tape and making voice overs.
We never had cable, but I well remember that when I expressed amazement that anyone would pay $ for TV, they'd always shoot back, "But there's no commercials!"
Ignorant people who bought pay services and then told you there were "no commercials" don't define the medium, they are simply telling you about one part of it. If they had any intelligence at all they wouldn't have said "there are no ads", because there certainly were, but that you aren't "pay[ing] $ for TV", you're paying for delivery and the ability to get service without buying an antenna. That's what cable originally was. CATV.
You never had cable. I was involved from the early 80's, was on the local regulatory board, and dealt with people who had been there forever. Some of them were the idealists who pushed for more local origination and public access and despite their idealistic view of cable as a great equalizer in the public debate, they never once claimed that cable TV promised "no ads". In fact, the local origination station that one of them ran and was then converted to public access failed because they could not find enough advertisers. That would be a funny way to fail if they never intended to have advertisers. I'd say if you are trying to promise "no ads" then a failure to get people to buy ad time would be spectacular success.
The network feeds were the only exception.
So there were ads, and there were no promises of "no ads" possible, and you know it. Like I said, I think Disney started out without ads, because they had a high per-sub fee that the cable companies paid, but most of the non-pay services have always had ads.
Later, I watched as more and more commercials crept in,
Yes, the percentage of ad time has gone up, but the line does not have an intercept of zero, and nobody ever promised it would.
Originally, cable TV promised no advertisements for a small fee,
I don't know why this canard keeps popping up, but it's simply not true.
Cable TV started as MATV -- master antenna TV, or CATV -- community antenna TV. Communities (or apartment buildings) that had poor reception (or didn't allow antennas in the case of apartments) put up a central antenna and fed the received broadcast signals to the users via cable. That's the "original" cable TV, and there was NEVER a promise of "no ads". It was simply broadcast TV with an antenna better than any one individual had.
Cable companies started popping up to provide this service. Why should an apartment manager deal with this when he can hire someone to do it for him? One big tower with a lot of antennas and one cable distribution plant is more cost effective than every building with one. Early cable companies provided up to 12 channels of service, using the VHF tuners in the customer's own TV. Those channels were what the head end antennas picked up OTA. With ads. For a fee.
The next step was the "pay TV" side of cable, now that you had a system to distribute the signals and control who got them. (A short-lived encrypted-via-broadcast system appeared, but this was expensive and died out.) Those pay services made the promise of "no ads" because they were subscriber supported and could afford it. HBO was a premiere player here. But alongside the pay services were the newly forming cable-only networks, distributed by the same satellite systems that the big pay services were using, and those have (almost) always had ads. (It was so uncommon that I cannot recall which ones were ad-free to start with, but I'm thinking Disney was.)
So no, there was never a promise of "no ads" by cable TV companies. That's just ridiculous. They formed to carry the broadcast signals originally, and those broadcast signals have always had ads. The pay services distributed by cable may promise "no ads" but cable as a whole has never ever ever made that promise. It can't. The promise cable made was diversity by being able to carry more networks than OTA ever coould. The secondary promise, now often forgot, is the ability of cable to carry local origination -- channels specific to each community, at a finer grained level than broadcast has. PEG -- public, education, and government -- access is the result of that.
But over time, advertising crept in.
That 'over time' period was at the beginning of TV itself, which followed the appearance of ads on radio.
Piracy, on the other hand, has no advertising. It has cut away all the bullshit and serves you just what you want to see, and only that. No mandatory trailers. No unskippable advertisements. No FBI warnings. Just the content, nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.
The only DVDs for which this hasn't been true have been the very few cheap crap DVDs from Alpha that aren't rippable. Otherwise, I've yet to be forced to watch trailers or ads. The trailers and ads are different titles from the content on every DVD I've seen.
See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising.
I'm watching Curse of the Pink Panther as I write this, in HD, from a DVD I bought from the local grocery store for $3. No ads. No FBI warnings. They aren't pirated, even though they look very much like it. They're "pre-watched". For a few dollars more I could buy the official DVD and still have no ads. Piracy may be one means of achieving this, but it certainly isn't the only means.
Considering we've had the technology to do this since the mid-80s, that says a lot about the mentality of content providers.
Yes. They want money to pay for providing programming, and instead of charging you by view they're charging advertisers. Now, many of the on-demand programs I watch allow fast forwarding through the ads, and many of them have a lot fewer ads to start with. Some annoying ones do disable the fast forward and even have the same ads as the original distribution, but that's a relatively new thing from what I've seen.
Yet another reason to provide a good enough service at a reasonable price from the very beginning, so that people never have a reason to explore illegal avenues.
Those who pirated the episode due to the "blackout" apparently thought that the Time Warner price was reasonable, since they were getting the program via cable prior.
If you are referring to CBS providing the program for a reasonable price, then you need to remember that it is one person (Time Warner) making that decision, not the market as a whole.
Perhaps what we should take from this is that CBS is cutting its own throat by making their product more expensive. The drop in ratings will convert to a drop in ad revenue, which CBS can keep higher by having more eyeballs viewing the ads. In this sense, cable is doing CBS a service and shouldn't have to pay extra.
I wonder if any of the blackout areas have a CBS affiliate that is willing to all for "must carry", which would mean Time Warner doesn't pay for the station and the blackout would be illegal.
I get home and find out that what I want to put in that box won't fit. I've already taped the bottom so I can't take it back, so I use a different box. Since it's not an "all you can fit one price" box, I decide to let UPS handle it. Am I now committing mail fraud?
It's interesting that your universe where it is mail fraud to send nothing by the mail seems to have a similar USPS and priority flat rate mail system ours does, with apparently the only difference being the thought crime of mail fraud for thinking about sending something by mail and then not following through.
Yoyo, yes.
huh?
Extrapolate the same movements to a phone on a string - since it's not spinning on a free axis (like the yoyo), the force at the end of string travel is effectively 0g.
The phone at the end of the string is subjected to much more than 1G as you spin it around. It is that force that is keeping the phone from simply dangling at the end of the string. Why do you think you need to pull back on the string so hard if there is "0g" on the phone at the other end? That pull you exert is the "equal and opposite" part of the laws of motion. It is the same principle that makes centrifuges work; the rotation of the centrifuge creates HIGHER forces (more g's) on the thing being spun, not because it creates a 0g environment.
The rotation of the yoyo is not why there is 1g during "walk the dog". There is 1g experienced by the yoyo because it is subject to the earth's gravitational field and is being prevented from accelerating downward by the carpet/floor it is in contact with. If you simply hang a phone from a piece of string, it will experience 1g because the string will be pulling upwards to keep it from falling to the floor.
At the local post office, purchase a normal cardboard shipping box. I understand walmart also carries these.
The express mail ones at the post office are free. You only pay for them when you actually mail them.
My fancy trick yoyo begs to differ - what you've described is, essentially, "walking the dog"
Uhhh, no. The snap of sending the yoyo to the end of the string is a high acceleration, but while it is spinning on the ground it is feeling 1G. It is that 1G that keeps the tiny amount of friction from the string from catching the hub and ending the trick. If the yoyo wasn't pulling against the string it would easily catch and strart to wind back up.