This idea has been explored ad nauseum by Star Trek. It's called a replicator. They replicate FOOD too, so yes, it does put food on the table. In "First Contact", Troi explained how a lot of society's ills were cured in their fictitious world because warp drive made many things possible. Her concentration was on the "we are not alone in the universe" implications, but I was thinking about how, if we had enough energy we could reproduce matter and then money would be useless and not needed.
The economic systems of this world would collapse, but everyone would have everything they need anyway just by replicating it, so who cares? There would be struggles at first, like who would control the first replicators until everyone has one. Hmmm...sounds like the digital problem we have now. There is a struggle going on now about who controls the digital replictors now that everyone has one (a PC and Internet access)?
I'll shortcut this for you....move! I was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area. I live in Northern VA now. Pittsburgh is a fantastic place to live, and a lousy place to work.
Of course, I'm not sure where to tell you to move. Things are hard around here (AOL/Worldcom/Cable&Wireless, etc). Some folks say Colorado is doing well, other say it's lousy too. Not sure about the Golden Triangle, but I was in the area last April and there was construction everywhere. I hear Atlanta's doing well now. And of course, forget California.
OK, then it's not just me. I haven't been able to find all the pieces I want either. I found a video capture card that has a svideo out as well, but it's a full-height video card (ATI A-i-W 7500). There are only two slots on this Flex PC, and one is used by the 100Base-T card.
I'd really like to do this, but I would rather watch the recorded stuff on a real TV (TV is 36", monitor is 19"). I don't believe the ATI TV card nor the hauppuge does that, does it? Also, I have limited room since I inherited an old Gateway Flex PC (one of the half-height PC's that's about the size of a VCR). I want to use that as a CD/DVD player/PVR, saving the files on my server with 180Gigs on it.
But so far I've been stopped by the one feature I really want...TV viewing. Oh, and I want to spend less than a TiVo to do it!
PKWare. Hmmm. Seems to me I've heard about that.
on
.ZIP Standard to Fragment?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I used to know a PKWare. Let's see. I think the last time I used it was back in Win31 days! Until now I didn't care much about which one I would use. Now that they are diverging, it appears that WinZip will be the one I use since I can find it more readily than PKWare. Besides, I seem to remember a while back something about PKWare ceasing to be. Guess I was wrong.
Also, since WinZip is compatible with.tar.gz files, I'll stick with it. So in effect, instead of not caring, I just have to care enough to make a mental note to only remember WinZip and forget PKWare. And if I run across a PKWare-only file, either I'll have to trash it or download a trial PKWare long enough to convert the file, and then discard it.
I agree with kmosen on this. Several years ago there were three types of printers: dot matrix, inkjet, and laser. I know, there are others (daisy wheel), but I'm not going back that far. Everyone bought dot matrix because they were cheap and good enough. But everyone also drooled over the inkjet printers because they were much quieter than dot matrix, and almost as good as laser printers. But nobody bought them. Why? The price was too high. How do I know? Because HP's Deskjet 500 was one of those printers. At $600 it was too expensive. HP decided to get out of the inkjet market since they weren't selling well. So this discontinued the Deskjet 500 and cut the price to $350. That was about the same price as a decent dot matrix printer. They cleared out the warehouses in record time; people bought them as fast as they could. In fact, HP reconsidered their tactics and reopened the plants that were making the Deskjets. Of couse, they kept the price at $350, and they kept selling.
Soon Canon, Epson and others were getting killed by HP, so they lowered their prices too. The result is that today we have a fantastic market in inkjet printers. I think the Newton fell victim to this as well, but there was no alternative at the time, and so the market dried up, until Palm came around and reintroduced the idea smaller and cheaper, albeit not as high-powered as the Newton. This is what will happen to the tablet PC's as well, if they don't wise up and lower the prices.
I most definitely WOULD tell people about the flaw in the bank vault. I would tell them not to do business with the bank because of the flaw, and prove it by pointing out the flaw to the public. Then, an informed public would go to another bank without the flaw to do business.
If it were illegal for me to tell people about the flaw, I would simply say not to do business with the bank because of some flaw and watch as people get robbed daily through their bank. then the bank could sue me for defaming the character of the bank. While a court case would make me prove the flaw exists, and the bank might be forced to fix it, I would be broke after the experience. Not wanting to be broke, I wouldn't tell anyone about it, except my friends and relatives in private, because their well-being is more important. If word gets out that way, the bank really can't pin the lawsuit on anyone, and they would either go out of business or fix the flaw.
Gotta love the complications.
Re: to the tune of "if your'e happy & you know
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Wrong. In 1991 the goal was to ensure that Iraq couldn't be a threat to Kuwait again after they were ejected. To accomplish this Iraq had to disarm, and there would be inspectors to monitor that. There would also be no-fly zones so that missiles and jets wouldn't try to attack Kuwait or their own people.
They are still there, and there has been no disarmament. It's about time this was put to an end. Enough is enough.
Exactly! This entire series is supposed to be how it was a "long road getting from there to here." It was supposed to be about how humanity got from Zephram Cochran to Captain Pike. There really is a lot of potential in this series.
1. We have seen that the Vulcans are not the "intellectual puppets of the Federation" as they become in TOSmovies time. They are ruthlessly logical, even rejecting the concept of a mind meld as radical. Having them evolve into a "benevolent" logical species would help a lot, driven by T'Pol's experiences on Enterprise.
2. We have a Star Fleet, but there is no Federation. SO BUILD IT! Show how it evolves from nothing into what exists in TOS. A parallel to the current U.N. and the problems we currently have would be a great Roddenberry tie-in to current social/political events.
3. Evolve the Enterprise. It was good to see how phasers evolved by the seat of their pants, and even improved a bit. Why stop there? Have the Enterprise called back home for a refit and make it the NCC-0001 or something instead of an experimental ship. Upgrade the LCD displays to integrated consoles (using LCD screens, no doubt). Upgrade the universal translator with all that Hoshi has learned and what the experts back home have learned. Make the Enterprise talk and listen. And make all of this stuff buggy as hell to add drama as they work around the faults until the bugs are worked out. Finally, invent a new Warp 6 drive or something.
4. Speaking of Star Fleet, where is it? Shouldn't there be more than one ship in a fleet? Apparently they can fly around the solar system pretty easily. Refit some of those ships with warp 5/6 technology and have them go out exploring. Send other ships out to do follow-ups with previously-encountered species in preparation to building a Federation. Get the Vulcans to help out by twisting their arms, like we have seen Archer do once or twice already.
There is so much potential here without poisoning the "timeline" with Borg or Q. There was a Q in the old show, but only one show (Trelane?). That would be OK here, but treat it like the episode they had recently with the temporal prime directive where Enterprise wondered what it was that they just experienced. And forget the Borg. Just forget them. NOBODY in the Trek timeline knew about the Borg and vice-versa until Q snapped his fingers.
argh! Don't ruin a show where they spent two seasons getting their feet wet and built up a genre from "nothing".
Re:to the tune of "if your'e happy & you know
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
I completely disagree with everything you said in this post, but if I had mod points, and I could, you would get them all! This is a very amusing and creative post. If you didn't write this...nevermind.
My view is that this shouldn't have taken 12 years to finish, and it's about time it's happening. This situation is like a parent who believes in corporal punishment being criticized by neighbors for wanting to spank a bad child. It's not a perfect analogy, but it kind of fits.
Re:I doubt if my manager can understand this
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
You are mis-applying rule number 4. In fact, rules four and 6 are complementary, according to the authors. The money moving to the suburbs is referring to the value being on the endpoints of the Internet. In other words, there's money in providing services.
Rule 4 means that trying to tinker with the core network that delivers the bits among the endpoints diminishes its value. If you deliver some bits at a higher priority than others, there is inequality, and you diminish the power and therefore value of the endpoints. In other words, you end up with mansions and slums instead of equality.
Personally, I don't like this article, as it oversimplifies a lot of what happens in the Real Internet. While it may be true that anyone can send bits to anyone else, some idiots have decided that sending LOTS of bits to everyone's email box is a good thing, and others have decided that viruses are a good thing. So we need NAT's and Firewalls to prevent just anyone from accessing my endpoints.
There is another consideration where "small science" can be useful. That is in the case where an anomaly discovered in "big science" or elsewhere is "rediscovered" by someone else or purposely investigated which turns out to have very interesting properties that can be just as valuable as the thing the "big science" was looking for.
An example of this would be nanotubes, which started out as an anomaly by some researchers looking for "pure" forms of carbon. Their experiments showed an unexpected pure form with 60 carbon atoms. It turned out to be a "buckey ball", which led directly to nanotubes. The difference here is that when they found out about the buckeyball, they didn't drop the ball (pun intended) in favor of their current research.
My story is a chemistry class in high school. The teacher wanted to show the difference between a fast and a slow chemical reaction. The slow was easy to see, but for the fast one I expected a firecracker or something. She mixed two clear liquids together. 10 seconds later she stirred it and it got milky. 10 seconds later the reaction took off, creating lots of heat and lots of black goo. It was a cool thing to watch.
Afterwards, when she gave us work to do she went to clean out the large beaker she used, and I walked over to her, and quietly asked her why the reaction started out so slow, and I expected something faster. She told the rest of the class that I thought the reaction was slow, and did anyone else think it was slow. Of course, nobody else did. Killed my curiosity for the rest of the year.
Another case was in math class (5th grade? 6th maybe) when I got the question about infinite vs. finite vs. uncountably finite, "Grains of sand on a beach" wrong when I answered "uncountably finite". I argued with the teacher about this, and lost. But I knew I was right. Still do.
This is exactly what happens to me as well. I don't know what it is about having air trapped that triggers the hiccups, but it rarely lasts very long for me. I also get rid of them by drinking a large glass of water, or soda. Water forces out the air, and the soda adds more air, both causing a burp. When those aren't available, I do what you do. However, it only happens where there is a little air in there. When there is more, it's just a burp.
However, there is one kind of uncontrollable hiccup I get. It occurs when I eat something that is too hot, too fast, like biting into a jalapeno when I'm not expecting it. My family and friends laugh at me when this happens. It has nothing to do with trapped air. If I build up the heat before biting into that jalapeno, I don't hiccup.
Hey, *I'm* still using other people's throwaways as well. I have an AMD 1.7GHz machine that I play games on, but I also have a P3-500 as a Linux file server (overkill, so it runs Seti@home), a P5-200 that I'm deciding what to do with (Linux boot problems), and a P5-133 laptop (HP 800CT) next to my chair in the living room. I'm about to get an IBM TP600E as well because it was cheap and good enough.
Anybody want an old 486DX4-100? It works, but is collecting dust in my basement.
If the students ran the MSSQL servers, they would have been patched. Perhaps students administer the users and tables, but some admin (bureaucratic, not system) is in charge of the software.
The problem with BEST UPS's is that if the power goes out long enough for the unit to shut down after draining the battery, the UPS will remain off even when the power is restored. An IT guy here said that he got a sick feeling when he walked in the next morning and his server room was eerily quiet.
Apparently nobody noticed though, since he didn't get paged!
Newton's laws are bogus? nonsense! Within the proper scope they are perfectly valid. Just because one theory supercedes another doesn't make the previous one invalid. From what I understand (IANAphysicist) some folks are proving that there are limits to Einstein's theories and coming up with new theories and formulae that supercede it. Does that make it less valid? Withing the proper scope, no.
I took Cheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun", extracted it into a WAV file on my PC, converted it to a 160kbps MP3, and saved it. Then I used Audacity to load both up. I inverted the MP3 version, and mixed it with the WAV version. In effect, I subtracted the MP3 from the WAV file.
What was the result? When I played back the resulting mix, all I heard was a loud, rumbling hiss, something like white or pink noise with more at the low frequencies. I also heard the occasional syllable from Cheryl's background singers.
I don't know about anyone else, but I kinda like not having that noise in there.
No, that isn't a DVD, but it could be. True, you *DO* have to wait for a season to come out on DVD. By that time the "newness" factor has worn off. And the last I checked, a DVD *WAS* a digital copy.
Using what you say, the cable companies can go a step further and say "For $Y.YY per show, we can remove the copy-protection bit and you can copy this onto your personal DVD collection." This would be the same as you going to the video store (or amazon, etc) and buying the season on DVD. The added benefit here is that you can pick and choose what episodes you want, and throw away the ones that stink.
Geez, the business model is so simple, why can't the cable company come up with this? There are analogies available today.
Hmmm.. OK. "Buy a season for $XX.XX, or $X.XX per show. Add $Y.YY per show if you don't want to see commercials."
Then cable companies will still get their advertising revenue, and the real cost of the show will be evident to consumers. When both sides see the others' pain, then real compromise can be achieved.
If cable companies would just learn to work WITH PVR's, they would actually make MORE money with their pay-per-view/VOD offerings.
It's simple. The advertisement for it would go like this: "Order SuperBowl ZZZZ now on pay-per-view, and we will program your TiVo/ReplayTV to record it for you automatically!"
They could then extend that to say "you can now order your cable TV BY THE SHOW instead of by the channel. The cost is $XX.XX per season, or $X.XX per show." Then they wouldn't have to worry about commercials as much since they have people only paying for what they want to watch.
But then again, cable companies are too lazy to be creative, being too interested in maintaining current business models and not finding new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
This idea has been explored ad nauseum by Star Trek. It's called a replicator. They replicate FOOD too, so yes, it does put food on the table. In "First Contact", Troi explained how a lot of society's ills were cured in their fictitious world because warp drive made many things possible. Her concentration was on the "we are not alone in the universe" implications, but I was thinking about how, if we had enough energy we could reproduce matter and then money would be useless and not needed.
The economic systems of this world would collapse, but everyone would have everything they need anyway just by replicating it, so who cares? There would be struggles at first, like who would control the first replicators until everyone has one. Hmmm...sounds like the digital problem we have now. There is a struggle going on now about who controls the digital replictors now that everyone has one (a PC and Internet access)?
Oh, well in that case, cancel your auto insurance, sell your POS car, and buy a bus ticket.
OK, then it's not just me. I haven't been able to find all the pieces I want either. I found a video capture card that has a svideo out as well, but it's a full-height video card (ATI A-i-W 7500). There are only two slots on this Flex PC, and one is used by the 100Base-T card.
I'll keep looking. Thanks for taking the time!
I'd really like to do this, but I would rather watch the recorded stuff on a real TV (TV is 36", monitor is 19"). I don't believe the ATI TV card nor the hauppuge does that, does it? Also, I have limited room since I inherited an old Gateway Flex PC (one of the half-height PC's that's about the size of a VCR). I want to use that as a CD/DVD player/PVR, saving the files on my server with 180Gigs on it.
But so far I've been stopped by the one feature I really want...TV viewing. Oh, and I want to spend less than a TiVo to do it!
I used to know a PKWare. Let's see. I think the last time I used it was back in Win31 days! Until now I didn't care much about which one I would use. Now that they are diverging, it appears that WinZip will be the one I use since I can find it more readily than PKWare. Besides, I seem to remember a while back something about PKWare ceasing to be. Guess I was wrong.
.tar.gz files, I'll stick with it. So in effect, instead of not caring, I just have to care enough to make a mental note to only remember WinZip and forget PKWare. And if I run across a PKWare-only file, either I'll have to trash it or download a trial PKWare long enough to convert the file, and then discard it.
Also, since WinZip is compatible with
I agree with kmosen on this. Several years ago there were three types of printers: dot matrix, inkjet, and laser. I know, there are others (daisy wheel), but I'm not going back that far. Everyone bought dot matrix because they were cheap and good enough. But everyone also drooled over the inkjet printers because they were much quieter than dot matrix, and almost as good as laser printers. But nobody bought them. Why? The price was too high. How do I know? Because HP's Deskjet 500 was one of those printers. At $600 it was too expensive. HP decided to get out of the inkjet market since they weren't selling well. So this discontinued the Deskjet 500 and cut the price to $350. That was about the same price as a decent dot matrix printer. They cleared out the warehouses in record time; people bought them as fast as they could. In fact, HP reconsidered their tactics and reopened the plants that were making the Deskjets. Of couse, they kept the price at $350, and they kept selling.
Soon Canon, Epson and others were getting killed by HP, so they lowered their prices too. The result is that today we have a fantastic market in inkjet printers. I think the Newton fell victim to this as well, but there was no alternative at the time, and so the market dried up, until Palm came around and reintroduced the idea smaller and cheaper, albeit not as high-powered as the Newton. This is what will happen to the tablet PC's as well, if they don't wise up and lower the prices.
I most definitely WOULD tell people about the flaw in the bank vault. I would tell them not to do business with the bank because of the flaw, and prove it by pointing out the flaw to the public. Then, an informed public would go to another bank without the flaw to do business.
If it were illegal for me to tell people about the flaw, I would simply say not to do business with the bank because of some flaw and watch as people get robbed daily through their bank. then the bank could sue me for defaming the character of the bank. While a court case would make me prove the flaw exists, and the bank might be forced to fix it, I would be broke after the experience. Not wanting to be broke, I wouldn't tell anyone about it, except my friends and relatives in private, because their well-being is more important. If word gets out that way, the bank really can't pin the lawsuit on anyone, and they would either go out of business or fix the flaw.
Gotta love the complications.
Wrong. In 1991 the goal was to ensure that Iraq couldn't be a threat to Kuwait again after they were ejected. To accomplish this Iraq had to disarm, and there would be inspectors to monitor that. There would also be no-fly zones so that missiles and jets wouldn't try to attack Kuwait or their own people.
They are still there, and there has been no disarmament. It's about time this was put to an end. Enough is enough.
Exactly! This entire series is supposed to be how it was a "long road getting from there to here." It was supposed to be about how humanity got from Zephram Cochran to Captain Pike. There really is a lot of potential in this series.
1. We have seen that the Vulcans are not the "intellectual puppets of the Federation" as they become in TOSmovies time. They are ruthlessly logical, even rejecting the concept of a mind meld as radical. Having them evolve into a "benevolent" logical species would help a lot, driven by T'Pol's experiences on Enterprise.
2. We have a Star Fleet, but there is no Federation. SO BUILD IT! Show how it evolves from nothing into what exists in TOS. A parallel to the current U.N. and the problems we currently have would be a great Roddenberry tie-in to current social/political events.
3. Evolve the Enterprise. It was good to see how phasers evolved by the seat of their pants, and even improved a bit. Why stop there? Have the Enterprise called back home for a refit and make it the NCC-0001 or something instead of an experimental ship. Upgrade the LCD displays to integrated consoles (using LCD screens, no doubt). Upgrade the universal translator with all that Hoshi has learned and what the experts back home have learned. Make the Enterprise talk and listen. And make all of this stuff buggy as hell to add drama as they work around the faults until the bugs are worked out. Finally, invent a new Warp 6 drive or something.
4. Speaking of Star Fleet, where is it? Shouldn't there be more than one ship in a fleet? Apparently they can fly around the solar system pretty easily. Refit some of those ships with warp 5/6 technology and have them go out exploring. Send other ships out to do follow-ups with previously-encountered species in preparation to building a Federation. Get the Vulcans to help out by twisting their arms, like we have seen Archer do once or twice already.
There is so much potential here without poisoning the "timeline" with Borg or Q. There was a Q in the old show, but only one show (Trelane?). That would be OK here, but treat it like the episode they had recently with the temporal prime directive where Enterprise wondered what it was that they just experienced. And forget the Borg. Just forget them. NOBODY in the Trek timeline knew about the Borg and vice-versa until Q snapped his fingers.
argh! Don't ruin a show where they spent two seasons getting their feet wet and built up a genre from "nothing".
I completely disagree with everything you said in this post, but if I had mod points, and I could, you would get them all! This is a very amusing and creative post. If you didn't write this...nevermind.
My view is that this shouldn't have taken 12 years to finish, and it's about time it's happening. This situation is like a parent who believes in corporal punishment being criticized by neighbors for wanting to spank a bad child. It's not a perfect analogy, but it kind of fits.
You are mis-applying rule number 4. In fact, rules four and 6 are complementary, according to the authors. The money moving to the suburbs is referring to the value being on the endpoints of the Internet. In other words, there's money in providing services.
Rule 4 means that trying to tinker with the core network that delivers the bits among the endpoints diminishes its value. If you deliver some bits at a higher priority than others, there is inequality, and you diminish the power and therefore value of the endpoints. In other words, you end up with mansions and slums instead of equality.
Personally, I don't like this article, as it oversimplifies a lot of what happens in the Real Internet. While it may be true that anyone can send bits to anyone else, some idiots have decided that sending LOTS of bits to everyone's email box is a good thing, and others have decided that viruses are a good thing. So we need NAT's and Firewalls to prevent just anyone from accessing my endpoints.
There is another consideration where "small science" can be useful. That is in the case where an anomaly discovered in "big science" or elsewhere is "rediscovered" by someone else or purposely investigated which turns out to have very interesting properties that can be just as valuable as the thing the "big science" was looking for.
An example of this would be nanotubes, which started out as an anomaly by some researchers looking for "pure" forms of carbon. Their experiments showed an unexpected pure form with 60 carbon atoms. It turned out to be a "buckey ball", which led directly to nanotubes. The difference here is that when they found out about the buckeyball, they didn't drop the ball (pun intended) in favor of their current research.
My story is a chemistry class in high school. The teacher wanted to show the difference between a fast and a slow chemical reaction. The slow was easy to see, but for the fast one I expected a firecracker or something. She mixed two clear liquids together. 10 seconds later she stirred it and it got milky. 10 seconds later the reaction took off, creating lots of heat and lots of black goo. It was a cool thing to watch.
Afterwards, when she gave us work to do she went to clean out the large beaker she used, and I walked over to her, and quietly asked her why the reaction started out so slow, and I expected something faster. She told the rest of the class that I thought the reaction was slow, and did anyone else think it was slow. Of course, nobody else did. Killed my curiosity for the rest of the year.
Another case was in math class (5th grade? 6th maybe) when I got the question about infinite vs. finite vs. uncountably finite, "Grains of sand on a beach" wrong when I answered "uncountably finite". I argued with the teacher about this, and lost. But I knew I was right. Still do.
This is exactly what happens to me as well. I don't know what it is about having air trapped that triggers the hiccups, but it rarely lasts very long for me. I also get rid of them by drinking a large glass of water, or soda. Water forces out the air, and the soda adds more air, both causing a burp. When those aren't available, I do what you do. However, it only happens where there is a little air in there. When there is more, it's just a burp.
However, there is one kind of uncontrollable hiccup I get. It occurs when I eat something that is too hot, too fast, like biting into a jalapeno when I'm not expecting it. My family and friends laugh at me when this happens. It has nothing to do with trapped air. If I build up the heat before biting into that jalapeno, I don't hiccup.
Hey, *I'm* still using other people's throwaways as well. I have an AMD 1.7GHz machine that I play games on, but I also have a P3-500 as a Linux file server (overkill, so it runs Seti@home), a P5-200 that I'm deciding what to do with (Linux boot problems), and a P5-133 laptop (HP 800CT) next to my chair in the living room. I'm about to get an IBM TP600E as well because it was cheap and good enough.
Anybody want an old 486DX4-100? It works, but is collecting dust in my basement.
If the students ran the MSSQL servers, they would have been patched. Perhaps students administer the users and tables, but some admin (bureaucratic, not system) is in charge of the software.
The problem with BEST UPS's is that if the power goes out long enough for the unit to shut down after draining the battery, the UPS will remain off even when the power is restored. An IT guy here said that he got a sick feeling when he walked in the next morning and his server room was eerily quiet.
Apparently nobody noticed though, since he didn't get paged!
Newton's laws are bogus? nonsense! Within the proper scope they are perfectly valid. Just because one theory supercedes another doesn't make the previous one invalid. From what I understand (IANAphysicist) some folks are proving that there are limits to Einstein's theories and coming up with new theories and formulae that supercede it. Does that make it less valid? Withing the proper scope, no.
I took Cheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun", extracted it into a WAV file on my PC, converted it to a 160kbps MP3, and saved it. Then I used Audacity to load both up. I inverted the MP3 version, and mixed it with the WAV version. In effect, I subtracted the MP3 from the WAV file.
What was the result? When I played back the resulting mix, all I heard was a loud, rumbling hiss, something like white or pink noise with more at the low frequencies. I also heard the occasional syllable from Cheryl's background singers.
I don't know about anyone else, but I kinda like not having that noise in there.
CP SM RSCS CMD MSG
That's over BITNET.
Then there's the old CHAT system. Then came RELAY. Then came IRC.
There's a lot of prior art for instant messaging.
Now *THAT* is thinking on your feet. Nice feature...charging if/when you watch, not when you record. Kudos to them.
No, that isn't a DVD, but it could be. True, you *DO* have to wait for a season to come out on DVD. By that time the "newness" factor has worn off. And the last I checked, a DVD *WAS* a digital copy.
Using what you say, the cable companies can go a step further and say "For $Y.YY per show, we can remove the copy-protection bit and you can copy this onto your personal DVD collection." This would be the same as you going to the video store (or amazon, etc) and buying the season on DVD. The added benefit here is that you can pick and choose what episodes you want, and throw away the ones that stink.
Geez, the business model is so simple, why can't the cable company come up with this? There are analogies available today.
Hmmm.. OK. "Buy a season for $XX.XX, or $X.XX per show. Add $Y.YY per show if you don't want to see commercials."
Then cable companies will still get their advertising revenue, and the real cost of the show will be evident to consumers. When both sides see the others' pain, then real compromise can be achieved.
If cable companies would just learn to work WITH PVR's, they would actually make MORE money with their pay-per-view/VOD offerings. It's simple. The advertisement for it would go like this: "Order SuperBowl ZZZZ now on pay-per-view, and we will program your TiVo/ReplayTV to record it for you automatically!" They could then extend that to say "you can now order your cable TV BY THE SHOW instead of by the channel. The cost is $XX.XX per season, or $X.XX per show." Then they wouldn't have to worry about commercials as much since they have people only paying for what they want to watch. But then again, cable companies are too lazy to be creative, being too interested in maintaining current business models and not finding new ones.