Well, the problem (for them) is that there is the clear dichotomy between traditional advertising and entertainment... they cut to a commercial and then cut back to the show. The modern approach is simply embed paid advertising in all forms of media, from TV and movies to video games. No way to escape it, no way to skip around it, if you watch the program you're being advertised to. If you've ever watched the film "Repo Man" you'll see that producer's abhorrence of the idea because all the products used by the actors come in white cans and boxes marked clearly in bold black letters as "food", "beer", "dogfood", "cereal", etc.
Re:Popups, Prices, and Crap Programming
on
TV Outside the Box
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· Score: 1
When I get some type of broadband network access where I can download movies in a reasonably short period of time
I think pretty much any type of broadband access will let you do that.
Well, given Carter's background you would certainly have expected him to be able to pronounce "nuclear" correctly, so I'll give Bush a pass on this one.
And you're right... achieving the Presidency does require intelligence and ability in certain areas. Truly stupid people don't make it that far, and this constant impugning of the man's intellect is pointless. On the other hand, a high native intelligence and the capacity to exploit the political process up to the point of being elected does not, unfortunately, imply competence at the actual job of being President. That's been demonstrated repeatedly over the past two-hundred-odd years, and indicates that the political process is selecting for the wrong types. Evolution in reverse, you might say, and when we actually do get a President that leaves the country in better shape than he found it in, it just means we got lucky. It's not like we're given a lot of choice in the matter.
No, he's representing the "standard Slashdotter's" feeling of moral outrage at what has been done to the copyright and patent systems, both of which were designed to encourage creativity and the cross-fertilization of ideas between creators that fosters rapid innovation. Using the law to effectively blackbox anything "new" or that is merely claimed to be "new" is not only immoral but dangerous, and when that same law can be used to bitchslap anyone or anything perceived as a threat to your way of doing business... well. As an engineer with a few patents behind me, I am outraged by the subversion of national interests to corporate interests. Because that is precisely what has happened.
The big rightsholders (in the case of copyright) made two fundamental errors in their long-range planning. One, they failed to understand that advances in communications and processing technology would render their grip on their distribution channels useless. Utterly useless, and so far as music is concerned that cat will never get put back in the bag. Even if they could, by pressing some magic switch, turn off all peer-to-peer activity right now, there are a lot of people that have already downloaded so many tracks they'll never need to buy another CD. So, if the studios want any sales at all they'd best start learning to play nice. What, they're going to have to behave like any other manufacturer that wants to stay in business by treating its customers with respect because those customers can now go elsewhere? Oh my, the humanity, the humanity!
Two, they are finally starting to realize that what they have to offer are luxuries not necessities, for people with disposable income. Since Americans have traditionally had plenty of disposable income they were able to ride pretty high on the hog. Well, that particularly gravy train is slowing down and will probably come to its last station soon. The media companies (the "big rightsholders") certainly didn't help matters by buying laws like the DMCA, which have had an additional detrimental effect upon the economy. They shot us all in the foot with a.44 Magnum, and are standing around watching us bleed. I will shed no tears for the likes of a Disney or a Sony... they've earned whatever is happening to them.
Better to have no copyright at all than the mess we have now. But the grandparent was right: there was a balance that was struck between the perceived needs of the creator of an original work, and everyone else. Given the pace of change in the modern world compared to when those laws were originally written, if anything the balance should have been tilted a little more towards the public domain. Instead, it has been dramatically shifted in favor of the major copyright holders.
Congress has breached a lot of such contracts with the public in the past fifty years or so. But thats only because they've made some new ones. Thank Disney and that little bastardo Mickey for a good part what's been lost to the public domain. I have to ask: what would old Walt think now?
On a similar note, a friend once mentioned that our local Wal-Mart has a $5 bin of DVDs. I don't shop Wal-Mart ordinarily (for oh, so many reasons) but this brought me in. Older stuff, but since I don't go to the theater very often (or watch much TV) they're all new to me. So for five bucks each I bought a few "new" movies. I know, it's still going to a bad cause (two bad causes in this case) but at least it wasn't $17 or $22.
Probably took Wal-Mart's considerable clout to get the studios to release even their old stuff that cheap. Concerns of true piracy and illegal downloading aside, I think some market realities are catching up to the movie people. Besides, here in the U.S. with gas fast approaching four bucks a gallon (with five on the horizon), heating bills through the roof, and everything else getting more expensive by leaps and bounds I know that I, for one, have less disposable income to blow on $22 movies (over twice what our local iMax charges!)
As another poster pointed out, how many movies are just so good that you'll watch them multiple times, justifying the expense of buying the disc? Not many. There are some, to be sure, but not many. The vast majority of new releases sold are crap. The studios know they're crap before the first scene is shot, which is why so many movies go direct to disc nowadays. They'd never make it in the theaters. Heck, if the gross rake-in figures you hear are anywhere near correct, I don't think a lot of theater releases are in the black either.
But that's okay. At seventeen bucks a disc, they'll just make it up in the DVD market.
I am an American, and I could certainly take offense to your +5 Insightful remark, however I won't because you still got it wrong. The implementation will probably be quite impressive, from a technological perspective (just a dedicated Web crawler and associated new Justice Department bureaucracy to manage the fines and press related charges against offending site operators) but the motivations are most definitely not correct, as the GP put it. I'm not sure if this is a matter of misguided right-wing pseudo-Puritanism or a simple Federal power grab, or something worse, but any way you slice it the motives aren't pure, you can bet your case buck on that.
I'm betting the TSA is currently debating whether or not the decision to make the scanners capable of displaying false images in the first place was a wise one.
I'm betting they aren't. This is acceptable collateral damage, just like all the other stupid invasive things they've done. For an outfit supposedly charged with maintaining our personal safety, they don't seem to care all that much about what actually happens to us. But what the hell... it's all for the greater good, right?
Re:Great, my boss will love this!
on
TV Outside the Box
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· Score: 3, Funny
Nobody thinks outside the box. Some people just have a bigger box.
Once again, you have to perform a proper risk-benefit analysis. The impact on our society of the lights being turned off is significant as well, significant enough that we may decide it's worthwhile to take some risks. Expensive power is a economic risk, since cheap energy drove a lot of foreign investment in American industry. In the long run, we'll continue to see a mix of different power sources... it's just that the ratio of nuclear to fossil-fuel to "alternative" will have to change.
Personally, I'm a big fan of orbiting solar collectors transmitting power via microwave to ground-based antenna farms. In space, solar power is something, you know. But we're a long ways from having that capability. I do think it would be one of the best investments our civilization has ever made, though.
True... but on the other hand, safety generally isn't one of the military's highest priorities. Any military. You really can't compare a civilian power-generation program to a weapons program.
So the question is, do you have sufficient faith in your economic-political system that it is going to safeguard you and your family? That there'll be sufficient transparency to ensure that problems aren't covered up.
Nope, and I think my original comment reflected a similar point of view. But most people I see discussing nuclear power focus almost entirely on the technology rather than the politics. Unfortunately, you cannot separate the two. I did want to make the point that nuclear power can be a safe, effective form of power production. I just don't believe that our government is any longer capable of creating, maintaining and enforcing the requisite standards. Too much corporate influence in Congress. The French, I understand, have done a marvelous job of standardizing their reactor designs: ours, by comparison, are individual works of art.
Just so we're clear, you might say that I'm very much pro-nuclear but very much anti-having-them-built-here. Now, that doesn't preclude our buying a bunch of French reactors.
Of course uranium is a natural source of energy. All sources of energy are natural. For that matter, so is petroleum, which also has to be refined in order to be useful. Or perhaps you meant "renewable", which for the most part is just enviro-speak for "solar energy". Besides, if we reinstitute the breeder-reactor program, nuclear power is also pretty damn renewable.
The problem with nuclear energy is not that it can be unsafe. Of course it can... if handled as badly as the Russians did it is an unmitigated disaster. Contrast that with the Three Mile Island event, which did in fact melt a lot of equipment but so far as nuclear accidents go was a success because containment wasn't breached. Yes yes, there was a minor release of gas but the two events cannot be compared in terms of severity, no matter how much some people want to. Besides, the French seem to be doing a substantially better job with their nuclear program, which just goes to show that the bulk of the concerns about nuclear power (at least in the U.S.) are politico-economic more than technological.
The problem is that society wants an absolute, iron-clad guarantee that a particular technology is safe... and you can never have that, not when dealing with the energy levels a high-tech civilization requires. As an engineer I can tell you this much: everything is a trade-off. Everything is: it is the nature of our reality. A trade-off is a decision, a balancing act between the costs, risks and benefits of different approaches to solving a problem. In this case, by choosing to not develop nuclear power to any useful degree we are choosing to go down a different path, one which also has serious consequences. As fossil-fuels go, coal isn't exactly safe you know, and supplies of fuel oil and natural gas will continue to be uncertain for the foreseeable future. At some point in the not-too-distant future we will have to make a decision, whether we want to or not.
You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too, at least not in the context of our current technology.
Sure, you can promote tidal power, wind power, solar power or {insert favorite alternative energy source here}. If such a source is going to generate enough power to significantly offset our use of fossil fuuels it will have economic and environmental impact, probably serious ones. Worse yet, none of them are really energy-dense enough to handle our power needs. Take a typical 2400 megawatt nuclear plant for example. Yes, they are very expensive, but so would be the physical plant required to generate and store enough solar power to provide the same level of service. Regardless, we (for a variety of reasons) may choose to make that investment. But we'd best do it with our eyes open and be willing to accept the downsides of whatever road (or roads) we decide to travel.
Sure, until a defective launch vehicle self-destructs a couple hundred miles up. Nothing like sintered plutonium waste covering a few million square miles. That would quickly replace Chernobyl as the worst nuclear accident in history.
The article includes some controversial statements recommending disposal of nuclear waste in tropical forests to keep forest land away from greedy developers and farmers
I'd say less controversial and more hysterical. Of course, were I one of the animals being exposed to that "developer repellent" I'd might feel a bit differently.
Larry Niven had some similar ideas, once upon a time.
My real speed is more like 3 Mbit/sec. I used to get about 3.8 under the old plan, but now my speed has actually dropped. My back channel runs about 700 kbits/sec, so that's okay. But they tell me they can't do much about it, even though I'm paying ten bucks a month more. So yeah, I'm a little irritated. Apparently I'm close enough to my CO that I could probably get some decent speed over DSL. Where I used to live a couple years ago I was about 500 feet from the central office.
I've looked into a colo but I'm not ready to run a full-time server (yet) but that'll probably be the way I go.
Sign any agreements you like, but Microsoft and Google and others know perfectly well that if they get a rep for removing peoples files (because they are "assumed" to have been copied illegally) they'll be in hot water from a number of directions. Besides, from the standpoint of the RIAA, they can monitor P2P networks as best they can because that isn't illegal. Well, it might be, that hasn't been decided in court so far as I know. But once you put a password on a remote account, it's a felony for anyone to try and break into it. So they won't be doing any enforcement by directly viewing what people are storing. The best they can do is try to convince the storage outfits that it is in their best interests to act as proxy enforcers. We'll see, probably you're right in this case, but I just have the feeling that the demand for music is so high right now that people will find a way to get it, since the studios don't seem willing to accommodate their customers.
A better analogy is a tube full of ping-pong balls. Push the ball on one end, and a ball falls out the other. Propagation is nearly instantaneous of great distances, but the electrons themselves hardly move at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Mainly I think it's because, unlike most other stories, people are actually Reading The Fucking Article before posting. Interesting concept, eh?
Well, the problem (for them) is that there is the clear dichotomy between traditional advertising and entertainment ... they cut to a commercial and then cut back to the show. The modern approach is simply embed paid advertising in all forms of media, from TV and movies to video games. No way to escape it, no way to skip around it, if you watch the program you're being advertised to. If you've ever watched the film "Repo Man" you'll see that producer's abhorrence of the idea because all the products used by the actors come in white cans and boxes marked clearly in bold black letters as "food", "beer", "dogfood", "cereal", etc.
When I get some type of broadband network access where I can download movies in a reasonably short period of time
I think pretty much any type of broadband access will let you do that.
Well, given Carter's background you would certainly have expected him to be able to pronounce "nuclear" correctly, so I'll give Bush a pass on this one.
... achieving the Presidency does require intelligence and ability in certain areas. Truly stupid people don't make it that far, and this constant impugning of the man's intellect is pointless. On the other hand, a high native intelligence and the capacity to exploit the political process up to the point of being elected does not, unfortunately, imply competence at the actual job of being President. That's been demonstrated repeatedly over the past two-hundred-odd years, and indicates that the political process is selecting for the wrong types. Evolution in reverse, you might say, and when we actually do get a President that leaves the country in better shape than he found it in, it just means we got lucky. It's not like we're given a lot of choice in the matter.
And you're right
Couldn't have put it better m'self.
No, he's representing the "standard Slashdotter's" feeling of moral outrage at what has been done to the copyright and patent systems, both of which were designed to encourage creativity and the cross-fertilization of ideas between creators that fosters rapid innovation. Using the law to effectively blackbox anything "new" or that is merely claimed to be "new" is not only immoral but dangerous, and when that same law can be used to bitchslap anyone or anything perceived as a threat to your way of doing business ... well. As an engineer with a few patents behind me, I am outraged by the subversion of national interests to corporate interests. Because that is precisely what has happened.
.44 Magnum, and are standing around watching us bleed. I will shed no tears for the likes of a Disney or a Sony ... they've earned whatever is happening to them.
The big rightsholders (in the case of copyright) made two fundamental errors in their long-range planning. One, they failed to understand that advances in communications and processing technology would render their grip on their distribution channels useless. Utterly useless, and so far as music is concerned that cat will never get put back in the bag. Even if they could, by pressing some magic switch, turn off all peer-to-peer activity right now, there are a lot of people that have already downloaded so many tracks they'll never need to buy another CD. So, if the studios want any sales at all they'd best start learning to play nice. What, they're going to have to behave like any other manufacturer that wants to stay in business by treating its customers with respect because those customers can now go elsewhere? Oh my, the humanity, the humanity!
Two, they are finally starting to realize that what they have to offer are luxuries not necessities, for people with disposable income. Since Americans have traditionally had plenty of disposable income they were able to ride pretty high on the hog. Well, that particularly gravy train is slowing down and will probably come to its last station soon. The media companies (the "big rightsholders") certainly didn't help matters by buying laws like the DMCA, which have had an additional detrimental effect upon the economy. They shot us all in the foot with a
Better to have no copyright at all than the mess we have now. But the grandparent was right: there was a balance that was struck between the perceived needs of the creator of an original work, and everyone else. Given the pace of change in the modern world compared to when those laws were originally written, if anything the balance should have been tilted a little more towards the public domain. Instead, it has been dramatically shifted in favor of the major copyright holders.
Congress has breached a lot of such contracts with the public in the past fifty years or so. But thats only because they've made some new ones. Thank Disney and that little bastardo Mickey for a good part what's been lost to the public domain. I have to ask: what would old Walt think now?
On a similar note, a friend once mentioned that our local Wal-Mart has a $5 bin of DVDs. I don't shop Wal-Mart ordinarily (for oh, so many reasons) but this brought me in. Older stuff, but since I don't go to the theater very often (or watch much TV) they're all new to me. So for five bucks each I bought a few "new" movies. I know, it's still going to a bad cause (two bad causes in this case) but at least it wasn't $17 or $22.
Probably took Wal-Mart's considerable clout to get the studios to release even their old stuff that cheap. Concerns of true piracy and illegal downloading aside, I think some market realities are catching up to the movie people. Besides, here in the U.S. with gas fast approaching four bucks a gallon (with five on the horizon), heating bills through the roof, and everything else getting more expensive by leaps and bounds I know that I, for one, have less disposable income to blow on $22 movies (over twice what our local iMax charges!)
As another poster pointed out, how many movies are just so good that you'll watch them multiple times, justifying the expense of buying the disc? Not many. There are some, to be sure, but not many. The vast majority of new releases sold are crap. The studios know they're crap before the first scene is shot, which is why so many movies go direct to disc nowadays. They'd never make it in the theaters. Heck, if the gross rake-in figures you hear are anywhere near correct, I don't think a lot of theater releases are in the black either.
But that's okay. At seventeen bucks a disc, they'll just make it up in the DVD market.
I am an American, and I could certainly take offense to your +5 Insightful remark, however I won't because you still got it wrong. The implementation will probably be quite impressive, from a technological perspective (just a dedicated Web crawler and associated new Justice Department bureaucracy to manage the fines and press related charges against offending site operators) but the motivations are most definitely not correct, as the GP put it. I'm not sure if this is a matter of misguided right-wing pseudo-Puritanism or a simple Federal power grab, or something worse, but any way you slice it the motives aren't pure, you can bet your case buck on that.
I'm betting the TSA is currently debating whether or not the decision to make the scanners capable of displaying false images in the first place was a wise one.
... it's all for the greater good, right?
I'm betting they aren't. This is acceptable collateral damage, just like all the other stupid invasive things they've done. For an outfit supposedly charged with maintaining our personal safety, they don't seem to care all that much about what actually happens to us. But what the hell
Nobody thinks outside the box. Some people just have a bigger box.
Not as much fun as playing with knobs and patchcords on a modular analog synth.
I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.
He fiddled with it until it sounded nice.
In other words, one should multiple-source one's customer base.
Once again, you have to perform a proper risk-benefit analysis. The impact on our society of the lights being turned off is significant as well, significant enough that we may decide it's worthwhile to take some risks. Expensive power is a economic risk, since cheap energy drove a lot of foreign investment in American industry. In the long run, we'll continue to see a mix of different power sources ... it's just that the ratio of nuclear to fossil-fuel to "alternative" will have to change.
Personally, I'm a big fan of orbiting solar collectors transmitting power via microwave to ground-based antenna farms. In space, solar power is something, you know. But we're a long ways from having that capability. I do think it would be one of the best investments our civilization has ever made, though.
True ... but on the other hand, safety generally isn't one of the military's highest priorities. Any military. You really can't compare a civilian power-generation program to a weapons program.
So the question is, do you have sufficient faith in your economic-political system that it is going to safeguard you and your family? That there'll be sufficient transparency to ensure that problems aren't covered up.
Nope, and I think my original comment reflected a similar point of view. But most people I see discussing nuclear power focus almost entirely on the technology rather than the politics. Unfortunately, you cannot separate the two. I did want to make the point that nuclear power can be a safe, effective form of power production. I just don't believe that our government is any longer capable of creating, maintaining and enforcing the requisite standards. Too much corporate influence in Congress. The French, I understand, have done a marvelous job of standardizing their reactor designs: ours, by comparison, are individual works of art.
Just so we're clear, you might say that I'm very much pro-nuclear but very much anti-having-them-built-here. Now, that doesn't preclude our buying a bunch of French reactors.
Of course uranium is a natural source of energy. All sources of energy are natural. For that matter, so is petroleum, which also has to be refined in order to be useful. Or perhaps you meant "renewable", which for the most part is just enviro-speak for "solar energy". Besides, if we reinstitute the breeder-reactor program, nuclear power is also pretty damn renewable.
... if handled as badly as the Russians did it is an unmitigated disaster. Contrast that with the Three Mile Island event, which did in fact melt a lot of equipment but so far as nuclear accidents go was a success because containment wasn't breached. Yes yes, there was a minor release of gas but the two events cannot be compared in terms of severity, no matter how much some people want to. Besides, the French seem to be doing a substantially better job with their nuclear program, which just goes to show that the bulk of the concerns about nuclear power (at least in the U.S.) are politico-economic more than technological.
... and you can never have that, not when dealing with the energy levels a high-tech civilization requires. As an engineer I can tell you this much: everything is a trade-off. Everything is: it is the nature of our reality. A trade-off is a decision, a balancing act between the costs, risks and benefits of different approaches to solving a problem. In this case, by choosing to not develop nuclear power to any useful degree we are choosing to go down a different path, one which also has serious consequences. As fossil-fuels go, coal isn't exactly safe you know, and supplies of fuel oil and natural gas will continue to be uncertain for the foreseeable future. At some point in the not-too-distant future we will have to make a decision, whether we want to or not.
The problem with nuclear energy is not that it can be unsafe. Of course it can
The problem is that society wants an absolute, iron-clad guarantee that a particular technology is safe
You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too, at least not in the context of our current technology.
Sure, you can promote tidal power, wind power, solar power or {insert favorite alternative energy source here}. If such a source is going to generate enough power to significantly offset our use of fossil fuuels it will have economic and environmental impact, probably serious ones. Worse yet, none of them are really energy-dense enough to handle our power needs. Take a typical 2400 megawatt nuclear plant for example. Yes, they are very expensive, but so would be the physical plant required to generate and store enough solar power to provide the same level of service. Regardless, we (for a variety of reasons) may choose to make that investment. But we'd best do it with our eyes open and be willing to accept the downsides of whatever road (or roads) we decide to travel.
Sure, until a defective launch vehicle self-destructs a couple hundred miles up. Nothing like sintered plutonium waste covering a few million square miles. That would quickly replace Chernobyl as the worst nuclear accident in history.
As a software engineer I have to agree.
The article includes some controversial statements recommending disposal of nuclear waste in tropical forests to keep forest land away from greedy developers and farmers
I'd say less controversial and more hysterical. Of course, were I one of the animals being exposed to that "developer repellent" I'd might feel a bit differently.
Larry Niven had some similar ideas, once upon a time.
My real speed is more like 3 Mbit/sec. I used to get about 3.8 under the old plan, but now my speed has actually dropped. My back channel runs about 700 kbits/sec, so that's okay. But they tell me they can't do much about it, even though I'm paying ten bucks a month more. So yeah, I'm a little irritated. Apparently I'm close enough to my CO that I could probably get some decent speed over DSL. Where I used to live a couple years ago I was about 500 feet from the central office.
I've looked into a colo but I'm not ready to run a full-time server (yet) but that'll probably be the way I go.
{sigh} I know, I was following the parent's misuse in an attempt to be funny.
Sign any agreements you like, but Microsoft and Google and others know perfectly well that if they get a rep for removing peoples files (because they are "assumed" to have been copied illegally) they'll be in hot water from a number of directions. Besides, from the standpoint of the RIAA, they can monitor P2P networks as best they can because that isn't illegal. Well, it might be, that hasn't been decided in court so far as I know. But once you put a password on a remote account, it's a felony for anyone to try and break into it. So they won't be doing any enforcement by directly viewing what people are storing. The best they can do is try to convince the storage outfits that it is in their best interests to act as proxy enforcers. We'll see, probably you're right in this case, but I just have the feeling that the demand for music is so high right now that people will find a way to get it, since the studios don't seem willing to accommodate their customers.
I mean, my car already runs on a credit-card-sized device. It's called a credit card.
A better analogy is a tube full of ping-pong balls. Push the ball on one end, and a ball falls out the other. Propagation is nearly instantaneous of great distances, but the electrons themselves hardly move at all.