Most of the wireless stores I see have MAYBE 10-20 phones for sale at any point in time. Say every one of them cost $500, with a market life of one year and a salvage value of 20%. That's a $5-10k investment and a final $4-8k cost over a year. So over ten years, the store will cough up $40-80k in demos. When the commercial space the store sits in costs in the neighborhood of $100k per year, whining about the $4k in demo stock is just pathetic.
Would you put up with that sort of response from a car dealer whose demo models cost $30,000-130,000 a piece and must keep an on-site inventory worth millions of dollars? No. Why would you when the demo only costs $300 and when the onsite inventory is barely worth what they pay the janitor in a week?
It's pretty easy. 90% of the packages are installed by less, usually FAR less, than half the users. Although, I must admit I found it humorous that the package tracking the usage was installed by less than the total number of users ostensibly reporting.
Sure this is a tricky case, but they're going to have a hard time getting out of an interpretation of USC title 18, pt. 1, ch. 119, sect. 2511, aka the Wiretap Act and 18 U.S.C. 1030, aka the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Yes there are legal tests to this, particularly in the latter case, but the former does not require "damage" and the latter allows for even unintentional damage with a very low threshold. US Law is often interpreted VERY punitively. Take the _ONE_ exception in 18USC1030: "unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any one-year period." A piece of spyware like this over an entire year sucking up $5k of computing resources? Not very difficult. Note the necessary "AND" -- that is to say the mere use IS sufficient if the predicate value is true--and that value is AGGREGATE.
Get one modestly adept lawyer and these guys are in trouble. They've got 12,000 people now. If they hit fifty, a class action suit claiming each person lost a DIME would be sufficient. I wouldn't be so aloof about this. The United States is too litigious a place to skirt the law like this.
You are making the assumption that because people think these guys are criminals that they think pirates are not. You're wrong. What these guys are doing IS criminal, no matter their intentions or the [il]legality of the actions of their victims--whose to say their victims were correctly targeted, some random programmer with a chip on his shoulder? Vigilantism in its other forms is generally frowned upon, in many cases it is explicitly criminal, so why do you seem to support it now that it involves a computer?
The last SuSE install I purchased (I'm on number three because they deserve the cash) automatically detected and correctly configured a three-panel display using two different types of video cards (one AGP ATi, two PCI NVidias), to say nothing of getting the network config right etc. etc.
It's funny, a couple years back I'd mention I was favoring SuSE and people would respond aghast, "but you don't use RedHat?!? BSD? Debian? What crap is this 'SuSE' you speak of?"
Clearly they are talking about "personal cell phones" for "personal use." That is to say, they don't want Accounts Receivable sitting there blathering away on the cell phone when they should be answering their company phone processing invoices.
Just ask for a company cellphone or a Blackberry or something. While you imagine the policy to be intrusive, imagine being in a cubicle farm with everyone's polyphonic ringtones going off all the time for personal calls... ugh.
Ok, so you just bought a $50k server to run a $50k installation of, say, Oracle. You have 2500 employees and the lifespan of the beast is five years. That's $1,600 per month (not including interest). You could save $800 per month by using MySQL or PostgreSQL, which is about thirty two cents per month, per employee. Your SysAdmin/DBA, on the other hand, will cost $6-8k per month or about $2.80 per user, regardless. Say you have an application suite developed for six months (hah, six months, right) with a team of four people at the cost of your SysAdmin. That's $168,000, or $2,800 per month, or just over a buck per user per month. If that development was to equal, say, the Oracle Collaboration Suite, which would cost about $37,000 per year, that's $187,500 over the five-year term in question, or about $1.25 per user per month. Now, let's say you could get that that using OSS that would take four people a week to integrate (YEAH, RIGHT), or about $7k. You'd only save about $1/employee/month.
Now, do you as a business manager, or "solution provider" who has to deal with business managers, still care much about "free software?" The little bit of security that comes with a software maintenance agreement with a trusted vendor (deservingly or not) is often worth that extra buck as the old FUD goes: "no one was ever fired for buying IBM."
Oh, touche. Hardly worth sending the legal hounds out was more the point. Mozilla is a non-profit organization supported by donations--BIG donations, not t-shirt sales. Sure, they have a right to protect their trademark etc. etc., but this just comes off as petty because they are sending the hounds out before they actually have a competing product. Put up the schwag, then tell everyone "hey, don't compete with us." They're being relatively nice about it, which makes it seem all the more petty because they've got no goods.
It's like if you had a favorite sports team that hadn't bothered to set up licensing agreements or production of their own merchandise, then went after all their fans' little garage silk-screening operations--and still failed to produce anything but one sad little t-shirt. Come on. You're getting free marketing. Put up or shut up.
Ironic also because they have ONE FSCKING PRODUCT at the Mozilla store. A t-shirt. Period. Come on guys, they're not "competing" with your single crap t-shirt. Why didn't they spend their energy developing, say, a coaster and a ballcap instead of writing pithy letters. Why not just set up licensing terms? If you got nothin' and other people are already making something, just ask for the cut. This idea of "competition" with a store that sells basically NOTHING is just lame.
My family ran a business with 12 non-family employees for 25 years. Along the way, extended family members (cousins/nieces etc.) and friends came on. BAD NEWS. Office politics happen in all businesses. When you mix outside emotions and alliances, you risk turning your livelihood into a Shakespearian tragedy. The conflicting interests can destroy not only your business, but every aspect of your life. Most people come home from work and can leave business at the office. You can't do that when your coworkers come home with you. In addition to speaking to a lawyer, speak with a psychologist--seriously. Proceed with extreme caution.
My immediate thought was why not just get an old laptop off ebay or from the closet, yank the lcd off the case and flip it round to the bottom of the laptop, stick a WiFi card in it and mount it in the frame. Something like an old HP Omnibook subnote would be perfect as they don't need active cooling and cost practically nothing....although the idea of having a machine logged in 24/7 on WiFi makes me cringe. Might as well make it a honeypot too.
That's the problem. If this goes through, just wait until Singapore shows up demanding to take you to trial under their "Undesirable Publication Act" or any of a long list of repressive countries with strict decency laws. This is a very dangerous line to cross as merely communicating with people in other countries can be considered criminal depending on the content.
I was a bit underwhelmed as well. I carry around a laptop, digicam, PDA/Phone (with PalmOS SSH and S/KEY), WiFi router, subnotebook etc. etc. etc. When travelling on business I carry at least as much shit as mentioned in this article, except for the iPod because I have zero interest, but I do have a 6GB handheld drive I use with the camera, so basically the same thing. In short, Big Fat Hairy Fscking Deal.
Yes, I can imagine how difficult it is. Italics not necessary. Sure, there is ALWAYS someone who has it worse off. An Indian's plight would sound trivial compared to a Burmese, whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Mali whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Burkina Faso whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Western Sahara.
This "you've no right to complain" line is silly. Someone living in the United States earning $5,000 per year will be worse-off than someone in India earning $500 per year, okay? Just imagine.
Obviously you haven't done much of it. It is exceedingly difficult to do anything without actually being there. Find an apartment blind? Good luck getting even so much as a returned phone call. Local bank accounts? Ain't happening. Jobs? Guffaw. Sure, you might get recruited at a university job fair at a company with offices all over creation, but anymore, you'll still have to foot the entire relocation bill. Almost no one is paying for relocation these days. If you haven't had the luxury of being recruited locally for a distant job, most companies are not interviewing anyone that isn't already local.
If you haven't done it lately, don't give me hypothetical shoulda-woulda-couldas. Go do it, then get back to me.
The vast majority of jobs are not selecting new hires from 2800 miles away anymore. Executives, maybe, mid-range, not likely. Again, if you've basically got the shirt on your back, sure, you could hitchhike. I'm not talking about a recent college graduate with a backpack. Suffice it to say, $30k is CHEAP and, no, you can't just "buy another one." Selling $50,000 worth of possessions that will now cost your $75,000 to replace, but will cost $5,000 to ship is rather silly, n'est-ce pas? I get the sneaking suspicion you're significantly under 30 years old if you think $30k is excessive. In fact, that's a painfully tight budget for such a move. It's barely enough to compensate for the time off work, let alone the actual "moving" part of the equation. I have a friend whose company moves him around every four or five years. The charge is routinely in the range of $50,000 and he's effectively single. Yes, if you can stay with mommy and daddy, obviously things will be a tad cheaper.
Part of the problem is in the level of analysis. While Indians, or people of any nationality, individually may be considered "traditional" or merely quaintly idiosyncratic in their xenophobia, whem those characteristics become a matter not only of internal national policy but of international relations, i.e. reciprocal trade and immigration policies or the lack of reciprocation therein, it does become a matter of political arrogance. Witness the Cold War when both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in monumental acts of political bluster, while when anyone from either side encountered anyone from the other, they generally found each other as mundane as humans generally are: eat, sleep, work, raise the kids, feed the dog etc.
When any abusive tactics in international relations are used, it is a bit coy for people to run back and hide behind the fact that they are just humans because that is true of every country. The fact that both American and Indian corporations take advantage of those abusive tactics does not excuse the governments that make it possible. That Americans direct their fury at India shouldn't be taken to mean they direct their fury at grandmothers and children (really, even when the more volatile voices put it in those terms), but at the governments that represent them and make the abuse possible. When policy communicates arrogance, it is not unfair to characterize the source as being arrogant. Unfortunately, in a democracy, that source is not only the governments but the people represented by those governments and that cuts both ways. Political reality sucks.
No one said it was impossible, just that it might as well be impossible. It cost me over $30,000 to move from Los Angeles to Washington, DC -- and I was able to do it blindly without the visa hurdles, obviously. If you've tried to support two unemployed people during an apartment AND job search in a new city, you know what I'm talking about. The necessary burn rate for the first eight weeks is equal to the subsequent eight months. Unless you have already lost everything down to the shirt on your back and you're planning on walking, it's a logistical and financial nightmare.
You don't just wake up in the morning and think "gosh, I'll move to India." Moving overseas for employment is horrendously complicated if you are attempting to immigrate. When you are talking about people who have been struggling for 18-24 months already, it's a pipe dream for all but the most flush with cash. Regardless of the local laws, it would be suicide to come in without at least an entire year's budget in cash--and most countries require it, some of them require two years (see: New Zealand). For two people in most countries, that's roughly $120,000 in reserves. I'll just pull that out of my wallet. Obviously, India is cheaper, but what say we call it $10k per year per person. That's still $40,000 in burnable cash. That's undoubtedly far beyond what most of unemployed IT workers have sitting around--and if India doesn't work out, congratulations, now you're getting off a plane homeless and broke, but with all that bankable international experience. Whatever.
Besides, "you can just move to India" is so fscking abusive it makes me sick. It's basically saying "we think your life is worthless." Want to know why people accuse Indians of being arrogant about this issue? That's it. It ignores all of the cultural and social aspects to existing. "Just give up all of your family, friends, acadmic and professional relationships, oh and sell the pets too, to move to Bangalore." Unless your professional ambitions already include such ventures (in my case, they do and I have done it, so don't start with me), moving half way across the globe just for a paycheck is ludicrous.
Because that is a magnitude of destructive power than people can quantify from the ubiquitous photographic and cinematic evidence. When you see a city leveled, you can identify with it. St. Helens is not as easily quanitifiable because there is no human scale to it other than a point on a map. If you were to say, "this volcano was as destructive as St. Helens," people wouldn't really "get it." Ok, a bunch of trees burned. Big deal. If you say "2000 times the destructive force of Hiroshima was released" people DO get it. They think, crap, that would level Los Angeles.
Like it or not, "Hiroshima" is a very useful relative unit of measure for destructive force that people can wrap there brains around.
Aww... I was there with you until Family Guy. They're coming up with a new 3-year contract based on their phenomenal DVD sales.
That'a also part of the equation. If there are no sales, there's no way to tell if a franchise is worth bothering with. Family Guy was cancelled and then proved itself on the shelf, so it's coming back, no thanks to you...
Oddly enough, there seems to be a direct correlation between the number of years spent studying Shakespeare and the intellectual distance from the mob that first appreciated it. Every once in awhile someone hauls out the perennial "let's take something blatantly trashy a deliver as high Shakespearean" or vice versa and the audience coos and gushes at the artistic genius of the director. Meanwhile, the rest of the population takes a knowing glance, shrugs, and wanders off.
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Hypothetically speaking...
Most of the wireless stores I see have MAYBE 10-20 phones for sale at any point in time. Say every one of them cost $500, with a market life of one year and a salvage value of 20%. That's a $5-10k investment and a final $4-8k cost over a year. So over ten years, the store will cough up $40-80k in demos. When the commercial space the store sits in costs in the neighborhood of $100k per year, whining about the $4k in demo stock is just pathetic.
Would you put up with that sort of response from a car dealer whose demo models cost $30,000-130,000 a piece and must keep an on-site inventory worth millions of dollars? No. Why would you when the demo only costs $300 and when the onsite inventory is barely worth what they pay the janitor in a week?
It's pretty easy. 90% of the packages are installed by less, usually FAR less, than half the users. Although, I must admit I found it humorous that the package tracking the usage was installed by less than the total number of users ostensibly reporting.
WTF?
Sure this is a tricky case, but they're going to have a hard time getting out of an interpretation of USC title 18, pt. 1, ch. 119, sect. 2511, aka the Wiretap Act and 18 U.S.C. 1030, aka the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Yes there are legal tests to this, particularly in the latter case, but the former does not require "damage" and the latter allows for even unintentional damage with a very low threshold. US Law is often interpreted VERY punitively. Take the _ONE_ exception in 18USC1030: "unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any one-year period." A piece of spyware like this over an entire year sucking up $5k of computing resources? Not very difficult. Note the necessary "AND" -- that is to say the mere use IS sufficient if the predicate value is true--and that value is AGGREGATE.
Get one modestly adept lawyer and these guys are in trouble. They've got 12,000 people now. If they hit fifty, a class action suit claiming each person lost a DIME would be sufficient. I wouldn't be so aloof about this. The United States is too litigious a place to skirt the law like this.
You are making the assumption that because people think these guys are criminals that they think pirates are not. You're wrong. What these guys are doing IS criminal, no matter their intentions or the [il]legality of the actions of their victims--whose to say their victims were correctly targeted, some random programmer with a chip on his shoulder? Vigilantism in its other forms is generally frowned upon, in many cases it is explicitly criminal, so why do you seem to support it now that it involves a computer?
The last SuSE install I purchased (I'm on number three because they deserve the cash) automatically detected and correctly configured a three-panel display using two different types of video cards (one AGP ATi, two PCI NVidias), to say nothing of getting the network config right etc. etc.
It's funny, a couple years back I'd mention I was favoring SuSE and people would respond aghast, "but you don't use RedHat?!? BSD? Debian? What crap is this 'SuSE' you speak of?"
Pfffft.
Clearly they are talking about "personal cell phones" for "personal use." That is to say, they don't want Accounts Receivable sitting there blathering away on the cell phone when they should be answering their company phone processing invoices.
Just ask for a company cellphone or a Blackberry or something. While you imagine the policy to be intrusive, imagine being in a cubicle farm with everyone's polyphonic ringtones going off all the time for personal calls... ugh.
The fundamental business case.
Ok, so you just bought a $50k server to run a $50k installation of, say, Oracle. You have 2500 employees and the lifespan of the beast is five years. That's $1,600 per month (not including interest). You could save $800 per month by using MySQL or PostgreSQL, which is about thirty two cents per month, per employee. Your SysAdmin/DBA, on the other hand, will cost $6-8k per month or about $2.80 per user, regardless. Say you have an application suite developed for six months (hah, six months, right) with a team of four people at the cost of your SysAdmin. That's $168,000, or $2,800 per month, or just over a buck per user per month. If that development was to equal, say, the Oracle Collaboration Suite, which would cost about $37,000 per year, that's $187,500 over the five-year term in question, or about $1.25 per user per month. Now, let's say you could get that that using OSS that would take four people a week to integrate (YEAH, RIGHT), or about $7k. You'd only save about $1/employee/month.
Now, do you as a business manager, or "solution provider" who has to deal with business managers, still care much about "free software?" The little bit of security that comes with a software maintenance agreement with a trusted vendor (deservingly or not) is often worth that extra buck as the old FUD goes: "no one was ever fired for buying IBM."
Oh, touche. Hardly worth sending the legal hounds out was more the point. Mozilla is a non-profit organization supported by donations--BIG donations, not t-shirt sales. Sure, they have a right to protect their trademark etc. etc., but this just comes off as petty because they are sending the hounds out before they actually have a competing product. Put up the schwag, then tell everyone "hey, don't compete with us." They're being relatively nice about it, which makes it seem all the more petty because they've got no goods.
It's like if you had a favorite sports team that hadn't bothered to set up licensing agreements or production of their own merchandise, then went after all their fans' little garage silk-screening operations--and still failed to produce anything but one sad little t-shirt. Come on. You're getting free marketing. Put up or shut up.
A storefront on cafeshops.com does not a commercial empire make.
Oh gosh, I'm sorry. Big fat hairy oversight. Something they're not concerned about and a bunch of crap they don't have yet.
Terrific.
Besides, like there's a huge untapped market for Mozilla schwag. Puh-lease.
Ironic also because they have ONE FSCKING PRODUCT at the Mozilla store. A t-shirt. Period. Come on guys, they're not "competing" with your single crap t-shirt. Why didn't they spend their energy developing, say, a coaster and a ballcap instead of writing pithy letters. Why not just set up licensing terms? If you got nothin' and other people are already making something, just ask for the cut. This idea of "competition" with a store that sells basically NOTHING is just lame.
or Weiss Rauch, starring Ted Kennedy...
Pity Leni Riefenstahl isn't around to consult on such positive outlooks of the future.
My family ran a business with 12 non-family employees for 25 years. Along the way, extended family members (cousins/nieces etc.) and friends came on. BAD NEWS. Office politics happen in all businesses. When you mix outside emotions and alliances, you risk turning your livelihood into a Shakespearian tragedy. The conflicting interests can destroy not only your business, but every aspect of your life. Most people come home from work and can leave business at the office. You can't do that when your coworkers come home with you. In addition to speaking to a lawyer, speak with a psychologist--seriously. Proceed with extreme caution.
My immediate thought was why not just get an old laptop off ebay or from the closet, yank the lcd off the case and flip it round to the bottom of the laptop, stick a WiFi card in it and mount it in the frame. Something like an old HP Omnibook subnote would be perfect as they don't need active cooling and cost practically nothing. ...although the idea of having a machine logged in 24/7 on WiFi makes me cringe. Might as well make it a honeypot too.
That's the problem. If this goes through, just wait until Singapore shows up demanding to take you to trial under their "Undesirable Publication Act" or any of a long list of repressive countries with strict decency laws. This is a very dangerous line to cross as merely communicating with people in other countries can be considered criminal depending on the content.
I was a bit underwhelmed as well. I carry around a laptop, digicam, PDA/Phone (with PalmOS SSH and S/KEY), WiFi router, subnotebook etc. etc. etc. When travelling on business I carry at least as much shit as mentioned in this article, except for the iPod because I have zero interest, but I do have a 6GB handheld drive I use with the camera, so basically the same thing. In short, Big Fat Hairy Fscking Deal.
Oh for the love of god.
Yes, I can imagine how difficult it is. Italics not necessary. Sure, there is ALWAYS someone who has it worse off. An Indian's plight would sound trivial compared to a Burmese, whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Mali whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Burkina Faso whose plight would sound trivial compared to someone in Western Sahara.
This "you've no right to complain" line is silly. Someone living in the United States earning $5,000 per year will be worse-off than someone in India earning $500 per year, okay? Just imagine.
Obviously you haven't done much of it. It is exceedingly difficult to do anything without actually being there. Find an apartment blind? Good luck getting even so much as a returned phone call. Local bank accounts? Ain't happening. Jobs? Guffaw. Sure, you might get recruited at a university job fair at a company with offices all over creation, but anymore, you'll still have to foot the entire relocation bill. Almost no one is paying for relocation these days. If you haven't had the luxury of being recruited locally for a distant job, most companies are not interviewing anyone that isn't already local.
If you haven't done it lately, don't give me hypothetical shoulda-woulda-couldas. Go do it, then get back to me.
The vast majority of jobs are not selecting new hires from 2800 miles away anymore. Executives, maybe, mid-range, not likely. Again, if you've basically got the shirt on your back, sure, you could hitchhike. I'm not talking about a recent college graduate with a backpack. Suffice it to say, $30k is CHEAP and, no, you can't just "buy another one." Selling $50,000 worth of possessions that will now cost your $75,000 to replace, but will cost $5,000 to ship is rather silly, n'est-ce pas? I get the sneaking suspicion you're significantly under 30 years old if you think $30k is excessive. In fact, that's a painfully tight budget for such a move. It's barely enough to compensate for the time off work, let alone the actual "moving" part of the equation. I have a friend whose company moves him around every four or five years. The charge is routinely in the range of $50,000 and he's effectively single. Yes, if you can stay with mommy and daddy, obviously things will be a tad cheaper.
Part of the problem is in the level of analysis. While Indians, or people of any nationality, individually may be considered "traditional" or merely quaintly idiosyncratic in their xenophobia, whem those characteristics become a matter not only of internal national policy but of international relations, i.e. reciprocal trade and immigration policies or the lack of reciprocation therein, it does become a matter of political arrogance. Witness the Cold War when both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in monumental acts of political bluster, while when anyone from either side encountered anyone from the other, they generally found each other as mundane as humans generally are: eat, sleep, work, raise the kids, feed the dog etc.
When any abusive tactics in international relations are used, it is a bit coy for people to run back and hide behind the fact that they are just humans because that is true of every country. The fact that both American and Indian corporations take advantage of those abusive tactics does not excuse the governments that make it possible. That Americans direct their fury at India shouldn't be taken to mean they direct their fury at grandmothers and children (really, even when the more volatile voices put it in those terms), but at the governments that represent them and make the abuse possible. When policy communicates arrogance, it is not unfair to characterize the source as being arrogant. Unfortunately, in a democracy, that source is not only the governments but the people represented by those governments and that cuts both ways. Political reality sucks.
No one said it was impossible, just that it might as well be impossible. It cost me over $30,000 to move from Los Angeles to Washington, DC -- and I was able to do it blindly without the visa hurdles, obviously. If you've tried to support two unemployed people during an apartment AND job search in a new city, you know what I'm talking about. The necessary burn rate for the first eight weeks is equal to the subsequent eight months. Unless you have already lost everything down to the shirt on your back and you're planning on walking, it's a logistical and financial nightmare.
You don't just wake up in the morning and think "gosh, I'll move to India." Moving overseas for employment is horrendously complicated if you are attempting to immigrate. When you are talking about people who have been struggling for 18-24 months already, it's a pipe dream for all but the most flush with cash. Regardless of the local laws, it would be suicide to come in without at least an entire year's budget in cash--and most countries require it, some of them require two years (see: New Zealand). For two people in most countries, that's roughly $120,000 in reserves. I'll just pull that out of my wallet. Obviously, India is cheaper, but what say we call it $10k per year per person. That's still $40,000 in burnable cash. That's undoubtedly far beyond what most of unemployed IT workers have sitting around--and if India doesn't work out, congratulations, now you're getting off a plane homeless and broke, but with all that bankable international experience. Whatever.
Besides, "you can just move to India" is so fscking abusive it makes me sick. It's basically saying "we think your life is worthless." Want to know why people accuse Indians of being arrogant about this issue? That's it. It ignores all of the cultural and social aspects to existing. "Just give up all of your family, friends, acadmic and professional relationships, oh and sell the pets too, to move to Bangalore." Unless your professional ambitions already include such ventures (in my case, they do and I have done it, so don't start with me), moving half way across the globe just for a paycheck is ludicrous.
Because that is a magnitude of destructive power than people can quantify from the ubiquitous photographic and cinematic evidence. When you see a city leveled, you can identify with it. St. Helens is not as easily quanitifiable because there is no human scale to it other than a point on a map. If you were to say, "this volcano was as destructive as St. Helens," people wouldn't really "get it." Ok, a bunch of trees burned. Big deal. If you say "2000 times the destructive force of Hiroshima was released" people DO get it. They think, crap, that would level Los Angeles.
Like it or not, "Hiroshima" is a very useful relative unit of measure for destructive force that people can wrap there brains around.
Aww... I was there with you until Family Guy. They're coming up with a new 3-year contract based on their phenomenal DVD sales.
That'a also part of the equation. If there are no sales, there's no way to tell if a franchise is worth bothering with. Family Guy was cancelled and then proved itself on the shelf, so it's coming back, no thanks to you...
Oddly enough, there seems to be a direct correlation between the number of years spent studying Shakespeare and the intellectual distance from the mob that first appreciated it. Every once in awhile someone hauls out the perennial "let's take something blatantly trashy a deliver as high Shakespearean" or vice versa and the audience coos and gushes at the artistic genius of the director. Meanwhile, the rest of the population takes a knowing glance, shrugs, and wanders off.