Why should you pay for GPL software? Simple. Because you don't want to compile it yourself. (No, I don't mean you personally, of course.) It's the same reason as I'd pay for plumbing. I don't want to be elbow-deep in sewage, and I wouldn't have a clue what to do anyway.
The software is free, but that doesn't prevent others from making a profit off services. The GPL specifically allows it. And the point of the CNR service is that it supplies working software to users who either can't or won't compile their own. Is that wrong?
By the way, Windows doesn't come with a compiler. OS X does, but you have to install the development tools specifically. Ubuntu doesn't have the development toolchain in the basic installation. It's not as unusual as you seem to think, at least for a regular-person-targeted OS.
In British usage, either spelling is correct, although I think that the -ise spelling is more common: it also tends to be the form used by official publications.
The Oxford Dictionary has always preferred -ize, although this is more through tradition and stubborn prescriptivism than anything else. (And maybe the fact that one of the original edition's most prolific contributors was the American murderer and lunatic William Chester Minor, then detained in Britain, might have had some small part to play.) Older editions of Chambers, on the other hand, preferred -ise to the extent of not even acknowledging the -ize variant.
I think that the strong desire to differentiate British usage from its colonial counterpart has also led to an increase in the usage of -ise, in an analoguous process to that in which Noah Webster attempted to Americanise the US orthography for political reasons.
Why the menu is below the tabs
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The reason that the menu is below the tabs is simple. If it were above the tabs, then you'd be able to use the menu even when Javascript has annoyingly tried to disable it.
To you or me, being able to use the menu at any time is a feature. To MS, however, it's a bug - it gives control to the user, which is basically anathema to the whole concept of a leveraged monopoly.
I think you missed those Pound signs in his post. What you say may be true for the US market, but is the US market big enough to make HD a global success?
I doubt many people are going to go out and buy a new TV so they can watch HighDef Discs. In the US, most everyone is going to end up with a new digital TV over the next few years, with or without HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.
This is actually important: without a higher resolution television set, the advantage of HD discs is moot. And as digital signals in Europe are generally standard definition, even new digital sets generally won't be HD.
The two big sat companies in the US essentially GIVE AWAY their equipment, and I don't see the upgrade to HDTV equipment being any different. They will also be carrying far more HDTV channels, very soon.
You haven't seen Sky's broadcasts, obviously. Given how much they compress signals already in order to get the maximum number of channels onto the stream, I find it unlikely that they will move many to HD. It's likely to be only the premium channels: movies and sport.
Regarding the equipment, eventually, HD receivers will be given away free in packets of cereal as they are now. Initially, however, they are going to be expensive, premium devices.
Absolutely ridiculous. No doubt you're talking about PAL, which is just slightly higher res than NTSC... HDTV DOUBLES the vertical resolution, and almost triples the horizontal resolution.
That would be 1.8 times the vertical, and 2.5 times the horizontal, if upgrading from PAL. Plus, you'll get a 20% increase in refresh-rate, which is a huge improvement.
I've lived in countries using PAL and NTSC, and I think you're wrong. Even though the proportional difference is small, it's just enough that, whilst NTSC looks like crap, PAL actually looks pretty good, especially from a normal viewing distance. The colour fidelity of PAL is also much better than that of NTSC (no red bleed for example), so for European consumers, there's much less of an incentive to upgrade.
I think you're wrong on the 20% higher refresh rate, too - The European HDTV standard seems to be 50Hz refresh. But it's not a massive problem in any case - better modern standard-definition PAL TVs store and duplicate each half-frame so that the screen is refreshed at 100Hz, and there's no discernible flicker. The other advantage of PAL's refresh rate is that there are no pull-down artefacts when watching film-sourced material - on the other hand, we get everything speeded up by 4%, but that's less noticeable.
I'm sure that your characterisation is accurate for the US market, but over this side of the Atlantic, it's less of a sure thing.
While you are on your billion rant, the "correct" way is to use commas, not apostrophes, to separate the groups of three digits.:-)
I'm with you on the fact that the British system is more systematic in that it counts the power of one million (bi- = 1e6 ^ 2; tri- = 1e6 ^ 3; quadri = 1e6 ^ 4 etc.) whereas the American system counts the power of one thousand, less one (bi- = 1e3 ^ (2+1); tri- = 1e3 ^ (3+1) etc.). And I mourn the loss of "milliard" from British usage. However, given that even the UK government now uses the American standard, I fear that the war is lost.
However, both systems are really French in origin, and there's no overwhelming historical justification for choosing one over the other.
On the subject of the word "program(me)", I believe that the overwhelming British preference is for -mme in all cases except that of computing, where -m is almost ubiquitous. To me, seeing -mme used in print is usually an indicator that the author (or editor) is less than entirely au courant with computing matters. But that is just an opinion. I must say, though, that the parent post's erratic spelling and grammar do not give the impression that the writer is an authority on orthographical matters!
Although it might be "environmentally safe" insofar as the leaked metal is not toxic, it's still far from being environmentally friendly. The fact that a graphics card needs liquid metal cooling is cause for concern.
Efficient cooling just means transferring the heat generated away from the card more rapidly - the energy input is still high, with all the negative consequences of that (cost, pollution, geopolitical instability, etc.). What we should really be demanding is more efficient systems that don't waste so much energy in the first place. Still, the Mac mini is a step forward in that regard (although not in the same graphics league, I concede).
The program is licensed under the GPL, with all that entails. The logo, however, is not. Thus, I can hack and rerelease Firefox to my heart's content, but I can't use Mozilla's logo on it.
In the same way, RedHat distributes a branded operating system that uses a lot of GPL software. But you or I cannot just make our own "RedHat Linux" based on it - not without feeling the warm breath of lawyers on our necks. There are, nonetheless, repackaged and renamed operating systems based on RedHat, such as CentOS (who were recently enjoined from using trademarks of said "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" on their site).
Although I find it annoying that, for example, Ubuntu's version of Firefox comes with a substandard icon as a result, the concept of the logo as a kind of proof of authenticity seems like a reasonable idea - it makes it clear whether or not a particular version comes from the Mozilla Organization or not.
Slashdot editors can't be bothered to read Slashdot (hence all the dupes), let alone the linked articles in a story submission. And as for actually, you know, editing the submissions? No chance.
"Allofmp3 encodes the MP3s for you from source and they're a relatively small time operation."
I could be wrong, but I don't think that it necessarily translates to a high load. I assume that AllOfMP3 store the encoded MP3s once they have been created. I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
I would also wager that the majority of their downloads consists of a small number of albums. That means that most downloads will simply be pre-prepared data. They can offer the value-added custom encoding service to the minority that want it at little additional cost to themselves.
"[O]nline digital music is the inevitable future, and I don't see why anyone would want to hurt that."
It's not a question of wanting to "hurt" it, but of wanting digital distribution on the same liberal terms under which (most) CDs are already available. Anything less is a retrograde step.
I went into a record shop specifically to buy Velvet Revolver's CD. I actually had it in my hand, ready to pay, when I noticed the vague compatibility warnings on the back, threatening that it might not work in my equipment.
I put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to pay money for that? I wonder how many others did the same, and turned to alt.binaries.* for a copy that they could actually listen to.
For me, the online music stores are the same dodgy deal. Each will only play on a subset of the devices I own, and carries the threat that my listening freedom may be restricted further in the future at the arbitrary whim of a content provider (c.f. iTunes' ever-changing streaming/licensing regime.)
Digital distribution has a lot to recommend it. It saves energy, time, and money - not to mention carbon. But we don't have to give up the freedoms we already have in order to get digital music. The industry is using the transition as a useful excuse to foist extra restrictions on us. Resist them now, or regret it later.
The simple reason is that, although you can personalise each DRM'ed download on the server, it's expensive to do so.
I haven't researched Apple's solution; however, I have personal experience of implementing a Windows Media-based DRM solution in my previous job. (I don't agree with DRM, and won't purchase any DRM-protected media, but it was nonetheless an interesting assignment, and I discovered a lot about how it works.) With that in mind, here is my tentative analysis.
Apple are probably using one of the edge-cache services like Akamai to reduce server load and bandwidth fees. In order for this to work, the data that each client downloads must be the same - otherwise, it can't be cached.
Although it is possible, and even desirable from a security standpoint, to apply the DRM to each file as it is downloaded, the increased server load and bandwidth probably makes this economically and logistically unviable.
It may be judged as stupid that Apple has not applied even basic, generic encryption to what they send over the wire. However, since they would have to supply the enemy (a.k.a. the customer) with the encrypted content and the means to decrypt it, it would not deter a determined hacker. Then again, nor can DRM.
The parent writes, "The first rule of security is that the client is untrustworthy." The first rule of DRM is, by contrast, "We give the client the encrypted content, the keys, and the decoder, and hope that he won't work out how to use them."
The lesson that you should take away from this is that DRM is snake oil. It can never work. But it is being sold to and bought in gallons by the entertainment oligopoly mastodons who have repeatedly proven that they don't get the internet. It's basically useless for all parties concerned. We get inconvenient restrictions; they think that they are getting copy protection but are actually being sold a river.
As an aside, even if Palladium/NGSCB becomes prevalent and required for downloading DRM content, it seems unlikely that each resource will be custom-encrypted against the customer's Palladium/NGSCB public key. And even if it were, there would be likely be ways to extract the raw data at some point. I doubt that we will see truly uncrackable DRM for a long time to come. In fact, I doubt that we will ever see it.
Given a DVD burner and a Mac, it's trivial to burn your own non-system-restricted install DVD from the system-specific one. Apple may not want you to do it, but it's a lot more convenient than installing an old version of Panther from the retail CD set, followed by downloading several hundred MB of upgrades. It may even violate the EULA, although I'll start worrying about such technicalities when Apple start paying for my download bandwidth and disc-swapping time. But you needn't feel bad about it if you are using it as a replacement for the CD set.
It boils down to disabling the bundled software section in a plist file: Instructions.
That's not how Coral links work. You have to put the ".nyud.net:8090" right after the hostname (or, to express the same thing in another way, right before the first single slash).
JSB is probably meant to be JCB, one of the biggest CC operators in Japan. It's easy for a Russian to confuse C and S, as Russian "C" is Roman "S" (CCCP = SSSR etc.).
I get them too. I do, however, use eBay, but the Belgian site, so anything that doesn't come from ebay.be is fake. In addition, as all my legitimate eBay emails come in French, it's very easy to spot a phish.
These phishers really need to get their acts together and start supporting international users. There's a whole untapped market out there!
Mobistar was fined under Belgian law, according to which "tying" is illegal. The practice is, however, perfectly legal in other countries of the EU: phone + service bundles are commonly sold in the UK, to give one example.
I always fancied the idea of wandering around with a nice big Japanese sword hanging beside me. It would certainly dissuade the riff-raff.
I never thought that I would legally be able to do it, however. Now I know that somewhere, albeit on another continent from where I am, that ambition can be achieved.
You write in your sig, "Remember the Nigerian yellowcake?"
As a matter of fact, I don't. If, as seems likely, you are talking about the yellowcake uranium ore that Iraq was alleged to have attempted to obtain, then the country in question is Niger, not Nigeria.
The two countries' respective adjective forms are: Nigeria => Nigerian Niger => Nigerien
Now, I know that the names look similar (although the pronunciation is different), the countries are neighbours, and they are named after the same river, but it's an important factual distinction.
I'm writing this on a G4 PowerMac into which I have retrofitted a PC version of an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card. (I just had it lying around. Really.)
OS X recognised it as a VGA card. It wouldn't do anything useful with it, however, as OpenFirmware didn't know what to do with VGA. (It's understandable: if you aren't tied down to ancient PC standards, why would you want to be?) I stuck the card into a PC and flashed it with the Mac ROM image, obtained from a website, and it worked perfectly.
I also have a generic USB 2.0 PCI card in there that didn't need special treatment.
Like the immediate parent says, it's not a lockout, but certain architectural differences require things like the graphics cards to interact differently with the host system at boot time.
I'm a native English speaker, and I also speak Japanese and French fairly well. I can and have watched films in those languages without subtitles. However, watching with subtitles is easier.
It's not entirely a matter of laziness, although it is definitely easier work to watch something in your first language - it's less mental effort and more relaxing as entertainment.
Even if you can speak a language well in everyday two-way situations, the one-way nature of TV and film means that you lack the feedback loop that allows two people to find a mutually comprehensible vocabulary when talking. When watching foreign-language material, it's very easy, having missed one important word, to lose the thread of a scene. Being able to glance down at the subtitles for reinforcement and correction really helps.
Frankly, I like watching English stuff with subtitles on as well, so that I can check on misheard or confused dialogue. But I might just be weird that way.
You obviously haven't watched Sky then. They place adverts right after the opening titles, exactly as you describe US TV. In fact, Sky One has more ads than the UK free-to-air channels, and yet you have to pay a monthly fee to view it. It's a nice deal for Murdoch, I suppose...
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Why should you pay for GPL software? Simple. Because you don't want to compile it yourself. (No, I don't mean you personally, of course.) It's the same reason as I'd pay for plumbing. I don't want to be elbow-deep in sewage, and I wouldn't have a clue what to do anyway.
The software is free, but that doesn't prevent others from making a profit off services. The GPL specifically allows it. And the point of the CNR service is that it supplies working software to users who either can't or won't compile their own. Is that wrong?
By the way, Windows doesn't come with a compiler. OS X does, but you have to install the development tools specifically. Ubuntu doesn't have the development toolchain in the basic installation. It's not as unusual as you seem to think, at least for a regular-person-targeted OS.
In British usage, either spelling is correct, although I think that the -ise spelling is more common: it also tends to be the form used by official publications.
The Oxford Dictionary has always preferred -ize, although this is more through tradition and stubborn prescriptivism than anything else. (And maybe the fact that one of the original edition's most prolific contributors was the American murderer and lunatic William Chester Minor, then detained in Britain, might have had some small part to play.) Older editions of Chambers, on the other hand, preferred -ise to the extent of not even acknowledging the -ize variant.
I think that the strong desire to differentiate British usage from its colonial counterpart has also led to an increase in the usage of -ise, in an analoguous process to that in which Noah Webster attempted to Americanise the US orthography for political reasons.
The reason that the menu is below the tabs is simple. If it were above the tabs, then you'd be able to use the menu even when Javascript has annoyingly tried to disable it.
To you or me, being able to use the menu at any time is a feature. To MS, however, it's a bug - it gives control to the user, which is basically anathema to the whole concept of a leveraged monopoly.
My analysis may be a little paranoid, I'll admit.
I think you missed those Pound signs in his post. What you say may be true for the US market, but is the US market big enough to make HD a global success?
This is actually important: without a higher resolution television set, the advantage of HD discs is moot. And as digital signals in Europe are generally standard definition, even new digital sets generally won't be HD.
You haven't seen Sky's broadcasts, obviously. Given how much they compress signals already in order to get the maximum number of channels onto the stream, I find it unlikely that they will move many to HD. It's likely to be only the premium channels: movies and sport.
Regarding the equipment, eventually, HD receivers will be given away free in packets of cereal as they are now. Initially, however, they are going to be expensive, premium devices.
I've lived in countries using PAL and NTSC, and I think you're wrong. Even though the proportional difference is small, it's just enough that, whilst NTSC looks like crap, PAL actually looks pretty good, especially from a normal viewing distance. The colour fidelity of PAL is also much better than that of NTSC (no red bleed for example), so for European consumers, there's much less of an incentive to upgrade.
I think you're wrong on the 20% higher refresh rate, too - The European HDTV standard seems to be 50Hz refresh. But it's not a massive problem in any case - better modern standard-definition PAL TVs store and duplicate each half-frame so that the screen is refreshed at 100Hz, and there's no discernible flicker. The other advantage of PAL's refresh rate is that there are no pull-down artefacts when watching film-sourced material - on the other hand, we get everything speeded up by 4%, but that's less noticeable.
I'm sure that your characterisation is accurate for the US market, but over this side of the Atlantic, it's less of a sure thing.
While you are on your billion rant, the "correct" way is to use commas, not apostrophes, to separate the groups of three digits. :-)
I'm with you on the fact that the British system is more systematic in that it counts the power of one million (bi- = 1e6 ^ 2; tri- = 1e6 ^ 3; quadri = 1e6 ^ 4 etc.) whereas the American system counts the power of one thousand, less one (bi- = 1e3 ^ (2+1); tri- = 1e3 ^ (3+1) etc.). And I mourn the loss of "milliard" from British usage. However, given that even the UK government now uses the American standard, I fear that the war is lost.
However, both systems are really French in origin, and there's no overwhelming historical justification for choosing one over the other.
On the subject of the word "program(me)", I believe that the overwhelming British preference is for -mme in all cases except that of computing, where -m is almost ubiquitous. To me, seeing -mme used in print is usually an indicator that the author (or editor) is less than entirely au courant with computing matters. But that is just an opinion. I must say, though, that the parent post's erratic spelling and grammar do not give the impression that the writer is an authority on orthographical matters!
Although it might be "environmentally safe" insofar as the leaked metal is not toxic, it's still far from being environmentally friendly. The fact that a graphics card needs liquid metal cooling is cause for concern.
Efficient cooling just means transferring the heat generated away from the card more rapidly - the energy input is still high, with all the negative consequences of that (cost, pollution, geopolitical instability, etc.). What we should really be demanding is more efficient systems that don't waste so much energy in the first place. Still, the Mac mini is a step forward in that regard (although not in the same graphics league, I concede).
The program is licensed under the GPL, with all that entails. The logo, however, is not. Thus, I can hack and rerelease Firefox to my heart's content, but I can't use Mozilla's logo on it.
In the same way, RedHat distributes a branded operating system that uses a lot of GPL software. But you or I cannot just make our own "RedHat Linux" based on it - not without feeling the warm breath of lawyers on our necks. There are, nonetheless, repackaged and renamed operating systems based on RedHat, such as CentOS (who were recently enjoined from using trademarks of said "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" on their site).
Although I find it annoying that, for example, Ubuntu's version of Firefox comes with a substandard icon as a result, the concept of the logo as a kind of proof of authenticity seems like a reasonable idea - it makes it clear whether or not a particular version comes from the Mozilla Organization or not.
Slashdot editors can't be bothered to read Slashdot (hence all the dupes), let alone the linked articles in a story submission. And as for actually, you know, editing the submissions? No chance.
"Allofmp3 encodes the MP3s for you from source and they're a relatively small time operation."
I could be wrong, but I don't think that it necessarily translates to a high load. I assume that AllOfMP3 store the encoded MP3s once they have been created. I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
I would also wager that the majority of their downloads consists of a small number of albums. That means that most downloads will simply be pre-prepared data. They can offer the value-added custom encoding service to the minority that want it at little additional cost to themselves.
"[O]nline digital music is the inevitable future, and I don't see why anyone would want to hurt that."
It's not a question of wanting to "hurt" it, but of wanting digital distribution on the same liberal terms under which (most) CDs are already available. Anything less is a retrograde step.
I went into a record shop specifically to buy Velvet Revolver's CD. I actually had it in my hand, ready to pay, when I noticed the vague compatibility warnings on the back, threatening that it might not work in my equipment.
I put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to pay money for that? I wonder how many others did the same, and turned to alt.binaries.* for a copy that they could actually listen to.
For me, the online music stores are the same dodgy deal. Each will only play on a subset of the devices I own, and carries the threat that my listening freedom may be restricted further in the future at the arbitrary whim of a content provider (c.f. iTunes' ever-changing streaming/licensing regime.)
Digital distribution has a lot to recommend it. It saves energy, time, and money - not to mention carbon. But we don't have to give up the freedoms we already have in order to get digital music. The industry is using the transition as a useful excuse to foist extra restrictions on us. Resist them now, or regret it later.
The simple reason is that, although you can personalise each DRM'ed download on the server, it's expensive to do so.
I haven't researched Apple's solution; however, I have personal experience of implementing a Windows Media-based DRM solution in my previous job. (I don't agree with DRM, and won't purchase any DRM-protected media, but it was nonetheless an interesting assignment, and I discovered a lot about how it works.) With that in mind, here is my tentative analysis.
Apple are probably using one of the edge-cache services like Akamai to reduce server load and bandwidth fees. In order for this to work, the data that each client downloads must be the same - otherwise, it can't be cached.
Although it is possible, and even desirable from a security standpoint, to apply the DRM to each file as it is downloaded, the increased server load and bandwidth probably makes this economically and logistically unviable.
It may be judged as stupid that Apple has not applied even basic, generic encryption to what they send over the wire. However, since they would have to supply the enemy (a.k.a. the customer) with the encrypted content and the means to decrypt it, it would not deter a determined hacker. Then again, nor can DRM.
The parent writes, "The first rule of security is that the client is untrustworthy." The first rule of DRM is, by contrast, "We give the client the encrypted content, the keys, and the decoder, and hope that he won't work out how to use them."
The lesson that you should take away from this is that DRM is snake oil. It can never work. But it is being sold to and bought in gallons by the entertainment oligopoly mastodons who have repeatedly proven that they don't get the internet. It's basically useless for all parties concerned. We get inconvenient restrictions; they think that they are getting copy protection but are actually being sold a river.
As an aside, even if Palladium/NGSCB becomes prevalent and required for downloading DRM content, it seems unlikely that each resource will be custom-encrypted against the customer's Palladium/NGSCB public key. And even if it were, there would be likely be ways to extract the raw data at some point. I doubt that we will see truly uncrackable DRM for a long time to come. In fact, I doubt that we will ever see it.
Given a DVD burner and a Mac, it's trivial to burn your own non-system-restricted install DVD from the system-specific one. Apple may not want you to do it, but it's a lot more convenient than installing an old version of Panther from the retail CD set, followed by downloading several hundred MB of upgrades. It may even violate the EULA, although I'll start worrying about such technicalities when Apple start paying for my download bandwidth and disc-swapping time. But you needn't feel bad about it if you are using it as a replacement for the CD set.
It boils down to disabling the bundled software section in a plist file: Instructions.
That's not how Coral links work. You have to put the ".nyud.net:8090" right after the hostname (or, to express the same thing in another way, right before the first single slash).
o ns-article106. php.
To whit: http://www.tomsnetworking.com.nyud.net:8090/Secti
However, it's not working right now.
JSB is probably meant to be JCB, one of the biggest CC operators in Japan. It's easy for a Russian to confuse C and S, as Russian "C" is Roman "S" (CCCP = SSSR etc.).
I get them too. I do, however, use eBay, but the Belgian site, so anything that doesn't come from ebay.be is fake. In addition, as all my legitimate eBay emails come in French, it's very easy to spot a phish.
These phishers really need to get their acts together and start supporting international users. There's a whole untapped market out there!
Utah it self [sic] is noted for odd laws [...]
Yeah - for example, whaling is an offense in Utah.
(For those who don't understand why this is funny, look for UT on a map.)
Mobistar was fined under Belgian law, according to which "tying" is illegal. The practice is, however, perfectly legal in other countries of the EU: phone + service bundles are commonly sold in the UK, to give one example.
Can you really carry a sword in CA?
I always fancied the idea of wandering around with a nice big Japanese sword hanging beside me. It would certainly dissuade the riff-raff.
I never thought that I would legally be able to do it, however. Now I know that somewhere, albeit on another continent from where I am, that ambition can be achieved.
Thanks. Unlike certain politicians, I feel that the facts are important!
The sad thing is that someone wasted a mod point on moderating it down as "offtopic" even though I'd marked it as such in the title.
I could be out of step here, but I've always understood property to mean just that: all the things one owns.
Is this an American/British difference, perhaps?
You write in your sig, "Remember the Nigerian yellowcake?"
As a matter of fact, I don't. If, as seems likely, you are talking about the yellowcake uranium ore that Iraq was alleged to have attempted to obtain, then the country in question is Niger, not Nigeria.
The two countries' respective adjective forms are:
Nigeria => Nigerian
Niger => Nigerien
Now, I know that the names look similar (although the pronunciation is different), the countries are neighbours, and they are named after the same river, but it's an important factual distinction.
I'm writing this on a G4 PowerMac into which I have retrofitted a PC version of an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card. (I just had it lying around. Really.)
OS X recognised it as a VGA card. It wouldn't do anything useful with it, however, as OpenFirmware didn't know what to do with VGA. (It's understandable: if you aren't tied down to ancient PC standards, why would you want to be?) I stuck the card into a PC and flashed it with the Mac ROM image, obtained from a website, and it worked perfectly.
I also have a generic USB 2.0 PCI card in there that didn't need special treatment.
Like the immediate parent says, it's not a lockout, but certain architectural differences require things like the graphics cards to interact differently with the host system at boot time.
I see absolutely nothing on that page, because falkag is in my AdBlock list. They have nothing useful to offer me.
I'm a native English speaker, and I also speak Japanese and French fairly well. I can and have watched films in those languages without subtitles. However, watching with subtitles is easier.
It's not entirely a matter of laziness, although it is definitely easier work to watch something in your first language - it's less mental effort and more relaxing as entertainment.
Even if you can speak a language well in everyday two-way situations, the one-way nature of TV and film means that you lack the feedback loop that allows two people to find a mutually comprehensible vocabulary when talking. When watching foreign-language material, it's very easy, having missed one important word, to lose the thread of a scene. Being able to glance down at the subtitles for reinforcement and correction really helps.
Frankly, I like watching English stuff with subtitles on as well, so that I can check on misheard or confused dialogue. But I might just be weird that way.
You obviously haven't watched Sky then. They place adverts right after the opening titles, exactly as you describe US TV. In fact, Sky One has more ads than the UK free-to-air channels, and yet you have to pay a monthly fee to view it. It's a nice deal for Murdoch, I suppose...