The other half is that copyright is extremely inefficient at converting money into produced works. Money is siphoned off left and right, and it is rare for even 10% of gross revenues to reach actual production laborers. Much of the money is even used against the working class, in the form of advertising and lobbying.
Here's a typical trace of where the money goes.
1: Customer buys $20 DVD. 2: $6.50 goes to retailer, leaving $13.50. 3: $1.50 goes to printing, packaging, and shipping, leaving $12.00. 4: $2.00 goes to legal fees and lobbying, leaving $10.00. 5: 33% goes to profits (executing salaries + real corporate profit), which is $3.33, leaving $6.67. 6: $4.44 for advertising and promotion, leaving $2.22 for production. 7: $1.50 for the celebrities, leaving $.72.
Of that $20 you paid in the store, under $1 went to pay for the actual grunt work of making the film. It's not suprising considering how many hands are in the cookie jar, and considering that there is little competition to reduce costs, because the industry is both an oligopoly and undergoes monopolistic competition. The first is due to lax anti-trust enforcement, and the latter is due directly to copyrights and a broad interpretation of trademarks.
Having the government directly fund movie and tv production would actually be far more efficient since even the worst government agencies are moore than 5% efficient. The government would also keep cranking out the same drivel that media companies make anyway, since that's what the electorate demands. To make it interesting, the government could even put tv programming decisions to a general vote, which might help turn around our very sickly voter turn out numbers.
Well, I don't either copy or buy the stuff (not out of respect of the law, but because even copying the stuff is still supporting them by giving them market share, but the reason doesn't matter).
However, that doesn't stop copyright law from pissing me off, since I do give up quite a bit (not with computers, where the copyleft stuff is generally better quality, but it does hurt plenty in other domains). It also pisses me off morally, because I barely believe that physical property should even exist, no less some irrational thing like copyright.
When it comes election time, copyright is my #1 issue (which generally rules out me ever voting for a Republican or Democrat). Civil liberties and drug policy come up a distant second and third, once again making it quite certain I won't be voting Republican or Democrat.
Look more closely at the word 'taking'. Taking is more or less equivalent to remove. Copying is not taking.
Yep, you are consuming a service, but that service is provided by you and the person you're downloading from, and you did get permission from the uploader to use his/her resources to download it. Some third party media company is not the one providing the service.
People who used to go to the cinema a lot and buy a lot of VHS tapes, but now don't because of the MPAA and RIAA.
The thought of licensing a DVD just carries too much guilt for me to be possibly capable of enjoying the movie, and considering that I would want to watch something to have fun, I'll just do without.
So both my standard of living is reduced, and the media industries get less money from me. Personally, I would be overjoyed if the entire film industry was decimated, because then that would leave the field open for new companies, which perhaps wouldn't trigger such hostility in me.
You haven't countered the parent's argument. You just ignored the parent and gave the same argument again.
You're not saying why it's obvious (apparently it isn't obvious enough for the parent, or for me, or for most people for that matter). You're even using the language you're trying to defend in your argument, which is classical circular reasoning.
Also, you're attacking the person, not the argument, by calling him childish and stuffing words into his mouth.
As far as a counter-argument goes, you haven't even produced an cohesive argument, so why bother.
the RIAA demonizes people in order to remove the guilt they feel and paint other people as the bad guys doing wrong in order to justify their actions.
That makes much more sense now, as, after all, file sharing probably would be legal if it wasn't for the lobbying efforts of the above said corporations, and the media companies are racketeers.
Actually, I wouldn't. I've got a far more ingenious way of coding it, which I still don't think is worthy of a patent since it used in stenography. I would rather encode the number as a sentance or two of text.
Here's how it would go: 1: Write a Mad Lib (a sentence with certain parts of speech, usually nouns, verbs, and adjectives, left out). 2: Split the words in the English language into thier parts of speech, and for each part of speech, number the words. Take all words whose binary number is more than 2 digits shorter than the largest number, and reassign them to the end (since they'll never be used otherwise). 3: For each blank in the sentence, take as many digits as can be represented by a word, and place the word in the sentence. 4: With any extra blanks, encode error-correction bits.
While the user will be hard pressed to decode the number in their head or even with pencil and paper, a machine could easily do it for them, and a witty sentence like "Mary slipped tendrils into the slimy rock." is much easier to remember than AF332EEO5598110. 1 misspelled or forgotten word shouldn't ruin the decoding, and even if the sentence is totally garbled, the GPS unit will at least know it's wrong.
Additionally, multiple words can be mapped to the same number, to give businesses more leeway into what phrases they can use, and to avoid embarassing phrases.
Well, I don't know about the domain names, but the directory and file name part sure is case sensitive. How else would a person differentiate between file.txt and File.txt on my server?
Historically, 20 and 60 have been used as bases since well before the year 0. It's generally not used because people aren't familliar with those bases and mental arithmetic is awfully hard to do with those bases, especially multiplication.
I guess I can consider myself lucky that I've only used base 36 (0-9 + A-Z) and base 62 (0-0 + A-Z + a-z) and never base 30 in any of my projects, or I'd be infringing yet another patent.
About that egg example: Had the statement been more specifically phrased, such as "Can you make the egg stand on end, including through the use of destructive means?", then it would be quite obvious. It is just a common and almost always correct assumption that one doens't want to break the egg. You can also make it stand on end without breaking it by hard-boiling it and then spinning it.
Find me just one person who has gotten even a single idea for their software project by searching expired patents.
I certainly have never met such a person. Patents are written in such a way that they are very hard to decipher and most developers have a 'not developed here' mentality too. An engineer would have more success reverse engineering code than reading a patent filing.
If anything, having P2P networks clogged with child porn is probably a good thing if you're thinking of the children.
When it comes to stuff like sex, people have basic urges and a child porn junkie is either born to be one, one led to be one by seemingly unrelated stuff (like general pop culture), or it might just be the repressed urges that everyone has (just ask Freud).
Making the assumption that the child porn makers do it for profit (no idea if it's true), they need to charge for the material to make money. P2P directly competes with whatever black market channels they use to sell their smut.
If my goal was to minimise the number of children abused, I would ignore P2P since:
1 - Aside from the gateway drug effect (which happens with every popular thing made illegal, be it good or bad), watching kiddie porn is unlikely to change your disposition. The perverts have plenty of other stimulation they can get, and I for one would rather it happens behind closed doors than with real kids.
2 - P2P is directly competing with the smut publishers for eyeballs. If the police focus on the for profit distribution, it will become very hard to make a buck off of making child porn because even computer novices will use it once the word gets around that it's fairly safe compared to the alternatives.
3 - It's extremely easy to monitor, so the police can keep easy tabs of what stuff is going around (so long as actions by other groups, like the RIAA and MPAA, don't push P2P to be heavily encrypted, like Freenet).
Things being needs or luxuries is not a good criterion for making something state or corporate run. What is important is the marginal cost and the initial cost.
Things like police, fire, wars, parks, and broadband have very high fixed costs but minimal marginal costs.
It would be cost prohibitive to have 50 fibre networks all capable of reaching everyone, and if you don't have many networks, you will not have competition and prices will be obscene. Either the government has to run the business, or it has to regulate it heavily (where private companies will put the capital in for a single network, but the government decides how the show is run and forces competition or at least reasonable prices).
It might not be necessary for the government to provide it, but then again, disposable income above and beyond the requirements to live (which should be zero if the social safety net is halfway decent) isn't a necessity either. In this case, the government will spend those luxury dollars far more effectively then individuals being charged an arm and a leg for overpriced monopoly broadband (as is the current case).
Morals and ethics are generally what are invoked to defend the system of patents and copyrights. It's like Hitler's big lie. Blatently obvious to someone not under the influence, but if it's parroted enough times by the media (which makes massive amounts of dough and gets massive control from copyrights), it becomes accepted as fact.
Economically, both copyright and patents (and especially software patents) are counter-productive, so the elite would rather use a moral argument in which the one with the louder megaphone wins instead of an economic argument where they can get torn apart (though a sham argument is presented to economics students).
It seems more fitting as a punishment for rape or assault for an adult than minor computer cracking.
If I was in charge, I would suspend the student for a week and fail them for the class for which (s)he was selling answers. It would take a second offense before I would even think of calling in the law.
I quite like the pbskids site. It sure beats stuff like disney's site or nickelodeon's site, which take forever to load, and won't run without javascript.
Pbskids does not require cookies, javascript, java, or flash to work, though some of the games to require some of the above. It also renders perfectly in Konqueror, and loads reasonable fast for a grahphics-heavy site.
And I love the bright colors. The only thing I don't like is that some of the games use flash (which I refuse to install on my system for licensing, copyright, and closed-source reasons).
I just read what's at www.notpca.org and you're right, that thing is extremely comprehensive.
I was thinking it was just a centralized and secure key storage mechanism.
Nope, it verifies that all hardware is compliant, and requires internet access to work (because it dials into some central server to get permission for each of your HW components).
It's also 100x as nasty as I had envisioned, and leaves you with no security and without even knowing what your own system is doing. I guess I see now why everyone is so upset about this. It is horrible.
Maybe it can't forge the report, but it isn't that hard to trick the program running into thinking it is a secure report.
If I had to hack the emulator to make things work, I would do the following:
1 - Flag the register or memory location that the fake report is stored in. All moves, adds, copies, etc of the register are flagged too, and if it is destroyed it is unflagged.
2 - Whenever a register (or memory location, if that is how the protocol works) is set (via any operation), check to see if it is the public key (which you have access to). If so, flag it. Treat it like step 1 for keeping track of where it and any derivatives of it have gone.
3 - When a comparison is done between a public key flagged register and a fake report flagged register, take note of it.
4 - If a conditional jump follows before another comparison instruction, do the opposite of what is instructed. If it is a jne instruction, treat it like a je instruction.
Leave some programmability in the emulator so that this can be overridden in case the app developer decides to confuse the emulator, which is possible but must be done on purpose. In that case, disassembly and traditional cracking skills can be used.
Remember, the program is running on your emulator, which you have 100% control over. The program cannot assume that any instruction will be properly interpreted. It is just a matter of how hard it is to trick. Access to the network, memory, and registers can also all be controlled transparently.
Use an x86 emulator and two copies of Linux, one that uses TCPA and one that doesn't. Run the x86 emulator on the unrestricted Linux copy, and use it to run the TCPA copy under emulation. The x86 emulator would just have some security 'flaws' when it comes to storing keys or it might do stuff like forgetting to apply the encryption. It would still report as a valid DRM chip, and would be able to provide keys and authentication on demand.
Since the source is available for Linux, what would stop someone from sandboxing 'trusted' software by having the OS validate code before it's executed (slow, though a bit faster than emulation and without all the bugs), and then implenting the DRM hardware (or BIOS) instructions in software in a way that stores the keys (or plaintext information, if that is not doable) and allows access to any software to get the info.
The software DRM implementation would be 100% transparent to the application and noone would be the wiser.
It should also be workable with a x86 emulator running a closed source 'trusted' application along with its closed source OS, with the emulator doing the DRM instructions a little differently than normal.
Even in the stratosphere, ozone is fairly short lived. It is destroyed in the process of absorbing UV radiation, and is regenerated rapidly.
The only reason that CFCs are such a big problem is that they can destroy about 100,000 ozone molecules before they finally leave the environment a few decades later. A pound of CFCs will destroy tens of tons of ozone in the course of its life, so even if ozone was long-lasting, it would take a crazy amount of ozone to replace what CFCs destroy.
Here's three good reasons why the hole is still there:
1 - CFCs are very long lived, and it takes decades for CFCs to leave the atmosphere once released.
2 - Other countries are still producing CFCs, though many are phasing it out.
3 - There are still legacy appliances and manufacturing processes that use them.
Using CFCs again would just make things worse, and no ozone would mean a lot more than just having to wear sunblock in the middle of winter, and plants (which we depend on for food) and animals are also effected by UV radiation.
Not only that, but increasing greenhouse gas concentrations (which normally goes along with tropospheric warming) decreases the rate at which heat from the ground reaches the stratosphere, so the stratosphere actually gets colder above and beyond the effect of just raising the tropopause.
It's like putting better insulation on a house. The inside of the house gets warmer, but the outside gets colder as less heat gets leaked out.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold, the most a trait of the average American: the complete inability to take any criticism of his own country as something other than a personal insult. This is not patriotism, but a terrible sense of emotional insecurity; for any criticism is a threat to the illusion that this country is a wonderful place.
It's just as illegal as any other TV show. In fact, they don't even hold the copyrights to some of their stuff (Sony holds the copyright to Dragon Tales, for example), even though the stuff is mostly funded by government money and donations.
Considering that I am paying for it (through taxes), you would think that at least US citizens would be entitled to use the material as they see fit (with a possible limitation of forcing that there be no restrictions on derivative works, a la GPL).
The main hook is generally through product familiarity. People feel more comfortable buying brands they 'know', and seeing advertisements give people that feeling.
Thus an ad must grab the viewers attention and the name or logo of the product being pitched must stay in their minds as well as possible, which is why so many commercials try to be different instead of just stating the cold facts about the product. Just getting people to become 'familliar' with the brand is success enough.
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That's only half the picture.
The other half is that copyright is extremely inefficient at converting money into produced works. Money is siphoned off left and right, and it is rare for even 10% of gross revenues to reach actual production laborers. Much of the money is even used against the working class, in the form of advertising and lobbying.
Here's a typical trace of where the money goes.
1: Customer buys $20 DVD.
2: $6.50 goes to retailer, leaving $13.50.
3: $1.50 goes to printing, packaging, and shipping, leaving $12.00.
4: $2.00 goes to legal fees and lobbying, leaving $10.00.
5: 33% goes to profits (executing salaries + real corporate profit), which is $3.33, leaving $6.67.
6: $4.44 for advertising and promotion, leaving $2.22 for production.
7: $1.50 for the celebrities, leaving $.72.
Of that $20 you paid in the store, under $1 went to pay for the actual grunt work of making the film. It's not suprising considering how many hands are in the cookie jar, and considering that there is little competition to reduce costs, because the industry is both an oligopoly and undergoes monopolistic competition. The first is due to lax anti-trust enforcement, and the latter is due directly to copyrights and a broad interpretation of trademarks.
Having the government directly fund movie and tv production would actually be far more efficient since even the worst government agencies are moore than 5% efficient. The government would also keep cranking out the same drivel that media companies make anyway, since that's what the electorate demands. To make it interesting, the government could even put tv programming decisions to a general vote, which might help turn around our very sickly voter turn out numbers.
Well, I don't either copy or buy the stuff (not out of respect of the law, but because even copying the stuff is still supporting them by giving them market share, but the reason doesn't matter).
However, that doesn't stop copyright law from pissing me off, since I do give up quite a bit (not with computers, where the copyleft stuff is generally better quality, but it does hurt plenty in other domains). It also pisses me off morally, because I barely believe that physical property should even exist, no less some irrational thing like copyright.
When it comes election time, copyright is my #1 issue (which generally rules out me ever voting for a Republican or Democrat). Civil liberties and drug policy come up a distant second and third, once again making it quite certain I won't be voting Republican or Democrat.
You just proved yourself wrong.
Look more closely at the word 'taking'. Taking is more or less equivalent to remove. Copying is not taking.
Yep, you are consuming a service, but that service is provided by you and the person you're downloading from, and you did get permission from the uploader to use his/her resources to download it. Some third party media company is not the one providing the service.
What about category 4:
People who used to go to the cinema a lot and buy a lot of VHS tapes, but now don't because of the MPAA and RIAA.
The thought of licensing a DVD just carries too much guilt for me to be possibly capable of enjoying the movie, and considering that I would want to watch something to have fun, I'll just do without.
So both my standard of living is reduced, and the media industries get less money from me. Personally, I would be overjoyed if the entire film industry was decimated, because then that would leave the field open for new companies, which perhaps wouldn't trigger such hostility in me.
You haven't countered the parent's argument. You just ignored the parent and gave the same argument again.
You're not saying why it's obvious (apparently it isn't obvious enough for the parent, or for me, or for most people for that matter). You're even using the language you're trying to defend in your argument, which is classical circular reasoning.
Also, you're attacking the person, not the argument, by calling him childish and stuffing words into his mouth.
As far as a counter-argument goes, you haven't even produced an cohesive argument, so why bother.
Hmm, I wonder how it sounds reversed?
the RIAA demonizes people in order to remove the guilt they feel and paint other people as the bad guys doing wrong in order to justify their actions.
That makes much more sense now, as, after all, file sharing probably would be legal if it wasn't for the lobbying efforts of the above said corporations, and the media companies are racketeers.
Actually, I wouldn't. I've got a far more ingenious way of coding it, which I still don't think is worthy of a patent since it used in stenography. I would rather encode the number as a sentance or two of text.
Here's how it would go:
1: Write a Mad Lib (a sentence with certain parts of speech, usually nouns, verbs, and adjectives, left out).
2: Split the words in the English language into thier parts of speech, and for each part of speech, number the words. Take all words whose binary number is more than 2 digits shorter than the largest number, and reassign them to the end (since they'll never be used otherwise).
3: For each blank in the sentence, take as many digits as can be represented by a word, and place the word in the sentence.
4: With any extra blanks, encode error-correction bits.
While the user will be hard pressed to decode the number in their head or even with pencil and paper, a machine could easily do it for them, and a witty sentence like "Mary slipped tendrils into the slimy rock." is much easier to remember than AF332EEO5598110. 1 misspelled or forgotten word shouldn't ruin the decoding, and even if the sentence is totally garbled, the GPS unit will at least know it's wrong.
Additionally, multiple words can be mapped to the same number, to give businesses more leeway into what phrases they can use, and to avoid embarassing phrases.
Well, I don't know about the domain names, but the directory and file name part sure is case sensitive. How else would a person differentiate between file.txt and File.txt on my server?
Historically, 20 and 60 have been used as bases since well before the year 0. It's generally not used because people aren't familliar with those bases and mental arithmetic is awfully hard to do with those bases, especially multiplication.
I guess I can consider myself lucky that I've only used base 36 (0-9 + A-Z) and base 62 (0-0 + A-Z + a-z) and never base 30 in any of my projects, or I'd be infringing yet another patent.
About that egg example: Had the statement been more specifically phrased, such as "Can you make the egg stand on end, including through the use of destructive means?", then it would be quite obvious. It is just a common and almost always correct assumption that one doens't want to break the egg. You can also make it stand on end without breaking it by hard-boiling it and then spinning it.
Find me just one person who has gotten even a single idea for their software project by searching expired patents.
I certainly have never met such a person. Patents are written in such a way that they are very hard to decipher and most developers have a 'not developed here' mentality too. An engineer would have more success reverse engineering code than reading a patent filing.
If anything, having P2P networks clogged with child porn is probably a good thing if you're thinking of the children.
When it comes to stuff like sex, people have basic urges and a child porn junkie is either born to be one, one led to be one by seemingly unrelated stuff (like general pop culture), or it might just be the repressed urges that everyone has (just ask Freud).
Making the assumption that the child porn makers do it for profit (no idea if it's true), they need to charge for the material to make money. P2P directly competes with whatever black market channels they use to sell their smut.
If my goal was to minimise the number of children abused, I would ignore P2P since:
1 - Aside from the gateway drug effect (which happens with every popular thing made illegal, be it good or bad), watching kiddie porn is unlikely to change your disposition. The perverts have plenty of other stimulation they can get, and I for one would rather it happens behind closed doors than with real kids.
2 - P2P is directly competing with the smut publishers for eyeballs. If the police focus on the for profit distribution, it will become very hard to make a buck off of making child porn because even computer novices will use it once the word gets around that it's fairly safe compared to the alternatives.
3 - It's extremely easy to monitor, so the police can keep easy tabs of what stuff is going around (so long as actions by other groups, like the RIAA and MPAA, don't push P2P to be heavily encrypted, like Freenet).
Things being needs or luxuries is not a good criterion for making something state or corporate run. What is important is the marginal cost and the initial cost.
Things like police, fire, wars, parks, and broadband have very high fixed costs but minimal marginal costs.
It would be cost prohibitive to have 50 fibre networks all capable of reaching everyone, and if you don't have many networks, you will not have competition and prices will be obscene. Either the government has to run the business, or it has to regulate it heavily (where private companies will put the capital in for a single network, but the government decides how the show is run and forces competition or at least reasonable prices).
It might not be necessary for the government to provide it, but then again, disposable income above and beyond the requirements to live (which should be zero if the social safety net is halfway decent) isn't a necessity either. In this case, the government will spend those luxury dollars far more effectively then individuals being charged an arm and a leg for overpriced monopoly broadband (as is the current case).
Morals and ethics are generally what are invoked to defend the system of patents and copyrights. It's like Hitler's big lie. Blatently obvious to someone not under the influence, but if it's parroted enough times by the media (which makes massive amounts of dough and gets massive control from copyrights), it becomes accepted as fact.
Economically, both copyright and patents (and especially software patents) are counter-productive, so the elite would rather use a moral argument in which the one with the louder megaphone wins instead of an economic argument where they can get torn apart (though a sham argument is presented to economics students).
A year and a half is very severe punishment.
It seems more fitting as a punishment for rape or assault for an adult than minor computer cracking.
If I was in charge, I would suspend the student for a week and fail them for the class for which (s)he was selling answers. It would take a second offense before I would even think of calling in the law.
I quite like the pbskids site. It sure beats stuff like disney's site or nickelodeon's site, which take forever to load, and won't run without javascript.
Pbskids does not require cookies, javascript, java, or flash to work, though some of the games to require some of the above. It also renders perfectly in Konqueror, and loads reasonable fast for a grahphics-heavy site.
And I love the bright colors. The only thing I don't like is that some of the games use flash (which I refuse to install on my system for licensing, copyright, and closed-source reasons).
I just read what's at www.notpca.org and you're right, that thing is extremely comprehensive.
I was thinking it was just a centralized and secure key storage mechanism.
Nope, it verifies that all hardware is compliant, and requires internet access to work (because it dials into some central server to get permission for each of your HW components).
It's also 100x as nasty as I had envisioned, and leaves you with no security and without even knowing what your own system is doing. I guess I see now why everyone is so upset about this. It is horrible.
Maybe it can't forge the report, but it isn't that hard to trick the program running into thinking it is a secure report.
If I had to hack the emulator to make things work, I would do the following:
1 - Flag the register or memory location that the fake report is stored in. All moves, adds, copies, etc of the register are flagged too, and if it is destroyed it is unflagged.
2 - Whenever a register (or memory location, if that is how the protocol works) is set (via any operation), check to see if it is the public key (which you have access to). If so, flag it. Treat it like step 1 for keeping track of where it and any derivatives of it have gone.
3 - When a comparison is done between a public key flagged register and a fake report flagged register, take note of it.
4 - If a conditional jump follows before another comparison instruction, do the opposite of what is instructed. If it is a jne instruction, treat it like a je instruction.
Leave some programmability in the emulator so that this can be overridden in case the app developer decides to confuse the emulator, which is possible but must be done on purpose. In that case, disassembly and traditional cracking skills can be used.
Remember, the program is running on your emulator, which you have 100% control over. The program cannot assume that any instruction will be properly interpreted. It is just a matter of how hard it is to trick. Access to the network, memory, and registers can also all be controlled transparently.
I can already think of a workaround.
Use an x86 emulator and two copies of Linux, one that uses TCPA and one that doesn't. Run the x86 emulator on the unrestricted Linux copy, and use it to run the TCPA copy under emulation. The x86 emulator would just have some security 'flaws' when it comes to storing keys or it might do stuff like forgetting to apply the encryption. It would still report as a valid DRM chip, and would be able to provide keys and authentication on demand.
Since the source is available for Linux, what would stop someone from sandboxing 'trusted' software by having the OS validate code before it's executed (slow, though a bit faster than emulation and without all the bugs), and then implenting the DRM hardware (or BIOS) instructions in software in a way that stores the keys (or plaintext information, if that is not doable) and allows access to any software to get the info.
The software DRM implementation would be 100% transparent to the application and noone would be the wiser.
It should also be workable with a x86 emulator running a closed source 'trusted' application along with its closed source OS, with the emulator doing the DRM instructions a little differently than normal.
Even in the stratosphere, ozone is fairly short lived. It is destroyed in the process of absorbing UV radiation, and is regenerated rapidly.
The only reason that CFCs are such a big problem is that they can destroy about 100,000 ozone molecules before they finally leave the environment a few decades later. A pound of CFCs will destroy tens of tons of ozone in the course of its life, so even if ozone was long-lasting, it would take a crazy amount of ozone to replace what CFCs destroy.
Here's three good reasons why the hole is still there:
1 - CFCs are very long lived, and it takes decades for CFCs to leave the atmosphere once released.
2 - Other countries are still producing CFCs, though many are phasing it out.
3 - There are still legacy appliances and manufacturing processes that use them.
Using CFCs again would just make things worse, and no ozone would mean a lot more than just having to wear sunblock in the middle of winter, and plants (which we depend on for food) and animals are also effected by UV radiation.
Not only that, but increasing greenhouse gas concentrations (which normally goes along with tropospheric warming) decreases the rate at which heat from the ground reaches the stratosphere, so the stratosphere actually gets colder above and beyond the effect of just raising the tropopause.
It's like putting better insulation on a house. The inside of the house gets warmer, but the outside gets colder as less heat gets leaked out.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold, the most a trait of the average American: the complete inability to take any criticism of his own country as something other than a personal insult. This is not patriotism, but a terrible sense of emotional insecurity; for any criticism is a threat to the illusion that this country is a wonderful place.
It's just as illegal as any other TV show. In fact, they don't even hold the copyrights to some of their stuff (Sony holds the copyright to Dragon Tales, for example), even though the stuff is mostly funded by government money and donations.
Considering that I am paying for it (through taxes), you would think that at least US citizens would be entitled to use the material as they see fit (with a possible limitation of forcing that there be no restrictions on derivative works, a la GPL).
The main hook is generally through product familiarity. People feel more comfortable buying brands they 'know', and seeing advertisements give people that feeling.
Thus an ad must grab the viewers attention and the name or logo of the product being pitched must stay in their minds as well as possible, which is why so many commercials try to be different instead of just stating the cold facts about the product. Just getting people to become 'familliar' with the brand is success enough.