I don't know what the prices are at the Sony Video Store - but if they are any substantial fraction of the cost of the physical media, then you should just buy the disc instead.
With the DRM on DVD a defeated minion of darkness, and BluRay certain to go the same way, the format with the most longevity, barring manufacturing defects, is a pressed ROM disc. You can be sure that you will be able to read, transcode, format-shift and enjoy these to your hearts content.
Not so for something that vanishes in a puff of virtual smoke when some vital component of your console goes "phut".
The best counterweight is... another elevator car. If you have multiple tethers and superconducting cable (or another means of transmission), you can use a large fraction of the potential energy of the descending car to power the ascending car.
If you bring net mass down from orbit, you can actually make an energy profit (just on the elevator, I'm not saying that it would offset the costs of hauling propellant, etc, for asteroid miners and such).
many cars today have reversing sensors that could be employed to warn lorry drivers that the lane next to them is not clear
Sorry to nitpick, but these sensors use ultrasound, and are not going to be accurate at the speeds and ranges involved in motorway driving ; your idea about the CCTV camera is a much better one, and probably far cheaper to implement.
The security industry of Israel is renowned the world over. As soon as they have proved the concept on dog poop, they'll have a market to sell it to other countries, for dogs, and probably long pig as well.
Some of me thinks that this is just a trial of a technique to raise the public acceptance of ubiquitous DNA testing. Some of me thinks it may be an exercise in raising the public FEAR of ubiquitous DNA testing. You'd only have to try a dozen cases or so and soon everyone will be a-scoopin' that poop.
And what exactly will they discover? Some long string of bytes that's all.
And where that string of bytes travels. No longer do you have to present your license ; the RFID can be read at a distance. You don't need to know the format ; the number should be unique in any given system. All you need is to associate that number with the person.
Corporate? They'll scan you at the counter and tie your RFID to your payment card details or loyalty card. Now they know when you walk into the store, which aisles you hover around, which things to send you coupons for.
Once the corporates have the data it's only a matter of time before someone cracks it, steals it, loses their laptop on a train. Everyone will know your license RFID and your SS number.
Government? They'll know which buildings you walk into. Libraries, hospitals, police stations.
A contact card might have some technical issues, but you can't read it without the owners consent, unless you ping him down and rifle through his wallet.
Sometimes you can't see the obvious solution ; thanks.
it wouldn't be that difficult to determine if the thing tends to be sitting at an angle rather than flat
The sensor is a piezo sensor and can only detect acceleration in a single axis, and cannot detect motion with constant acceleration - so unlike the sensor in the Wiimote, it cannot orient itself with respect to the vector of gravity.
Even if it could, the device might shut off if you start running down a hill, perhaps. It wouldn't preclude other manufacturers putting horizontal sensor pockets in their soles, or stop users hacking their own. Heck, Clarkes already make shoes with TOY pockets in the sole.
If you need to rip your shoes apart to get at it
That's the idea ; if it's easily removable and user servicable, then you'll have people just removing it. People who buy Nikes but don't want the iPod sensor kit could realize value by selling their RFID to people who had generic shoes and an iPod. Nike perceive this as a lost sale.
Now obviously, if the sole (pun not intended) use of the RFID was inventory control, putting the tag in.. well, a tag, attached through a lace hole, would be simpler, just as cheap, and provide most of the benefits ; apart from the iPod DRM and ubiquitous shoe-tracking.
"For about $5,000 a school could have a tag readers solution and start tracking their kids, via the now standard and ubquitous RFID tags in their clothing, shoes, and bags"
The first quote is from a product being used to time the movement of running shoes in races. The second line is what happens when this company realizes it can grow it's market by tapping the paranoia of middle America, like so many other companies.
Perhaps he has this archaic belief that people should be compensated for their efforts? That if no-one paid for games, there would be nothing but homebrew? Perhaps he enjoys playing games with high production values?
I personally think it's a shame that many of the developers whose games I enjoyed in the 80s have folded, because the ones that are left are benefitting from their hard work. I was never going to buy games back then because I had no disposable income. Now I don't hesitate.... except when confronted by this kind of DRM.
Since it's server side, I'd imagine that you just have to configure a number in a file or table to change the number of activations ; perhaps Spore and Red Alert are on the same database?
Three activations was widely speculated to be the door-in-the-face, with five "not sounding so bad".
OTOH, Stardock did things the right way ; they got me to fill in a survey (I said - No DRM!), and gave me a 20% coupon code, which encouraged me to buy a game that isn't even released yet. Now that's the right way to market games....
I believe the patent covers pairing the sensor unit with an RFID chip in the shoes ; ensuring that the device won't work out of proximity of the shoe.
In one embodiment, the sensor can be authenticated for use with a particular garment using, for example, an identification device (such as an RFID type device)
They are even talking about active RFID, using a battery or a running-powered charge generator.
Since the RFID can be glued between the sole and the inner, or even cast into the foam, it would be an effective way of making sure the user bought a pair of Nikes, even if they just intended to destroy the shoes to get the RFID out.
This is whole lot more robust and less expensive to implement than giving the sensor a tilt switch.
Some people speculate that Nikes already have RFID tags in them ; I have no confirmation of that (but I may destroy my current pair when they wear out to find out). But this would be an excuse to put one in, and imagine the uses for an RFID tag in a shoe. The ideal location, because you can pretty much guarantee the sole of a shoe is going to be in contact with the ground, so you now know the ideal place to site your aerial.
Their wrapper is required to be GPL ; but since they don't distribute it, the source distribution clauses are not in effect.
Their commercial software pipelines frames into their wrapper ; they are separate processes, not linked, and thus their use does not violate GPL.
Otherwise you could argue that because you opened a Word document in OOo, that Word was now required to be GPL because it had emitted data that was now being consumed by a GPL application.
AFAIK the only thing that can cause a BSOD is code running in the kernel space, ring 0.
Quite why iTunes affects stuff that runs in kernel space is another matter... but I suspect it's probably to do with the Protected Media Path stuff. DRM, in other words. I can't think of anything in iTunes that should be running in kernel space - in Vista, all drivers apart from a component of the graphics driver are supposed to run in userspace.
Well, even if cats are carriers, they are also predators.
One cat will dispose of multiple rats, therefore even if cats are carriers, the total number of carriers diminshes. In the absence of predatory checks on the rat population, the numbers of carriers increases (esp. with all these scrummy corpses around to eat!).
I was able to find a charming letter from 1899 to the British Medical Journal on the subject of cats as plague carriers though.
You drive 'em in, fill the wiper fluid, rotate the tires, and drive 'em out again
Now, that's a full EV. I'd expect most of the maintainence on a hybrid to be related to the combustion engine, which is being run carefully, by a computer, instead of recklessly, by a human.
Imagine what could be done if the USA had a similar arrangement to the BBC license fee for PBS.
The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee, which you must pay if you have a device capable of receiving it's broadcasts. For television, it's less than £12 (less than $22) per month. From this, and from licensing of their content worldwide, they maintain
8 national TV channels
10 national radio channels
Local radio covering most of the UK
The BBC World Service
The BBC Website
Including the excellent BBC News web
They produce many original programmes, like;
The flabberghastingly beautiful Planet Earth
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
And buy in the best of foreign content
All without commercials
The beauty of media, as many Slashdotters will have noted already, is that the more you spread it around, the greater it's total value is.
The USA has a far greater population than the UK, so they could either pay about £5 a month ($9) for the same level of service (I'm assuming that infrastructure costs do not diminish but content is a fixed cost in this estimate), or pay about the same, and get much more excellent, commercial-free content.
Another enormous benefit of the BBC is that the commercial channels here are forced to raise their game. We have on average (and enforced by regulation), only 7 minutes of commercials per hour (about 12 minutes at peaks times), instead of the more customary 18 in the states. USA networks frequently cut old Trek by 9 minutes to fit it in because in the 60s you had half the commercials.
Television is by far the most powerful influencer, informer and educator of the masses and to leave it solely in the hands of the corporations is to invite facism.
Given a free reign or even a mandate to "inform, educate and entertain", public broadcasting can elevate an entire nation.
I'd advocate Bazaar ; it's faster than SVN and supports more workflows, and it's branch/merge support is a full generation beyond SVN. Feature and bugfix branches are a "good practice" that is far more costly to use when your tooling doesn't support it adequately.
If your language has one, get a *Unit testing framework and start to write tests for it. When you encounter a bug, write a test that exposes it before you fix it. When you need a new feature, write the tests for it first ; they can really clarify what the requirements are.
When you have tests, you can change things with less fear of breakage, because you have the tests to verify whether you did or not.
You don't need to store all those details about personal identity though. You only need to know that someone is the person with a contract with you.
Swiss banks will deal with people so long as they know the account number. Modern cryptographic techniques no doubt supplement this to the point where the attestation that given set of credentials is genuine is more reliable now than at any time in history ; the only missing variable is the assurance that those credentials belong to the person presenting them, which no doubt biometrics can solve ; you don't need to store the biometric data either, you just need to cryptographically sign a hash of it, and forgery is well-nigh impossible. The customer can retain the data with your signature (maybe placing a backup in a safety deposit box), and you can verify that yes, it was you, and yes, it was this person, and yes, you have a contract.
In the past, personal familiarity would trump this, of course, but in this era, where everyone is a few rows of data in some corporate database close to a pibibyte in size, personal anonymity is easy to achieve, with the right credentials ; photo ID is easy to forge. Crypto can at least make identifiers that are hard to forge. If you include the biometrics, they are hard to share with other people too, and you don't need to retain the biometric data at the corporate end of the transactions.
Id got big because they gave the first third of the game away. People played Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake in multiplayer modes and loved them enough to pay for the rest.
I have to say, I had more fun out of Unreal Tournament 2003 than Quake 3.
UT2k3 was the office "friday afternoon" sport. It was just the demo pack, with only two levels and the instagib mod, but it was enjoyed immensely.
I later bought UT3. It was colourful, fast-paced and fun.
Doom 3 was fast (well, the monsters were, my computer wasn't while running it), but not fun. Whoever thought up the "hey, we'll make the player have to put his flashlight away to fire the gun" mechanic needs to be locked in a dark room full of motion-detecting mines with nothing but one of these for a light source.
I refuse to use self-service checkouts. They have installed two of them in the local Tesco (occupies the position that Wal-Mart does in the UK market).
Every time I go in, a clipboard-wielding junior manager tries to make me use them. I usually just say "No", but next time I've resolved to explain why.
Completely aside from the fact that the implementation is dreadful, the things are designed to do people out of a job, in a town that sorely needs jobs. Two of these things are typically supervised by one worker, instead of requiring two people to man two manual ones. You only spend on capital if you have an expectation of increased quality or reduced labour costs, and I can't see these things increasing quality.
People who work grocery retail are at the bottom end of the labour market, so where are they going to go? I don't feel comfortable helping the the likes of Tesco line their pockets like this. I'm starting to feel close to the line where I stop shopping there (if only they hadn't managed to crowd out all the local greengrocers and fishmongers, which I suppose is partially my fault).
It varies. The Simpsons premier on Sky 1, but reruns are shown fairly often on Channel 4, along with 2 episodes of Futurama (might be E4? I don't know, I just record shows without paying too much attention to channels). Heroes premiered on BBC 2 and 3.
So some things *premier* on pay-tv. But many premier on FTA, with or without commercials. And anything good enough gets picked up by a FTA channel eventually. More so since Freeview (DVB-T) has provided them with a lot more channel bandwidth to fill.
Now, being able to talk about something during it's first run around the water cooler has some value I suppose... but I'm not really the type to do that, I prefer to just enjoy it. Heroes I saved up for six weeks, downloaded it to my laptop, and used it to while away the time when visiting my parents (along with Dirty Sexy Money, also FTA on Channel 4).
So for the impatient, yes, maybe there is value in a cable sub. But I'd be happy paying double the license fee (£12 a month) if it meant keeping the BBC, which provides all that lovely TV AND, more importantly, means that the other FTA channels have to raise their game to the same level to attract viewers for their advertisers, and keep the advert ratio to 12 mins an hour (instead of the more common 18 mins in the states).
They are, eventually. The only stuff that doesn't show up is (some) coverage of sports ; its value is lost when it's no longer current. As someone who isn't interested in sports to any degree, this isn't much of a loss.
As a UK resident I have an enormous amount of excellent commercial-free TV and radio for the bargain price of £12 a month. The BBC and other FTA channels go out over unencrypted DVB-T, so I can record the stream for a perfect no-loss recording I can view in broadcast quality at any time later, archive to the media of my choice and play on the device of my choice.
Most of the best pay-for TV ends up on one of the British free to air channels eventually. Sopranos, Heroes, Trek, Simpsons, Lost, Futurama, etc.
MythTV has managed my trio of DVB-T tuners wonderfully, and had the added side-effect of teaching me lots about Linux.
Part of the problem is the preferential rates that MS give to schools ; you can get Office for a song. I'm not sure what the encentives they offer to public offices are, but I know that you can get a full copy of the Office du jour on the home use program for £18.
I'm going to have a good crack at infiltrating Edubuntu into my daughters school when she starts there this year.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm tempted by a Sony Reader, it would be perfect for me on the train.
This is a point against it.
I don't know what the prices are at the Sony Video Store - but if they are any substantial fraction of the cost of the physical media, then you should just buy the disc instead.
With the DRM on DVD a defeated minion of darkness, and BluRay certain to go the same way, the format with the most longevity, barring manufacturing defects, is a pressed ROM disc. You can be sure that you will be able to read, transcode, format-shift and enjoy these to your hearts content.
Not so for something that vanishes in a puff of virtual smoke when some vital component of your console goes "phut".
The best counterweight is... another elevator car. If you have multiple tethers and superconducting cable (or another means of transmission), you can use a large fraction of the potential energy of the descending car to power the ascending car.
If you bring net mass down from orbit, you can actually make an energy profit (just on the elevator, I'm not saying that it would offset the costs of hauling propellant, etc, for asteroid miners and such).
many cars today have reversing sensors that could be employed to warn lorry drivers that the lane next to them is not clear
Sorry to nitpick, but these sensors use ultrasound, and are not going to be accurate at the speeds and ranges involved in motorway driving ; your idea about the CCTV camera is a much better one, and probably far cheaper to implement.
The security industry of Israel is renowned the world over. As soon as they have proved the concept on dog poop, they'll have a market to sell it to other countries, for dogs, and probably long pig as well.
Some of me thinks that this is just a trial of a technique to raise the public acceptance of ubiquitous DNA testing. Some of me thinks it may be an exercise in raising the public FEAR of ubiquitous DNA testing. You'd only have to try a dozen cases or so and soon everyone will be a-scoopin' that poop.
Yet another brick in the wall.
And what exactly will they discover? Some long string of bytes that's all.
And where that string of bytes travels. No longer do you have to present your license ; the RFID can be read at a distance. You don't need to know the format ; the number should be unique in any given system. All you need is to associate that number with the person.
Corporate? They'll scan you at the counter and tie your RFID to your payment card details or loyalty card. Now they know when you walk into the store, which aisles you hover around, which things to send you coupons for.
Once the corporates have the data it's only a matter of time before someone cracks it, steals it, loses their laptop on a train. Everyone will know your license RFID and your SS number.
Government? They'll know which buildings you walk into. Libraries, hospitals, police stations.
A contact card might have some technical issues, but you can't read it without the owners consent, unless you ping him down and rifle through his wallet.
So pick up an RFID scanner
Sometimes you can't see the obvious solution ; thanks.
it wouldn't be that difficult to determine if the thing tends to be sitting at an angle rather than flat
The sensor is a piezo sensor and can only detect acceleration in a single axis, and cannot detect motion with constant acceleration - so unlike the sensor in the Wiimote, it cannot orient itself with respect to the vector of gravity.
Even if it could, the device might shut off if you start running down a hill, perhaps. It wouldn't preclude other manufacturers putting horizontal sensor pockets in their soles, or stop users hacking their own. Heck, Clarkes already make shoes with TOY pockets in the sole.
If you need to rip your shoes apart to get at it
That's the idea ; if it's easily removable and user servicable, then you'll have people just removing it. People who buy Nikes but don't want the iPod sensor kit could realize value by selling their RFID to people who had generic shoes and an iPod. Nike perceive this as a lost sale.
Now obviously, if the sole (pun not intended) use of the RFID was inventory control, putting the tag in.. well, a tag, attached through a lace hole, would be simpler, just as cheap, and provide most of the benefits ; apart from the iPod DRM and ubiquitous shoe-tracking.
How long does it take to go from 1 to 2 ? :
The first quote is from a product being used to time the movement of running shoes in races. The second line is what happens when this company realizes it can grow it's market by tapping the paranoia of middle America, like so many other companies.
Perhaps he has this archaic belief that people should be compensated for their efforts? That if no-one paid for games, there would be nothing but homebrew? Perhaps he enjoys playing games with high production values?
I personally think it's a shame that many of the developers whose games I enjoyed in the 80s have folded, because the ones that are left are benefitting from their hard work. I was never going to buy games back then because I had no disposable income. Now I don't hesitate .... except when confronted by this kind of DRM.
Since it's server side, I'd imagine that you just have to configure a number in a file or table to change the number of activations ; perhaps Spore and Red Alert are on the same database?
Three activations was widely speculated to be the door-in-the-face, with five "not sounding so bad".
OTOH, Stardock did things the right way ; they got me to fill in a survey (I said - No DRM!), and gave me a 20% coupon code, which encouraged me to buy a game that isn't even released yet. Now that's the right way to market games....
I believe the patent covers pairing the sensor unit with an RFID chip in the shoes ; ensuring that the device won't work out of proximity of the shoe.
In one embodiment, the sensor can be authenticated for use with a particular garment using, for example, an identification device (such as an RFID type device)
They are even talking about active RFID, using a battery or a running-powered charge generator.
Since the RFID can be glued between the sole and the inner, or even cast into the foam, it would be an effective way of making sure the user bought a pair of Nikes, even if they just intended to destroy the shoes to get the RFID out.
This is whole lot more robust and less expensive to implement than giving the sensor a tilt switch.
Some people speculate that Nikes already have RFID tags in them ; I have no confirmation of that (but I may destroy my current pair when they wear out to find out). But this would be an excuse to put one in, and imagine the uses for an RFID tag in a shoe. The ideal location, because you can pretty much guarantee the sole of a shoe is going to be in contact with the ground, so you now know the ideal place to site your aerial.
Their wrapper is required to be GPL ; but since they don't distribute it, the source distribution clauses are not in effect.
Their commercial software pipelines frames into their wrapper ; they are separate processes, not linked, and thus their use does not violate GPL.
Otherwise you could argue that because you opened a Word document in OOo, that Word was now required to be GPL because it had emitted data that was now being consumed by a GPL application.
AFAIK the only thing that can cause a BSOD is code running in the kernel space, ring 0.
Quite why iTunes affects stuff that runs in kernel space is another matter... but I suspect it's probably to do with the Protected Media Path stuff. DRM, in other words. I can't think of anything in iTunes that should be running in kernel space - in Vista, all drivers apart from a component of the graphics driver are supposed to run in userspace.
Well, even if cats are carriers, they are also predators.
One cat will dispose of multiple rats, therefore even if cats are carriers, the total number of carriers diminshes. In the absence of predatory checks on the rat population, the numbers of carriers increases (esp. with all these scrummy corpses around to eat!).
I was able to find a charming letter from 1899 to the British Medical Journal on the subject of cats as plague carriers though.
A quote from a mechanic on the EV-1 program ;
You drive 'em in, fill the wiper fluid, rotate the tires, and drive 'em out again
Now, that's a full EV. I'd expect most of the maintainence on a hybrid to be related to the combustion engine, which is being run carefully, by a computer, instead of recklessly, by a human.
You bet the maintainence is going to be lower.
Imagine what could be done if the USA had a similar arrangement to the BBC license fee for PBS.
The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee, which you must pay if you have a device capable of receiving it's broadcasts. For television, it's less than £12 (less than $22) per month. From this, and from licensing of their content worldwide, they maintain
The beauty of media, as many Slashdotters will have noted already, is that the more you spread it around, the greater it's total value is.
The USA has a far greater population than the UK, so they could either pay about £5 a month ($9) for the same level of service (I'm assuming that infrastructure costs do not diminish but content is a fixed cost in this estimate), or pay about the same, and get much more excellent, commercial-free content.
Another enormous benefit of the BBC is that the commercial channels here are forced to raise their game. We have on average (and enforced by regulation), only 7 minutes of commercials per hour (about 12 minutes at peaks times), instead of the more customary 18 in the states. USA networks frequently cut old Trek by 9 minutes to fit it in because in the 60s you had half the commercials.
Television is by far the most powerful influencer, informer and educator of the masses and to leave it solely in the hands of the corporations is to invite facism.
Given a free reign or even a mandate to "inform, educate and entertain", public broadcasting can elevate an entire nation.
I'd not adopt CVS these days, or SVN.
I'd advocate Bazaar ; it's faster than SVN and supports more workflows, and it's branch/merge support is a full generation beyond SVN. Feature and bugfix branches are a "good practice" that is far more costly to use when your tooling doesn't support it adequately.
If your language has one, get a *Unit testing framework and start to write tests for it. When you encounter a bug, write a test that exposes it before you fix it. When you need a new feature, write the tests for it first ; they can really clarify what the requirements are.
When you have tests, you can change things with less fear of breakage, because you have the tests to verify whether you did or not.
You don't need to store all those details about personal identity though. You only need to know that someone is the person with a contract with you.
Swiss banks will deal with people so long as they know the account number. Modern cryptographic techniques no doubt supplement this to the point where the attestation that given set of credentials is genuine is more reliable now than at any time in history ; the only missing variable is the assurance that those credentials belong to the person presenting them, which no doubt biometrics can solve ; you don't need to store the biometric data either, you just need to cryptographically sign a hash of it, and forgery is well-nigh impossible. The customer can retain the data with your signature (maybe placing a backup in a safety deposit box), and you can verify that yes, it was you, and yes, it was this person, and yes, you have a contract.
In the past, personal familiarity would trump this, of course, but in this era, where everyone is a few rows of data in some corporate database close to a pibibyte in size, personal anonymity is easy to achieve, with the right credentials ; photo ID is easy to forge. Crypto can at least make identifiers that are hard to forge. If you include the biometrics, they are hard to share with other people too, and you don't need to retain the biometric data at the corporate end of the transactions.
Id got big because they gave the first third of the game away. People played Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake in multiplayer modes and loved them enough to pay for the rest.
I have to say, I had more fun out of Unreal Tournament 2003 than Quake 3.
UT2k3 was the office "friday afternoon" sport. It was just the demo pack, with only two levels and the instagib mod, but it was enjoyed immensely.
I later bought UT3. It was colourful, fast-paced and fun.
Doom 3 was fast (well, the monsters were, my computer wasn't while running it), but not fun. Whoever thought up the "hey, we'll make the player have to put his flashlight away to fire the gun" mechanic needs to be locked in a dark room full of motion-detecting mines with nothing but one of these for a light source.
Pillaging is hardly a scam. It's immoral, but it is at least honest. Unless you lie about it, of course.
"I'm only killing people with genetic defects! It's for the good of your gene pool!"
"I'm stimulating the yurt building industry!"
"I'm a radical environmentalist and you're wrecking the local squirrel population!"
Point out this scenario and insist they measure lines of diff, not lines of code. Then re-indent the entire codebase and ask for a bonus.
I refuse to use self-service checkouts. They have installed two of them in the local Tesco (occupies the position that Wal-Mart does in the UK market).
Every time I go in, a clipboard-wielding junior manager tries to make me use them. I usually just say "No", but next time I've resolved to explain why.
Completely aside from the fact that the implementation is dreadful, the things are designed to do people out of a job, in a town that sorely needs jobs. Two of these things are typically supervised by one worker, instead of requiring two people to man two manual ones. You only spend on capital if you have an expectation of increased quality or reduced labour costs, and I can't see these things increasing quality.
People who work grocery retail are at the bottom end of the labour market, so where are they going to go? I don't feel comfortable helping the the likes of Tesco line their pockets like this. I'm starting to feel close to the line where I stop shopping there (if only they hadn't managed to crowd out all the local greengrocers and fishmongers, which I suppose is partially my fault).
It varies. The Simpsons premier on Sky 1, but reruns are shown fairly often on Channel 4, along with 2 episodes of Futurama (might be E4? I don't know, I just record shows without paying too much attention to channels). Heroes premiered on BBC 2 and 3.
So some things *premier* on pay-tv. But many premier on FTA, with or without commercials. And anything good enough gets picked up by a FTA channel eventually. More so since Freeview (DVB-T) has provided them with a lot more channel bandwidth to fill.
Now, being able to talk about something during it's first run around the water cooler has some value I suppose... but I'm not really the type to do that, I prefer to just enjoy it. Heroes I saved up for six weeks, downloaded it to my laptop, and used it to while away the time when visiting my parents (along with Dirty Sexy Money, also FTA on Channel 4).
So for the impatient, yes, maybe there is value in a cable sub. But I'd be happy paying double the license fee (£12 a month) if it meant keeping the BBC, which provides all that lovely TV AND, more importantly, means that the other FTA channels have to raise their game to the same level to attract viewers for their advertisers, and keep the advert ratio to 12 mins an hour (instead of the more common 18 mins in the states).
Most of the good TV shows are not on free tv.
They are, eventually. The only stuff that doesn't show up is (some) coverage of sports ; its value is lost when it's no longer current. As someone who isn't interested in sports to any degree, this isn't much of a loss.
As a UK resident I have an enormous amount of excellent commercial-free TV and radio for the bargain price of £12 a month. The BBC and other FTA channels go out over unencrypted DVB-T, so I can record the stream for a perfect no-loss recording I can view in broadcast quality at any time later, archive to the media of my choice and play on the device of my choice.
Most of the best pay-for TV ends up on one of the British free to air channels eventually. Sopranos, Heroes, Trek, Simpsons, Lost, Futurama, etc.
MythTV has managed my trio of DVB-T tuners wonderfully, and had the added side-effect of teaching me lots about Linux.
Part of the problem is the preferential rates that MS give to schools ; you can get Office for a song. I'm not sure what the encentives they offer to public offices are, but I know that you can get a full copy of the Office du jour on the home use program for £18.
I'm going to have a good crack at infiltrating Edubuntu into my daughters school when she starts there this year.
Not a movie.. but
A complete music video in Simlish!