If I work for a company, and I email you to say that "Yes, we will do business with your company according to the contract we discussed" (or something like that), that is a form of legal agreement - or at least shows the intent to do business. Its probably a little less important than physically shaking hands in front of witnesses might be but it has some importance. Moreover because it took place electronically, I suspect courts are likely to expect it to be recorded. If we later get into a lawsuit about the business deal and our intents concerning it, that email might prove essential in the discovery phase of the trial. One or another side might insist that the text of that email be produced - or the other side can suffer expensive penalties imposed by the court for not complying. Therefore that email MUST be preserved - probably for at least 5 years, or must have been destroyed according to a recorded and previously implemented document retention/destruction program, or again, you can be held liable if you can't produce the email. As soon as the Discovery phase is begun, nothing should be deleted at all by any employee that might have the remotest bearing on things - ideally nothing at all until the case is completed. Most companies do not have a good and implemented document retention strategy. They work on a much more fluid basis and with less oversight of their employees etc. This often bites them in the ass when a lawsuit takes place - sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars. That's all it takes really, a simple sentence like the example I gave. Employees should never be doing business on a machine (computer or phone etc) that is not recording all traffic, which is then backed up and stored off site etc. Likewise all traffic from Twitter, Chat etc should also be recorded when it comes from a company machine, not because the business needs to be all Big Brother like, but because it could easily be held accountable for things that occur there that imply legal obligations. Not retaining documents just in case can ruin a company entirely under the wrong circumstances.
Note:IANAL yada yada, but I did work on a website that recorded a lot of data on the legality of document storage - and it was rather frightening how serious a matter it is.
Well if enough stories about this get posted to the web that mention the fact that Lyonnaise de Garantie didn't want its name associated with "escroc" - then google will end up indexing a ton of instances where Lyonnaise de Garantie's name is associated with "escroc". In fact it may be enough instances of "escroc" being associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie, to "guarantee" (pun intended) that it turns up as a common result. I hope this story gets great coverage.
Harper definitely has an ultra-conservative agenda, and he will continue to ram it down the throats of Canadian citizens as long as our fellow citizens continue to the vote the cocksucker into office. I am so ashamed of my fellow Canadians, embarrassed even, that we gave this asshole a single vote, let alone returned a majority for him. I don't think he represents a single position I can agree with. Harper, IMHO, stands to ruin just about every aspect of Canada I cherish. Apparently Canadians as a whole agree with him and want to turn us into nothing more than a finlandized state that worships the US Republican party. Harper stands for the rule of Corporations and the elimination of the rights of the citizen. We saw what he supported in the way of abuse during the G8/G20 sessions. Does no one else worry when they see the practice test for a police state, followed by a government with a majority who want to build a lot more prisons and toughen the laws to throw more citizens into them?
Yes thanks for the reply. I have read about grid layouts, and I have fucked around with a lot of different stylesheet designs to layout a page with multiple columns etc. I can work with that if I have to, and btw I recognize that CSS is useful when doing layouts for different devices.
I think my problem is that psychologically, HTML used to be content with markup controls to show how I wanted it displayed. Now its content with some meaningless tags surrounding it - which I have to reference in another document to make sense - and I find this frustrating. In large part this is because I am more interested in writing the script to generate the data for the page than I am in making it look pretty. With HTML I would be able to quickly make it look readable and away we go. With CSS it takes a lot longer to get the same simple appearance, and I resent the time spent on it. Yes I know, go master the fucking rules for CSS and it will take me less time - however I don't want to be a designer, I want to make things. The web looks prettier now, its more flexible, it displays better on devices I mostly don't use, but that all feels like just one more technology I need to master in order to put data on the page. Mostly I just hate the way CSS was implemented I suspect Off the lawn, now!:P
My problem with CSS is fairly simple overall: * With tables I can see how things are laid out on the page from the HTML itself, clearly and succinctly. I do have to retype things and its not always clear, nor is it perfectly reproduced in all browsers, but its close enough. I can do complex layouts quite easily. * With CSS, I have to constantly have a seperate page open containing the CSS, and its not inherently clear in the HTML how things are being laid out on the page. I must reference back and forth.
I think CSS makes sense as a concept, but the reality is really quite annoying for the most part. I see it as a triumph of the designers and artists over the developer.
I am using CSS but reluctantly. I prefer tables as development time for a page was easily 20x faster for me. I can think in tables. I cannot think in CSS at all.
The US Government has abrogated to itself the right to create legislation that is, according to it, applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what Empires do, and whether or not US citizens like the idea, the US is currently acting like an Empire - like the Roman Empire in a lot of ways - outside of its borders mostly but more increasingly inside its borders. You still ostensibly have a democracy at the moment but to me it looks like this is becoming less true over the past few decades. According to the US Government and this legislation, there are US citizens and then there is everyone else in the world who are less than US citizens. They don't get the same rights if they get any at all. Its like an extension of Manifest Destiny - the US is destined by God to do whatever the fuck it wants to whomever the fuck it wants and we had better not question it, or else we can end up renditioned to some ugly US client state.
The US seems to be far more right-wing by default than most other countries. Up here in Canada, Obama would be considered a Conservative. By and large most Americans seem unable to distinguish between Communist (Left-Wing extreme) and Fascist (Right-Wing extreme), at least by the posts I see on the web at places like/. and CNN. On/. the posters seem to tend towards the very ultra-right-wing typically. Not sure why that is but the sort of shit that regularly gets posted here (and then modded Informative) just baffles me.
Yes, I have to check that show out. Caught 1 or 2 episodes of it and enjoyed them a lot. MI-5 (more properly known as Spooks but that couldn't be used in the US for fear of offending black people apparently) is somewhat hit or miss, but overall I enjoy what they do with the storilines, and how hard they are on their characters. I am currently enjoying Homeland as well.
My Wife and I bought ourselves a Samsung Blue-Ray player for Christmas. Cost us $68 + Tax at London Drugs. It supports network connections to my PC for watching downloaded content via Wi-Fi and works flawlessly, it supports Netflix, YouTube etc. So far its terrific.
There are lots of people for whom winning is much more important than playing fairly. When they lose, they assume others are cheating better than they are.
There is no sense of sportsmanship these days. None at all.
For me: MI-5 (8 seasons of it), Lie to Me (1 season, fun so far), Walking Dead (only seen a few episodes so far so good), Luther (havent watched it yet but loved the main actor when he was in The Wire), and a lot of other TV shows, let alone the movies listed. There is a lot on Netflix IMHO, and its well worth the cost.
The film version is nothing like the book version, on multiple levels. When I saw the movie version I hated it. Only by viewing it as a completely separate story can I really enjoy it in and of itself. Heinlein was quite serious, Verhoeven made a violent comedy.
I absolutely love GM Fraser's Flashman series. They are a great romp through history and the author has gone to great care to portray the events that took place in all their details good and bad, rather than the whitewashed version that we usually get from the official histories.
If you like historical fiction mind you, you should read the Aubrey & Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien, which the NY Times Book review called "The finest historical fiction ever written". 22 books in the series and a great, stylish read
You will pay, one way or another. If you pay a subscription fee, the developers will work to ensure the game is balanced and fun for as many as possible. If you don't pay a fee because its a F2P game, then the developers will work to ensure that you need to buy certain items, advancements, zone access etc from the company store, or you will not enjoy the game as much because its not as balanced. Either way the companies running these games plan on hoovering your wallet in some form. F2P is the result of dropping subscription rates and a desire to get money by some means or another. Generally it signifies a game that is dying. LOTRO is the only exception I can think of that has done it well. Game companies run MMOs to make as much money as possible. When they don't, and can't salvage a dying title, they close it without any thought to the game's players - see SWG and SOE/LA.
Yes it costs money to buy the game itself - which gives the developer incentive to make expansions. Yes, it costs money each month to play the game, but given the amount of time you can play it in a month - and which many players will play it in a month - its a very cost effective form of entertainment. If I buy this game - and I am still on the fence, although I liked it in beta - I will likely play it rather casually, say 5-10 hours a week. Thats 20-40 hours a month, so thats between $0.75 and $0.375 an hour. Put another way, I could spend the same money on a few coffees at Starbucks over the course of that month, and get far less entertainment value out of it. MMOs are pretty decent value for the money, and by paying the subscription fees you ensure they have the money to maintain the servers, pay the developers and artists, writers etc a wage to generate new content and new expansions etc.
For its time, SWG was one of the most successful MMOs ever launched. It had massive subscription rates for a non-Asian MMO. You have to remember the standards were completely different then. Getting over 300k subscriptions was HUGE, few other titles could compete with those numbers. Its WOW that has blown the stats up to the point where people feel if a title doesn't launch with 1m subscribers its a complete failure. If you were there at the time though, SWG did amazingly well.
Except DAOC was (and IS even in its current state) a far better game than WOW. Its just that its a bit harder and more involved. WOW is designed to be easy to play, with less challenges.
Like monotheistic religion, it is an essential part of US culture and thinking that their way is the only correct way. Any viewpoint that differs significantly from what the US collectively - or its government - considers to be correct or normal is therefore wrong. Now, I know they are not alone in thinking this way, probably everyone does to one degree or another but in the US it seems to be particularly virulent, and they are a major economic, cultural and military force at the moment so their view is dominating. You have to understand that God himself came down and gave the US their constitution, and it is perfect. The problem with this of course is that very intelligent, but otherwise ordinary men drafted the document, it is subject to revision - and has been revised - and its something that they need to keep refining and protecting from introduced errors. However for many US citizens the Constitution seems to be a near holy object treated with undo reverence. A lot of Americans also seem to think that if you are a citizen of the US you are inherently superior to anyone else in the world. As in more deserving, more intelligent, a better person, superior to foreigners, more deserving of everything. Conversely, non-US citizens are inferior human beings with less rights, less intelligence, less value etc.
Yes I got my TS up here in Canada. They handed me a massive form and said, fill in everywhere you lived and worked in the past 20 years. I had just finished university at that point - and had lived the life of a poor student, moving constantly. I think I lived in something like 12 different locations in the 4 years I was at school, and of course when I was a kid I moved on average every 1.75 years because my parents liked to buy a house, renovate it (while we lived in it), then sell it. Work was almost as bad. I never wrote down all the places I lived or worked so I had to spend ages figuring it all out, and they wanted it covered to the day:P Once I had submitted it, the RCMP had to investigate all of the details. I pity the poor bastards who got my file. Once I got into my trade in the army it wasn't so bad with any updates because it was all tracked and recorded.
Wow, you went from a geographical style of reference in English that has been used throughout my lifetime and is fairly common, to including racial slurs, and holocaust denial all in just 3 paragraphs. You may take offense at use of "The Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" but the use of that form in English probably dates back to the Crimean war, and there is no insult attached to it in meaning that I am aware of as an English speaker. As someone else pointed out there are a lot of geographical locations that English speakers commonly attach "the" to when speaking about them. I have lived in the province of Alberta in Canada, its part of our prairies here. I can't think of a single Canadian who would feel like it was an insult to refer to Alberta and the other 2 prairie provinces as "The Prairies" - in fact its very common usage. I would not deny the holocaust that happened in the Ukraine - I am well aware of it - nor denigrate its people or culture - There are a lot of Canadians who came from the Ukraine.
What I think is happening here is that in Ukraine the country they are aware of this distinction, but in English speaking countries - at least for those not of Ukrainian origins - its a meaningless distinction and we use the "the" or not, as we see fit.
I watch a lot of British TV shows, mostly from the BBC. They pay a tax to access the BBC there I believe, and in return they get no advertising. As a result most British shows are better written, better paced and better produced I think, in part because the program has that much extra time to evolve the story in. Of course, their series are generally pitifully short for a season (say 6-10 episodes in Britain per season, versus 22 in North America). I think that if a big channel were to show its programs WITHOUT any commericals, they might be able to make more money in the end. Of course, I would have to be able to subscribe just to that channel through my cable company and that is never gonna happen. They are too busy matching up crap channels with the 1 or 2 decent ones in a tiering system that ensures I have to spend $100/mo to get all the stuff I want. Thus I am killing my cable shortly. I generally run without cable at all for most of the year then sometimes break down and get it hooked up for a few months before realizing that "yes its still pretty much all shit, all the time" and cut it again. There are probably good shows on TV channels that I am not willing to spend an extra $40 to see, but I will never know it because the channels that I do have access too are all full of fucking crap like Survivor, XFactor etc - shit for the mindless masses. If I download, I get what I want when I want it and without interruptions. If I like a series, I buy the season as a set and watch it off disks. I own a lot of complete TV series because of that. I now watch a lot of stuff on Netflix mind you, so thats changing too:P
Slashdot Mirror
If I work for a company, and I email you to say that "Yes, we will do business with your company according to the contract we discussed" (or something like that), that is a form of legal agreement - or at least shows the intent to do business. Its probably a little less important than physically shaking hands in front of witnesses might be but it has some importance. Moreover because it took place electronically, I suspect courts are likely to expect it to be recorded.
If we later get into a lawsuit about the business deal and our intents concerning it, that email might prove essential in the discovery phase of the trial. One or another side might insist that the text of that email be produced - or the other side can suffer expensive penalties imposed by the court for not complying.
Therefore that email MUST be preserved - probably for at least 5 years, or must have been destroyed according to a recorded and previously implemented document retention/destruction program, or again, you can be held liable if you can't produce the email. As soon as the Discovery phase is begun, nothing should be deleted at all by any employee that might have the remotest bearing on things - ideally nothing at all until the case is completed.
Most companies do not have a good and implemented document retention strategy. They work on a much more fluid basis and with less oversight of their employees etc. This often bites them in the ass when a lawsuit takes place - sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars.
That's all it takes really, a simple sentence like the example I gave. Employees should never be doing business on a machine (computer or phone etc) that is not recording all traffic, which is then backed up and stored off site etc. Likewise all traffic from Twitter, Chat etc should also be recorded when it comes from a company machine, not because the business needs to be all Big Brother like, but because it could easily be held accountable for things that occur there that imply legal obligations. Not retaining documents just in case can ruin a company entirely under the wrong circumstances.
Note:IANAL yada yada, but I did work on a website that recorded a lot of data on the legality of document storage - and it was rather frightening how serious a matter it is.
Well if enough stories about this get posted to the web that mention the fact that Lyonnaise de Garantie didn't want its name associated with "escroc" - then google will end up indexing a ton of instances where Lyonnaise de Garantie's name is associated with "escroc". In fact it may be enough instances of "escroc" being associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie, to "guarantee" (pun intended) that it turns up as a common result. I hope this story gets great coverage.
Leglislating search results is just hopeless.
Harper definitely has an ultra-conservative agenda, and he will continue to ram it down the throats of Canadian citizens as long as our fellow citizens continue to the vote the cocksucker into office. I am so ashamed of my fellow Canadians, embarrassed even, that we gave this asshole a single vote, let alone returned a majority for him. I don't think he represents a single position I can agree with.
Harper, IMHO, stands to ruin just about every aspect of Canada I cherish. Apparently Canadians as a whole agree with him and want to turn us into nothing more than a finlandized state that worships the US Republican party.
Harper stands for the rule of Corporations and the elimination of the rights of the citizen. We saw what he supported in the way of abuse during the G8/G20 sessions. Does no one else worry when they see the practice test for a police state, followed by a government with a majority who want to build a lot more prisons and toughen the laws to throw more citizens into them?
Yes thanks for the reply. I have read about grid layouts, and I have fucked around with a lot of different stylesheet designs to layout a page with multiple columns etc. I can work with that if I have to, and btw I recognize that CSS is useful when doing layouts for different devices.
I think my problem is that psychologically, HTML used to be content with markup controls to show how I wanted it displayed. Now its content with some meaningless tags surrounding it - which I have to reference in another document to make sense - and I find this frustrating. In large part this is because I am more interested in writing the script to generate the data for the page than I am in making it look pretty. With HTML I would be able to quickly make it look readable and away we go. With CSS it takes a lot longer to get the same simple appearance, and I resent the time spent on it. :P
Yes I know, go master the fucking rules for CSS and it will take me less time - however I don't want to be a designer, I want to make things.
The web looks prettier now, its more flexible, it displays better on devices I mostly don't use, but that all feels like just one more technology I need to master in order to put data on the page.
Mostly I just hate the way CSS was implemented I suspect
Off the lawn, now!
My problem with CSS is fairly simple overall:
* With tables I can see how things are laid out on the page from the HTML itself, clearly and succinctly. I do have to retype things and its not always clear, nor is it perfectly reproduced in all browsers, but its close enough. I can do complex layouts quite easily.
* With CSS, I have to constantly have a seperate page open containing the CSS, and its not inherently clear in the HTML how things are being laid out on the page. I must reference back and forth.
I think CSS makes sense as a concept, but the reality is really quite annoying for the most part. I see it as a triumph of the designers and artists over the developer.
I am using CSS but reluctantly. I prefer tables as development time for a page was easily 20x faster for me. I can think in tables. I cannot think in CSS at all.
Get off my lawn :P
The US Government has abrogated to itself the right to create legislation that is, according to it, applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what Empires do, and whether or not US citizens like the idea, the US is currently acting like an Empire - like the Roman Empire in a lot of ways - outside of its borders mostly but more increasingly inside its borders. You still ostensibly have a democracy at the moment but to me it looks like this is becoming less true over the past few decades.
According to the US Government and this legislation, there are US citizens and then there is everyone else in the world who are less than US citizens. They don't get the same rights if they get any at all. Its like an extension of Manifest Destiny - the US is destined by God to do whatever the fuck it wants to whomever the fuck it wants and we had better not question it, or else we can end up renditioned to some ugly US client state.
Amazon, Facebook and Google gone eh? I would miss Google, but the other 2 could stay off permanently and the web would be a better place :P
Yes here: http://www.wordnik.com/words/Fascism
and here: http://www.wordnik.com/words/Anti-Semitism
The US seems to be far more right-wing by default than most other countries. Up here in Canada, Obama would be considered a Conservative. By and large most Americans seem unable to distinguish between Communist (Left-Wing extreme) and Fascist (Right-Wing extreme), at least by the posts I see on the web at places like /. and CNN. /. the posters seem to tend towards the very ultra-right-wing typically. Not sure why that is but the sort of shit that regularly gets posted here (and then modded Informative) just baffles me.
On
Yes, I have to check that show out. Caught 1 or 2 episodes of it and enjoyed them a lot. MI-5 (more properly known as Spooks but that couldn't be used in the US for fear of offending black people apparently) is somewhat hit or miss, but overall I enjoy what they do with the storilines, and how hard they are on their characters.
I am currently enjoying Homeland as well.
My Wife and I bought ourselves a Samsung Blue-Ray player for Christmas. Cost us $68 + Tax at London Drugs. It supports network connections to my PC for watching downloaded content via Wi-Fi and works flawlessly, it supports Netflix, YouTube etc. So far its terrific.
Ah so now the true motivation of the 1% is clear: They want flying cars. In order to do that they need to ensure that only they can fly them :P
Now it all makes much more sense :)
There are lots of people for whom winning is much more important than playing fairly. When they lose, they assume others are cheating better than they are.
There is no sense of sportsmanship these days. None at all.
For me: MI-5 (8 seasons of it), Lie to Me (1 season, fun so far), Walking Dead (only seen a few episodes so far so good), Luther (havent watched it yet but loved the main actor when he was in The Wire), and a lot of other TV shows, let alone the movies listed. There is a lot on Netflix IMHO, and its well worth the cost.
The film version is nothing like the book version, on multiple levels. When I saw the movie version I hated it. Only by viewing it as a completely separate story can I really enjoy it in and of itself.
Heinlein was quite serious, Verhoeven made a violent comedy.
I absolutely love GM Fraser's Flashman series. They are a great romp through history and the author has gone to great care to portray the events that took place in all their details good and bad, rather than the whitewashed version that we usually get from the official histories.
If you like historical fiction mind you, you should read the Aubrey & Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien, which the NY Times Book review called "The finest historical fiction ever written". 22 books in the series and a great, stylish read
You will pay, one way or another. If you pay a subscription fee, the developers will work to ensure the game is balanced and fun for as many as possible. If you don't pay a fee because its a F2P game, then the developers will work to ensure that you need to buy certain items, advancements, zone access etc from the company store, or you will not enjoy the game as much because its not as balanced.
Either way the companies running these games plan on hoovering your wallet in some form. F2P is the result of dropping subscription rates and a desire to get money by some means or another. Generally it signifies a game that is dying. LOTRO is the only exception I can think of that has done it well.
Game companies run MMOs to make as much money as possible. When they don't, and can't salvage a dying title, they close it without any thought to the game's players - see SWG and SOE/LA.
Yes it costs money to buy the game itself - which gives the developer incentive to make expansions. Yes, it costs money each month to play the game, but given the amount of time you can play it in a month - and which many players will play it in a month - its a very cost effective form of entertainment. If I buy this game - and I am still on the fence, although I liked it in beta - I will likely play it rather casually, say 5-10 hours a week. Thats 20-40 hours a month, so thats between $0.75 and $0.375 an hour. Put another way, I could spend the same money on a few coffees at Starbucks over the course of that month, and get far less entertainment value out of it.
MMOs are pretty decent value for the money, and by paying the subscription fees you ensure they have the money to maintain the servers, pay the developers and artists, writers etc a wage to generate new content and new expansions etc.
For its time, SWG was one of the most successful MMOs ever launched. It had massive subscription rates for a non-Asian MMO. You have to remember the standards were completely different then. Getting over 300k subscriptions was HUGE, few other titles could compete with those numbers.
Its WOW that has blown the stats up to the point where people feel if a title doesn't launch with 1m subscribers its a complete failure. If you were there at the time though, SWG did amazingly well.
Except DAOC was (and IS even in its current state) a far better game than WOW. Its just that its a bit harder and more involved. WOW is designed to be easy to play, with less challenges.
Like monotheistic religion, it is an essential part of US culture and thinking that their way is the only correct way. Any viewpoint that differs significantly from what the US collectively - or its government - considers to be correct or normal is therefore wrong. Now, I know they are not alone in thinking this way, probably everyone does to one degree or another but in the US it seems to be particularly virulent, and they are a major economic, cultural and military force at the moment so their view is dominating.
You have to understand that God himself came down and gave the US their constitution, and it is perfect. The problem with this of course is that very intelligent, but otherwise ordinary men drafted the document, it is subject to revision - and has been revised - and its something that they need to keep refining and protecting from introduced errors. However for many US citizens the Constitution seems to be a near holy object treated with undo reverence.
A lot of Americans also seem to think that if you are a citizen of the US you are inherently superior to anyone else in the world. As in more deserving, more intelligent, a better person, superior to foreigners, more deserving of everything. Conversely, non-US citizens are inferior human beings with less rights, less intelligence, less value etc.
Yes I got my TS up here in Canada. They handed me a massive form and said, fill in everywhere you lived and worked in the past 20 years. I had just finished university at that point - and had lived the life of a poor student, moving constantly. I think I lived in something like 12 different locations in the 4 years I was at school, and of course when I was a kid I moved on average every 1.75 years because my parents liked to buy a house, renovate it (while we lived in it), then sell it. Work was almost as bad. I never wrote down all the places I lived or worked so I had to spend ages figuring it all out, and they wanted it covered to the day :P
Once I had submitted it, the RCMP had to investigate all of the details. I pity the poor bastards who got my file.
Once I got into my trade in the army it wasn't so bad with any updates because it was all tracked and recorded.
I live just fine with "The West Coast", "The Prairies", "The Maritimes" :P
Wow, you went from a geographical style of reference in English that has been used throughout my lifetime and is fairly common, to including racial slurs, and holocaust denial all in just 3 paragraphs.
You may take offense at use of "The Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" but the use of that form in English probably dates back to the Crimean war, and there is no insult attached to it in meaning that I am aware of as an English speaker.
As someone else pointed out there are a lot of geographical locations that English speakers commonly attach "the" to when speaking about them. I have lived in the province of Alberta in Canada, its part of our prairies here. I can't think of a single Canadian who would feel like it was an insult to refer to Alberta and the other 2 prairie provinces as "The Prairies" - in fact its very common usage.
I would not deny the holocaust that happened in the Ukraine - I am well aware of it - nor denigrate its people or culture - There are a lot of Canadians who came from the Ukraine.
What I think is happening here is that in Ukraine the country they are aware of this distinction, but in English speaking countries - at least for those not of Ukrainian origins - its a meaningless distinction and we use the "the" or not, as we see fit.
I watch a lot of British TV shows, mostly from the BBC. They pay a tax to access the BBC there I believe, and in return they get no advertising. As a result most British shows are better written, better paced and better produced I think, in part because the program has that much extra time to evolve the story in. :P
Of course, their series are generally pitifully short for a season (say 6-10 episodes in Britain per season, versus 22 in North America).
I think that if a big channel were to show its programs WITHOUT any commericals, they might be able to make more money in the end. Of course, I would have to be able to subscribe just to that channel through my cable company and that is never gonna happen. They are too busy matching up crap channels with the 1 or 2 decent ones in a tiering system that ensures I have to spend $100/mo to get all the stuff I want.
Thus I am killing my cable shortly. I generally run without cable at all for most of the year then sometimes break down and get it hooked up for a few months before realizing that "yes its still pretty much all shit, all the time" and cut it again. There are probably good shows on TV channels that I am not willing to spend an extra $40 to see, but I will never know it because the channels that I do have access too are all full of fucking crap like Survivor, XFactor etc - shit for the mindless masses.
If I download, I get what I want when I want it and without interruptions. If I like a series, I buy the season as a set and watch it off disks. I own a lot of complete TV series because of that. I now watch a lot of stuff on Netflix mind you, so thats changing too