http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4/
specifically:-
Though entirely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned: Originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by the Channel Four Television Corporation, a public body established in 1990 for this purpose and which came into operation in 1993, following the abolition of the IBA. But I think - having not read the whole page cause I'm lazy - that they get a bunch of money from the tv license that pays for some of the programing like you mention but they also don't have to pay broadcast fees - or maybe they don't pay broadcast fees and thats their subsidy - its something along tose lines anyway - I just remeber this from a few months ago cause C4 wants more money to deal with the digital switchover.
I'm sure Sky had a big part in funding or producing BSG - I thought SciFi droped it after the first series and sky picked up the ball - I might be wrong.
Also remember that Channel 4 - which spaced was on - is ALSO a publicly owned channel with a similar (but different) remit to that of the BBC but it has to make most of it's revenue from adverts.
I am, of course, no train expert but i always thought that wider was better and more stable - Isambard Kingdom Brunel built his track at 7' which he considered optimum and based on mine railways. Of course he lost out to standard gauge in the end - like he was the betamax of the rail world.
I know I'm being a bit pedantic here but thats not entirly true - Betacam, the pro version of betamax, won in a big way in broadcasting and, together with philps, sony developed the cd, dat, cd-rom and cd-r not to mention spdif.
Fair enough, the ones they do on their own don't seem all that succesful but they have their niche markets.
I absolutely agree but wiki doesn't nessesarily just aply to wikipedia - a lot of FOSS now use wiki as the basis of their manuals - which is great but you could see why in that context the wiki element is the tool that lets the substance form and then it's closed until new software updates etc.
I think wiki and wikipedia is great but its strongest point is its biggest weakness - registration of users helps reduce misuse but that isn't the most satisfactory answer either.
The most interesting thing about wiki is the debates and arguments that go on on the discussion pages - it's that plus boards like/.'s that make me feel that there is any debate left in the world now that our glorius leaders seem not to listen to what people say or how they feel - that would be the worst thing if we were to loose that too.
But if we modify the analogy so that wiki IS the dance and that all the people meet at the dance and pair off and settle down, they don't need to go to the dance anymore.
What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.
I'm not saying that this would work but I can see on both sides of the line.
Sony owns the rights to so much of the content. They end up with the R&D dept coming up with products and concepts for the electronics dept which have to keep the media and content dept happy - that means bundles of DRM obviously - but if you invented succesful formats before - or helped in the creation of them - and got bundles of cash for it why wouldn't you do that again.
Radio over the internet is great untill the conection goes "a bit funny" and it stops streaming or drops to a lower sample rate.
Also how do you listen to it on the move - I can't listen to it in the car or on my portable device.
Then there's the problem whereby you can't go to your local comet (or other electronics store) and buy a radio for the office that has an ethernet port on the back - and no i'm not going to connect my computer up to the stereo becase evry time someone IM's me or I get an email or windows breaks you get horible alert noises that would drive everyone insane!
Surley these problems are why these broadcasters are having problems.
You can have the best sig in the world on paper but when you try and wite it on that wee strip of writable plastic on the card it never comes out right, so your signature is always a bit different on card versus paper. At the checkout the last thing that the person on the till is going to do is question you if the way you crossed the T looks a bit out of place - especialy, as you say, for £4.50/$8 an hour.
Thats why when my bank started to offer their cash cards with the signature laser printed on under the protective plastic i was very impressed - not only because the box you had to sign in on the form was large enough to write in but because they also lasered on my photograph too. So if you don't look like me it doesn't matter how well you forge my signature!
I was under the impresion that the NSA wasn't allowed to spy within the US and GCHQ in the UK wasn't allowed to spy within the UK - so GCHQ spies on the US and the NSA spies on the UK and then the CIA and the SIS(MI6) trade the information that each other gathers, hence bypassing the needs of warrents and other anoying legal type stuff! Hence my tinfoil headwear.
If more radiation hits the Earth and the Sun is spewing out more heat, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this? I've been bouncing this idea in my head for a while now and I can't see why this MAY not be true.
I've had that idea in the back of my mind for a while now too. Thing is i've done various google searches for data on the output of the sun over the last few decades and haven't found anything yet - i can't help but feel howevewr that the increase in storms and freak weather, plus the melting of some glaciers (many are actually growing!!) is more to do with more radiation from the sun heating the planet up rather than an increase in CO2. Thats not really an indepth explanation but I haven't got time to go on at length at the moment.
Personally, I believe Intel see this as a way to make money off the RIAA and MPAA - sponge off of their paranoia
You're totaly right! When i read that bit i had a lightbulb moment:)
Intel as a corporate entity looks at other corporate entities much as i look at other people - thinking the phrase "possible clients".
I mean it's stupid to consider Intel as a partner in some sort of ludicrously evil plot against mankind. They make a range of products and they've seen a market for a new type of product from some "possible clients" who are moaning that they need to do a particular task.
The problems arise of course because of the (non-existant??) evil partnership of Intel and MS as this is exactly the sort of technology that MS wants to control the Internets and everything I see. But even then is Intel really rubbing their hands together saying "finaly the evil plan is coming together!!!" or "bonus, another client for our new technology that cost us loads to R&D and we need to make some money back before our shareholders do nasty things to us!"
I'm not defending them and i'm not saying there aren't evil plans either, just that when you take an objective look at it, it appears like very normal business practice.
So, quick question: Windows has appeared to evolved into a seriously fragmented OS. How many different versions of Windows are there? There is a Mobile, Embedded, Server, Pro, Home, Starter, Handheld......What else?
I'm not having a go but how many linux distro's are there? Before you stab me in the eye i'm a linux fan but the difference is that all the versions of windows work - for the end user - pretty much the same. In linux, there are so many desktop enviroments - and iterations of the the desktop enviroments - that it really (IMHO) turns people off - thats the key to why windows is world dominent, by having the market share everyone knows how to use the OS and feels comfortable in the "enviroment". If everyone had linux - that would of course be great but - when someone took a new job they'd have to spend ages getting used to the differnt desktop enviroments, never mind doing any work - of course thats asuming you'd let them have a gui...
I totaly agree.
For one thing i hate the sevices that the operators say you want but i hate the idea of downloading music and video over my phone when i have DSL sitting at home and at work which is faster so i can get bigger files which are better quality etc, etc...
I also believe that since i use my mobile phone for and during work all day everyday and find that its hard enough to keep it charged anyway, why would i want it to then have to play music too? Bigger battery? I think i would prefer a small lighweight phone thanks and choose whether to take a music device with me or not. On the flipside, if i was using my phone as an mp3 player could i turn the "mobile" part off when i'm out of work? - i doubt they'd make it that simple would they?!
I agree. Lets face it, the moon is as far as a human has ever travelled in space (ie in terms of distance away from the earth) and that was 30 odd years ago. How can we sit here on this planet and think that we can just work it all out like that.
I always like to think of the start of the last centuary - around 1900 - victorian scientists had it all worked out, think dalton sphere and then think 50 years in the further on when we'd seen the atom split.
I'm not going to claim that anyone's wrong and i'm no expert myself but isn't it just possible that we really don't understand in any way what we're talking about?? I mean are you really sure that if you take all the matter and light and heat and energy in the entire universe and compress it into a little ball so that it explodes that photons won't go 4x10^8 m/s??
Then again, Im pretty sure I'd be happy with that quality..
I totally agree. Film has a double edge to it, on one side is its (almost) infinte resolution but OTOH it fades every time you expose it to the really bright projector light. That means that new big blockbusters that get hammered over the first weekend of showings look absolutely awfull come Monday, almost to the point that you wouldn't want to see the film in that condition - certainly not for £5!!
But even in small cinemas the digital revolution will be a great thing too.I visited the small indepengant cinema near me the other day. In the 40 seat "screen 3" that i was in they have this old projector that outputs a picture thats smaller and no brighter than a 2000 ansi lummen desktop data projector - which you can buy for easily under £2000. I'm sure that you'd want something better for a cinema of course but you get the idea.
I think you're right mostly but I would say this...
I'm comfortable in the windows enviroment, i know that its helishly buggy and quite badly put together but I feel comfertable. I don't like macs - I don't like their OS - even though I know that its built better - cause I'm maybe a bit stuck in my ways now and I'm not into this design nonsense for what is efectivley a box that sits under your desk. I like to build my own computer and you really can't do that with apple - you can with *nix though but I don't know how to speak *nix and quite frankley I don't know that I have the time or patience to learn. Then (AFAIK) you are up against the fact that top hardware may not get drivers because the manufacturers won't release the source PLUS even if you could most (all?) games are not realeased for *nix apart from TUX racer and I think you can get AAO now too.
Quite simply, I'm all for MS being cut down to size but untill there is either a straight-forward replacement OS to migrate to OR a *nix release that is preconfigured to install onto your machine and then boot into (eg) X which has full driver support for your hardware and has the full range of Apps AND Games then I guess I'll keep running MS:\
The reason the developing world is still developing is because of the government for god's sake.
Which government, yours or theirs? I know that the Brittish Empire, as it was, hand a big old hand in "conquering" the "savage lands", striping the wealth out of these countries and pulling out leaving no stable government in place as they left creating poor nations with BIG power vacumes. Many other European countries can hold up their hands along with us Brits to that sort of behaviour too. [These areas include the Middle East and Africa and you can definatly draw a parallel between our {the west} behaviours in these areas and the instability we have today.]
And then with the cold war, America and the USSR pumped money and arms into the same ex-european colonies around the world to support regiems they could control and fight each other through. [This is where the actual _war_ part of the cold war took place]. Then "the wall" came down and they washed their hands of their dirty work leaving these countries in a state of ruins where civil war still rages in many of these areas.
And now today, the decadent western world talks of helping them out by cancelling some debt that, in many cases, has been paid back many times in interest alone, but won't give them what they need - the free trade agreements that would help them actually have an economy of growth. This would help many other problems too.[Even more off topic but e.g. giving coca farmers in South America a real reason to grow other crops and help end their reliance on the only crop that will get them any money at all.]
So don't blame the governments of the developing world for being what we created them to be.
...everything to do with Earthquakes that are going to happen anyway...
I'm no earthquake expert or weather expert so don't flame me for this but i did have a thought about that the other day. If the atmospheric temperature is higher does that not heat up the actual earth which could trigger more earthquakes as the energy in the mantle is higher?
Is also important that both the asian tsunami and the year before the Iranian earthquake happened when that "geographic region" or "tectonic plate" or whatever it is, was being exposed to "summer time"?
I don't know if thats clear or not and I have no scietific basis for this idea other than the idea of higher temperature increases preasure which needs to be vented ie earthquakes.
End piracy? No. You're just as delusional as the *AA if you think there's a magic bullet to end piracy. A positive step towards ending it? Fuck yes.
I agree but for a different reason. One of the major factors in why there is a big piracy issue (IMHO) is deffinatly having regional release dates. If a film is released in the US and released globaly within the week well thats just fine, however much of the films are not. There can be more than a month between US and European releases.
For example, top 5 US Box Office[www.imdb.com]:
1 Coach Carter
2 Meet the Fockers
3 Racing Stripes
4 In Good Company
5 Elektra
Top 5 UK Box Office[uk.imdb.com]:
1 White Noise
2 The Aviator
3 Alexander
4 The Incredibles
5 Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
See the difference? But its worse when it comes to TV shows, there can be over a year between whats happening in the states and whats happening in Europe, and thats also if any of the channels decide to pick up the shows that people actually want to watch.
No, you're never going to end piracy, or probably crime in general, but you can try to do everything to prevent it happening and earn more money in the process too.
It's funny but since I moved into my new house (I live in Scotland) I can now only get 4 analogue channels - there's no cable in my village, I can't get a terestrial digital signal (called Freeview) and I'm not giving any of my money to Murdoch/BSkyB.
However, my analogue picture on my £150 21" Aiwa TV is remarcably better quality than the picture that my parents get from their cable box through their £600 Sony 32" Trinitron.
The difference is that the bandwidth thats used on the cable and satalite pictures here is shockingly low and analogue gives such a better picture.
Unfortunatly over here in the UK they are going to switch the analogue service off in about 3-4 years time, its almost a shame!
You can't be bothered to walk down to the local video/music/software store?
Actually its very hard to get to my "local" video/music/software store as i live in a small village nowhere near a city and they tend not to stock things that I like.
Can't work up the energy to log on to Amazon.Com?
Yes, however it will take a minimum of 3-5 days for anything to reach me and if i'm out during the day, which i am, i'll have to go to pick it up from the very_far_away postal depot at my earliest convinience, if they haven't "lost it" by the time i can get there.
iTunes takes too long?
No, it doesn't and is exactly my point.
If there was a legal way to download movies and tv shows and software (like HL2 is) then i'd use it.
I'm not trying to justify illegal P2P activity, just point out that some of the people using the facility might be doing so for other reasons than getting the stuff for free. It turned out that iTunes was a big hit and you hear less about music piracy these days (IMHO), is it not reasonable to assume that similar results might be achieved with "iMovies" or "iTV"??
Slashdot Mirror
specifically
Though entirely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned: Originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by the Channel Four Television Corporation, a public body established in 1990 for this purpose and which came into operation in 1993, following the abolition of the IBA. But I think - having not read the whole page cause I'm lazy - that they get a bunch of money from the tv license that pays for some of the programing like you mention but they also don't have to pay broadcast fees - or maybe they don't pay broadcast fees and thats their subsidy - its something along tose lines anyway - I just remeber this from a few months ago cause C4 wants more money to deal with the digital switchover.
I'm sure Sky had a big part in funding or producing BSG - I thought SciFi droped it after the first series and sky picked up the ball - I might be wrong.
Also remember that Channel 4 - which spaced was on - is ALSO a publicly owned channel with a similar (but different) remit to that of the BBC but it has to make most of it's revenue from adverts.
Just my 2p.
I am, of course, no train expert but i always thought that wider was better and more stable - Isambard Kingdom Brunel built his track at 7' which he considered optimum and based on mine railways. Of course he lost out to standard gauge in the end - like he was the betamax of the rail world.
I know I'm being a bit pedantic here but thats not entirly true - Betacam, the pro version of betamax, won in a big way in broadcasting and, together with philps, sony developed the cd, dat, cd-rom and cd-r not to mention spdif.
Fair enough, the ones they do on their own don't seem all that succesful but they have their niche markets.
I'm not having a go, really!
I absolutely agree but wiki doesn't nessesarily just aply to wikipedia - a lot of FOSS now use wiki as the basis of their manuals - which is great but you could see why in that context the wiki element is the tool that lets the substance form and then it's closed until new software updates etc.
/.'s that make me feel that there is any debate left in the world now that our glorius leaders seem not to listen to what people say or how they feel - that would be the worst thing if we were to loose that too.
I think wiki and wikipedia is great but its strongest point is its biggest weakness - registration of users helps reduce misuse but that isn't the most satisfactory answer either.
The most interesting thing about wiki is the debates and arguments that go on on the discussion pages - it's that plus boards like
I see what you're saying.
But if we modify the analogy so that wiki IS the dance and that all the people meet at the dance and pair off and settle down, they don't need to go to the dance anymore.
What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.
I'm not saying that this would work but I can see on both sides of the line.
Sony owns the rights to so much of the content. They end up with the R&D dept coming up with products and concepts for the electronics dept which have to keep the media and content dept happy - that means bundles of DRM obviously - but if you invented succesful formats before - or helped in the creation of them - and got bundles of cash for it why wouldn't you do that again.
Radio over the internet is great untill the conection goes "a bit funny" and it stops streaming or drops to a lower sample rate.
Also how do you listen to it on the move - I can't listen to it in the car or on my portable device.
Then there's the problem whereby you can't go to your local comet (or other electronics store) and buy a radio for the office that has an ethernet port on the back - and no i'm not going to connect my computer up to the stereo becase evry time someone IM's me or I get an email or windows breaks you get horible alert noises that would drive everyone insane!
Surley these problems are why these broadcasters are having problems.
Thats no laughter track, thats just how us Brits laugh!
You can have the best sig in the world on paper but when you try and wite it on that wee strip of writable plastic on the card it never comes out right, so your signature is always a bit different on card versus paper. At the checkout the last thing that the person on the till is going to do is question you if the way you crossed the T looks a bit out of place - especialy, as you say, for £4.50/$8 an hour.
Thats why when my bank started to offer their cash cards with the signature laser printed on under the protective plastic i was very impressed - not only because the box you had to sign in on the form was large enough to write in but because they also lasered on my photograph too. So if you don't look like me it doesn't matter how well you forge my signature!
I was under the impresion that the NSA wasn't allowed to spy within the US and GCHQ in the UK wasn't allowed to spy within the UK - so GCHQ spies on the US and the NSA spies on the UK and then the CIA and the SIS(MI6) trade the information that each other gathers, hence bypassing the needs of warrents and other anoying legal type stuff! Hence my tinfoil headwear.
If more radiation hits the Earth and the Sun is spewing out more heat, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this? I've been bouncing this idea in my head for a while now and I can't see why this MAY not be true.
I've had that idea in the back of my mind for a while now too. Thing is i've done various google searches for data on the output of the sun over the last few decades and haven't found anything yet - i can't help but feel howevewr that the increase in storms and freak weather, plus the melting of some glaciers (many are actually growing!!) is more to do with more radiation from the sun heating the planet up rather than an increase in CO2. Thats not really an indepth explanation but I haven't got time to go on at length at the moment.
Personally, I believe Intel see this as a way to make money off the RIAA and MPAA - sponge off of their paranoia
You're totaly right! When i read that bit i had a lightbulb moment
Intel as a corporate entity looks at other corporate entities much as i look at other people - thinking the phrase "possible clients".
I mean it's stupid to consider Intel as a partner in some sort of ludicrously evil plot against mankind. They make a range of products and they've seen a market for a new type of product from some "possible clients" who are moaning that they need to do a particular task.
The problems arise of course because of the (non-existant??) evil partnership of Intel and MS as this is exactly the sort of technology that MS wants to control the Internets and everything I see. But even then is Intel really rubbing their hands together saying "finaly the evil plan is coming together!!!" or "bonus, another client for our new technology that cost us loads to R&D and we need to make some money back before our shareholders do nasty things to us!"
I'm not defending them and i'm not saying there aren't evil plans either, just that when you take an objective look at it, it appears like very normal business practice.
And since i pay my TV licence that pays for the BBC that should mean that it's my recording so I should have access to it.
If they get anoyed about this what are they going to say when the BBC archive goes live online?
So, quick question: Windows has appeared to evolved into a seriously fragmented OS. How many different versions of Windows are there? There is a Mobile, Embedded, Server, Pro, Home, Starter, Handheld......What else?
I'm not having a go but how many linux distro's are there? Before you stab me in the eye i'm a linux fan but the difference is that all the versions of windows work - for the end user - pretty much the same. In linux, there are so many desktop enviroments - and iterations of the the desktop enviroments - that it really (IMHO) turns people off - thats the key to why windows is world dominent, by having the market share everyone knows how to use the OS and feels comfortable in the "enviroment". If everyone had linux - that would of course be great but - when someone took a new job they'd have to spend ages getting used to the differnt desktop enviroments, never mind doing any work - of course thats asuming you'd let them have a gui...
I totaly agree.
For one thing i hate the sevices that the operators say you want but i hate the idea of downloading music and video over my phone when i have DSL sitting at home and at work which is faster so i can get bigger files which are better quality etc, etc...
I also believe that since i use my mobile phone for and during work all day everyday and find that its hard enough to keep it charged anyway, why would i want it to then have to play music too? Bigger battery? I think i would prefer a small lighweight phone thanks and choose whether to take a music device with me or not. On the flipside, if i was using my phone as an mp3 player could i turn the "mobile" part off when i'm out of work? - i doubt they'd make it that simple would they?!
I agree. Lets face it, the moon is as far as a human has ever travelled in space (ie in terms of distance away from the earth) and that was 30 odd years ago. How can we sit here on this planet and think that we can just work it all out like that.
I always like to think of the start of the last centuary - around 1900 - victorian scientists had it all worked out, think dalton sphere and then think 50 years in the further on when we'd seen the atom split.
I'm not going to claim that anyone's wrong and i'm no expert myself but isn't it just possible that we really don't understand in any way what we're talking about?? I mean are you really sure that if you take all the matter and light and heat and energy in the entire universe and compress it into a little ball so that it explodes that photons won't go 4x10^8 m/s??
Then again, Im pretty sure I'd be happy with that quality..
I totally agree. Film has a double edge to it, on one side is its (almost) infinte resolution but OTOH it fades every time you expose it to the really bright projector light. That means that new big blockbusters that get hammered over the first weekend of showings look absolutely awfull come Monday, almost to the point that you wouldn't want to see the film in that condition - certainly not for £5!!
But even in small cinemas the digital revolution will be a great thing too.I visited the small indepengant cinema near me the other day. In the 40 seat "screen 3" that i was in they have this old projector that outputs a picture thats smaller and no brighter than a 2000 ansi lummen desktop data projector - which you can buy for easily under £2000. I'm sure that you'd want something better for a cinema of course but you get the idea.
I think you're right mostly but I would say this...
:\
I'm comfortable in the windows enviroment, i know that its helishly buggy and quite badly put together but I feel comfertable. I don't like macs - I don't like their OS - even though I know that its built better - cause I'm maybe a bit stuck in my ways now and I'm not into this design nonsense for what is efectivley a box that sits under your desk. I like to build my own computer and you really can't do that with apple - you can with *nix though but I don't know how to speak *nix and quite frankley I don't know that I have the time or patience to learn. Then (AFAIK) you are up against the fact that top hardware may not get drivers because the manufacturers won't release the source PLUS even if you could most (all?) games are not realeased for *nix apart from TUX racer and I think you can get AAO now too.
Quite simply, I'm all for MS being cut down to size but untill there is either a straight-forward replacement OS to migrate to OR a *nix release that is preconfigured to install onto your machine and then boot into (eg) X which has full driver support for your hardware and has the full range of Apps AND Games then I guess I'll keep running MS
The reason the developing world is still developing is because of the government for god's sake.
Which government, yours or theirs?
I know that the Brittish Empire, as it was, hand a big old hand in "conquering" the "savage lands", striping the wealth out of these countries and pulling out leaving no stable government in place as they left creating poor nations with BIG power vacumes. Many other European countries can hold up their hands along with us Brits to that sort of behaviour too. [These areas include the Middle East and Africa and you can definatly draw a parallel between our {the west} behaviours in these areas and the instability we have today.]
And then with the cold war, America and the USSR pumped money and arms into the same ex-european colonies around the world to support regiems they could control and fight each other through. [This is where the actual _war_ part of the cold war took place]. Then "the wall" came down and they washed their hands of their dirty work leaving these countries in a state of ruins where civil war still rages in many of these areas.
And now today, the decadent western world talks of helping them out by cancelling some debt that, in many cases, has been paid back many times in interest alone, but won't give them what they need - the free trade agreements that would help them actually have an economy of growth. This would help many other problems too.[Even more off topic but e.g. giving coca farmers in South America a real reason to grow other crops and help end their reliance on the only crop that will get them any money at all.]
So don't blame the governments of the developing world for being what we created them to be.
PS. Sorry for my spelling.
...everything to do with Earthquakes that are going to happen anyway...
I'm no earthquake expert or weather expert so don't flame me for this but i did have a thought about that the other day. If the atmospheric temperature is higher does that not heat up the actual earth which could trigger more earthquakes as the energy in the mantle is higher?
Is also important that both the asian tsunami and the year before the Iranian earthquake happened when that "geographic region" or "tectonic plate" or whatever it is, was being exposed to "summer time"?
I don't know if thats clear or not and I have no scietific basis for this idea other than the idea of higher temperature increases preasure which needs to be vented ie earthquakes.
It's probably taken its design from the Inovason SY80 or the Digico D5
End piracy? No. You're just as delusional as the *AA if you think there's a magic bullet to end piracy. A positive step towards ending it? Fuck yes.
I agree but for a different reason. One of the major factors in why there is a big piracy issue (IMHO) is deffinatly having regional release dates. If a film is released in the US and released globaly within the week well thats just fine, however much of the films are not. There can be more than a month between US and European releases.
For example, top 5 US Box Office[www.imdb.com]:
1 Coach Carter
2 Meet the Fockers
3 Racing Stripes
4 In Good Company
5 Elektra
Top 5 UK Box Office[uk.imdb.com]:
1 White Noise
2 The Aviator
3 Alexander
4 The Incredibles
5 Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
See the difference? But its worse when it comes to TV shows, there can be over a year between whats happening in the states and whats happening in Europe, and thats also if any of the channels decide to pick up the shows that people actually want to watch.
No, you're never going to end piracy, or probably crime in general, but you can try to do everything to prevent it happening and earn more money in the process too.
It's funny but since I moved into my new house (I live in Scotland) I can now only get 4 analogue channels - there's no cable in my village, I can't get a terestrial digital signal (called Freeview) and I'm not giving any of my money to Murdoch/BSkyB.
However, my analogue picture on my £150 21" Aiwa TV is remarcably better quality than the picture that my parents get from their cable box through their £600 Sony 32" Trinitron.
The difference is that the bandwidth thats used on the cable and satalite pictures here is shockingly low and analogue gives such a better picture.
Unfortunatly over here in the UK they are going to switch the analogue service off in about 3-4 years time, its almost a shame!
You can't be bothered to walk down to the local video/music/software store?
Actually its very hard to get to my "local" video/music/software store as i live in a small village nowhere near a city and they tend not to stock things that I like.
Can't work up the energy to log on to Amazon.Com?
Yes, however it will take a minimum of 3-5 days for anything to reach me and if i'm out during the day, which i am, i'll have to go to pick it up from the very_far_away postal depot at my earliest convinience, if they haven't "lost it" by the time i can get there.
iTunes takes too long?
No, it doesn't and is exactly my point.
If there was a legal way to download movies and tv shows and software (like HL2 is) then i'd use it.
I'm not trying to justify illegal P2P activity, just point out that some of the people using the facility might be doing so for other reasons than getting the stuff for free. It turned out that iTunes was a big hit and you hear less about music piracy these days (IMHO), is it not reasonable to assume that similar results might be achieved with "iMovies" or "iTV"??