This is not a "resolution," this is the enforcement of a consumer protection law. The FTC has been given the authority to levy fines for those infringing on the various laws they enforce (a complete list of consumer protection statutes enforced by the FTC can be found here: http://www.ftc.gov/ogc/stat3.htm.
I don't get this argument. Adobe owns Acrobat and Microsoft is unwilling to meet their price on negotiating a continued partnership for Windows Vista. How is this antitrust exactly?
First off, Adobe is itself a de facto monopoly - sure the PDF is open, but Adobe makes any and all money on it, and there are no competing standards at all (they buy all their competitors, including Macromedia.)
Secondly, Microsoft choosing a different format for their documentation is not an antitrust violation, and since they are selling their Office Suite independently (as required by the antitrust settlement), again, no laws are being violated. (You have to be forced to *buy* something for it to matter.)
And finally, many of Microsoft's troubles in the past have been tied to them taking open standard products (a la PDF) and converting them into MS-only formats and software via their monopoly. THAT is what gets them in trouble with the DoJ and consumers. Coming up with a new format for PDF is nothing new for MS; they also had the Microsoft Reader for e-Books, which used its own format. So now they're repeating the same old business, but I imagine every US government agency in existince (which all use PDF as the standard) will nip this one in the bud rather quickly, or force MS to come up with some resoution with Adobe.
I think the RIAA's ship has sailed though. Everyone knows their greedy, thieving little liars and blowhards. AllOfMP3 still has a chance to show the world (and potential US customers) that there is a real air of legitimacy to them.
Also, since Russia is trying so hard to join the WTO, soon there will be a big trade treaty in place which will make Russian companies like AllOfMp3 much more susceptible to interference from the RIAA. So don't act as though AllOfMp3 has some permanent sovereign immunity - Russia is pushing hard to become just like America.
Maybe we ought to just have a website where people post their Linux distro problem, the Google search they performed, a Google Cache link to the result they used, and an epilogue on the success and failure.
Then someone can compile it all into a PDF, call it "Linux Server Documentation" and update it every month.
Or maybe we should start a Linux Server documentation Wiki.
Seriously, the idea of centralization is our friend.
The parent strikes exactly at what the GP was complaining about: "poor documentation/changed install" = "free to create your own" in the Linux world. If instead it translated to "improve documentation, have valid and constructive changelogs", how much better off would OSS be?
I did not read the article, but as the former manager of a radio station, I'm well-versed in the requisite laws of royalty payments to rights owners. And AllOfMp3.com's general reticence to transparency with regards to a) their ownership, b) their process of acquiring music, and c) their general lack of cooperation with overseas authorities who wish to ascertain more info about and b.
I'm not saying they're illegal in the US or any of that nonsense. I am saying that their image is that of a Russian bootlegger *despite* their payments to ROMS, which by the way, does NOT absolve them of their responsibilities to pay other licensing agencies abroad (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC in the US) nor does it absolve them of any other licensing issues they have with the United States. In short, they are treading on what is essentially UN-litigated ground - nobody has set the ground rules. The RIAA is trying to set the ground rules, and AllOfMp3 is being delightfully piratical in their responses and general behavior, which is just fuel for the fire.
It is only completely legal if they make the proper payments to the songwriting rights holders. Which is the point of this article. The best thing AllofMp3.com could do would be to raise all of their prices by 1 cent per megabyte (or some other appropriate value) and stay ABOVE BOARD on all payments to all license holding entities. One of the major reasons people on this site and across the world think they're illegitimate is because they ACT shady about EVERYTHING.
First, you picked three children's series. Children's books have featured serial characters since well before Hollywood (Mary Poppins, Tom Swift, and the Oz books, for example) because children attach more easily to characters than to plots.
Secondly, you picked on the horror genre, which feeds itself on the possibility that no matter how many times you "kill" the monster, he may return - it in fact revels in the immortality of its villains. It's spawned a lot of in-jokes, but the genre has never apologized for this behavior - the killers *are* the stars people pay to see. Again, characters drive these movies, and if characters don't resonate, horror movies flop big-time (witness the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which despite an excellent premise, featured much-less truly creepy baddies.)
Now back to the topic, if Hollywood could learn anything from the game industry, it's that people like original and inspired characters. Gamers would be quick to name their favorite characters: Mario, Zelda, Solid Snake, Master Chief, Sephiroth. It's hard to find similar affinities within the demands of the 2 hour movie, but when exceptions are made, those characters *really* *really* resonate: a quick look at the top 25 grossing movies in the US of all time reveals:
Jack and Rose. Star Wars. Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo... Shrek, ET, Harry Potter, and Spiderman the Lord of the Rings. Great characters that translated wonderfully from book to screen. Jesus Christ (the Passion.) Captain Jack Sparrow Forrest Gump
And just below it you see a litany of interesting, riveting characters worth watching over and over again. Even adjusting for inflation, we see characters like Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, Moses (The Ten Commandments), and Jaws and Captain Quint.
If I haven't said it enough, characters, characters, characters that people can relate to and admire drive all interest in entertainment, both gaming and filmwise. Hollywood has spent too much time lately dredging up characters only a few people were interested in (apologies to the niche markets of Fat Albert, Dukes of Hazzard, and Josie and the Pussycats aficionados) and trying to pass them off as something bigger.
But the truth (of course) is that this is nothing new! Hollywood has been making cheap forgettable pictures since its inception - we just never see the treacle in between all the goodness on the filtered Turner Classic Movies - or even in the bargain bin at Best Buy. Want proof?
Check out the filmography of Andy Clyde. A lifetime vaudevillian at heart, as a bona fide *star* (equivalent to Adam Sandler or at the least Tim Allen) he made 300 (!) movies from 1923 to 1950, mostly playing himself or California Carlson, his alter ego. These movies were made for Columbia Pictures, and were decent draws in their day. Yet I'd be surprised if anyone here had ever heard of Andy Clyde until now.
We can go more modern, too - beach movies from AIP, blaxploitation in the 70s, bad spring break movies of the 80s, it doesn't matter. http://us.imdb.com/company/co0020206/ There is a link to every movie MGM has put their stamp on. There are of course some great ones, some very good ones, and some average ones. Look at the movies distributed between 1984's excellent The Terminator (#328) and the equally excellent 1986 film Hoosiers (#287). Of those 49 movies, I have seen exactly 4 of them - A Chorus Line, Rocky IV, Poltergeist 2, and Haunted Honeymoon - none of which were that great. The other 45? I've hardly heard of any of them. And you can do this for any era of movies, with any company.
The simple truth is that for every good movie, 20 bad ones are made, at every level, from Hollywood to Bollywood to indie cinema. Sturgeon's Law holds true, and no amount of "learning" from the gaming industry is gonna change that.
The real problem with artificial intelligence of course is that humans (and indeed, almost all animals) learn through a variety of frameworks and methods, and learn extremely abstract concepts that are hard to quantify (hence the birth of fuzzy logic), something computers are more or less unable to do given current technologies.
However, I think a very useful application of the AI we have created now and these avatars would be very narrowly-tailored computerized "bots" who are experts in various (but limited) fields. In particular, I think most on-line educational courses, continuing education courses, adult education courses, and recreational courses could benefit from having full 24/7 access to an "instructor" well-versed in that field alone.
Consider an avatar that can teach you terminology and methods, provide feedback on your decisions, and offer you a nuanced dialogue when you have questions. You could have a day-trading guru, a Photoshop instructor, a DIY assistant for plumbing, tiling, and auto repair, a Spanish or French coach, a medical dictionary with pictures and examples, your own chessmaster or bridge partner, a chef, a computer technician, a personal trainer.
You could even have professional versions for specific fields: a Perl debugger that can point out logic loops and a better method for storing data, or a judicial assistant with intricate knowledge of copyright law, tax law, IT law...
I think the avenue for modular, specialized, and limited "weak" AI bots is rapidly approaching, as interconnectivity, capacity, and computing speed technologies have converged to a point where things like Cleopatra are thought of as not only possible, but likely. It is less a question of if but when, but this is clearly an underrepresented market at the moment, and I'm excited about the changes on the horizon.
They sell their (anonymous) user data to 3rd party marketers and advertisers.
Pandora also has a subscriber service, which offers a few insider-ish advantages to its users for fairly cheap. But their real money comes from selling user data.
All three of these criteria have a long-standing judicial precedent (see Miller v. California, 1973, and the many cases that led up to it through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.)
They are extremely well-crafted, in that it is hard to prove something is obscene/overly violent/unacceptable, but if something can be proven to be just that, there is very little wiggle room for appeal.
Your arguments (witless and trollish as they come across) are exactly the same debates that go on when judges try to determine whether something is obscene, offensive, or objectionable in this country already. Within the minutiae of any given subject, arguments can be made that this is of an "artistic value", is not "patently offensive", etc. That's why we have the judicial process.
And PS "community standards" means the community surrounding the point of sale, usually defined as the city, township, or sometimes county depending on the level of incorporation. So, yes, Penthouse can be banned in Knoxville, Tennessee but still be legal in Hartford, Connecticut. But banning it in Knoxville doe snot also ban it in Hartford.
Seriously, could you bother to read even the slightest bit of jurisprudential history before commenting so dumbly on well-written legislative texts?
This is a Canadian story, but I promise you the same law is in effect in the United States (but I don't want to spend a lot of time Googling for it at work.) Source.
Uhh - at least in Texas (and many other states) school districts are considered autonomous government bodies, equivalent to a city, in which they can make their own rules and laws for governance, including rules that define conduct and behavior of the students, and punishments for violating those rules.
So, yes, yes they do have that authority. Now perhaps in Illinois the state legislature has binding and exclusive authority over the laws of school districts and their boards, but the only way you can defeat a Texas school district law is through court appeal.
That's not true at all. If it costs you $10 to sell a product, and you are selling it for $12, and suddenly prices rise and it costs you $13 to sell the product, you can make up that extra dollar by either:
a) raising your price (to increase revenue) b) bringing on advertising dollars to reduce your own costs
Which is what the movie theaters did. They didn't tack on advertising dollars to make an extra buck, they did it to make *a* buck. Period.
One of the reasons Major League Baseball has a de facto monopoly unchecked by Congress or anti-trust legislation is because MLB has "proven" (with varying degrees of success) that the market for professional baseball is pretty much limited by location, initial startup costs, and fan base. Because they are limited by infrastructure, location, and population in the viability of entering all markets, they can act as a "natural monopoly."
Concert venues and Ticketmaster appear to work in the same way, but if the venues (which are owned by large conglomerates) can get a better deal (*and* the same amount of ticket sales) from a cheaper company, then they will do so. So somebody just needs to step up through the ranks and compete with Ticketmaster.
No, that's not quite what happened, because the person selling the land immediately saw the mistake between the price and what was offered, and complained. There was no realization that something seemed amiss and then a shrug.
I would think that the negative PR NASA engenders over every mistake big and small - and in particular the disproportionately negative PR it received over the loss of the shuttles in comparison to the many successful missions gone unnoticed over the years - would mean that they of all people would indeed try to fix *every* problem, and err more on the side of "let's try to fix it" rather than "let's pick and choose our battles." They have so much more to lose than even large civil engineering firms if, say, a bridge or building collapses.
You mean Titanic, the #1 grossing movie of all time? The spiderman and x-men movies? The Lord of the Rings trilogy? King Kong? The Matrix movies? War of the Worlds? The Day After Tomorrow? The Planet of the Apes remake?
All of those movies are in the top 100 grossing movies of all time.
I don't get this logic. Movie theaters don't make any money on the actual showing of the movie - that all goes back to the distribution companies (conveniently owned by the moviemakers themselves.) They make their money on advertising and food sales (both of which are rising due to slumping sales.)
But more to the point, ad revenue is used to offset the price of the things you buy, and at a rate considerably higher than the increase in price that would occur without it. Without ads, movies might cost as much as $15-$20 a ticket; games, $75-100.
In fact, this is more or less the "social contract" we as society has with advertising: they subsidize the art we patronize (movies, games, television, magazines) in exchange for agreeing to hear their spiel on various product. And because they are targeted advertisers (a 1% sales success rate can pay for an ad in many cases), they lower the cost of the art by more than what we as individual consumers could do - even in a collective.
The best way is to make the "human eyes" not anonymous.
I suggest that we open up kiosks at shopping malls, Wal-Mart, and other retail stores.
"Spend 2 Minutes Pointing Out Spam for a chance to win a $1,000 Shopping Spree!"
Simply give every customer 10 emails to look at, and say whether they think it's spam or not.
Not only does it guarantee good faith (there are a lot more non-spammers than spammers), but it prevents hacking (by requiring physical presence and limiting everyone to a one-input model.) The only downside is the initial cost of infrastructure, and getting people to play along.
I'm sure ISPs, telecom companies, and small business associations don't like having their bandwidth filled with spam, scams, and phishing. So that at least counteracts the direct marketing lobbyists.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly does getting one's girlfriend pregnant involve violence and hatred?
This is not a "resolution," this is the enforcement of a consumer protection law. The FTC has been given the authority to levy fines for those infringing on the various laws they enforce (a complete list of consumer protection statutes enforced by the FTC can be found here: http://www.ftc.gov/ogc/stat3.htm.
I don't get this argument. Adobe owns Acrobat and Microsoft is unwilling to meet their price on negotiating a continued partnership for Windows Vista. How is this antitrust exactly?
First off, Adobe is itself a de facto monopoly - sure the PDF is open, but Adobe makes any and all money on it, and there are no competing standards at all (they buy all their competitors, including Macromedia.)
Secondly, Microsoft choosing a different format for their documentation is not an antitrust violation, and since they are selling their Office Suite independently (as required by the antitrust settlement), again, no laws are being violated. (You have to be forced to *buy* something for it to matter.)
And finally, many of Microsoft's troubles in the past have been tied to them taking open standard products (a la PDF) and converting them into MS-only formats and software via their monopoly. THAT is what gets them in trouble with the DoJ and consumers. Coming up with a new format for PDF is nothing new for MS; they also had the Microsoft Reader for e-Books, which used its own format. So now they're repeating the same old business, but I imagine every US government agency in existince (which all use PDF as the standard) will nip this one in the bud rather quickly, or force MS to come up with some resoution with Adobe.
I think the RIAA's ship has sailed though. Everyone knows their greedy, thieving little liars and blowhards. AllOfMP3 still has a chance to show the world (and potential US customers) that there is a real air of legitimacy to them.
Also, since Russia is trying so hard to join the WTO, soon there will be a big trade treaty in place which will make Russian companies like AllOfMp3 much more susceptible to interference from the RIAA. So don't act as though AllOfMp3 has some permanent sovereign immunity - Russia is pushing hard to become just like America.
Maybe we ought to just have a website where people post their Linux distro problem, the Google search they performed, a Google Cache link to the result they used, and an epilogue on the success and failure.
Then someone can compile it all into a PDF, call it "Linux Server Documentation" and update it every month.
Or maybe we should start a Linux Server documentation Wiki.
Seriously, the idea of centralization is our friend.
The parent strikes exactly at what the GP was complaining about: "poor documentation/changed install" = "free to create your own" in the Linux world. If instead it translated to "improve documentation, have valid and constructive changelogs", how much better off would OSS be?
I did not read the article, but as the former manager of a radio station, I'm well-versed in the requisite laws of royalty payments to rights owners. And AllOfMp3.com's general reticence to transparency with regards to a) their ownership, b) their process of acquiring music, and c) their general lack of cooperation with overseas authorities who wish to ascertain more info about and b.
I'm not saying they're illegal in the US or any of that nonsense. I am saying that their image is that of a Russian bootlegger *despite* their payments to ROMS, which by the way, does NOT absolve them of their responsibilities to pay other licensing agencies abroad (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC in the US) nor does it absolve them of any other licensing issues they have with the United States. In short, they are treading on what is essentially UN-litigated ground - nobody has set the ground rules. The RIAA is trying to set the ground rules, and AllOfMp3 is being delightfully piratical in their responses and general behavior, which is just fuel for the fire.
It is only completely legal if they make the proper payments to the songwriting rights holders. Which is the point of this article. The best thing AllofMp3.com could do would be to raise all of their prices by 1 cent per megabyte (or some other appropriate value) and stay ABOVE BOARD on all payments to all license holding entities. One of the major reasons people on this site and across the world think they're illegitimate is because they ACT shady about EVERYTHING.
First, you picked three children's series. Children's books have featured serial characters since well before Hollywood (Mary Poppins, Tom Swift, and the Oz books, for example) because children attach more easily to characters than to plots.
...
Secondly, you picked on the horror genre, which feeds itself on the possibility that no matter how many times you "kill" the monster, he may return - it in fact revels in the immortality of its villains. It's spawned a lot of in-jokes, but the genre has never apologized for this behavior - the killers *are* the stars people pay to see. Again, characters drive these movies, and if characters don't resonate, horror movies flop big-time (witness the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which despite an excellent premise, featured much-less truly creepy baddies.)
Now back to the topic, if Hollywood could learn anything from the game industry, it's that people like original and inspired characters. Gamers would be quick to name their favorite characters: Mario, Zelda, Solid Snake, Master Chief, Sephiroth. It's hard to find similar affinities within the demands of the 2 hour movie, but when exceptions are made, those characters *really* *really* resonate: a quick look at the top 25 grossing movies in the US of all time reveals:
Jack and Rose.
Star Wars. Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo
Shrek, ET, Harry Potter, and Spiderman
the Lord of the Rings. Great characters that translated wonderfully from book to screen.
Jesus Christ (the Passion.)
Captain Jack Sparrow
Forrest Gump
And just below it you see a litany of interesting, riveting characters worth watching over and over again. Even adjusting for inflation, we see characters like Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, Moses (The Ten Commandments), and Jaws and Captain Quint.
If I haven't said it enough, characters, characters, characters that people can relate to and admire drive all interest in entertainment, both gaming and filmwise. Hollywood has spent too much time lately dredging up characters only a few people were interested in (apologies to the niche markets of Fat Albert, Dukes of Hazzard, and Josie and the Pussycats aficionados) and trying to pass them off as something bigger.
But the truth (of course) is that this is nothing new! Hollywood has been making cheap forgettable pictures since its inception - we just never see the treacle in between all the goodness on the filtered Turner Classic Movies - or even in the bargain bin at Best Buy. Want proof?
Check out the filmography of Andy Clyde. A lifetime vaudevillian at heart, as a bona fide *star* (equivalent to Adam Sandler or at the least Tim Allen) he made 300 (!) movies from 1923 to 1950, mostly playing himself or California Carlson, his alter ego. These movies were made for Columbia Pictures, and were decent draws in their day. Yet I'd be surprised if anyone here had ever heard of Andy Clyde until now.
We can go more modern, too - beach movies from AIP, blaxploitation in the 70s, bad spring break movies of the 80s, it doesn't matter. http://us.imdb.com/company/co0020206/ There is a link to every movie MGM has put their stamp on. There are of course some great ones, some very good ones, and some average ones. Look at the movies distributed between 1984's excellent The Terminator (#328) and the equally excellent 1986 film Hoosiers (#287). Of those 49 movies, I have seen exactly 4 of them - A Chorus Line, Rocky IV, Poltergeist 2, and Haunted Honeymoon - none of which were that great. The other 45? I've hardly heard of any of them. And you can do this for any era of movies, with any company.
The simple truth is that for every good movie, 20 bad ones are made, at every level, from Hollywood to Bollywood to indie cinema. Sturgeon's Law holds true, and no amount of "learning" from the gaming industry is gonna change that.
The real problem with artificial intelligence of course is that humans (and indeed, almost all animals) learn through a variety of frameworks and methods, and learn extremely abstract concepts that are hard to quantify (hence the birth of fuzzy logic), something computers are more or less unable to do given current technologies.
...
However, I think a very useful application of the AI we have created now and these avatars would be very narrowly-tailored computerized "bots" who are experts in various (but limited) fields. In particular, I think most on-line educational courses, continuing education courses, adult education courses, and recreational courses could benefit from having full 24/7 access to an "instructor" well-versed in that field alone.
Consider an avatar that can teach you terminology and methods, provide feedback on your decisions, and offer you a nuanced dialogue when you have questions. You could have a day-trading guru, a Photoshop instructor, a DIY assistant for plumbing, tiling, and auto repair, a Spanish or French coach, a medical dictionary with pictures and examples, your own chessmaster or bridge partner, a chef, a computer technician, a personal trainer.
You could even have professional versions for specific fields: a Perl debugger that can point out logic loops and a better method for storing data, or a judicial assistant with intricate knowledge of copyright law, tax law, IT law
I think the avenue for modular, specialized, and limited "weak" AI bots is rapidly approaching, as interconnectivity, capacity, and computing speed technologies have converged to a point where things like Cleopatra are thought of as not only possible, but likely. It is less a question of if but when, but this is clearly an underrepresented market at the moment, and I'm excited about the changes on the horizon.
I didn't know Ovaltine had been invented in 1862 ...
They sell their (anonymous) user data to 3rd party marketers and advertisers.
Pandora also has a subscriber service, which offers a few insider-ish advantages to its users for fairly cheap. But their real money comes from selling user data.
All three of these criteria have a long-standing judicial precedent (see Miller v. California, 1973, and the many cases that led up to it through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.)
They are extremely well-crafted, in that it is hard to prove something is obscene/overly violent/unacceptable, but if something can be proven to be just that, there is very little wiggle room for appeal.
Your arguments (witless and trollish as they come across) are exactly the same debates that go on when judges try to determine whether something is obscene, offensive, or objectionable in this country already. Within the minutiae of any given subject, arguments can be made that this is of an "artistic value", is not "patently offensive", etc. That's why we have the judicial process.
And PS "community standards" means the community surrounding the point of sale, usually defined as the city, township, or sometimes county depending on the level of incorporation. So, yes, Penthouse can be banned in Knoxville, Tennessee but still be legal in Hartford, Connecticut. But banning it in Knoxville doe snot also ban it in Hartford.
Seriously, could you bother to read even the slightest bit of jurisprudential history before commenting so dumbly on well-written legislative texts?
This is a Canadian story, but I promise you the same law is in effect in the United States (but I don't want to spend a lot of time Googling for it at work.) Source.
Way to rip off The Onion. It's called karma for a reason, dude.
Uhh - at least in Texas (and many other states) school districts are considered autonomous government bodies, equivalent to a city, in which they can make their own rules and laws for governance, including rules that define conduct and behavior of the students, and punishments for violating those rules.
So, yes, yes they do have that authority. Now perhaps in Illinois the state legislature has binding and exclusive authority over the laws of school districts and their boards, but the only way you can defeat a Texas school district law is through court appeal.
That's not true at all. If it costs you $10 to sell a product, and you are selling it for $12, and suddenly prices rise and it costs you $13 to sell the product, you can make up that extra dollar by either:
a) raising your price (to increase revenue)
b) bringing on advertising dollars to reduce your own costs
Which is what the movie theaters did. They didn't tack on advertising dollars to make an extra buck, they did it to make *a* buck. Period.
One of the reasons Major League Baseball has a de facto monopoly unchecked by Congress or anti-trust legislation is because MLB has "proven" (with varying degrees of success) that the market for professional baseball is pretty much limited by location, initial startup costs, and fan base. Because they are limited by infrastructure, location, and population in the viability of entering all markets, they can act as a "natural monopoly."
Concert venues and Ticketmaster appear to work in the same way, but if the venues (which are owned by large conglomerates) can get a better deal (*and* the same amount of ticket sales) from a cheaper company, then they will do so. So somebody just needs to step up through the ranks and compete with Ticketmaster.
No, that's not quite what happened, because the person selling the land immediately saw the mistake between the price and what was offered, and complained. There was no realization that something seemed amiss and then a shrug.
What will they say when 500 more ServerChecks "emerge" from the woodworks with a giant class action suit?
I would think that the negative PR NASA engenders over every mistake big and small - and in particular the disproportionately negative PR it received over the loss of the shuttles in comparison to the many successful missions gone unnoticed over the years - would mean that they of all people would indeed try to fix *every* problem, and err more on the side of "let's try to fix it" rather than "let's pick and choose our battles." They have so much more to lose than even large civil engineering firms if, say, a bridge or building collapses.
You mean Titanic, the #1 grossing movie of all time? The spiderman and x-men movies? The Lord of the Rings trilogy? King Kong? The Matrix movies? War of the Worlds? The Day After Tomorrow? The Planet of the Apes remake?
All of those movies are in the top 100 grossing movies of all time.
I don't get this logic. Movie theaters don't make any money on the actual showing of the movie - that all goes back to the distribution companies (conveniently owned by the moviemakers themselves.) They make their money on advertising and food sales (both of which are rising due to slumping sales.)
But more to the point, ad revenue is used to offset the price of the things you buy, and at a rate considerably higher than the increase in price that would occur without it. Without ads, movies might cost as much as $15-$20 a ticket; games, $75-100.
In fact, this is more or less the "social contract" we as society has with advertising: they subsidize the art we patronize (movies, games, television, magazines) in exchange for agreeing to hear their spiel on various product. And because they are targeted advertisers (a 1% sales success rate can pay for an ad in many cases), they lower the cost of the art by more than what we as individual consumers could do - even in a collective.
The best way is to make the "human eyes" not anonymous. I suggest that we open up kiosks at shopping malls, Wal-Mart, and other retail stores. "Spend 2 Minutes Pointing Out Spam for a chance to win a $1,000 Shopping Spree!" Simply give every customer 10 emails to look at, and say whether they think it's spam or not. Not only does it guarantee good faith (there are a lot more non-spammers than spammers), but it prevents hacking (by requiring physical presence and limiting everyone to a one-input model.) The only downside is the initial cost of infrastructure, and getting people to play along.
I'm sure ISPs, telecom companies, and small business associations don't like having their bandwidth filled with spam, scams, and phishing. So that at least counteracts the direct marketing lobbyists.