I may be somewhat intelligent, but I'm biased so not the best judge. Thanks for noticing though. My family, friends and community members might assert otherwise, but I try my best. My greatest triumph was my teenaged daughter who recently declared that "You're pretty smart, dad". If you have or have had teenaged children, you'll know that such an unsolicited statement is as rare as winning the lottery and shockingly gratifying. And fleeting because you're destined to be a clueless dumbass a few minutes later. :-)

I question your premise that the existence of something that couples users to YouTube equates to a blanket condemnation of the service as evil and exploitative. The above-mentioned daughter has a YouTube account to which she posts videos, so you could declare she was "coupled" to the service, but she's not forced to use it and she can post the same videos anywhere else she wants without worrying about exclusivity restrictions. Anyone at all can view videos posted to YouTube without restriction or being coupled to YouTube. I don't deny that the ease of posting videos and the fact that the potential audience is unlimited and unrestricted might bring back repeat users regardless of the quality of the service (whatever that means), but you haven't made a case for why that is bad. Sounds like a desirable feature to me. And those features are available without the element of coercion that so many other services seem to deem obligatory.

So please elaborate what it is you want me to see, because I'm not seeing the evil you apparently think is the defining attribute of the service. YouTube brings back repeat users because of the quality of the service. There seems to be little else of a coercive nature that "forces" users to use the service, either as content providers or enjoyers of content. YouTube is as "take it or leave it" as the internet itself. View the videos or don't. Where is the evil?

Greetings Bob9113.

Please forgive me if I disregard all your academic arguments about economic philosophy that are based on one term I used ("free market") because that was the most concise term I could think of using the english language. There is no dogmatic and irrational belief in lassaiz faire at work here.

I'm not sure what features YouTube has that couple users to it, because I've never had a YouTube account, yet I can go to YouTube and watch absolutely anything (with the exception of a few vexing restrictions when using a mobile device). I'm not forced to use YouTube for anything, and plenty of videos I watch are provided by services other than YouTube. Lots of stuff is on YouTube, but I don't feel particularly coupled to it. In fact, I'd classify YouTube as the most uncoupled service on the internet because I am not forced to be a YouTube user in any way, yet I can watch any YouTube video I wish on just about any device I own.

More importantly, I can choose to NOT watch YouTube videos, and there is plenty of interesting information out there that does not use YouTube.

I'm not seeing the closed market you are describing, at least with respect to YouTube. I DO see a closed market with other services that require me to use that service exclusively to see something, but YouTube has been pretty egalitarian in my experience.

So what is your point exactly, and what service do you use that is more free than YouTube?

Nonsense.

Google spends time, effort and resource to create the infrastructure for a music streaming service that requires daily, constant effort to maintain, and so gets to define the terms.

Musicians spend a few hours/days/weeks/months/years creating songs, then look for ways to milk that brief period of productivity for a lifetime (and for their descendants or estates as well, because copyright).

What musicians don't do: create their own music streaming service built on their own terms and funded by them, asking for the fees they sincerly believe they deserve. And then test it in the free marketplace and discover what the true value of their work actually is. And adjust their model until they have come up with a viable and sustainable business. That's what musicians don't do.

Yet when someone else does all the work for them but actually wants to get something for THEIR effort that actually reflects the cost and effort involved, it's evil and exploitative.

Strong arming? Threat? De-listing? Bullshit. Use the music service someone else created for you, find another that suits you better, or create your own. That should be how things work in a free market.

I can't blame those who are actually doing the hard work for refusing to cater to the exaggerated sense of entitlement that pervades the culture of 'creatives'. For every artist that is sitting on their duff crying out about the unfairness of these services, there are probably a hundred hard working people that get up every single day to collect their tiny paycheck in order to make that service viable so the artists can reap the rich benefits they think they are due.

Indeed. You could probably find plenty of volunteers right on this site. In fact, I'll go first and point out that Linus never uses ALL CAPS to repeatedly berate someone. He wields his derision as a surgeon wields a scalpel, using proper english and punctuation and rarely if ever repeats himself.

Stupid git. :-)

More importantly, does the fact that you declined the privacy policy mean that the services function without gathering your personal information or is it gathered regardless of your preference? In a way, the behavior of LG is more honest, since they have to spend money and resources to make the 'smart' services work. If you're not paying a subscription, you're paying with your valuable private information. I suspect that information is too valuable for other vendors like Samsung to ignore despite the pesky fact that you declined to accept the privacy policy. That's a revenue stream they just can't ignore, since there seems to be little consequence if they do, unless some government or lawyer decides to make something of it.

"Mmm, bacon ..."

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki......

Shockingly, maybe decent people inside BT that are of the opinion that child pr0n is vile and shouldn't exist thought that filtering might be a way to keep vile people from accessing this material easily. Even for-profit companies engage in activities not directly related to profit, whether contributing to charities (eg. sponsoring events, matching employee contributions etc), supporting the local communitiy and so forth. Companies are made up of people, and many of those people want to do good in the world. I'm not sure filtering is the most effective way to combat child abuse, but I can understand why people might want to give it a try. At the very least they make it harder for people to use their facilities (the network, in this case) to contribute to something they find wrong.

Your statement if altered slightly to reflect the perspective of the NSA and the US government might actually provide insight into the reason behind the outlash against Edward Snowden. One would presume such tampering isn't done wholesale because doing so on an industrial scale is not feasible. Yet. And because ubiquitous tampering would be detected by security researchers so the majority of devices on the market should remain untampered with. Tampering is most effective when done in a targeted manner depending on who will own the routers in question. Maintaining a baseline level of trust that is actually justified is very important, otherwise this technique wouldn't work. Mr. Snowden's revelations have destroyed all trust, thus undermining the ability of the NSA to ride on the back of that trust to engage in targeted spying.

This is why it baffles me that people can so readily point to entities like Startpage and Duck Duck Go as trustworthy just because they say so. Their claims may indeed be accurate for the vast majority of those using their services, but it's easy to imagine that particular searches can be scrutinized on demand if there is an interest. In other words, they can't be trusted based on their claims alone, even if they themselves believe them to be true.

It seems to me the only rational approach is to assume that nothing can be trusted and and act accordingly. Assume that whatever you are doing online is being observed by someone or anyone and don't communicate about genuinely private things, because they will no longer be private.

Addendum: I was right. Modded as Troll. Another /. achievement recieved. Yay.

I'm working on it. Almost there, but I still trip and fall down if I don't alternate chews and walking steps. I'll master the skill eventually, thanks to your helpful encouragement.

Once I have achieved walking/gum chewing mastery, will you respond with something more intelligent than a silly non-sequitor question that adds nothing to the conversation, makes you snicker to yourself at your clever superiority though you've really said nothing of substance?

Is that a serious question? Spying is just information gathering. Information alone is powerless - it has to be used to be a threat. To be precise, it can be used to direct where the police should apply their power. It seems reasonable to worry about both, as they go hand in hand.

I'm sure this will get modded as Troll, but of all the things to get worked up about, this seems pretty unimportant. Given all the things of actual significance going on in the world right now (NSA/GCHQ/everyone_else spying, erosion of civil liberties, widening wealth gap, ever increasing police powers, etc.), why is this so all-important? Let it go and fix the world around you - it needs it more.

Depends on what you're correlating and how you categorize your observations.

In the case of successful people, not watching TV doesn't cause the success, but preferring habits conducive to success may cause no TV to be watched.

In the case of the homeless, not watching TV doesn't cause homelessness, but having no TV causes no TV to be watched.

So two different causes in two different contexts can result in the same outcome - not watching TV.

Interesting arrangement. Not quite the (vague) point I was trying to make, but tangentially related. The common and most important element of course is that the content *is* paid for, not "stolen" as the anti-sharing forces and their apologists frequently declare. I would suppose that a sizeable fraction of downloaders on the internet have paid for the content in some way, possibly multiple times. So the accusations that the creators haven't been compensated for the content people are "stealing" rings a bit hollow.

The arrangement you describe seems a bit iffy since you don't all seem to reside together even if you're sharing the bill. Your arrangement seems similiar to paying for service at one location and stringing cables to the neighbors, which is frowned upon by the providers. On the other hand, if everyone in your group subscribed to a package at their own residence that at least contained the channels of the shows they actually retrieve and watch, then your arrangement is just a more elaborate form of a DVR.

My argument was more along the lines of:

- I am required to purchase a bundle including channels in which I have no interest in order to subsidize less 'popular' content that can't be sustained by an ala carte model.
- I am given no alternative. It's pay for this bundle and all the content, or nothing.
- I am legally permitted to record content on any of those channels using some form of recording device (usually a DVR) to watch at a later time.
- There is no mandated time limit on how long I can retain the recording or how many times I can watch it.
- There is no mandated restriction on the reason I did not watch the content as it was broadcast. "I wasn't interested at the time" seems just as valid as "I wasn't home", "I had to respond to an unexpected emergency", "Thought it might be cool so I recorded it just in case".
- There seems to be no real limitation I know of on the method the content is recorded for viewing at a later date. DVR, video tape, camera etc. As long as it's for my personal use, I'm legally allowed to timeshift content I have paid for.

So now I've subscribed and paid for a bunch of content and all parties have been compensated according to the model created to make sure that happens. And it's sustainable because the content providers are still in business (and reaping record profits), the content creators are still in business (and were compensated enough to keep making more content), etc. I've paid more than I wanted to sustain a business model that includes a rich and varied ecosystem of channels rather than being able to sustain the most popular.

So sometime later, I become interested in a show that was broadcast on a channel I subsidized, or I'm traveling and don't have access to my recordings at home, or my DVR broke, or whatever. So I find the show on TPB, retrieve it and watch it. Suddenly I'm a pirate "stealing" content I didn't pay for when I fact I did.

There are a lot of holes in this reasoning I'm sure (many of the actions above probably violated terms of service if not laws), but the essential fact remains: the content was paid for which takes some of the wind out of the sails of the argument that all filesharing/unauthorized downloading equates to theft and lost sales. That argument would be a lot stronger in an ala carte model where the customer was allowed to pay only for the content desired rather than being forced to pay for additional content that wasn't.

In a way, bundling weakens the argument that downloaders/file sharers don't pay for their content. Anyone who has had a cable subscription for any length of time has paid for every program aired during the duration of that subscription and has the right to watch them. With a multi-channel tuner and a DVR with really large storage capacity, every show on every channel of interest could be saved for later viewing, legally. It's not a big stretch to view the cloud as the aforementioned DVR. In a sense, filesharing could be viewed as extreme timeshifting, at least for anyone who had cable when the show in question was broadcast.