I like this comment. I'm reminded of a recent interview that Neil Degrasse-Tyson did with the director of several big blockbusters. Neil called him out on a shot where there was a big lightning storm on the horizon and the sound of the thunder was coincident with the lightning in the distance. The director laughed and said he originally cut it with the real sound and the long delay was off-putting, despite being accurate. Apparently the accurate sound pulled you right out of the movie (because the delay was like 7-8 seconds).

Interesting that "real" sometimes doesn't help tell the story, and it can even hinder it.

The point about the dealerships is that several states have protectionist laws that prohibit direct sales from an auto manufacturer. They require a separately owned dealership.

Tesla does not sell through separate dealers. They only do direct sales.

It was a complete puff piece, but I did really like one voiceover quote:

"In the history of space exploration, four entities have sent a capsule into orbit and successfully recovered it. Russia, the United States, China and Elon Musk."

If I was Elon, I'd have that on a continuous loop somewhere.

Artor3 has you there. I was going to post along the same lines, but I think that pretty much covers it. Everyone is susceptible to confirmation bias and a myriad of other logical fallacies that support our personal world view. If you think you are exempt, that's just because your own biases are particularly strong.

I gotta agree with the furry fungus here - this legislator was spending his career expanding the prohibition of guns while allegedly being involved in the black market for guns.

Drug and alcohol prohibition and the black markets they create are directly applicable examples for this discussion. Although it is admittedly pretty rare for the perverse incentives to be as directly applied as they are in this case. Usually it just involves interested parties like police and prison unions and private prisons lobbying (donating to campaigns) for more prohibition.

You are correct. Ad-hominem is only a logical fallacy if you are arguing against my point of view.

I don't know. "receive a digital version" is somewhat ambiguous. I might interpret that to mean that I would get a copy of the movie that I could keep and use offline, not just a licence to stream the movie from their service.

I'll add one more requirement: the popular/standard format should be convertible to other formats for viewing on disparate devices.

Dear Hollywood,

I would like to be able to pay you a reasonable fee for a permanent and transferable license to view your movies in any and every format. I want to be able to watch flawless HD on my 60 inch display at home, compressed HD on my tablet, and highly compressed lower def files on my cell phone. I want to be able to use the hosting service of my choice for streaming content, not be tied down to any one company once you've sold me the rights to a given movie.

Make this happen at a reasonable cost and you'll earn most of our business while cutting out the middle men who take such a large slice of your revenue. No, it won't end piracy. But if you make it cheap and convenient enough to pay you for content that we can use in the ways that we would like, you'll get that piracy level as low as it will ever be possible.

"Downloaded" or "Streamed"? Having a downloaded copy of a movie and being able to stream a movie from their servers is not the same thing. If they told me I would be able to "download the movie" or they would provide a "digital copy" I would expect a copy of the entire film on my local machine that I could access at any time even offline.

If they said they would provide access to their streaming service for the film I would have different expectations.

It sounds like they are not allowing a copy for download. This is something that I find very annoying about digital media services. Amazon allows me to download a copy to 2 devices at a time, but only movies that I own. The movies from their Prime service cannot be downloaded. This is a bit of a PITA with the ability to play children's TV shows being one of the major benefits of the Prime service. Not so useful when you take your Kindle into a restaurant that doesn't have free WiFi available.

On the last test the stage began to spin too rapidly and the engine shut down because the fuel was slung out of reach of the fuel intake. This time they will have the legs attached which helps with stability on the way down. The water part is just for safety - if you lose control during a landing in the middle of the ocean you crash in the middle of the ocean. Losing control on the way back to Canaveral and crashing into Cocoa Beach would be bad.

Because this is 20 years later and now it is cool to make things look retro. In the 70's a faded color photo taken with a brownie camera wasn't retro, it was your family photo album.

Kodak did have a film camera that carried the film in a "floppy disk" cartridge. I think that thing was in the "truth is stranger than fiction" category.

Gah.... touchpad mouse controller deleted a line - about TV manufacturers not touting their paid service apps in an expensive ad campaign during sporting events.

About the paid content - one thing us computer nerds are really good at is being correct while getting it wrong. I was sure that the paid services were a dumb idea from the jump - for the same reasons the GP stated. Those reasons are right.... yet reality didn't turn out that way. My old CEO and I used to talk with a couple of our sales directors about our marketing and we had all kinds of points that we felt were really important for informing our customers about their choices. (and they were in fact the salient points if you wanted to make a good decision about using our products). The people who work in sales and actually know what the customers really want told us very succinctly: "You don't think like normal people think." Apparently people don't always evaluate things using the same criteria as one would expect.

But then, as techies we should know this. In 2014 you will still help someone who has lost their important document and ask them "where did you save it?" only to receive the reply: "In Word." It has only been 30 years, nobody should be confused about application/data/file/storage anymore - yet that is more the norm than our mindset.

Nobody would ever subscribe to a service that provides content, particularly DRM video. Things like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Redbox, Vudu... that will never fly. And nobody would ever buy a little box like a Roku to play the services on their TV when they already own a PC. And no TV manufacturers would ever include applications for such paid services in their television sets during the NCAA national championship game and NFL playoff games. Not to mention cable and satellite as paid content providers with DRM.

Maybe people are willing to pay for DRM protected video content. Perhaps there are some other types of content that they are less willing to pay for, like traditional newspaper services. And some types of content that they just won't pay for at all, like blogs about some chick's cat toys. People even pay for porn on the internet for some reason, to the tune of many, many billions of dollars.

Sometimes old truisms are true, like "The only constant in business is change."