So what stops them from using variety of real products without the paid placement to keep things realistic?

Having a disproportionate amount of a single company's products filing a scene, or in use by characters throughout the show, is also quite noticeable. Outside of going in a company store, can you give me an example of going somewhere and having a brand image being a noticeable part of of the experience? I can't even say going into my school's computer labs, filled with desktops from a single brand of would have qualified, and that was over a course of four years.

Yet something about the camera angles, prevalence in the world, choice of local contrast, etc. makes you notice Dell in V for Vendetta, for example.

Haven't experienced this with my 2009 unibody with an nVidia card on Lion, but it does not seem like I should be expecting to either.

In any case, I have Windows on bootcamp if bugs in Lion ever become an issue. Unlike Lion which only has partial OpenGL 3.2 support, I get full OpenGL 3.3 support on the windows side, so I'm on there for my graphics coding projects anyway.

Even if they are a generation behind in their GPU (I'm thinking mid to low-end GTX 4xx equivalent), that would still put them significantly ahead of XBox 360 and PS3 in terms of hardware. (Assuming other hardware is reasonably capable capable as well.) Considering how the Wii compared to the state of the art on its release, that seems the high end of something to reasonably expect.

If not mistaken, that would give them a two generation lead on the 360 and PS3 in terms of what they can actually program the cards to do. (Don't know the real term, thinking shader model though.) Think two generations in terms of a jump from DirectX 9 capable to DirectX 11 capable, not simply incremental GTX 2xx - 3xx card series generations. For starters, that would give them GPU tessellation in the "traditional" rendering pipeline, and real GPGPU capabilites (think CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute), not just what you can shoehorn into shaders. Even the low of reasonable expectations, a simple DirectX 9 - DirectX 10 equivalent jump would give, them a lot of this.

I don't expect the hardware will be competitive to the Next Generation of XBox and PS systems, but even the low end of what to expect should still be significantly more capable than the 360 and PS3.

One of the things I have liked about the Wii is getting the games, and feeling like I have purchased a complete game. No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete. The simplicity of the Wii is what got me back into gaming, and the aforementioned aspects of the "Digital Market Place" being so integrated into the gaming experience, or at least how publishers exploit it, is what's driving me away.

To me, a true HD Wii with a modern GPU, decent raw processing power, and higher capacity media for games would be perfect.

That "selling a copy" did not stop working. Even with piracy, which has been around a lot longer than 10 years, it generates billions in revenue. It's more that it doesn't work for them in terms of the strict control they would like to have over your use of it. But for a sale, protecting a copyright and controlling use may overlap to a certain extent, but are very different things.

Copyright is not impossible to enforce to a reasonable extent. A system where revokable keys to copyrighted content would have to be provided to anyone able to pay some reasonable fee. Their device or application would stand up to a court assessment similar to the betamax and limewire cases (including risk for damages if it doesn't), and revokable keys would make such rulings enforceable enough. That would be enforcing copyright.

Licensing the ability to make devices that can access peoples' purchased content on the conditions that they will only function as content holders see fit is controlling use. That this scheme effectively supersedes any rights that a purchaser might legally have and, more than anything, I think has signified the shift to what could be described as an "Imaginary property" model. Since this model became prevalent with the rise DVD 10 years ago, that would coincide with your estimate.

I don't really see those "free as in beer" people as being all that different from the MPAA/RIAA. They both think they can define what property really means on the basis of the beliefs that suit them, actual laws (hopefully made without corrupting influences) that define such things and related rights be damned. They are just on the other side of the same coin.

I am not overly concerned about the content that is on my shelf being DRM-free. I am more concerned about that DRM being too big to fail. Examples: Blu-ray is cracked, but they have to live with it because it's just not practical to replace everyone's players and movie collections to close that hole. Same with the HDMI private key being out in the open. I just want devices for playback to be prevalent, and able to work with the content on my shelf even if I never had an Internet connection in my life.

That being said, all the other points you made are exactly why I will NEVER "purchase" a "cloud" copy of anything. It is reasoning that translates to the average joe pretty well, and they just might realize that for what they've spent on their purchases, they could have rented a stream the number of times they ended up watching them for a lot cheaper.

Yes, If you replaced your TV with Internet based services, you'd go over the cap. That is exactly the point.

For a family of four, each with their own shows, that would be thirty minutes a day per person. Not much even for people who do get outside, if we overlook the fact that it's a red herring. Up the quality of the video to something that is not full of block artifacts or smoothed to wax, ie something that resembles HD in not just video resolution but also actual picture quality, and that time goes down significantly.

Whether people should go outside more or not has no bearing on the fact that the cap is about inhibiting competition.

The last tablet I helped someone with was a Microsoft Signature from HP. I'll grant that the bloatware was cut down. Instead, there was a lot crap related to the HP side of the "experience". They still had their pen software, and a lot of it was some part of HP Touch, provided by some other company that might have otherwise put the software as a "basic" edition on a non-signature machine. Some basic functions, such as the screen being reoriented when rotated, were buried in this heavyweight, HP branded "Touch" experience, when they could have been provided by small, "you don't know they're there" device drivers.

It is good to know Microsoft realizes the damage PC manufacturers are doing to Windows brand by including bloatware, but having it wrapped it in a custom "experience" does not get rid of it.

This kind of statement reminds me of Michael Bay saying something to the effect of, "I know people hate product placement, but without it, these movies would not be made."

Turns out that payment for the product placements was all of $850,000 on a movie with a budget of $126 million.

I know for a fact that is not true, because $1500 have been lost in sales from my immediate family alone, and the bloatware is the sole reason.

People ask me for advice on what to buy, and I now tell them Apple, and the problems with bloatware are the sole reason. That is $1500 is not the money that went to Apple, that is money the would have spent PC laptops. More went to Apple, and it has been worth the extra money.

Pretty much all the problems they were having were bloatware related, and when they would let format and put "plain, off the shelf" Windows their systems worked. However, they don't want to jump through the hoops to get the equivalent of a boxed OS from the manufacturer. They don't know how format the drive, and install a clean OS, and get the drivers. They don't want to wait til the next time I visit to get and use their computer. (And I don't want to spend that precious time building their systems either.)

It got to the point that I would refuse to assist them with their PC problems, in any way, if it the system had not been wiped (including the"recovery" partition), and had an "off the shelf" OS installed. If they did not want to do that, they could get an Apple, and feel free to call me with problems. A couple went the "wipe and start fresh" route, but most just decided to get Macs. Either way, support calls are now few and far between, and the Windows people were just as happy as the OS X people. But then, as the bloat on PCs become more and more attached to device drivers, all of their purchases became Macs.

The Dells, HPs, etc. (From your message, I assume you work for one of them.) can continue to think that bloatware does not take its toll on their bottom line. Or, they can open their eyes, see Apple kicking their asses in customer satisfaction, profits, and increasing market share. Ditch the bloatware, and maybe that trend will reverse.

So basically, Comcast has the right idea, they just need to be giving Netflix speed above that for which subscribers are paying?

All I really see happening with your suggested model is actual tier speeds remaining stagnant with insufficient caps, and ISPs using that as leverage to extort tolls from companies that wish to deliver to their customers. Why should an ISP offer a better speed at a reasonable rate to a single subsciber if they can extract multiple fees for that same bandwidth from every company that wants sufficient access to a potential customer?