General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Beneficial use of collegiate football in our society is extremely limited. Apart from those students who use it as their only exercise to stay fit, college football matches are used exclusively for entertainment. Yet this collegiate sport does not require much skill to cause repetitive brain injuries, often to students who play ball only to get into college. So spare us the stupidity of the "sports are for athletics, sports don't hurt people, etc". So people should have access only to participate in the sports they have a reasonable use for. They should be licensed, and inspected regularly for head trauma. It costs our health insurance companies quite a bit of money to cover sports injuries, after all.
Yeah, see how well that line of thinking would fly. You see, the problem with thinking of that sort is that it's a slippery slope.
Your logic is weak and based on comparing on equal grounds things that are not equal. You are comparing sport that is practiced by willing and informed participants following strict rules to somebody walking to you and in violation of the rule (law) shooting you. Do you see how this is not a slippery slope?
Besides, Europe has, pretty much, got U.S. per capita deaths due to guns converted to similar order of magnitude per capita abductions into the sex trade. I think I'd much rather my kid be dead, thank you very much.
That's not true. I am not sure where are you getting your statistics from but here is where I get mine: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop No EU country is even close to US.
I recall when
And I recall the time when baseless conspiracy theories were laughed out Slashdot instead of being moded "Insightful".
1) Detecting a switch from stereo to mono is bypassed by broadcasting commercials in the same audio format as the program.
2)This can result in false positives by having black frames between scenes in the programming.
3)What if they didn't utilize any cue tones?
There's no theoretical reason that a commercial could not be made completely indistinguishable from the broadcasted program by an automated appliance without developing an AI that is about as intelligent as a human being.
1. All these approaches require changing the current systems at the content providers. Some how it is always easier to spend money on lawyers than on R&D.
2. The content providers actually need the add queues to provide regional and interactive advertising. Certainly these can be removed when the ads are inserted, but again this will require changing the current systems.
3. All these countermeasures can be circumvented by fingerprinting the ads. Yes, couple of ads can slip the first time they are aired and the viewers are watching the live stream. But both the satellite and cable providers can/do update their boxes remotely, so I can imagine that new ads will be picked up quite quickly. I can also imagine that it will not be hard to find volunteers to identify and fingerprint the adds that slip the filter.
This is an arms race that can prove very expensive and with low chance of success for the content providers. I think they may have a better chance at protecting at least in part the ad revenue by reducing the add content, increasing the ad cost and pushing interactive ads. This will also put pressure on advertisers to rely more on the quality and less on the quantity of the ads. Then again they can simply sue everybody, including their customers.
Disclaimer: I have recently cut my satellite TV connection, as I didn't see any value in paying subscription fee for obnoxious ads. I am currently paying directly for what I want to see by using Netflix and Amazon
That would certainly deter me from buying products that were manufactured or contained parts that were manufactured abroad.
Name one such product.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro