However I look at these numbers, it appears that UK cops have got to be the highest-paid in the world.

Your comment wouldn't be stupid, if Congress didn't already have hundreds of pages of law about this very topic, to address various industries' entitlements to have special powers and exclusive rights granted by the government at the expense of the people. But they do. Congress is already pointing guns at peoples' faces, saying "do this business, this way or else." This is already a "market" (and I use that term loosely) where how it works is centrally planned. And it fails to deliver adequately or live up with the constitutional justification for it. What I'm proposing is an everyone-wins fix.

If anyone actually had a problem with "entitlement" here, someone would have voted that way by now. So far 100% of Congress (can't even find Rand Paul to suggest he'd be an exception) is still supporting some level of regulation of these industries, not advocating copyright be abolished, etc. We tried the radical-left-overregulated approach (DMCA) and it failed; now sit down, shut the fuck up, and let libertarians solve this mess. Yes, libertarians. I may be talking about pointing guns at peoples' faces too, but if you're paying attention you'll see it's a shitload fewer guns aimed at fewer people than the status quo, and every bit of it is based upon accomplishing the goal as stated in Article 1 Section 8.

I know I've been trolled, but .. damn. We've had DMCA on the books for about fifteen years and no one does anything about it, and then someone has the fucking nerve to suggest my idea involves entitlement? No, fuck you.

I didn't notice what I did until I read your reply.

I really started using github regularly at the same time that I started using github.

It's grown to so much more than the underlying version control software.

They shouldn't ask. They should just do it.

Heck, I'm no programmer at all (more a PHB), but I could fake my way through explaining both of those.

Remember this list 15 years ago, when they called it ECHELON instead of PRISM...

Good explanation. Upon reading GIT's comment, I initially assumed the two compounds were just different due to chirality and was hoping to have learned an interesting factoid. Then I found out she was just painfully wrong. And then her reply shows that she is willfully wrong as well.

Read more, type less; you may learn something.

Line up deals with content sources..

This is actually very close to right (you're not crazy), but it's wrong.

What this industry's player products, video services, and the users of those products and services, really need is for the player-manufacturer-makes-a-deal-with-the-service-provider to not happen, and for all the industry's mis-steps in this direction, to be rolled back.

If we can prevent these deals from happening, and instead put pressure on these video services to conform to a STANDARD INTERFACE for doing the same kinds of operations that you talk about -- so that any player is allowed to implement it, then Tivo (and MythTV and Sickbeard and AppleTV and your "smart TV" and Intel's new product and Roku and the hacker in the garage next door) would just have to write one component that speaks that protocol, and you would be able to use your player (whatever that may be) with any and all video services that you subscribe to, without giving a competitive advantage to Amazon and Netflix and Hulu (and by corollary: a disadvantage to their competitors, both present and future) .

Standard interfaces are what made analog TV (both OTA and cable) great. It's what makes OTA digital TV great, and it's how digital cable fails and why people stopped subscribing.

It's what made the web great.

This is how video could open for business again, instead of giving up and admitting that pirating is the only way to get things to work right. And right now, pirating is the only way to get things to work right, have clean interfaces, be user-friendly and hassle-free, etc. It's not even about money right now, it's about not-brain-damaged functionality and the fact that pirates use standards and the people they pirate from, don't.

Using congressional force to make video services use standards instead of DRM, would be easily justifiable and there's already ridiculous amounts of precedent (thanks, fifteen years of DMCA) that it's within Congress' powers and that no voters have a problem with it. It'd vastly improve the quality of consumer experience, and increase revenues since it'd remove the need for piracy. If video copyright can still be saved, this is how it'll be done.

But we can't get there, the more "deals" that are made between manufacturers and service providers, to make things work about 25% as well as they ought to while at the same time, excluding competition and innovation. That just makes it harder to get progress, and with each passing year of the current clusterfuck, more consumers "drop out." This should have been part of the 2009 mandatory digital OTA TV thing.

What crash? There will be no crash, just a steady devolving and regression. Every civilization has it's rise, glory and decline and fall, and we're witnessing the fall. As in the Roman fall, it will take generations. But happen it will.

We'll become more and more like Greece, which now has a 77% unemployment rate for those between 20 and 24 years old.

Where is the "Pork Fat" there? I tell you where it's not... it's not out whoring so they can eat that day.

If it makes your miserable life any more tolerable, keep hoping and dream "the man" gets what's coming to him.

He probably won't. You, however, being much more closer to the edge, most likely will.

Lack of that phrase is probably to appeal to European and Chinese movie goers.

Arrogant teenager? What a concept.

Played in a triple billing with the fabled Matrix sequels that never got made.