Are you sure about that?

If Porche starts selling cars with a digital lock on the gas cap that only pumps at gas stations that pay Porche a third of their revenue can unlock, you can bet there is going to be antitrust scrutiny for tying. Especially if "Porche" has close to 50% of the installed base of cars.

Do you think there's nobody outside the US that buys movies/music/software that are under US copyright protection?

China Syndrom film release date: March 16, 1979.
Three Mile Island Accident date: March 28, 1979.

The equity in the house is included. If they've lived in the house for 25 years then they very nearly own it (but still have to pay a huge chunk of their after-tax income every month for the remaining payments). Throw in a retirement fund marked "do not open until age 65" and a college fund for the kids and you can easily have $1M in assets without actually being able to spend any of it.

And yet it happens every day.

But it also seems like they're missing the point. OK, so actual photographers need better optics than you find in the typical phone. So why don't they just make a phone designed for photographers, which includes a camera with better optics and a more professional photography UI?

Or to put it a different way, this interesting product is conspicuously missing the ability to make cellular voice calls for no apparent reason.

I believe the point is that an OpenCL transcoding algorithm running on a typical GPU will make doing it on a CPU look silly and pointless, so who cares how fast the CPU can do it when you're going to do it on the GPU anyway?

I love advertising. I block it because it's the opposite of what I want.

Some may say I'm doing the adverse of what I want.

Some may say that to get people to do the adverse of what they want would be called "advertising".

I wouldn't know, cuz I'm an idiot and block out all the good shit, why listen to me!

Lemme get this straight, you were seriously looking to buy a diesel Beetle, and you found out they were making one from an ad?! The only reason they decided to market a diesel Beetle is because people like you got off their asses and demanded it. You speak like the ads brought your diesel Beetle to you. That's just so un-Fahrvergnügen.

I've long been a defender that the next generation Beetles aren't gayer than a treeful of chickadees, but I'm not sure I can extend my persuasive powers to include the diesel model after what I've read here. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Advertising literally means to get people to do what they do not want to do, the adverse. If they were just promoting one option over another that would be called divertising, to divert you to the preferred option over the other.

Fact is that most of what advertisers do is the promotion of what they're paid to promote. But the industry still chooses to use the term 'advertising'. It's like running for political office under the "Totalitarian Fascist Party" pitching to represent the constituents' best interests. Okay, bad example...

Let's try the obligatory car example. It's like claiming that the car you're selling is the best way of getting around despite all other sustainable means that undermine the infrastructure that make cars necessary, which other departments in your company are battling unmercifully. Err... that doesn't work either...

Umm, maybe it's like the farmers in India who were persuaded to use genetically modified seeds... Err, sorry, they're not around anymore to comment.

OK I got it! It's like knowing what you want to do, but getting paid to do something else, and then it bites you in the ass. But that NEVER happens, right?

That seems even less coherent. All you're saying is that you can have a patent system that allows anything to be patented. It has nothing to do with the makeup of the economy. If the economy is manufacturing-oriented then you could just as easily have patents on manufacturing methods, manufactured products, etc. And if the patent office granted patents of the same breadth and quality as they do software patents then you would have people with patents on "method of affixing one material to another" running around suing the pants off of anyone who dares to manufacture a product using nails, adhesives, zip ties or rubber bands.

Now you're just playing the sleight of hand where you classify everything that isn't physical as "intellectual property." Copyrights and patents don't play a dominant role in the jobs of an insurance adjuster or a nurse etc., notwithstanding that their work product isn't always "tangible."

The bigger question is how people still see ads at all. Is their ad blocker malfunctioning?