>>Along these lines, what use is the capital punishment if it doesn't punish capital?
>>
>>I mean, for capital offenses like spamming and telemarketing.
>
>I have to factor in that your childhood was spent in the socialist cocoon so you didn't develop the immunity to advertising that many of us did <bg>

Au contraire, mon ami. That's when I developed the aversion. We were a socialist market economy since mid-sixties ('63 or '65, can't really remember). So worker-managed enterprises were freely competing on the market, and the larger ones have discovered advertising. You won't believe how fast I learned to despise it. And I was just at the age of 10 or so.

>But there is kind of a problem for you with TV - you don't want ads but you don't want to pay for it.

I want to pay for it. We can haggle, but I do want to pay for ad-free TV where you can see some culture. Show me the world, show me the world's art. I want to see Shakespeare festival, I want to see Aida performed at Giza, I want to hear whoever is the equivalent of Andy Warhal, Susan Sontag, Salvador Dali, any of those smart guys - Chomsky maybe - speak for an hour without being cut mid-sentence, I want some unbiased news (I really wish they'd stop China- and Russia-bashing for a while and start reporting instead, BBC included) which wouldn't be reduced to soundbite sized headlines but actually have some content, show me any Dutch or other criminal series, a Thai love drama, and show it all in enough detail that I can really feel I saw something - not zap through it like the Travel channel does (yes, I know they are actually selling travel, and I took some time to see what they sell - gave up when I saw that I saw nothing about everything).

> Do you expect the Big Government TV Fairy to provide free, live, spontaneous content? Maybe make TV producers, actors, writers, directors civil servants? (hey, that may be a plank in the Democratic platform so you may have hope <g> )
>
>TANSTAAFL <s>

Free? Never was free (as in "free beer" and as in "liberated"), and we all know it, so that guy never had straw enough to be a man.

And yes, I'm not imagining - we had it. Can't say how it works now, because it's now a public service, pretty much BBC-like, funded by mandatory subscription (attached to your electricity bill) and still full of ads (worst of both).

But what'd be wrong with that, to complement the rest? As much as state owned TV network was wrong - it wasn't wrong for what it did, but because it was a monopoly. Nowadays when the emission spectrum is for lease to the best bidder to fulfill a public need, there's competition. So, IIRC, Italy has RAI (state network) and a bunch of private networks (I know, we watched them... when I was in the service, on a hill on the coast... if you turn the aerial just right, you watch soft porn on Rete Quattro or Canale Cinque); UK has BBC and ITV and whatnot. So why is the US afraid of letting a public service into the mix? Something that would be just granted sufficient funding to be independent... from commercial interests. Which would then finally have some competition.