Actually, it's hyperbole, not parody. It's exaggeration for emphasis. I must have told people this a million times.;)
For something to be libelous, at least in the US and probably in Canada, it has to be likely that someone will believe it. See 'Hustler Magazine Inc and Larry C Flynt v Jerry Falwell', where Hustler asserted that Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse. The courts said 'While that is a lie, it's a lie that no reasonable person would believe, and hence it's not libel.'
So the question is: Does anyone actually believe uncited claims on a damn YouTube post?
Of course, this officer sued everyone, anyway, including people who clearly didn't state anything but opinions. Like the guy in the linked article, who said 'officer bubbles probably looks at himself in the mirror a lot.', which is quite obviously an opinion.
In fact, one of the claims of the suit was that the comments imply he's a narcissist.
Now, there is something called 'narcissistic personality disorder' that you could plausibly sue someone for claiming you had, as you either have that or don't have it, but 'narcissist', like 'stupid', is an opinion about personality. There is no such thing, objectively, as to whether or not someone is a 'narcissist', and hence if I want to call someone that, I can, period.
At least in the US. Who knows what sort of stupidity is going on in Canada.
Despite the common misconceptions about it, the First Amendment does not grant people the right to slander or libel.
Correct.
The standard regarding ridicule used to be whether the person was "a public presence", or something to that effect.
And now you're in some damn stupid universe that you just invented. What the fuck is a standard regarding ridicule? Your first sentence didn't say anything about ridicule.
Ridiculing people is entirely legal, and has nothing to do with slander or libel. 'Ridicule' just means to mock, to make fun of, to cause laughter at.
You can ridicule people with lies, which can be slander or libel, you can ridicule people with opinions, you can ridicule people with facts. Here, I will demonstrate by ridiculing you three times:
LIE: You know less about the law than a baboon. (And, you will note, while that's a lie, it's clearly hyperbole, not intended to be believed by others, and hence not libel or slander. Aka, the 'Jerry Falwell is a motherfucker' rule.)
OPINION: You're an idiot.
TRUTH: You have corrected someone who was correct, with a falsehood. Universe 1, You -1,000,000
All those statements ridiculed you, none of them were libelous.
The only thing that's even vaguely relevant is that 'public' people have a lower standard toward repeated 'gossip'.
I.e., if I assert that Tom Cruise is gay, I'm probably safe from a lawsuit. If I assert some random guy is gay, I could get sued. Basically, with public people, you have a duty just to not say thing you know aren't true, whereas with private people, you have to check more, under the theory that a single lie repeated can easily destroy a private person's entire reputation, but public people have the ability to 'push back' against stories, and a megaphone to do it with. So it's harder for public people to sue if you're 'wrong', but thought you were right, whereas private people are still damaged no matter what your intent, and can sue if you're just careless. (Like Richard Jewell did to the AJC after they made him out to be a terrorist.)
That's about the only difference there, and totally irrelevant if someone is being ridiculed or not. It is perfectly legal to mock anyone at all. (Although some 'bullying' laws change that, but usually only include children.)
It's worth pointing out that, under US law, it would be pretty damn amazing if any comment on a video was libelous, because part of libel is that the speaker has to be believed. Even if there were outright falsehoods on the comments that would be very damaging if people believed them, the question then becomes: Who the hell believes 'facts' posted by angry people who everyone knows just watched the video and made up some crap?
But he apparently sued everyone anyway, including people who didn't even claim to have any facts, like the guy that posted 'officer bubbles probably looks at himself in the mirror a lot.' which is pretty clearly a guess, and, duh, not intended to be believed as a 'fact'.
Although who knows what the hell the law is in Canada. If stating guesses about people, clearly labeled as guesses, is illegal, than Canada is broken.
Threatening to kill someone actually is assault. It's battery that's actually hitting someone. Assault is just an immediate credible threat and the ability to pull it off. Aka, someone standing there with a baseball bat who swings it near your head a few times to scare you...just committed assault.
I'm not sure that someone in the back of a police car can be said to do that, though.
However, that doesn't mean there's any justification for tasing someone trapped in the back seat of a police car.
And, of course, thanks to the dash-cam, they had an open and shut case for assault against the police, and hell, probably could have gotten him denied bail (If, after you're arrested, you threaten to kill people, they'll deny your bail pretty automatically.)...but they fucked up and who knows what happened.
It's rather hilarious how a 'pro-police' idiot managed to describe some police behavior that is blatantly illegal.
I'm with you. They're supposed to be peace officers, and yet not a single fucking one of them appears to know how to respond to 'a large group of people'.
I fail to see how having random people in charge would be worse.
I think they're essentially talking about memory that doesn't need to be refreshed and thus use power. It's essentially 'eInk memory', or a million time faster Flash memory.
With a CPU that can turn itself off, a screen that either turns itself off or is static (eInk), and memory that doesn't use power when not reading or writing, you end up with a device that uses almost no power when not in use.
Of course, if it's a cell phone, obviously it's going to use some power to run the antenna. But that's actually a separate chip anyway. (A few, in fact.) The computer part of a smart phone isn't operating the antenna, so you wouldn't have to power it at all until a call actually came in. (Or until a push notification came in, which makes that entire concept even better.)
A very interesting thing that no one is talking about power-failure proof computers. If the power fails, just have the computer, essentially, 'pause', until it comes back. It'd probably be a few seconds reinitializing everything, but it could continue right where it left off.
Likewise, there's not really any point in 'suspending' a computer with this. A well designed OS should slowly shut down all devices that aren't in use, and then independently suspend each program by giving them no timeslices (Or, even better, come up with some API for that so that compatibly programs could be told what's happening.), and stop the processor when there's nothing to do. Which could wake up to process interrupts, but even be smart enough to put all that code in the CPU cache so that the memory isn't touched until it needs to be.
As was pointed out by others, we can't do real intelligence, because we have no idea how, and, no, we can't just let it run randomly until it gets it right.
What we can do, however, is language processing, which we can do by throwing CPU at it. Even visual object recognizance.
Combine that with better speech rendering that doesn't sound crappy (Which also takes CPU.), and you've essentially got an Eliza-bot that can understand speech and make speech, and even understand what you're pointing at.
And combine that with cheap 'set top' boxes, except not at your TV but one for each room, with a camera, a mic, and speakers, and that's the point that we can do actually workable 'home control' systems.
Houses that know who you are, can control lights on voice command or just movement, can recognize visitors, etc. With enough intelligence to mostly 'do the right thing', and enough learning to figure out what we want. Take messages and everything.
Aka, the classic 'smart home', that always failed previously because we couldn't communicate with it, and it sounded crappy when communicating with us, and those failures are entirely due to processing speed.
And at that point, it's a race to automate everything, or rather, hook it into the network so some computer can automate it. Automated door locks, where the house knows who you are and just lets you in. A piece of software that watches the camera in the kitchen and sees you haven't feed the dog, or that you're out of milk. Etc, etc.
Yup. We're already at the point that single-threaded instructions can't be executed straight through, they have to have NOOPs inserted by the processor before them because it hasn't finished the previous instruction and doesn't know the value of the registers yet!
And when's the last time you saw a CPU bigger than 6cm?
It's not how 'big' the CPU is, it's how long the pathways inside the CPU are.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with Ghz, anyway. Ghz is limited by how fast transistors can change state. If each microscopic piece of the processor was infinitely fast, you could operate at infinite Ghz.
It's like if you have a 100 foot network cable, it's not going to be 10Mhz, verse a 10 foot run being 100Mhz or a 1ft cable being 1Ghz. The speed of light isn't an issue, that causes a slight lag, not a slowdown. (And no one could possible notice a lag of 6 cm, especially considering it then takes four feet to get to your screen.)
An infinite Ghz processor wouldn't help, however, because the processor would have to sit and wait all the time for the results of the previous computation, which is what's limiting processors now. The instructions are dependent on the previous one, which means the result has to make it's way 'backward' through the CPU so it can be used as input. Upping the speed just means the process has to insert more blank instructions because it doesn't know the value of something it needs to know!
Which is why, at this point, almost all CPU-speed-up efforts are concentrating on multiple pathways for instructions, either via actual multiple cores, or very intelligent multiple pipelines.
I've never seen an HDTV that didn't have RCA audio in for at least one DVI input. In fact, I've only see one HDTV ever that didn't have RCA audio in for all DVI, it had two with RCA in and two without.
That doesn't mean that most people wouldn't set up a computer in their TV room, but audio input isn't the problem there, it's the fact they only have one PC
And for some reason no one's selling, or at least not advertising, a wireless device where you hook up one end to a USB port, it switches all your sound and video over, and you hook the other end up to a DVI input and get computer on your TV. You could even combine it with wireless USB for a keyboard and mouse and remote control receiver.
And then when you're done, you just unplug it and everything switches back to normal. Or put a button on it.
Yes, I know wireless USB video cards and sound cards and hubs exist that let you actually do this, but no one seems to have put all of it together in a single device and actually market it as a 'set top' box that's half the price of real set top boxes and lets you play computer games and stuff, anything you can do on your PC. (And, of course, advertised as using for MS's silly MCE interface, but it's a piece of hardware, you could use whatever.)
And the meddling didn't stop with Fox, either. It was even worse when it moved to Sci Fi.
But my point was that Sliders not really an example of what Fox did to sci-fi for a decade. It was before that.
Or, in a way, it's sorta the start of Fox's decade-long sabotage program. The transition from 'high expectations' to 'impossible expectations'. With Sliders, Fox said 'Hey, wait, sci-fi is supposed to have awesome ratings, look at X-Files! Let's meddle!'.
So Fox started out with 'Oh, this show doesn't have the super-amazing ratings that X-Files has, let's meddle, that didn't work, let's kill it', and later, post-Sliders, Fox became 'Let's meddle to start with (e.g. Firefly pilot), and then we won't have to meddle later before killing it'. It was a more efficient way to fuck shows over, saving an entire season or two.
And, as should be pointed out every time this is mentioned, X-Files had shitty ratings for the first few seasons. It was just, back then, Fox literally had no other shows to replace it with. (And, hilariously, Fox kept the X-Files running long after it was well below the impossible ratings it was asking from other shows.)
X-Files doesn't count, X-Files is the show that Fox wishes they had and are comparing all other sci-fi against, and they've totally forgotten all horrible ratings it started with. X-File is actually the problem. (Which is in no way X-File's fault.)
As for the others...Millennium coasted on X-File's rating, it was a boon given to Chris Carter. Ratings-wise, it should have been canceled first season.
Sliders is one of those inexplicably shitty shows that managed to have people watch it, and that was back when Fox was less trigger happy, back when they still had X-Files.
And if you think 'Farscape, Stargate, Galactica' have anywhere near the ratings to be on Fox, you're crazy.
As for Medium, that's not really a genre show. That's a detective show with a supernatural addition. And, perhaps more important, doesn't air on Friday, or at least didn't until it'd built up a pretty large fanbase.
Fox wasn't supposed to air the first Epitaph episode, it was produced solely for the DVD, both to boast sales and to wrap up the series if it wasn't renewed. Fox never had the rights to air it.
They did air the second one.
As for the original first episode, no, it wasn't much better than the one that aired.
While I love Joss Whedon, Dollhouse was too slow and no one watched it. Fox let it run as long as they could, probably because sci-fi fans would lynch them if they didn't.
If you want to restrict sales to the poor, why the fuck don't you restrict sales in some manner?
You can't ask for proof of income, but you sure as hell could restrict sales to people with library cards and only let them buy three books a week.
The reason they don't is that either your local library is very stupid, or you don't understand what's going on and that's not why they sell books. The fact you call it a library 'bookstore' rather indicates one or the other.
Libraries sell books they don't have the space for. They are not selling them to get books to poor people, as that is stupid inefficient. They lend books to poor people, the book selling is not some sort of damn charity, it's a way to get rid of stuff they don't need.
Your library might be trying to do it as charity, for some totally stupid reason, but if so it's possibly the dumbest charity I've ever heard of.
Libraries don't really need to 'reprogram' anything at all. They already have a perfectly functional scanners, and bar code scanners just send keystrokes.
A simple webpage that loads and uses javascript to put the cursor in a textbox, and then they scan, it queries amazon, and loads that in a frame, loads the original page back and puts the cursor back in the textbox. Write down the price on a label, scan the next book.
It's literally five minutes of web design. It already exists. Google 'isbn price lookup'.
Considering that librarians end up doing a lot of manual input by scanning ISBNs and putting that information in a database, the idea they couldn't look up prices is a bit surreal. It's a heck of a lot easier than putting a book on the shelve for loan.
The reason they're so low is that libraries are trying to get of the damn books, not because of any charitable impulses. Setting higher prices would turn it into a bookstore, and they don't have the room.
By extension, not all of us can afford personal assistants to do our shopping; this person is performing a task which would be carried out by such a person had we one to apply to the job, and like a shipping carrier, they are performing it more efficiently than legions of humans each on a mission to pick up one book.
That's the analogy I said below. Please mentally answer each question, yes/no, in order, do not read ahead.
Would anyone have a problem with some guy, probably one with no local book store, posting somewhere that he'd pay $10 for a specific out of print book?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who happens to have a copy I don't want, selling it to him?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who doesn't happen to have a copy, but happened to see one on sale for $5, buying it to sell to him?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who doesn't happen to have a copy, going out and finding one to sell to him?
Now let's say that, instead of one dude, there was such a shortage of that book there was actually a market for it?
Seriously, in the universe of people where scanning book is 'evil', someone is going to need to explain to me exactly what makes it evil, because I really don't see it.
A lot of people have commented on these guy's disruptive behavior, and I'm all for condemning that and kicking people out who think the entire inventory is theirs to paw through and move around and generally get in everyone's way. But that's got nothing to do with why they're doing it, it's just general assholish behavior.
And a lot of people seem to think libraries are selling at a low price as part of some aspect of their mission to provide books, which is a) not true, they'd doing it for space reasons, b) not efficient at all, and c) if it was for that purpose, they have trivial ways to stop people from buying a lot of books, by, you know, actually making a rule about that and recording it on the library card.
There is nothing wrong with the practice of buying stuff that's being sold cheaper than on the internet, and then selling it on the internet. There's a sort of moral boundary when you're buying $100,000 stuff at yard sales for $10, but the price of books isn't some giant secret. Hell, libraries have barcode scanners, they could look up the ISBN and thus the price as they sell it. They're not, because they're not in the book market.
Libraries, in particular, have no experience with having any sort of book catalog system or keeping track of books going in and out or having to look and enter any information about books when they get said books. Also, they have no computer system that could keep track of any of that, and certainly have no 'register' type system where people come up with the books they want and their absence is marked in any central database, and there's no website where people can look any of that that's hooked into the database.
If libraries want to restrict sales of books to specific people, in specific amounts, that's pretty easy to do.
They just need to issue people some sort of 'card' and build a database of people, and they can trivially keep track of how many books people buy each week, and limit it. Likewise, they could restrict sales to local people, perhaps by requiring people to prove they're local when they get a 'library card'.
Technologically, it shouldn't be that expensive. Put barcodes on the library card, so they can be scanned.
Libraries could always go look how public libraries are doing it, because this sounds a lot like how libraries loan books, so libra...hey, WAIT A SECOND! THOSE ARE THE SAME PLACES!
Seriously, this is totally damn idiotic. If libraries want to sell underpriced books and feel annoyed about people sweeping in and buying all the books they underpriced, well, duh, there's a pretty easy way to restrict it to X books a week or whatever. That combined with the fact they'd need have a library card, aka, either be local or pay, pretty solves it.
Not that libraries should be underpricing books in the first place, as that is a criminally stupid way to get people access to information. They should sell the books for whatever they can get, and then use that money to, I dunno, stay open longer. (Libraries in my town close at 5:30, which functionally means that people working 9-5 cannot get off work and take their kids there.)
In the trade off between 'one poor person owning one book instead of a richer person buying it' (When there's a library full of books there already.) and the library getting five more dollars, the library getting five more dollars is a buttload more useful, and libraries should be taking a cue from these people and selling at higher prices.
Wouldn't the solution be to simply kick disruptive people out, and not worry about exactly why they're disruptive?
Seriously, this is a damn stupid 'problem' to be worried about, and has nothing at all to do with why they're doing it. (Which is, in the end, buying the damn books at the price the place is trying to sell them.)
Here's an interesting moral question to the people who think there's an sore of issues with this: How would you feel if you wanted to purchase an out-of-print book, and posted online you'd be willing to pay, oh, $4 for it.
So I go to local bookstores until I find it for $3 or less, so I can get to you with shipping?
Is that 'wrong'? And how the fuck is that different that what these guys are doing, except they're doing it in advance?
I mean, some idiots here are acting like 'These people are keeping the books out of the hands who want to read them.' Why, are they burning them after they buy them? Why no, I believe they're selling them! To people! Probably to read!
Kick out disruptive people, period. It doesn't matter why someone is dismantling the inventory and thinks they own the floor, they get kicked out.
Likewise, it doesn't fucking matter why someone buys a book. They're buying it because someone wants to read it, obviously.
The problem is that they want to sell unlimited plans for, say, $10, and have almost 95% uses $2 worth of bandwidth, with the other 5% being maybe a $15 user, but at least have the population thinks they're one of the $15 people, so wrongly buys the plan. And that was, indeed, how it started.
Now, of course, 95% is at $8 dollars, and the other 5% is at $40, and they can't understand why everyone think they're allowed to do that. They're trying to make like it's all about the $40-using people, but in reality, very very shortly, and in some places this has already happened, they're going to run out of bandwidth for normal users. (Normal users who are quite aware, sometimes painfully, that they use too much for lower plans.)
This is why they're having so much trouble turning into a purely tier-based system, which is the logical thing to do. (With perhaps a cheaper first tier to customers who promise to stay in it.) Or even go to the exact same system they do minutes with, where you just buy them in advance.
It's that they don't have that much bandwidth anyway, and if they actually start selling it, people are going to get even more pissed then if they're promised unlimited-with-fine-print bandwidth.
No, that actually makes some sense, because the limiting factor back in dialup days was the amount of phone lines and modems. So stopping people from staying connected all the time is reasonable.
A more logical thing to do, of course, would be to drop idle connections, not '6 hour old' ones, so people with long downloads, and 6 hours isn't anywhere hard to hit on dialup, don't get very angry at you. After two hours, they could easily wait until the connection had no actual data transfer for five minutes.
But it was much easier to configure the dialup server to just drop old connections.
What they mean is that the flash problems can't be replicated. They can trivially be spoofed.
This is like a copy-protected CD, except in this case it's like the CD is built into a USB-CDROM, so it's even easier to fake.
Yeah, it sure would be a hassle trying to get another USB-CDROM exactly like that...but, um, if you're faking hardware, you just get some hardware that, duh, says exactly the right things instead of replicating the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's hyperbole, not parody. It's exaggeration for emphasis. I must have told people this a million times. ;)
For something to be libelous, at least in the US and probably in Canada, it has to be likely that someone will believe it. See 'Hustler Magazine Inc and Larry C Flynt v Jerry Falwell', where Hustler asserted that Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse. The courts said 'While that is a lie, it's a lie that no reasonable person would believe, and hence it's not libel.'
So the question is: Does anyone actually believe uncited claims on a damn YouTube post?
Of course, this officer sued everyone, anyway, including people who clearly didn't state anything but opinions. Like the guy in the linked article, who said 'officer bubbles probably looks at himself in the mirror a lot.', which is quite obviously an opinion.
In fact, one of the claims of the suit was that the comments imply he's a narcissist.
Now, there is something called 'narcissistic personality disorder' that you could plausibly sue someone for claiming you had, as you either have that or don't have it, but 'narcissist', like 'stupid', is an opinion about personality. There is no such thing, objectively, as to whether or not someone is a 'narcissist', and hence if I want to call someone that, I can, period.
At least in the US. Who knows what sort of stupidity is going on in Canada.
Despite the common misconceptions about it, the First Amendment does not grant people the right to slander or libel.
Correct.
The standard regarding ridicule used to be whether the person was "a public presence", or something to that effect.
And now you're in some damn stupid universe that you just invented. What the fuck is a standard regarding ridicule? Your first sentence didn't say anything about ridicule.
Ridiculing people is entirely legal, and has nothing to do with slander or libel. 'Ridicule' just means to mock, to make fun of, to cause laughter at.
You can ridicule people with lies, which can be slander or libel, you can ridicule people with opinions, you can ridicule people with facts. Here, I will demonstrate by ridiculing you three times:
LIE: You know less about the law than a baboon. (And, you will note, while that's a lie, it's clearly hyperbole, not intended to be believed by others, and hence not libel or slander. Aka, the 'Jerry Falwell is a motherfucker' rule.)
OPINION: You're an idiot.
TRUTH: You have corrected someone who was correct, with a falsehood. Universe 1, You -1,000,000
All those statements ridiculed you, none of them were libelous.
The only thing that's even vaguely relevant is that 'public' people have a lower standard toward repeated 'gossip'.
I.e., if I assert that Tom Cruise is gay, I'm probably safe from a lawsuit. If I assert some random guy is gay, I could get sued. Basically, with public people, you have a duty just to not say thing you know aren't true, whereas with private people, you have to check more, under the theory that a single lie repeated can easily destroy a private person's entire reputation, but public people have the ability to 'push back' against stories, and a megaphone to do it with. So it's harder for public people to sue if you're 'wrong', but thought you were right, whereas private people are still damaged no matter what your intent, and can sue if you're just careless. (Like Richard Jewell did to the AJC after they made him out to be a terrorist.)
That's about the only difference there, and totally irrelevant if someone is being ridiculed or not. It is perfectly legal to mock anyone at all. (Although some 'bullying' laws change that, but usually only include children.)
It's worth pointing out that, under US law, it would be pretty damn amazing if any comment on a video was libelous, because part of libel is that the speaker has to be believed. Even if there were outright falsehoods on the comments that would be very damaging if people believed them, the question then becomes: Who the hell believes 'facts' posted by angry people who everyone knows just watched the video and made up some crap?
But he apparently sued everyone anyway, including people who didn't even claim to have any facts, like the guy that posted 'officer bubbles probably looks at himself in the mirror a lot.' which is pretty clearly a guess, and, duh, not intended to be believed as a 'fact'.
Although who knows what the hell the law is in Canada. If stating guesses about people, clearly labeled as guesses, is illegal, than Canada is broken.
Threatening to kill someone actually is assault. It's battery that's actually hitting someone. Assault is just an immediate credible threat and the ability to pull it off. Aka, someone standing there with a baseball bat who swings it near your head a few times to scare you...just committed assault.
I'm not sure that someone in the back of a police car can be said to do that, though.
However, that doesn't mean there's any justification for tasing someone trapped in the back seat of a police car.
And, of course, thanks to the dash-cam, they had an open and shut case for assault against the police, and hell, probably could have gotten him denied bail (If, after you're arrested, you threaten to kill people, they'll deny your bail pretty automatically.) ...but they fucked up and who knows what happened.
It's rather hilarious how a 'pro-police' idiot managed to describe some police behavior that is blatantly illegal.
I'm with you. They're supposed to be peace officers, and yet not a single fucking one of them appears to know how to respond to 'a large group of people'.
I fail to see how having random people in charge would be worse.
I think they're essentially talking about memory that doesn't need to be refreshed and thus use power. It's essentially 'eInk memory', or a million time faster Flash memory.
With a CPU that can turn itself off, a screen that either turns itself off or is static (eInk), and memory that doesn't use power when not reading or writing, you end up with a device that uses almost no power when not in use.
Of course, if it's a cell phone, obviously it's going to use some power to run the antenna. But that's actually a separate chip anyway. (A few, in fact.) The computer part of a smart phone isn't operating the antenna, so you wouldn't have to power it at all until a call actually came in. (Or until a push notification came in, which makes that entire concept even better.)
A very interesting thing that no one is talking about power-failure proof computers. If the power fails, just have the computer, essentially, 'pause', until it comes back. It'd probably be a few seconds reinitializing everything, but it could continue right where it left off.
Likewise, there's not really any point in 'suspending' a computer with this. A well designed OS should slowly shut down all devices that aren't in use, and then independently suspend each program by giving them no timeslices (Or, even better, come up with some API for that so that compatibly programs could be told what's happening.), and stop the processor when there's nothing to do. Which could wake up to process interrupts, but even be smart enough to put all that code in the CPU cache so that the memory isn't touched until it needs to be.
It's not 'sleep', it's 'sitting still'.
As was pointed out by others, we can't do real intelligence, because we have no idea how, and, no, we can't just let it run randomly until it gets it right.
What we can do, however, is language processing, which we can do by throwing CPU at it. Even visual object recognizance.
Combine that with better speech rendering that doesn't sound crappy (Which also takes CPU.), and you've essentially got an Eliza-bot that can understand speech and make speech, and even understand what you're pointing at.
And combine that with cheap 'set top' boxes, except not at your TV but one for each room, with a camera, a mic, and speakers, and that's the point that we can do actually workable 'home control' systems.
Houses that know who you are, can control lights on voice command or just movement, can recognize visitors, etc. With enough intelligence to mostly 'do the right thing', and enough learning to figure out what we want. Take messages and everything.
Aka, the classic 'smart home', that always failed previously because we couldn't communicate with it, and it sounded crappy when communicating with us, and those failures are entirely due to processing speed.
And at that point, it's a race to automate everything, or rather, hook it into the network so some computer can automate it. Automated door locks, where the house knows who you are and just lets you in. A piece of software that watches the camera in the kitchen and sees you haven't feed the dog, or that you're out of milk. Etc, etc.
Yup. We're already at the point that single-threaded instructions can't be executed straight through, they have to have NOOPs inserted by the processor before them because it hasn't finished the previous instruction and doesn't know the value of the registers yet!
And when's the last time you saw a CPU bigger than 6cm?
It's not how 'big' the CPU is, it's how long the pathways inside the CPU are.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with Ghz, anyway. Ghz is limited by how fast transistors can change state. If each microscopic piece of the processor was infinitely fast, you could operate at infinite Ghz.
It's like if you have a 100 foot network cable, it's not going to be 10Mhz, verse a 10 foot run being 100Mhz or a 1ft cable being 1Ghz. The speed of light isn't an issue, that causes a slight lag, not a slowdown. (And no one could possible notice a lag of 6 cm, especially considering it then takes four feet to get to your screen.)
An infinite Ghz processor wouldn't help, however, because the processor would have to sit and wait all the time for the results of the previous computation, which is what's limiting processors now. The instructions are dependent on the previous one, which means the result has to make it's way 'backward' through the CPU so it can be used as input. Upping the speed just means the process has to insert more blank instructions because it doesn't know the value of something it needs to know!
Which is why, at this point, almost all CPU-speed-up efforts are concentrating on multiple pathways for instructions, either via actual multiple cores, or very intelligent multiple pipelines.
I've never seen an HDTV that didn't have RCA audio in for at least one DVI input. In fact, I've only see one HDTV ever that didn't have RCA audio in for all DVI, it had two with RCA in and two without.
That doesn't mean that most people wouldn't set up a computer in their TV room, but audio input isn't the problem there, it's the fact they only have one PC
And for some reason no one's selling, or at least not advertising, a wireless device where you hook up one end to a USB port, it switches all your sound and video over, and you hook the other end up to a DVI input and get computer on your TV. You could even combine it with wireless USB for a keyboard and mouse and remote control receiver.
And then when you're done, you just unplug it and everything switches back to normal. Or put a button on it.
Yes, I know wireless USB video cards and sound cards and hubs exist that let you actually do this, but no one seems to have put all of it together in a single device and actually market it as a 'set top' box that's half the price of real set top boxes and lets you play computer games and stuff, anything you can do on your PC. (And, of course, advertised as using for MS's silly MCE interface, but it's a piece of hardware, you could use whatever.)
Indeed.
And the meddling didn't stop with Fox, either. It was even worse when it moved to Sci Fi.
But my point was that Sliders not really an example of what Fox did to sci-fi for a decade. It was before that.
Or, in a way, it's sorta the start of Fox's decade-long sabotage program. The transition from 'high expectations' to 'impossible expectations'. With Sliders, Fox said 'Hey, wait, sci-fi is supposed to have awesome ratings, look at X-Files! Let's meddle!'.
So Fox started out with 'Oh, this show doesn't have the super-amazing ratings that X-Files has, let's meddle, that didn't work, let's kill it', and later, post-Sliders, Fox became 'Let's meddle to start with (e.g. Firefly pilot), and then we won't have to meddle later before killing it'. It was a more efficient way to fuck shows over, saving an entire season or two.
And, as should be pointed out every time this is mentioned, X-Files had shitty ratings for the first few seasons. It was just, back then, Fox literally had no other shows to replace it with. (And, hilariously, Fox kept the X-Files running long after it was well below the impossible ratings it was asking from other shows.)
X-Files doesn't count, X-Files is the show that Fox wishes they had and are comparing all other sci-fi against, and they've totally forgotten all horrible ratings it started with. X-File is actually the problem. (Which is in no way X-File's fault.)
As for the others...Millennium coasted on X-File's rating, it was a boon given to Chris Carter. Ratings-wise, it should have been canceled first season.
Sliders is one of those inexplicably shitty shows that managed to have people watch it, and that was back when Fox was less trigger happy, back when they still had X-Files.
And if you think 'Farscape, Stargate, Galactica' have anywhere near the ratings to be on Fox, you're crazy.
As for Medium, that's not really a genre show. That's a detective show with a supernatural addition. And, perhaps more important, doesn't air on Friday, or at least didn't until it'd built up a pretty large fanbase.
Have you not watched Inception or Toy Story 3?
Fox wasn't supposed to air the first Epitaph episode, it was produced solely for the DVD, both to boast sales and to wrap up the series if it wasn't renewed. Fox never had the rights to air it.
They did air the second one.
As for the original first episode, no, it wasn't much better than the one that aired.
While I love Joss Whedon, Dollhouse was too slow and no one watched it. Fox let it run as long as they could, probably because sci-fi fans would lynch them if they didn't.
If you want to restrict sales to the poor, why the fuck don't you restrict sales in some manner?
You can't ask for proof of income, but you sure as hell could restrict sales to people with library cards and only let them buy three books a week.
The reason they don't is that either your local library is very stupid, or you don't understand what's going on and that's not why they sell books. The fact you call it a library 'bookstore' rather indicates one or the other.
Libraries sell books they don't have the space for. They are not selling them to get books to poor people, as that is stupid inefficient. They lend books to poor people, the book selling is not some sort of damn charity, it's a way to get rid of stuff they don't need.
Your library might be trying to do it as charity, for some totally stupid reason, but if so it's possibly the dumbest charity I've ever heard of.
Libraries don't really need to 'reprogram' anything at all. They already have a perfectly functional scanners, and bar code scanners just send keystrokes.
A simple webpage that loads and uses javascript to put the cursor in a textbox, and then they scan, it queries amazon, and loads that in a frame, loads the original page back and puts the cursor back in the textbox. Write down the price on a label, scan the next book.
It's literally five minutes of web design. It already exists. Google 'isbn price lookup'.
Considering that librarians end up doing a lot of manual input by scanning ISBNs and putting that information in a database, the idea they couldn't look up prices is a bit surreal. It's a heck of a lot easier than putting a book on the shelve for loan.
The reason they're so low is that libraries are trying to get of the damn books, not because of any charitable impulses. Setting higher prices would turn it into a bookstore, and they don't have the room.
By extension, not all of us can afford personal assistants to do our shopping; this person is performing a task which would be carried out by such a person had we one to apply to the job, and like a shipping carrier, they are performing it more efficiently than legions of humans each on a mission to pick up one book.
That's the analogy I said below. Please mentally answer each question, yes/no, in order, do not read ahead.
Would anyone have a problem with some guy, probably one with no local book store, posting somewhere that he'd pay $10 for a specific out of print book?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who happens to have a copy I don't want, selling it to him?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who doesn't happen to have a copy, but happened to see one on sale for $5, buying it to sell to him?
Would anyone have a problem with me, who doesn't happen to have a copy, going out and finding one to sell to him?
Now let's say that, instead of one dude, there was such a shortage of that book there was actually a market for it?
Seriously, in the universe of people where scanning book is 'evil', someone is going to need to explain to me exactly what makes it evil, because I really don't see it.
A lot of people have commented on these guy's disruptive behavior, and I'm all for condemning that and kicking people out who think the entire inventory is theirs to paw through and move around and generally get in everyone's way. But that's got nothing to do with why they're doing it, it's just general assholish behavior.
And a lot of people seem to think libraries are selling at a low price as part of some aspect of their mission to provide books, which is a) not true, they'd doing it for space reasons, b) not efficient at all, and c) if it was for that purpose, they have trivial ways to stop people from buying a lot of books, by, you know, actually making a rule about that and recording it on the library card.
There is nothing wrong with the practice of buying stuff that's being sold cheaper than on the internet, and then selling it on the internet. There's a sort of moral boundary when you're buying $100,000 stuff at yard sales for $10, but the price of books isn't some giant secret. Hell, libraries have barcode scanners, they could look up the ISBN and thus the price as they sell it. They're not, because they're not in the book market.
Libraries, in particular, have no experience with having any sort of book catalog system or keeping track of books going in and out or having to look and enter any information about books when they get said books. Also, they have no computer system that could keep track of any of that, and certainly have no 'register' type system where people come up with the books they want and their absence is marked in any central database, and there's no website where people can look any of that that's hooked into the database.
Wait, made a typo. s/no//
If libraries want to restrict sales of books to specific people, in specific amounts, that's pretty easy to do.
They just need to issue people some sort of 'card' and build a database of people, and they can trivially keep track of how many books people buy each week, and limit it. Likewise, they could restrict sales to local people, perhaps by requiring people to prove they're local when they get a 'library card'.
Technologically, it shouldn't be that expensive. Put barcodes on the library card, so they can be scanned.
Libraries could always go look how public libraries are doing it, because this sounds a lot like how libraries loan books, so libra...hey, WAIT A SECOND! THOSE ARE THE SAME PLACES!
Seriously, this is totally damn idiotic. If libraries want to sell underpriced books and feel annoyed about people sweeping in and buying all the books they underpriced, well, duh, there's a pretty easy way to restrict it to X books a week or whatever. That combined with the fact they'd need have a library card, aka, either be local or pay, pretty solves it.
Not that libraries should be underpricing books in the first place, as that is a criminally stupid way to get people access to information. They should sell the books for whatever they can get, and then use that money to, I dunno, stay open longer. (Libraries in my town close at 5:30, which functionally means that people working 9-5 cannot get off work and take their kids there.)
In the trade off between 'one poor person owning one book instead of a richer person buying it' (When there's a library full of books there already.) and the library getting five more dollars, the library getting five more dollars is a buttload more useful, and libraries should be taking a cue from these people and selling at higher prices.
Wouldn't the solution be to simply kick disruptive people out, and not worry about exactly why they're disruptive?
Seriously, this is a damn stupid 'problem' to be worried about, and has nothing at all to do with why they're doing it. (Which is, in the end, buying the damn books at the price the place is trying to sell them.)
Here's an interesting moral question to the people who think there's an sore of issues with this: How would you feel if you wanted to purchase an out-of-print book, and posted online you'd be willing to pay, oh, $4 for it.
So I go to local bookstores until I find it for $3 or less, so I can get to you with shipping?
Is that 'wrong'? And how the fuck is that different that what these guys are doing, except they're doing it in advance?
I mean, some idiots here are acting like 'These people are keeping the books out of the hands who want to read them.' Why, are they burning them after they buy them? Why no, I believe they're selling them! To people! Probably to read!
Kick out disruptive people, period. It doesn't matter why someone is dismantling the inventory and thinks they own the floor, they get kicked out.
Likewise, it doesn't fucking matter why someone buys a book. They're buying it because someone wants to read it, obviously.
And if they're sold in bulk, the library doesn't make as much money. I'm not really seeing the upside here.
The problem is that they want to sell unlimited plans for, say, $10, and have almost 95% uses $2 worth of bandwidth, with the other 5% being maybe a $15 user, but at least have the population thinks they're one of the $15 people, so wrongly buys the plan. And that was, indeed, how it started.
Now, of course, 95% is at $8 dollars, and the other 5% is at $40, and they can't understand why everyone think they're allowed to do that. They're trying to make like it's all about the $40-using people, but in reality, very very shortly, and in some places this has already happened, they're going to run out of bandwidth for normal users. (Normal users who are quite aware, sometimes painfully, that they use too much for lower plans.)
This is why they're having so much trouble turning into a purely tier-based system, which is the logical thing to do. (With perhaps a cheaper first tier to customers who promise to stay in it.) Or even go to the exact same system they do minutes with, where you just buy them in advance.
It's that they don't have that much bandwidth anyway, and if they actually start selling it, people are going to get even more pissed then if they're promised unlimited-with-fine-print bandwidth.
No, that actually makes some sense, because the limiting factor back in dialup days was the amount of phone lines and modems. So stopping people from staying connected all the time is reasonable.
A more logical thing to do, of course, would be to drop idle connections, not '6 hour old' ones, so people with long downloads, and 6 hours isn't anywhere hard to hit on dialup, don't get very angry at you. After two hours, they could easily wait until the connection had no actual data transfer for five minutes.
But it was much easier to configure the dialup server to just drop old connections.
Indeed, this entire concept is stupid.
What they mean is that the flash problems can't be replicated. They can trivially be spoofed.
This is like a copy-protected CD, except in this case it's like the CD is built into a USB-CDROM, so it's even easier to fake.
Yeah, it sure would be a hassle trying to get another USB-CDROM exactly like that...but, um, if you're faking hardware, you just get some hardware that, duh, says exactly the right things instead of replicating the hardware.
Homoeopathy. Heh. That's when you're just a little gay.
Actually, that should logically be when have the same problem as another person, but that's less funny.
It's not nice to confuse people like that.