I am one of those wierdos who have cut our cable tv umbilical cord and watch everything via pc/tv hookup. It took me a while to figure out why there are only 5 trailing episodes of most shows on Hulu or elsewhere. Its the content providers holding on for dear life to the old-time business model that has made them so much money in the past. They are probably being force-fed a line of crap from the cable and satellite people saying if they let their content loose on the web it will destroy their content profits.
I have noticed however that more mainstream ads are starting to show up on all the online tv sites, with much more frequency than even a couple months ago, which says to me maybe the tide is turning.
I had all their services, except phone, for around $120 a month. I found that personally, 100 channels of crap and their high speed internet just wasn't worth it to me. As more content comes online, more people will also find this out.
We have completely dropped cable television and now support our TV fix with Netflix, Hulu, Joost, Youtube, etc. We watch what we want, when we want on my 42" TV hooked up to a PC.
I think they see the writing on the wall and instead of loosing the TV and phone revenue streams which can easily be replaced by the web, they are saying. sure.. go ahead and stream TV, get yourself a magicjack and use our internet to do it, but you will still be paying us $150 a month.
Luckily, we moved where there is a local ISP option, and now all I pay is $55 a month for unlimited Internet with 12M down and around 2M up.
Its about keeping a dying business model alive and getting their 3 service bundle price no matter how you do it, not so much about their bandwidth being saturated by the evil P2P scourge.
If an ISP decides to inspect all traffic, doesn't this make them responsible for the traffic? As in... you are not a common carrier, you do not have the "I didnt know" defense and now anything (virus's, copyright,child porn, etc..) that goes through you is your responsibility? I assume there is a money solution to this that will make this problem disappear, like buying a few laws or stacking some judicial BB's somewhere.. but I thought you either let it all go or you buy the responsibility..
I think the most important word you need to use is "indemnification".. if its that big of a deal, pay the $250ish whatever, get a legal document drawn up (from a real lawyer) that makes the company pay for your legal and judgement fees and hope you don't go to jail.
Imho, you cant "CYA" out of doing illegal things. If you are breaking laws, YOU are breaking laws.
So Im reading yet another article on how some troll is ransoming out some more patents.. great.. meanwhile, a day or two ago I read the who's got the most patents for 2008 and numbers like.. IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424. (from a Slashdot article)
Im thinkin the real weight of the patent system isnt even touched by major corps. Individual and small group/investment firm patent companys like Eolas looking for that ONE patent to go home on, by sheer numbers, probably dwarf the IBM and MS's of the world.. regardless..
By sheer brute force attack on common technology methods, conduits, hardware and the like they create a "monkeys typing Shakespear" effect, not with letters, but with common terms and principles.
At the rate the monkeys are being added, soon no one should be able to do anything without everyones approval.
We recently moved and I had a chance to "renegotiate" all our services, TWC being one of them. I was up to ~120 a month for expanded basic and RoadRunner before the move and every way you slice it the cable TV part was costing about $70 a month which was just too much for me.
After a few ping-pong are "you sure you dont want the package??" I managed to get limited basic cable and RoadRunner (7mb/~2mb) for ~65 a month. It is not something they wanted to do and they pushed hard for the "value meal".
With Windows Media Center, Hulu, TV.com, Netflix online and various online sites, my PC hooked up to my 42" TV is our entertainment now. The freedom of on-demand entertainment is great and I have been able to find anything I wanted to watch out and about on the internet.
And somehow, Ive managed not to miss 4 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes..
How many freakin times do we have to play the "you sell pipes now leave me alone" game?
Just because companyX found a way to make $1000 off your $50 a month pipe dosent mean they owe you $950. Get over it.
And... will John Q Public ever figure out that the logic behind using up all the internet for free is a lie of biblical proportions?
I have been doing tech work for 10+ years and for personal reasons had to pull up and move. The job market sucked, so I just filed a DBA and started my own business. Made my own job. Done.:)
Although locking down one facility, for better or worse, might be easier, it would seem that if we dont want cell use in prisons it would make more sense to make a federal law out of this, make "no cell zones" out of those GPS locations, and then create a white list of phones that are allowed.
I am also quite sure the implementation of this would get screwed somewhere around step #2, get all the providers together.
Ehh well...
I jumped on Lively when it was first announced, set up and furnished a room. The engine was slow but after it loaded it wasnt that bad. The application iteself always felt like an honest Beta, like there was something more to do before it was "real". Navigating around in Lively was a pain at best, users were never allowed to create and upload world items and the biggest issue was that once you finished outfitting a room, well, you had a chat room and that was about all Lively did.
I think they realized that they would either have to put some serious investment into this to make it worth it or drop it. Lively was an outside bet that just didnt pay off.
FTFA (hiliting mine)
"The FCC's wireless microphone field tests were carefully planned and thoroughly executed based on sound engineering science and real-world operating scenarios. These tests were open to the public, and those who choose to discount the results -- which have not yet been published -- had every option to be present and to witness them for themselves."
Ya gotta learn how to play the game, this is gov't after all guys and apparently you didnt lobby quite enough for this.
This is the reason, along with tabs in IE7, that I moved back to IE. After about 3-4 upgrades that basically neutered firefox and made me re-setup all my addons, find new ones that worked with the version of the day, etc.. I just said fuggit. Since I do web development too, it just made more sense to stay in the majority of the users environment and go on. FF was nice when it was like **OLD** ICQ.. now that theyve hit mainstream they start to feel a lot more like AOL ICQ..sorry for the blasphemey, but I'll pass on the whole thing.
I see your point in the whole no reasonable expectation of privacy.. and yes, it makes sense that by its very nature, being in public means you really dont have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Great. Where does anyone get the right to touch my property?
Dosen't this basically mean any property thats in public is free game for whatever we feel like doing to it as long as we dont deface or destroy it?
Hell, why stop at GPS? Ill make a magnetic potato holder and cook my dinner on your tailpipe. Maybe since I can see your door, thats public enough, Ill stick a poster of David Hasselhoff on it.. (although maybe a small one you wont notice).
Point is.. to me it seems more about my rights to my possessions and not so much about following me around in public.
I read that headline and did the ping-pong in my head.. IANC or any scientist, but it would seem that theoretically, if you could change the base of an atom you could effectively create a new matter type. If capable to control this, perhaps even create specific matter on request.. Star Trek anyone?
I work at a Texas Univ. and thats exactly what we do.. we shuffle them around, older machines ending up as student worker PC's, and eventually they get "surplused" where the hard drives are taken out and destroyed, then the PC's and periphs are sold at Univ. auction.
The day after MS says "nevermind" Yang says hey hey sliding stock, we're still open to MS offers.. (pls stop skidding stock) then old man Gates himself comes up the day after with.. umm Jerry.. no. We're done with you. Screw your weak attempts to stop the slide. (inner voice says "and when it hits $20 a share we'll be back") Shoulda took the money and run Yahoo..
"His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis."
New software to the rescue!!
With any luck it'll be as good as all the department level software theyve paid hory clap money for lately and eventually decided was worse than the 50's mainframe crap they went back to.
Believe it or not, the Internet, just like Electricity, is NOT a given right.
We enter into a contract, pay some money, and get a service.
If you dont want to be tracked, profiled, and served steaming hot piles of ads, then build your own network, backbone, etc and see how far you can go with that.
The other option is to simply not use the Internet or find someone with a contract/TOS you can live with but as long as there is money on the table (feeding you ads) tracking and profiling will always be one board meeting away.
In a perfect world, maybe it is your data. In the real world, you dont own the network, the board of directors, or any part of their business. In the end, it is theirs to do with as *they* please and your right to walk away as *you* please.
If thats AT&T/Yahoo then umm after their fun from yesterday about filtering things Im not sure which is worse.. I did do a little RTFA and apparently TWC is starting off with only new customers and not effecting current users..yet..
I haven't gotten a notice of change of service yet. I pay right at $100/mo for "unlimited" bandwidth and basic+ cable. I *will* go somewhere else if they try to cap me. There are DSL options in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I am one of those wierdos who have cut our cable tv umbilical cord and watch everything via pc/tv hookup. It took me a while to figure out why there are only 5 trailing episodes of most shows on Hulu or elsewhere. Its the content providers holding on for dear life to the old-time business model that has made them so much money in the past. They are probably being force-fed a line of crap from the cable and satellite people saying if they let their content loose on the web it will destroy their content profits.
I have noticed however that more mainstream ads are starting to show up on all the online tv sites, with much more frequency than even a couple months ago, which says to me maybe the tide is turning.
Here's my take on this..
I had all their services, except phone, for around $120 a month. I found that personally, 100 channels of crap and their high speed internet just wasn't worth it to me. As more content comes online, more people will also find this out.
We have completely dropped cable television and now support our TV fix with Netflix, Hulu, Joost, Youtube, etc. We watch what we want, when we want on my 42" TV hooked up to a PC.
I think they see the writing on the wall and instead of loosing the TV and phone revenue streams which can easily be replaced by the web, they are saying. sure.. go ahead and stream TV, get yourself a magicjack and use our internet to do it, but you will still be paying us $150 a month.
Luckily, we moved where there is a local ISP option, and now all I pay is $55 a month for unlimited Internet with 12M down and around 2M up.
Its about keeping a dying business model alive and getting their 3 service bundle price no matter how you do it, not so much about their bandwidth being saturated by the evil P2P scourge.
If an ISP decides to inspect all traffic, doesn't this make them responsible for the traffic? As in... you are not a common carrier, you do not have the "I didnt know" defense and now anything (virus's, copyright,child porn, etc..) that goes through you is your responsibility? I assume there is a money solution to this that will make this problem disappear, like buying a few laws or stacking some judicial BB's somewhere.. but I thought you either let it all go or you buy the responsibility..
I play one on the interwebs...
I think the most important word you need to use is "indemnification".. if its that big of a deal, pay the $250ish whatever, get a legal document drawn up (from a real lawyer) that makes the company pay for your legal and judgement fees and hope you don't go to jail.
Imho, you cant "CYA" out of doing illegal things. If you are breaking laws, YOU are breaking laws.
They want their blog back... FTFSDA http://blog.netflix.com/2008/10/opt-in-for-new-netflix-movie-player.html?commentPage=3
So Im reading yet another article on how some troll is ransoming out some more patents.. great.. meanwhile, a day or two ago I read the who's got the most patents for 2008 and numbers like.. IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424. (from a Slashdot article)
Im thinkin the real weight of the patent system isnt even touched by major corps. Individual and small group/investment firm patent companys like Eolas looking for that ONE patent to go home on, by sheer numbers, probably dwarf the IBM and MS's of the world.. regardless..
By sheer brute force attack on common technology methods, conduits, hardware and the like they create a "monkeys typing Shakespear" effect, not with letters, but with common terms and principles.
At the rate the monkeys are being added, soon no one should be able to do anything without everyones approval.
Tada...
Useless research on a daily basis dwarves Google carbon footprint.
Are we really sure we *can* stop them? (/tinfoilhat)
We recently moved and I had a chance to "renegotiate" all our services, TWC being one of them. I was up to ~120 a month for expanded basic and RoadRunner before the move and every way you slice it the cable TV part was costing about $70 a month which was just too much for me. After a few ping-pong are "you sure you dont want the package??" I managed to get limited basic cable and RoadRunner (7mb/~2mb) for ~65 a month. It is not something they wanted to do and they pushed hard for the "value meal".
With Windows Media Center, Hulu, TV.com, Netflix online and various online sites, my PC hooked up to my 42" TV is our entertainment now. The freedom of on-demand entertainment is great and I have been able to find anything I wanted to watch out and about on the internet.
And somehow, Ive managed not to miss 4 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes..
How many freakin times do we have to play the "you sell pipes now leave me alone" game? Just because companyX found a way to make $1000 off your $50 a month pipe dosent mean they owe you $950. Get over it.
And... will John Q Public ever figure out that the logic behind using up all the internet for free is a lie of biblical proportions?
I have been doing tech work for 10+ years and for personal reasons had to pull up and move. The job market sucked, so I just filed a DBA and started my own business. Made my own job. Done. :)
Although locking down one facility, for better or worse, might be easier, it would seem that if we dont want cell use in prisons it would make more sense to make a federal law out of this, make "no cell zones" out of those GPS locations, and then create a white list of phones that are allowed. I am also quite sure the implementation of this would get screwed somewhere around step #2, get all the providers together. Ehh well...
I jumped on Lively when it was first announced, set up and furnished a room. The engine was slow but after it loaded it wasnt that bad. The application iteself always felt like an honest Beta, like there was something more to do before it was "real". Navigating around in Lively was a pain at best, users were never allowed to create and upload world items and the biggest issue was that once you finished outfitting a room, well, you had a chat room and that was about all Lively did.
I think they realized that they would either have to put some serious investment into this to make it worth it or drop it. Lively was an outside bet that just didnt pay off.
FTFA (hiliting mine) "The FCC's wireless microphone field tests were carefully planned and thoroughly executed based on sound engineering science and real-world operating scenarios. These tests were open to the public, and those who choose to discount the results -- which have not yet been published -- had every option to be present and to witness them for themselves."
Ya gotta learn how to play the game, this is gov't after all guys and apparently you didnt lobby quite enough for this.
This is the reason, along with tabs in IE7, that I moved back to IE. After about 3-4 upgrades that basically neutered firefox and made me re-setup all my addons, find new ones that worked with the version of the day, etc.. I just said fuggit. Since I do web development too, it just made more sense to stay in the majority of the users environment and go on. FF was nice when it was like **OLD** ICQ.. now that theyve hit mainstream they start to feel a lot more like AOL ICQ..sorry for the blasphemey, but I'll pass on the whole thing.
I see your point in the whole no reasonable expectation of privacy.. and yes, it makes sense that by its very nature, being in public means you really dont have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Great. Where does anyone get the right to touch my property?
Dosen't this basically mean any property thats in public is free game for whatever we feel like doing to it as long as we dont deface or destroy it?
Hell, why stop at GPS? Ill make a magnetic potato holder and cook my dinner on your tailpipe. Maybe since I can see your door, thats public enough, Ill stick a poster of David Hasselhoff on it.. (although maybe a small one you wont notice).
Point is.. to me it seems more about my rights to my possessions and not so much about following me around in public.
I read that headline and did the ping-pong in my head.. IANC or any scientist, but it would seem that theoretically, if you could change the base of an atom you could effectively create a new matter type. If capable to control this, perhaps even create specific matter on request.. Star Trek anyone?
I work at a Texas Univ. and thats exactly what we do.. we shuffle them around, older machines ending up as student worker PC's, and eventually they get "surplused" where the hard drives are taken out and destroyed, then the PC's and periphs are sold at Univ. auction.
The day after MS says "nevermind" Yang says hey hey sliding stock, we're still open to MS offers.. (pls stop skidding stock) then old man Gates himself comes up the day after with.. umm Jerry.. no. We're done with you. Screw your weak attempts to stop the slide. (inner voice says "and when it hits $20 a share we'll be back") Shoulda took the money and run Yahoo..
"His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis."
New software to the rescue!!
With any luck it'll be as good as all the department level software theyve paid hory clap money for lately and eventually decided was worse than the 50's mainframe crap they went back to.
Smack that easy button again.
Sony is home to a *LOT* of movie content. I can see them taking a money hit and releasing some top titles in BD only to move the players and format.
And you dont think if they could that they wouldnt?
Believe it or not, the Internet, just like Electricity, is NOT a given right.
We enter into a contract, pay some money, and get a service.
If you dont want to be tracked, profiled, and served steaming hot piles of ads, then build your own network, backbone, etc and see how far you can go with that.
The other option is to simply not use the Internet or find someone with a contract/TOS you can live with but as long as there is money on the table (feeding you ads) tracking and profiling will always be one board meeting away.
In a perfect world, maybe it is your data. In the real world, you dont own the network, the board of directors, or any part of their business. In the end, it is theirs to do with as *they* please and your right to walk away as *you* please.
If thats AT&T/Yahoo then umm after their fun from yesterday about filtering things Im not sure which is worse.. I did do a little RTFA and apparently TWC is starting off with only new customers and not effecting current users..yet..
I haven't gotten a notice of change of service yet. I pay right at $100/mo for "unlimited" bandwidth and basic+ cable. I *will* go somewhere else if they try to cap me. There are DSL options in this area.