I've never had a problem when renting from the famous Swedish library. Never once have I had a bad video, missing audio, or anything else. What you have is a free system that provides error-free and convenient watching of shows. The other option is expensive, error-ridden, and a pain in the ass.
You know, the funny part of this whole story will be when CBS removes their blockade and people continue to pirate it because the user experience is better. My prediction is that CBS's current execs will be looking for work in a few months, canned by a furious board of directors after delivering a catastrophic loss in advertising revenue in their desperate attempt to squeeze blood out of a turnip.
My parents watch one of CBS's daytime soaps. Watching it on TV is a pain because they're not always home, and they don't have any sort of DVR, so they watch it online. Problem is, CBS's web player is the worst piece of dingo turd I've ever seen. After about 50% of the commercial breaks, it fails to come back to the show, and just hangs there with a black screen. Sometimes a few minutes later, if you leave it sitting there, the audio comes back with no video. Either way, it lobotomizes itself. If you reload the page, you get to sit through the same set of commercials all over again. And they usually show just three or four ads over and over, often showing a single ad more than once during a single commercial break. It is by far the worst TV viewing experience I've ever had—even worse than watching it on cable.
And because CBS doesn't make their shows available through real digital delivery channels like Hulu or iTunes, there's no way to watch their shows that isn't horribly painful and clogged with tedious commercials. Frankly, I can't imagine what's going through the heads of the people at CBS. I really can't. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so utterly clueless about the needs and desires of their audience, and I can't imagine them retaining that audience for much longer if they continue to be so bad at digital delivery.
Not just AT&T. The FCC and the Amber alert program screwed the pooch here by ordering a statewide emergency alert. That's bad for several reasons:
Unless you have reason to believe that the child is heading to a specific location, it is very unlikely that a kidnapping in San Diego will result in someone spotting that vehicle/child in the SF Bay Area.
If you are in the SF Bay Area, you're unlikely to know where Boulevard, CA even is, resulting in a lot of people wasting a lot of energy in a fruitless effort.
An Amber Alert should not use EAS. It might be an emergency for those kids and their families, but it is not an emergency for me. My life is not in danger if I don't hear about it. This abuse of EAS represents a very real public safety risk. If people get used to ignoring EAS, then when the real thing happens, they'll ignore that, too.
At the core of the problem with EAS is the fact that the message did not clearly identify itself as being a non-emergency message in the first two seconds. With a test, the starts with "This is a test of the emergency alert system." With an Amber alert, it is supposed to start with "This is an Amber alert." Either the message Sunday night did not start with those words or it was unintelligible. (The audio was so poorly recorded that I could barely understand any of it.)
As a result, when that EAS warning went off and was not followed by a test or an obvious Amber alert, it freaked me out thinking there was some big emergency, and I nearly drove off the road. When my brain processed enough of the message to realize that it was just an Amber alert, I wanted to drive down to San Diego and kick the *** of everyone involved. EPIC FAIL.
Basically, nothing went right as far as I can tell.
Translation: Watch YouTube at work, go directly to jail. Of course, it won't matter because YouTube would be gone. Immediately. With the possibility of felony charges against everyone in that division, such a site simply cannot afford to continue operating. Neither can the sites that are authorized by the networks. After all, they're authorized in only certain regions, and streaming to someone outside those regions, even accidentally, is the same as any other unauthorized streaming. Goodbye Hulu. Goodbye Netflix, goodbye Amazon video on demand, goodbye XFINITY TV, and so on. This is what big media wants, BTW.
Oh, and you know that Slingbox? If streaming is a felony and someone guesses your password or whatever, you might be guilty of a felony. Better unplug it. Or at least that's what the "You wouldn't stream a car" ads are going to say.
Excuse me while I mock the people who came up with this scheme derisively. Apparently, they would like us to roll technology back to the 1970s. I don't think a clue bat will do it this time. To try a power grab like this right after SOPA went down in flames suggests that these people are completely out of touch with reality. The only thing that will fix this is a massive "right sizing" of the Department of Commerce.
I suspected (or knew) most of what Snodden leaked. I did not knew the DEA was lying at trials and withholding evidence from pretrial discovery.
It isn't particularly surprising, though. They've built a huge surveillance system to keep close tabs on what people are doing. You'd be utterly naïve to believe that such a system could exist and not get massively abused on a near-daily basis. I mean, maybe for the first week, but....
Unable to blink, I can understand. The muscles that point your eyes and close and open the iris are cranial nerves that begin inside the brain. The muscles that are used to blink are facial nerves, which start at the brain stem.
That said, I have a hard time believing that someone can change the iris but cannot move the eyeball. I think those are fed by the same nerve bundle.
Normally once a kept animal kills or even bites a human, it is destroyed, under the theory it will be far less likely to do so in the future. I assume this wasn't done for half a dozen reasons stacking up, from it's too big, too hard to let go, how dare you, etc.
And don't forget what happened the last time someone tried to destroy a whale.
The problem is that somebody will realize at some point that there's more money to be made from a reality TV show called "Watch Astronauts Die", and then they'll stop sending food.
I wouldn't go quite as far as calling it "hard" sci-fi, but I try not to make a complete @$$ of myself.:-)
I don't have any books out on the market yet, but you can check out my prerelease site at http://www.patriotsbooks.com/. Apologies for the speed—I haven't migrated it off of my home DSL connection to a real hosting provider yet.
I'm planning to go the self-publishing route because... well, I'm too picky about the details to let anybody else touch anything.:-) I designed many of my own fonts because I could find nothing freely redistributable that didn't bug me. I did my own cover art. I wrote the tools that convert from my source content to LaTeX (for PDF) and EPUB, and wrote thousands of lines of LaTeX macros so that all the drop caps would be reproducibly positioned, the chapter title boxes would have a reasonable minimum width, etc.
Still to do: Get a few people to do a sanity-check read-through, then work out the final printing details for the dead-trees-and-ink edition(s).
I realize this is not a logical reaction. The aggravation you feel towards a bug should depend on how much the bug actually interferes with the user experience, not on how easily the manufacturer should have found it.
No, quite the contrary, it's a very logical reaction. I find consistently that the care a company takes in the little things reflects the care a company takes in the big things. A company whose software has really obvious and easily caught bugs almost certainly did not do a great job at designing the hardware either, hence your broken charge port (which should always be the single most robust component of a phone, because it is the most heavily abused).
Case in point, I recently shipped back a Canon 28-135 lens (two copies) because of severe lens creep. I tend to assume that if the tolerances on such a user-visible component are that sloppy, the tolerances on other components that are less visible are probably equally sloppy, and such sloppy tolerances are likely to result in severely diminished life expectancy.
Well, I couldn't tell you. I can't test an iPhone under normal usage because I'm too addicted to the Stratosphere's slide-out keyboard, which enables me to type much faster than a touchscreen but which only comes on a few Android and Windows phones, and not on any version of the iPhone. Maybe I'll try one more time to make the switch to a touchscreen while my Stratosphere is in the shop.
Helpful tip: You can buy cases for iPhones that include slide-out keyboards. You do have to charge the keyboards separately, but IMO that's a small price to pay for a phone that knows today isn't tomorrow.:-D
More money beyond what is needed to pay the bills and exercise your hobbies is not important.
Untrue. Most of us would like to be able to own a house, but that falls above your threshold. Most of us would like to eventually retire rather than working until the day we die, but that requires earning above your threshold so that we can save money for retirement.
That said, there is some point at which earning more money is pretty much pointless. Having more money beyond what is needed to retire on the interest while still maintaining your desired standard of living is clearly not important. At the point where you no could have at least a middle-class lifestyle for the rest of your life without work, work becomes optional, and having more money is not important.
By my math, somewhere around 3–5 million dollars (after taxes) is that magic threshold in pretty much any city in the U.S. except possibly New York. Anybody with significantly more money than that is wasting his or her life if he or she continues working. More to the point, those folks are taking scarce resources away from the rest of us who have not yet reached that threshold. Everyone would be better off if every CEO in the world retired after five to ten years and allowed somebody else to take his or her place. But I digress.
Chances are if you get shares they'll already have been diluted and you'll only get them if you stay there for a set number of years AND they don't get further diluted.
Chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees in a company, your initial shares will have been diluted so much by the time they IPO that they'll be worthless anyway unless you're already sufficiently independently wealthy that they'll let you buy pre-IPO shares to make up for the dilution. Oh, and chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees, the company will go bankrupt before it IPOs anyway.
Ironically, it has been my experience that the only people who really win are the ones who start out with enough money that they didn't need to.:-)
There is only 1 city owned lot that is free to park in anymore, they just added gates to the 3 story garage on Front and River streets.
Yup. That's why I've started eating supper in Scotts Valley instead of Santa Cruz. Why would I pay to park and walk nearly a mile to a Santa Cruz downtown restaurant when I can just as easily stop in Scotts Valley on the way down, park right in front of the business, and get the same food in half the time, without the hassle of dealing with parking stations or having to carry cash for parking meters? When Santa Cruz decides to get serious about revitalizing the downtown by adding enough free parking to make shopping feasible, I'll frequent their downtown businesses again. Until then, if you ask me, the entire downtown is just a waste of perfectly good space.
Incorrect. Highway 1 comes in from the north and south on the coast. Highway 9 comes in from SLV, and 152 comes in through Watsonville.
Yes, Hwy 17 is the highest capacity road that comes in, but if you're out to spend a leisurely day in Santa Cruz, why not take one of the more scenic routes to get there?
And by scenic, of course, you mean "filled with hairpin turns and no guardrail, overlooking a 300-foot dropoff into the water" (highway 1), "filled with hairpin turns and no guardrail, overlooking a 1000-foot dropoff onto solid rock" (highway 9), or "Hey look, it's not quite as bad as 129, and it is only two hours out of the way" (highway 152—one hour of actual driving, and one hour sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 5 MPH on highway 1 coming up from Watsonville).
Realistically, if you're coming from the Silicon Valley area, highway 17 is the only usable route. I've driven the others, and it's occasionally fun to do, if only to scare the bajeezus out of the passengers in your car), but IMO nobody in their right minds would drive it every day if they had an alternative.:-)
This is proof we're still living in a free country! They didn't die in a hail of military-grade automatic weapons fire.
You have a fascinating definition of "free". They could have been sent to prison without a trial, and our country would still qualify as free under your definition. Care to rethink that assertion?
The remarkable thing is that they've never come knocking on my door, given how many times (as part of research for my novels) I've searched for all manner of bomb-making chemistry, information about types of firearms, information about poisons, etc. I guess when they saw me use a planetary orbit calculator to compute precise positions of planets several hundred years in the future, they concluded that I wasn't dangerous, just seriously OCD.:-D
Slashdot Mirror
Alternative joke: Not to worry. Great Britain is not really part of Europa.
You know, the funny part of this whole story will be when CBS removes their blockade and people continue to pirate it because the user experience is better. My prediction is that CBS's current execs will be looking for work in a few months, canned by a furious board of directors after delivering a catastrophic loss in advertising revenue in their desperate attempt to squeeze blood out of a turnip.
My parents watch one of CBS's daytime soaps. Watching it on TV is a pain because they're not always home, and they don't have any sort of DVR, so they watch it online. Problem is, CBS's web player is the worst piece of dingo turd I've ever seen. After about 50% of the commercial breaks, it fails to come back to the show, and just hangs there with a black screen. Sometimes a few minutes later, if you leave it sitting there, the audio comes back with no video. Either way, it lobotomizes itself. If you reload the page, you get to sit through the same set of commercials all over again. And they usually show just three or four ads over and over, often showing a single ad more than once during a single commercial break. It is by far the worst TV viewing experience I've ever had—even worse than watching it on cable.
And because CBS doesn't make their shows available through real digital delivery channels like Hulu or iTunes, there's no way to watch their shows that isn't horribly painful and clogged with tedious commercials. Frankly, I can't imagine what's going through the heads of the people at CBS. I really can't. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so utterly clueless about the needs and desires of their audience, and I can't imagine them retaining that audience for much longer if they continue to be so bad at digital delivery.
Alternatively, all mobile phone software should be open source because it makes third-party security audits possible.
Yeah, this is the first G+ post I've seen, and it's spam. Not a very promising start.
Not just AT&T. The FCC and the Amber alert program screwed the pooch here by ordering a statewide emergency alert. That's bad for several reasons:
At the core of the problem with EAS is the fact that the message did not clearly identify itself as being a non-emergency message in the first two seconds. With a test, the starts with "This is a test of the emergency alert system." With an Amber alert, it is supposed to start with "This is an Amber alert." Either the message Sunday night did not start with those words or it was unintelligible. (The audio was so poorly recorded that I could barely understand any of it.)
As a result, when that EAS warning went off and was not followed by a test or an obvious Amber alert, it freaked me out thinking there was some big emergency, and I nearly drove off the road. When my brain processed enough of the message to realize that it was just an Amber alert, I wanted to drive down to San Diego and kick the *** of everyone involved. EPIC FAIL.
Basically, nothing went right as far as I can tell.
So basically just YouTube.
Translation: Watch YouTube at work, go directly to jail. Of course, it won't matter because YouTube would be gone. Immediately. With the possibility of felony charges against everyone in that division, such a site simply cannot afford to continue operating. Neither can the sites that are authorized by the networks. After all, they're authorized in only certain regions, and streaming to someone outside those regions, even accidentally, is the same as any other unauthorized streaming. Goodbye Hulu. Goodbye Netflix, goodbye Amazon video on demand, goodbye XFINITY TV, and so on. This is what big media wants, BTW.
Oh, and you know that Slingbox? If streaming is a felony and someone guesses your password or whatever, you might be guilty of a felony. Better unplug it. Or at least that's what the "You wouldn't stream a car" ads are going to say.
Excuse me while I mock the people who came up with this scheme derisively. Apparently, they would like us to roll technology back to the 1970s. I don't think a clue bat will do it this time. To try a power grab like this right after SOPA went down in flames suggests that these people are completely out of touch with reality. The only thing that will fix this is a massive "right sizing" of the Department of Commerce.
It isn't particularly surprising, though. They've built a huge surveillance system to keep close tabs on what people are doing. You'd be utterly naïve to believe that such a system could exist and not get massively abused on a near-daily basis. I mean, maybe for the first week, but....
Unable to blink, I can understand. The muscles that point your eyes and close and open the iris are cranial nerves that begin inside the brain. The muscles that are used to blink are facial nerves, which start at the brain stem.
That said, I have a hard time believing that someone can change the iris but cannot move the eyeball. I think those are fed by the same nerve bundle.
Checking the "post anonymously" box results in the moderation going away silently. You have to completely log out.
And don't forget what happened the last time someone tried to destroy a whale.
The problem is that somebody will realize at some point that there's more money to be made from a reality TV show called "Watch Astronauts Die", and then they'll stop sending food.
I wouldn't go quite as far as calling it "hard" sci-fi, but I try not to make a complete @$$ of myself. :-)
I don't have any books out on the market yet, but you can check out my prerelease site at http://www.patriotsbooks.com/. Apologies for the speed—I haven't migrated it off of my home DSL connection to a real hosting provider yet.
I'm planning to go the self-publishing route because... well, I'm too picky about the details to let anybody else touch anything. :-) I designed many of my own fonts because I could find nothing freely redistributable that didn't bug me. I did my own cover art. I wrote the tools that convert from my source content to LaTeX (for PDF) and EPUB, and wrote thousands of lines of LaTeX macros so that all the drop caps would be reproducibly positioned, the chapter title boxes would have a reasonable minimum width, etc.
Still to do: Get a few people to do a sanity-check read-through, then work out the final printing details for the dead-trees-and-ink edition(s).
Poe's law applies here.
No, quite the contrary, it's a very logical reaction. I find consistently that the care a company takes in the little things reflects the care a company takes in the big things. A company whose software has really obvious and easily caught bugs almost certainly did not do a great job at designing the hardware either, hence your broken charge port (which should always be the single most robust component of a phone, because it is the most heavily abused).
Case in point, I recently shipped back a Canon 28-135 lens (two copies) because of severe lens creep. I tend to assume that if the tolerances on such a user-visible component are that sloppy, the tolerances on other components that are less visible are probably equally sloppy, and such sloppy tolerances are likely to result in severely diminished life expectancy.
Helpful tip: You can buy cases for iPhones that include slide-out keyboards. You do have to charge the keyboards separately, but IMO that's a small price to pay for a phone that knows today isn't tomorrow. :-D
Untrue. Most of us would like to be able to own a house, but that falls above your threshold. Most of us would like to eventually retire rather than working until the day we die, but that requires earning above your threshold so that we can save money for retirement.
That said, there is some point at which earning more money is pretty much pointless. Having more money beyond what is needed to retire on the interest while still maintaining your desired standard of living is clearly not important. At the point where you no could have at least a middle-class lifestyle for the rest of your life without work, work becomes optional, and having more money is not important.
By my math, somewhere around 3–5 million dollars (after taxes) is that magic threshold in pretty much any city in the U.S. except possibly New York. Anybody with significantly more money than that is wasting his or her life if he or she continues working. More to the point, those folks are taking scarce resources away from the rest of us who have not yet reached that threshold. Everyone would be better off if every CEO in the world retired after five to ten years and allowed somebody else to take his or her place. But I digress.
Chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees in a company, your initial shares will have been diluted so much by the time they IPO that they'll be worthless anyway unless you're already sufficiently independently wealthy that they'll let you buy pre-IPO shares to make up for the dilution. Oh, and chances are, if you're one of the first 50 or so employees, the company will go bankrupt before it IPOs anyway.
Ironically, it has been my experience that the only people who really win are the ones who start out with enough money that they didn't need to. :-)
I'd be willing to bet that even of the 1% that resulted in some sort of action, almost all of them involved grow ops.
On the other hand, if the police then turn around and sell all that confiscated pot, it might actually be an efficient use of police money. No, wait.
Yup. That's why I've started eating supper in Scotts Valley instead of Santa Cruz. Why would I pay to park and walk nearly a mile to a Santa Cruz downtown restaurant when I can just as easily stop in Scotts Valley on the way down, park right in front of the business, and get the same food in half the time, without the hassle of dealing with parking stations or having to carry cash for parking meters? When Santa Cruz decides to get serious about revitalizing the downtown by adding enough free parking to make shopping feasible, I'll frequent their downtown businesses again. Until then, if you ask me, the entire downtown is just a waste of perfectly good space.
And by scenic, of course, you mean "filled with hairpin turns and no guardrail, overlooking a 300-foot dropoff into the water" (highway 1), "filled with hairpin turns and no guardrail, overlooking a 1000-foot dropoff onto solid rock" (highway 9), or "Hey look, it's not quite as bad as 129, and it is only two hours out of the way" (highway 152—one hour of actual driving, and one hour sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 5 MPH on highway 1 coming up from Watsonville).
Realistically, if you're coming from the Silicon Valley area, highway 17 is the only usable route. I've driven the others, and it's occasionally fun to do, if only to scare the bajeezus out of the passengers in your car), but IMO nobody in their right minds would drive it every day if they had an alternative. :-)
I told you the Loch Ness Monster existed.
Why won't anyone listen to me. *sigh*
Worded another way:
You have a fascinating definition of "free". They could have been sent to prison without a trial, and our country would still qualify as free under your definition. Care to rethink that assertion?
The remarkable thing is that they've never come knocking on my door, given how many times (as part of research for my novels) I've searched for all manner of bomb-making chemistry, information about types of firearms, information about poisons, etc. I guess when they saw me use a planetary orbit calculator to compute precise positions of planets several hundred years in the future, they concluded that I wasn't dangerous, just seriously OCD. :-D
Just a one-word omission:
...begs [for] the question...