If they could figure out how to eliminate the caps and ridiculous bandwidth charges, which I don't foresee happening in my lifetime, it could be a reasonable alternative to land based Internet, or at least enough of a competitor to Comcast, et al, that they might be slightly less monopolistic in their behavior.
Although it would take a real change in how they cap and charge for bandwidth. I just checked, and I've used 2.1 TB of downloads in the last 12 months. That'd be about my mortgage payment in cellular bandwidth, if I could even figure out a way to get an LTE provider who would even let me download that much at any price.
I would think that if something like that were to happen, it would have happened already.
Like attacking a major shopping mall on the day after Thanksgiving when there are enormous crowds and the usual "Look at how many people are shopping!!!111" stand-up TV spots there to feed the fear directly to the people at home.
Now you've not only made huge news, you've managed to scare people out of shopping malls and gut the American retail economy of profit for the year.
That this *hasn't* happened in spite of how obviously vulnerable these places are to even the typical American mass shooter, let alone some group with any kind of advanced planning and better weapons leads me to believe it ain't gonna happen, either. Like maybe the threat isn't nearly as real as the media makes it out to be, or maybe it's actually harder than you think to pull it off.
I would wager that the kind of person who couldn't cheat without a web site couldn't cheat with Ashley Madison even if it wasn't a complete fraud, either.
They're probably not attractive or charismatic enough to attract a partner to begin with.
I don't really know how all this works, but I would assume it could work mostly like it does now.
Client connects to web site Web site collects all the same client data that would be collected by the ad site now Web site passes this data on back channel to ad site Ad site does it's "dynamic" thing and returns the ad it would have otherwise fed to the end user browser Web site delivers ad content returned from back channel transaction with web site
I'm not sure how much less accurate the data would be in this scenario, as the ad site still gets whatever info the web site gets from the client, it just collects it indirectly on the back channel connection.
I guess the only thing the ad site is missing is the ability to set and read tracking cookies, which maybe is hugely important in the scheme of ad networks. And possibly a trust issue, if the web site is being paid each time they present an ad, since it would be possible for the back channel transaction to happen but a different or no ad presented to the client.
Maybe this could be provided as a "premium" service to "better" customers who wanted to foil ad blockers more by being able to present ads from their own domain/site.
People who use their work phone or laptop for personal use are stupid.
But the process for me works in reverse -- it's my damn phone, so I will decide how it will notify me of new messages (guess what, my VIP list includes no work addresses), when I will turn it off, what apps I will run on it, etc.
My wife got a new iPhone from work and was wondering if she should get rid of her personal one. I told her "do you want them to see your personal information? what happens when they fire you and you lose the number?" It was pretty hard to convince her to keep her personal phone.
That would be a pretty hilarious protest technique, to have some guy in a loud suit that held up a giant, bright LED sign in front of attendees faces and then moved it whenever they tried to look around it.
I'm wondering why this hasn't been done already to deter adblocking.
It seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to have some kind of server-side process that pulled the ad content on demand and then served it up as if it was local content, versus just the javascript they add to the web page to pull up the ads from remote domains.
With a little caching, it might even speed up page display because the content is coming from an existing http connection and not from a secondary connection with setup lag.
I'm using VMware, not Xen, and I don't know if there are any supported wifi adapters or drivers for them.
Even if there were, it's the worst place in my house for an access point -- concrete block on 3 sides, wire mesh lathe and plaster ceiling behind the drywall (it's an old tuck-under garage).
It reminds, me though, I need to find an AP that will work as a wireless bridge so that if the cable modem takes a shit I can turn on my LTE hotspot and backhaul my home LAN through it.
But you know, in a lot of states that doesn't prevent traffic cameras from being used to fine the owners of cars even if they weren't the drivers of the cars.
Fortunately in Minnesota, the state supreme court ruled them unconstitutional because they shift the burden of proof from the state to the vehicle owner.
I concur. Virtualizing a router firewall makes a ton of sense. It frees you from the hardware constraints of a separate box (you can have as many ethernet ports as the software will support) and the power consumption as well, along with all the usual benefits of virtualization features like snapshots, clones, etc.
I suppose there might be some paranoia about this if you believe the underlying virtualization system was vulnerable or you were sharing host NICs via tagged VLANs and believed there was underlying risk in those VLANs or switching vulnerable.
The only thing it doesn't generally get you is wifi, but frankly, wifi is sensitive to location and placement of APs for best coverage, so I don't mind having standalone APs.
I loved my iPad but decided I needed a portable real computer so I got an Asus Zenbook.
I might have gotten another iPad if they had supported a BT mouse, but they didn't, and for the cost of an iPad Pro I ended up with a much more flexible computer that's not really any heavier to carry around and is light years more flexible. Plus I have a TB of storage (I swapped in a new SSD), and if I really miss the iPad, I can always just use the web in full screen mode with the touch display.
Battery life isn't quite as good, but rare is the amount of time where I need 5+ hours of battery life, and if I do, well, I can always buy a 20,000 mah portable battery with 19v output.
I firmly believe that a great number of people get some kind of relief from what ails them from marijuana.
That being said, there are a lot of pro-legalization people who respond to challenges made as to its safety with a litany of medical claims that sound little different than the claims made by all manner of herbalists and charlatans.
It's a weak tactic that's not well validated scientifically and ultimately ends up making legalization advocates just sound like hippies down at the co-op.
But like I said, I really do believe that there are significant medical uses for marijuana, I just don't think they've been scientifically validated enough to use as a strong argument for actual legalization.
I know that some legalization advocates are willing to more or less settle for California style "medical marijuana" legalization, but opponents are right to label this as something of a sham and at worst, you might end up with the kind of "medical" legalization like we have in Minnesota with all kinds of strings attached that doesn't really help many people (like literally not many people, they capped participation and enormously restricted access).
And that kind of legalization doesn't really solve the many huge problems with criminalization.
The "safety" argument relative to drug legalization is huge red herring designed to drag legalization proponents down the path of needing to claim that marijuana is safer than tap water, or worse, into wild and unproven claims of its medical benefits.
The results of marijuana's relative safety have been in for years -- you can't really overdose on it and decades of mass use have failed to show any significant signs of problems in the general population. This is more than we can say about alcohol, acetaminophen, anti-depressants and whole long laundry list of substances that are legal and easy to get.
The REAL argument is that the public policy of marijuana criminalization has been an abject failure. We've spent trillions of dollars on prohibition on it and all we have to show for it is a complete dismantling of our constitutional rights, corruption of a law enforcement system that has produced an epidemic of civil rights abuses quite often enabled by the elusive pursuit of marijuana users (you didn't think they wanted to stop you for a traffic offense, did you?), an erosion in public respect for laws, almost certainly a disregard for the graver risks posed by other illegal drugs, and a criminal justice system that has ruined thousands of lives and built massive criminal enterprises
What we don't have to show for it is any reduction in marijuana use or availability. As a matter of public policy it has failed in its goals and produced a plague of horrific side effects.
This is the argument that needs to be made. The safety issue is a total and complete distraction.
I saw a video review of the XC90 with the dual-boost 2.0L engine (it's turbocharged *and* supercharged -- apparently supercharged at low RPM and then turbocharged at higher RPM).
The power output seemed kind of crazy for such a small engine and I do wonder how long they will hold up before either losing a ton of power and/or needing major rework.
What I thought was kind of crazy was that fuel consumption wasn't amazing, maybe mid-high 20s average MPG. I own a 2007 S80 with the 4.4L V8 that also used to ship in the XC90 and I get something like 26-28 in long-haul highway driving. The 2.0L will beat the V8 hands down in average MPG, but the improvement seems lesser at highway speeds for the wear and tear it will sustain.
My 4.4L V8 is mechanically superb, I get nearly the same engine wear stats at 110K miles that I had at 20K. Unless the tranny shits, I don't see a problem getting another 100k out of this car. I'm not sure how they will squeeze 200k out of a 2.0L like that.
It's a curious argument, but Rome did colonize Africa. Most of North Africa was controlled by Rome and largely part of the Roman empire after the fall of Carthage and the Jugurthine war. And the Romans controlled most of the middle East, although beyond Damascus it was frequently challenged by the Parthians.
And pretty much all of those places are a train wreck now, with plenty of tribal conflicts. In fact, bribing tribal leaders to abandon loyalty to al Qaeda was one of the principal counterinsurgency strategies of the US in Iraq.
You might make the argument that the Romans didn't really eliminate tribalism, but what they did was Romanize them so that while they may have remained kind of tribal they adopted enough Roman culture that their commonalities outweighed their tribal differences to the point where trade and cooperation made the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
It seems like whatever moral victory was obtained in the decolonization process in the 50s and 60s was lost (and then some) in the chaos and kleptocracy that followed.
Were the British colonies horrible, apartheid-style military dictatorships or were they something perhaps paternalistic but not repressive? Were many of them evolving in terms of local autonomy or civil rights, or just staying repressive?
I guess I'm trying not to assume their past was rosy, but I wonder how many adults who remember 1950s Rhodesia look back from Mugabe's Zimbabwe and think maybe being Rhodesian wasn't so bad.
I'd have to guess that access to the UK economy would have been beneficial and that the colonial officials would have made sure the roads and electricity worked.
The last Mac I owned was the first Intel MacBook. It was junk. The trim peeled off, the ethernet port wouldn't connect reliably unless you held the cable just right, the keyboard had keys that behaved funky and then the CD drive stopped working.
Worse, was taking it into Apple under warranty and finding out it'd be gone a 1-2 weeks to be fixed. Are you kidding me? 2 weeks for that? I *might* give you 24 hours if you really needed it but I would expect that kind of parts swap could be done in 2 hours or less.
Feds: We really need a back door into your encryption. ISIS, think of the children, sky is falling, etc.
Tech Industry: We've done the math. We stand to lose $xxx billion every year if we weaken encryption.
Feds: Think of the children.
Tech Industry: Here's our compromise. We get to keep stashing our global profits tax-free overseas. That's worth about half. We get to bulk import more H1Bs to keep labor costs down here at home. That's worth the other half. You promise to keep this a secret, that's worth another half (makes sure Fed isn't smart enough to do math on 3 halves..).
Feds: We think that's a great deal. Thanks!
So the tech industry gets what they want and makes the problem go away on a zero-cost basis. The Feds get to start bulk jailing people based on parallel constructions. The public gets zero reprieve from mass surveillance and the thing the government could do to help the public by making them pay their taxes and stop wage suppression they give up on.
But there is a huge swath of the Hollywood talent pool that doesn't have $100 million in the bank and isn't pulling in $20 million a year.
And even some of those people (like the stars of House of Cards) haven't refused to appear in a Netflix series, and that was when a Netflix original was a riskier proposition.
I would think that with as much buzz as high profile shows like Orange.. or House of Cards have gotten that even stars with some kind of established career wouldn't be all that hesitant to appear in a Netflix production at this point. And it's not like Netflix has a couple of datacenter monkeys trying to make TV shows, either, they're likely working with established production companies and producers, people that have some kind of credibility in production.
My sense is now that Netflix has enough name recognition and subscribers and a decent track record, even big names wouldn't bypass it over something stupid like Nielsen numbers.
I'm not sure that the TV viewer is the actual audience for this catfight.
I think the audience for this catfight are the actual creative types that write, direct and act in these productions. The "ratings" brouhaha is code for "popularity" and "success" and they want to discourage talent from getting involved with Netflix productions based on the argument that it will be damaging to their careers.
The whole thing seems bizarre, because I would think that MONEY would be the driver for most of Hollywood. Some self-promoting, reality-TV types might care about "popularity" angles, but I would bet that money would be a bigger driver for most others, with perhaps writers and directors being secondarily motivated by being able to do pet projects or being able to produce whatever their artistic vision is.
With Netflix spending more and more money on independent productions, claiming that their shows lack ratings and hence aren't popular seems to be the last thing they can try to leverage against creative talent signing up to be part of Netflix productions.
It's funny how this same block of made-up people also pushes a made-up holiday called Kwanzaa that claims to represent a made up African culture. You might even argue I'm taking their pan-Africanism at face value.
Of course, we both know that it's perfectly logical to consider the Moroccan pavilion representative of "Africa" because, well, Morocco is in Africa, but we also know perfectly well that my made-up group of activists would object that Morocco is no more "African" than Africa-born Boer leader Paul Kruger is African, because, well they're not black Africa.
So really what I suspect they would want is a country pavilion representing Black Africans. One for Nigeria where you embezzle government funds. Or one for Somalia, with a pirate ride where you hijack shipping for ransom. Or maybe one for Zimbabwe where the gift shop prices increase by 10% every day thanks to hyperinflation.
There's the nominal privacy angle, ie, of showing people or situations in private settings that weren't part of any kind of police action. Then there's the abuse-of-public-access privacy angle, like those web sites that show mug shots unless you pay to take them offline.
Then there's the bigger questions of whether relentless databasing forever of every possible police interaction with the public and using it to make all kinds of really arbitrary decisions based on it, like HR managers who assume any interaction with the police must mean you are a criminal and can't be hired for a job.
Then there's the reality of video footage. Storing, indexing, labeling, editing and managing what could end up being thousands of hours of video footage per day for an agency as large as NYPD is not a trivial task. I've seen a medium-sized city use 3 full racks of Compellent just for their intersection TV cameras.
Then there's the question of the public's legitimate *right* to access it, how to do it without the fucking cops editing out or "losing" footage of unarmed civilians getting gunned down.
I just don't know how you do it without it become a colossal expense, another police abuse of power, or a complete abuse of individual privacy for people who aren't actually accused of a crime. Maybe hand over control of the footage to some kind of ombudsman's office? Sounds like something the cops will never agree to, but allowing the cops to agree to it sounds like a recipe for secrecy. Giving the public unlimited access to it sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Paying for the whole process sounds like a dubious investment, yet controlling police dishonesty has been problematic even with dash video.
Slashdot Mirror
If they could figure out how to eliminate the caps and ridiculous bandwidth charges, which I don't foresee happening in my lifetime, it could be a reasonable alternative to land based Internet, or at least enough of a competitor to Comcast, et al, that they might be slightly less monopolistic in their behavior.
Although it would take a real change in how they cap and charge for bandwidth. I just checked, and I've used 2.1 TB of downloads in the last 12 months. That'd be about my mortgage payment in cellular bandwidth, if I could even figure out a way to get an LTE provider who would even let me download that much at any price.
I would think that if something like that were to happen, it would have happened already.
Like attacking a major shopping mall on the day after Thanksgiving when there are enormous crowds and the usual "Look at how many people are shopping!!!111" stand-up TV spots there to feed the fear directly to the people at home.
Now you've not only made huge news, you've managed to scare people out of shopping malls and gut the American retail economy of profit for the year.
That this *hasn't* happened in spite of how obviously vulnerable these places are to even the typical American mass shooter, let alone some group with any kind of advanced planning and better weapons leads me to believe it ain't gonna happen, either. Like maybe the threat isn't nearly as real as the media makes it out to be, or maybe it's actually harder than you think to pull it off.
I would wager that the kind of person who couldn't cheat without a web site couldn't cheat with Ashley Madison even if it wasn't a complete fraud, either.
They're probably not attractive or charismatic enough to attract a partner to begin with.
I don't really know how all this works, but I would assume it could work mostly like it does now.
Client connects to web site
Web site collects all the same client data that would be collected by the ad site now
Web site passes this data on back channel to ad site
Ad site does it's "dynamic" thing and returns the ad it would have otherwise fed to the end user browser
Web site delivers ad content returned from back channel transaction with web site
I'm not sure how much less accurate the data would be in this scenario, as the ad site still gets whatever info the web site gets from the client, it just collects it indirectly on the back channel connection.
I guess the only thing the ad site is missing is the ability to set and read tracking cookies, which maybe is hugely important in the scheme of ad networks. And possibly a trust issue, if the web site is being paid each time they present an ad, since it would be possible for the back channel transaction to happen but a different or no ad presented to the client.
Maybe this could be provided as a "premium" service to "better" customers who wanted to foil ad blockers more by being able to present ads from their own domain/site.
People who use their work phone or laptop for personal use are stupid.
But the process for me works in reverse -- it's my damn phone, so I will decide how it will notify me of new messages (guess what, my VIP list includes no work addresses), when I will turn it off, what apps I will run on it, etc.
My wife got a new iPhone from work and was wondering if she should get rid of her personal one. I told her "do you want them to see your personal information? what happens when they fire you and you lose the number?" It was pretty hard to convince her to keep her personal phone.
"These N+1 issues are our number 1 priority." I've always wondered how you can have more than one number one prioirty.
That would be a pretty hilarious protest technique, to have some guy in a loud suit that held up a giant, bright LED sign in front of attendees faces and then moved it whenever they tried to look around it.
I'm wondering why this hasn't been done already to deter adblocking.
It seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to have some kind of server-side process that pulled the ad content on demand and then served it up as if it was local content, versus just the javascript they add to the web page to pull up the ads from remote domains.
With a little caching, it might even speed up page display because the content is coming from an existing http connection and not from a secondary connection with setup lag.
Explain to me how it can be possible for the web to kill the publishing industry while being unprofitable.
I think you can somehow insert Goldman Sachs into the equation and then everybody loses money....except Lloyd Blankfein.
I'm using VMware, not Xen, and I don't know if there are any supported wifi adapters or drivers for them.
Even if there were, it's the worst place in my house for an access point -- concrete block on 3 sides, wire mesh lathe and plaster ceiling behind the drywall (it's an old tuck-under garage).
It reminds, me though, I need to find an AP that will work as a wireless bridge so that if the cable modem takes a shit I can turn on my LTE hotspot and backhaul my home LAN through it.
But you know, in a lot of states that doesn't prevent traffic cameras from being used to fine the owners of cars even if they weren't the drivers of the cars.
Fortunately in Minnesota, the state supreme court ruled them unconstitutional because they shift the burden of proof from the state to the vehicle owner.
I concur. Virtualizing a router firewall makes a ton of sense. It frees you from the hardware constraints of a separate box (you can have as many ethernet ports as the software will support) and the power consumption as well, along with all the usual benefits of virtualization features like snapshots, clones, etc.
I suppose there might be some paranoia about this if you believe the underlying virtualization system was vulnerable or you were sharing host NICs via tagged VLANs and believed there was underlying risk in those VLANs or switching vulnerable.
The only thing it doesn't generally get you is wifi, but frankly, wifi is sensitive to location and placement of APs for best coverage, so I don't mind having standalone APs.
I loved my iPad but decided I needed a portable real computer so I got an Asus Zenbook.
I might have gotten another iPad if they had supported a BT mouse, but they didn't, and for the cost of an iPad Pro I ended up with a much more flexible computer that's not really any heavier to carry around and is light years more flexible. Plus I have a TB of storage (I swapped in a new SSD), and if I really miss the iPad, I can always just use the web in full screen mode with the touch display.
Battery life isn't quite as good, but rare is the amount of time where I need 5+ hours of battery life, and if I do, well, I can always buy a 20,000 mah portable battery with 19v output.
I firmly believe that a great number of people get some kind of relief from what ails them from marijuana.
That being said, there are a lot of pro-legalization people who respond to challenges made as to its safety with a litany of medical claims that sound little different than the claims made by all manner of herbalists and charlatans.
It's a weak tactic that's not well validated scientifically and ultimately ends up making legalization advocates just sound like hippies down at the co-op.
But like I said, I really do believe that there are significant medical uses for marijuana, I just don't think they've been scientifically validated enough to use as a strong argument for actual legalization.
I know that some legalization advocates are willing to more or less settle for California style "medical marijuana" legalization, but opponents are right to label this as something of a sham and at worst, you might end up with the kind of "medical" legalization like we have in Minnesota with all kinds of strings attached that doesn't really help many people (like literally not many people, they capped participation and enormously restricted access).
And that kind of legalization doesn't really solve the many huge problems with criminalization.
The "safety" argument relative to drug legalization is huge red herring designed to drag legalization proponents down the path of needing to claim that marijuana is safer than tap water, or worse, into wild and unproven claims of its medical benefits.
The results of marijuana's relative safety have been in for years -- you can't really overdose on it and decades of mass use have failed to show any significant signs of problems in the general population. This is more than we can say about alcohol, acetaminophen, anti-depressants and whole long laundry list of substances that are legal and easy to get.
The REAL argument is that the public policy of marijuana criminalization has been an abject failure. We've spent trillions of dollars on prohibition on it and all we have to show for it is a complete dismantling of our constitutional rights, corruption of a law enforcement system that has produced an epidemic of civil rights abuses quite often enabled by the elusive pursuit of marijuana users (you didn't think they wanted to stop you for a traffic offense, did you?), an erosion in public respect for laws, almost certainly a disregard for the graver risks posed by other illegal drugs, and a criminal justice system that has ruined thousands of lives and built massive criminal enterprises
What we don't have to show for it is any reduction in marijuana use or availability. As a matter of public policy it has failed in its goals and produced a plague of horrific side effects.
This is the argument that needs to be made. The safety issue is a total and complete distraction.
I saw a video review of the XC90 with the dual-boost 2.0L engine (it's turbocharged *and* supercharged -- apparently supercharged at low RPM and then turbocharged at higher RPM).
The power output seemed kind of crazy for such a small engine and I do wonder how long they will hold up before either losing a ton of power and/or needing major rework.
What I thought was kind of crazy was that fuel consumption wasn't amazing, maybe mid-high 20s average MPG. I own a 2007 S80 with the 4.4L V8 that also used to ship in the XC90 and I get something like 26-28 in long-haul highway driving. The 2.0L will beat the V8 hands down in average MPG, but the improvement seems lesser at highway speeds for the wear and tear it will sustain.
My 4.4L V8 is mechanically superb, I get nearly the same engine wear stats at 110K miles that I had at 20K. Unless the tranny shits, I don't see a problem getting another 100k out of this car. I'm not sure how they will squeeze 200k out of a 2.0L like that.
Artisinally curated from free-range supernovae.
Harvesting sounds kind of imperialistic.
It's a curious argument, but Rome did colonize Africa. Most of North Africa was controlled by Rome and largely part of the Roman empire after the fall of Carthage and the Jugurthine war. And the Romans controlled most of the middle East, although beyond Damascus it was frequently challenged by the Parthians.
And pretty much all of those places are a train wreck now, with plenty of tribal conflicts. In fact, bribing tribal leaders to abandon loyalty to al Qaeda was one of the principal counterinsurgency strategies of the US in Iraq.
You might make the argument that the Romans didn't really eliminate tribalism, but what they did was Romanize them so that while they may have remained kind of tribal they adopted enough Roman culture that their commonalities outweighed their tribal differences to the point where trade and cooperation made the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
It seems like whatever moral victory was obtained in the decolonization process in the 50s and 60s was lost (and then some) in the chaos and kleptocracy that followed.
Were the British colonies horrible, apartheid-style military dictatorships or were they something perhaps paternalistic but not repressive? Were many of them evolving in terms of local autonomy or civil rights, or just staying repressive?
I guess I'm trying not to assume their past was rosy, but I wonder how many adults who remember 1950s Rhodesia look back from Mugabe's Zimbabwe and think maybe being Rhodesian wasn't so bad.
I'd have to guess that access to the UK economy would have been beneficial and that the colonial officials would have made sure the roads and electricity worked.
The last Mac I owned was the first Intel MacBook. It was junk. The trim peeled off, the ethernet port wouldn't connect reliably unless you held the cable just right, the keyboard had keys that behaved funky and then the CD drive stopped working.
Worse, was taking it into Apple under warranty and finding out it'd be gone a 1-2 weeks to be fixed. Are you kidding me? 2 weeks for that? I *might* give you 24 hours if you really needed it but I would expect that kind of parts swap could be done in 2 hours or less.
Feds: We really need a back door into your encryption. ISIS, think of the children, sky is falling, etc.
Tech Industry: We've done the math. We stand to lose $xxx billion every year if we weaken encryption.
Feds: Think of the children.
Tech Industry: Here's our compromise. We get to keep stashing our global profits tax-free overseas. That's worth about half. We get to bulk import more H1Bs to keep labor costs down here at home. That's worth the other half. You promise to keep this a secret, that's worth another half (makes sure Fed isn't smart enough to do math on 3 halves..).
Feds: We think that's a great deal. Thanks!
So the tech industry gets what they want and makes the problem go away on a zero-cost basis. The Feds get to start bulk jailing people based on parallel constructions. The public gets zero reprieve from mass surveillance and the thing the government could do to help the public by making them pay their taxes and stop wage suppression they give up on.
But there is a huge swath of the Hollywood talent pool that doesn't have $100 million in the bank and isn't pulling in $20 million a year.
And even some of those people (like the stars of House of Cards) haven't refused to appear in a Netflix series, and that was when a Netflix original was a riskier proposition.
I would think that with as much buzz as high profile shows like Orange.. or House of Cards have gotten that even stars with some kind of established career wouldn't be all that hesitant to appear in a Netflix production at this point. And it's not like Netflix has a couple of datacenter monkeys trying to make TV shows, either, they're likely working with established production companies and producers, people that have some kind of credibility in production.
My sense is now that Netflix has enough name recognition and subscribers and a decent track record, even big names wouldn't bypass it over something stupid like Nielsen numbers.
I'm not sure that the TV viewer is the actual audience for this catfight.
I think the audience for this catfight are the actual creative types that write, direct and act in these productions. The "ratings" brouhaha is code for "popularity" and "success" and they want to discourage talent from getting involved with Netflix productions based on the argument that it will be damaging to their careers.
The whole thing seems bizarre, because I would think that MONEY would be the driver for most of Hollywood. Some self-promoting, reality-TV types might care about "popularity" angles, but I would bet that money would be a bigger driver for most others, with perhaps writers and directors being secondarily motivated by being able to do pet projects or being able to produce whatever their artistic vision is.
With Netflix spending more and more money on independent productions, claiming that their shows lack ratings and hence aren't popular seems to be the last thing they can try to leverage against creative talent signing up to be part of Netflix productions.
It's funny how this same block of made-up people also pushes a made-up holiday called Kwanzaa that claims to represent a made up African culture. You might even argue I'm taking their pan-Africanism at face value.
Of course, we both know that it's perfectly logical to consider the Moroccan pavilion representative of "Africa" because, well, Morocco is in Africa, but we also know perfectly well that my made-up group of activists would object that Morocco is no more "African" than Africa-born Boer leader Paul Kruger is African, because, well they're not black Africa.
So really what I suspect they would want is a country pavilion representing Black Africans. One for Nigeria where you embezzle government funds. Or one for Somalia, with a pirate ride where you hijack shipping for ransom. Or maybe one for Zimbabwe where the gift shop prices increase by 10% every day thanks to hyperinflation.
I think it's a complex thing.
There's the nominal privacy angle, ie, of showing people or situations in private settings that weren't part of any kind of police action. Then there's the abuse-of-public-access privacy angle, like those web sites that show mug shots unless you pay to take them offline.
Then there's the bigger questions of whether relentless databasing forever of every possible police interaction with the public and using it to make all kinds of really arbitrary decisions based on it, like HR managers who assume any interaction with the police must mean you are a criminal and can't be hired for a job.
Then there's the reality of video footage. Storing, indexing, labeling, editing and managing what could end up being thousands of hours of video footage per day for an agency as large as NYPD is not a trivial task. I've seen a medium-sized city use 3 full racks of Compellent just for their intersection TV cameras.
Then there's the question of the public's legitimate *right* to access it, how to do it without the fucking cops editing out or "losing" footage of unarmed civilians getting gunned down.
I just don't know how you do it without it become a colossal expense, another police abuse of power, or a complete abuse of individual privacy for people who aren't actually accused of a crime. Maybe hand over control of the footage to some kind of ombudsman's office? Sounds like something the cops will never agree to, but allowing the cops to agree to it sounds like a recipe for secrecy. Giving the public unlimited access to it sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Paying for the whole process sounds like a dubious investment, yet controlling police dishonesty has been problematic even with dash video.
It's an existential quandary.