I think it's just a sign that the era of free and unlimited porn is causing porn itself to lose luster, and they're just going after weirder and weirder fetishes to try to keep people interested in what amounts to the same mundane sex that rehashes the same sex positions. Shuffle around the various positions and then the obligatory cumshot.
It was luridly appealing when it was uncommon, now it's just banal. And so much is made with so little creativity or passion that you have to attach increasingly weird tags to it to attract viewers, otherwise people are just tired of it.
What's funny is I've seen the same videos tagged multi-posted with different tags. One tag says "incest" the other says "teen with older guy". I mean, it's all the same with different titles.
WRT incest, I'm sure it's one of the socially "prohibited" fetishes with broad appeal. There are probably enough people who have thought about sex with a relative (close or distant) that you can make find people willing to watch either because they've had the idea or they're just bored with everything else.
#1 is the best thing in this entire set of comments.
Over the years, I'd wager most of these employees have done a fair amount of effort in self-retraining for new and emerging technologies. If you never learned anything new at all, you'd be obsolete in six months.
IMHO, the emerging challenge is "what to invest time into"? You can make a substantial argument that for a broad part of the business world, on-premise IT is slowly evaporating and moving to cloud-based services, managed by someone else, up to and including the local desktop. I know it's popular (and in some ways valid) on Slashdot to slam cloud-everything as just "someone else's computer" and that many local workloads will remain local for the foreseeable future, but none of that changes the fact that investing in a particular skill set could wind up being a complete waste of time much quicker than it was 20, 10 or even 5 years ago.
Organizations that lack a coherent technology road map for how and what their computing structure will look like will also fail to understand what their staff's expected skills should be. When management chooses to hedge their own bets and not make commitments, why do they act surprised when their employees do the same and thus fail to be prepared for which last-minute technology change management will embrace?
It's compounded by the fact that many technologies have grown increasingly complex, and that the effort required to obtain "expertise" in past technologies is now insufficient for actual expertise in new technologies. And in some cases, advancements, walled gardens and lack of choice have eliminated knowledge-based expertise, and what's mostly needed is just implementation experience. And in some cases, that's the only way to gain knowledge expertise. There aren't manuals, books or classes which cover actually using a technology in practice or if they exist they are hopelessly outdated.
Yes, but their personal intent doesn't eliminate the public effects of their behavior.
If I'm entirely secure in my personal self image and decide that my choices in personal grooming and dress are driven entirely by own desire for comfort and convenience, should I act surprised when my coworkers complain that my slovenly appearance is a distraction?
The paradox of course being that women invest a great amount of effort into their personal appearance, outspending men by substantial amounts to the point of creating an entire industry devoted to female personal appearance -- hair stylists, cosmetics, fragrances and apparel.
With all that money, time and personal effort into their appearance it remains a mystery how and why men would notice their appearance? Isn't the entire purpose of all that effort to develop their visual presentation to be noticed?
And is it truly surprising when at least the clothing choices and fragrances are almost sure to result in what economists would call signaling of their sexual appeal?
I wonder how the misguided diet advice of low fat/low dietary cholesterol/high carbs in the late 1960s onward is reflected in this study.
I would guess that the general improvement of human metrics extended slightly past the dawn of that dietary advice (ie, the 1990s) and the drop in statistically broad improvement may not be a hard limit but a byproduct of bad nutrition advice which has turned into the obesity epidemic.
I'm also not sure that growing any taller is really of that much utility, either. It may be in a world defined physical combat, but its general utility is kind of limited because it implies greater nutritional demand. Maybe some distant future interstellar anthropologists will say something like:
"It's apparent from their overly large skeletons that these were a people who would not have been capable of organized long distance space flight. Their nutritional demands and excess mass would have consumed too much energy and literally crushed them to death when accelerating to hyperspace. We now understand that only species whose height doesn't exceed 12 Nzsrs and mass doesn't exceed 35 Pmbrs will ever become interstellar."
I think there's something about the very *idea* of being found sexually desirable that is objectionable to a fair number of women, even when it's not weirdly anti-social kinds of "looking".
It's a odd thing, because it's hard to know what the threshold is between an acceptable "you've caught my eye" attractiveness that might be flattering and "he looked at me" creepiness, because the threshold really varies based on individuals. But it's kind of an accusation made without respect to the variation in thresholds.
I think it's why some people who make innocent comments like "that dress looks nice on you" and get accused of harassment find themselves feeling defensive and befuddled. Every woman wants (and I suppose deserves) their own standard of personal comfort, but I don't think we can make a broadly enforced rule based on widely varying standards of personal comfort.
You can't define vandalism as everything from leaving footprints in the dust to burning a building down, depending on how the property owner feels about whether they have been vandalized. Personal feelings about it matter, but can't be used as a functional definition.
We need a rule that's widely understood and generous enough to not unduly punish truly innocuous or innocent behavior. Which unfortunately means some chunk of the female population will have to put up with having their sensibilities offended by some looks and probably even some kinds of touches, although I would expect the latter to have much more stringent standards.
The thought that occurred to me about the whole #metoo phenomenon is that I think what could possibly happen is that men treat all women as total strangers at arm's length unless women wind up blatantly offering complete sexual intimacy. Middle ground just won't be possible, so women will find themselves either mostly alienated or be forced to offer intimacy they don't want in order to get something like middle ground.
The disclaimer was just to avoid the usual critics who rather than critiquing the argument (which I'd welcome) would chose to falsely extend to support for physical assault, coercive sexual encounters, and so on. Looks and looks alone was the actual subject matter, so I wanted it make perfectly clear there no was no justification for other types of more obvious sexual harassment.
More broadly, I'm trying to build the foundation for defining a certain amount of female agency, free will and responsibility for their own actions that explains how and why women experience certain situations that make them uncomfortable.
Too much of this #metoo movement seems to give women the ability to act however they want in the gendered sexual dynamic without regard to whether their behavior catalyzes men, other women, or contributes to the situation's dynamics in some way.
I don't really think women are all that innocent, that naive or should be that free of any consequences for their own behavior. They no more live in a single-gender vacuum than men do, yet it seems to me that women are being given a pass to that says no matter what they do, say, how the dress or act can be held against them.
That's exactly how we *used* to treat women centuries ago (and still do in some cultures) but it came along with the idea that women were somehow intellectually and emotionally deficient, unable to really control their behavior, lacked an awareness of their behavior and needed protection from themselves and men. We gender segregated them into their own worlds where their were no inter-gender relationships and they were literally free of the consequences of their actions in mixed genders because they weren't allowed to be those situations.
Ah yes, the attempt to downplay and dismiss the concerns of sexual harassment. After all, if they are at fault, then who even needs to worry about any of their complaints?
It's not that any of the headline-grabbing complaints of sexual harassment aren't all legitimate harassment if they're true as described.
But it does seem like there are a lot of women who make a big deal about "being looked at" or other similar non-contact/non-verbal behavior as some kind of harassment. I don't think that challenging "being looked at" as an arbitrary and excessive definition of harassment is the same as denying sexual harassment exists.
Humans are sexual animals and reproduction is principal drive. Mate selection is driven significantly by visually identifiable physical attributes -- hips, bust, and so on, for example. It's just not realistic to expect that the human reproduction system is going to be switched off like a light switch.
In some ways, women are right -- certain "looks" by men really do amount to a kind of instinctive evaluation of women's suitability as a reproductive partner, but much of this isn't really anything remotely like a conscious choice to harass a woman. A lot of it is a reflexive response to a physical stimulus, such as the prominence and definition of breasts and hips/bottom in a woman's dress.
I realize this can be framed as "blaming women for how they dress" but in some ways that's exactly what it boils down to. Women's fashions aren't designed by women looking to minimize male reproductive instincts, they're designed by people who often look to maximize women's body characteristics, including busts and hips. Ask yourself why so many lesbians dress "like men" -- there maybe some kind of political choice in wanting to look like a mechanic, but there's definitely an aspect where they are explicitly choosing not to define their appearance in terms of reproductive appeal.
And the issue is further blurred by a certain narcissism inherent in many women -- they *want* to "look pretty", aka be visually appealing. I mean, if you're trying to be visually appealing and you choose the apparel that does so by highlighting your physical attributes which also highlight your reproductive advantages, why exactly were you expecting a man to never look at you in any way that suggested they recognized those same physical attributes?
I shouldn't have to end this little screed with this, but I will for the reactionaries anyway -- NONE of this justifies coercive or any kind of unwanted physical contact. I am ONLY explaining and critiquing the common and fairly narrow cases of women who complain that "being looked at" is a kind of harassment.
It seems hard to believe now, but I find it kind of compelling because in the absence of any compelling evidence/information/communication to the contrary it seems like the "voice in your head" could possibly be thought of as a separate entity or at least something different than your animal impulses.
If you buy into any of the bicameral mind concept, it wasn't even much of an idea to form religions. They just didn't know any better because their assumed their voice of consciousness was a religious deity.
Both Amazon and Netflix have long crippled their search/sort features to mask how small and craptastic their catalogs are. Amazon on most platforms is slightly deceptive by including pay offerings in searches where you thought you were looking at prime content, but this is mostly because they also haven't sorted out a consistent user interface across platforms.
On the PC, Amazon Prime Video is too much like the store's interface. On embedded platforms (DVD, smart TV, etc) it's more Netflix-like but still weird and hard to navigate. I'm inclined to give them a slight pass as the embedded platforms are probably a nightmare to code for and they need to cram in both Prime browsing and pay per view functionality (which I have used a couple of times).
Does the Bitcoin ledger remain as computationally intensive as it is now once there are no more coins to mine? Will people bother with Bitcoin "ledger computing" once there's no coins to extract from the process?
My guess is that they coordinate this with further removal of end-user control/subscription/etc on the desktop side of Win 10.
This will make crapware disposable Arm Win10 machines palatable to most people when the alternative is paying Intel prices for basically the same OS experience.
It's also likely targeted at the education market and other similar ones that have taken up Chromebooks.
I'm not convinced it's about which "side" would win, but about the catharsis that would result.
Unfortunately I think that we're so far down the road of mistrust and hatred that it would probably have to get pretty close to actual civil war for people on both sides to see how far off the deep end they really are and what the consequences of continuing that path might mean.
I had a queue like that when I did DVDs, but when streaming became more common I got lazy and did that instead of the discs and ultimately cancelled the disc plan because I wasn't watching them. Another reason I cancelled is that many of the old/rare/niche movies I wanted to watch went from "some delay" to "long delay" to "unavailable" and the disc service lost a lot of value to me.
Based on some basic back of the envelope calculations, I'd be better off just paying to stream content on-demand from wherever (amazon, itunes, etc) based on my actual volume of consumption.
It doesn't completely solve the paradox of choice, but it'd be kind of like renting VHS again. You're more inclined to accept what you choose because you paid a price to get it.
My theory (and this may just be own rehashing/reinvention of the Paradox of Choice) is that the ability to make alternative choices with near zero transaction costs leads to an unrealistic expectation of gratification.
With one VHS or one cassette and no easy way to obtain an alternative, I can either accept the gratification of something to watch/listen to or the alternative, which is nothing. At least in my mind, even a poor experience was better than no experience, even with the burden of some kind of buyer's remorse (ie, I should have rented a different movie or brought a different cassette).
With many choices, I expect that I will achieve an optimal level of gratification because I won't face any buyer's remorse and I expect that there is a choice which will achieve that optimal gratification. When it doesn't, I think the frustration of re-choosing and not achieving gratification masks the value of marginal gratification vs. no gratification.
It's the expectation that unlimited choice always equals optimal gratification that winds up being consistently disappointing.
I don't pirate but "not included in the offering" is Hollywood's major failure and essential manipulation.
The major TV networks alone had something like 1,500 hours of scripted entertainment per year. Probably at least 30 studio feature films per year. If you just think about a single 10 year period, that's enough entertainment to occupy even a picky person for years.
But where is it? You can barely find older films on streaming services, of if you do it's a minuscule fraction of what' out there. Older TV shows are almost non-existent.
We've been told "Oh vey, the rights are so difficult" and given some random high profile examples like "WKRP in Cincinnati" with all its music licensing problems. I don't think that's it, I think Hollywood is worried that if large back catalogs of programming become available it will kill new revenue for current programming or undermine the ability to essentially remake old concepts with updated slang, fashions and characterizations.
It also makes me wonder where old news programming is -- why isn't 60 Minutes available for streaming its old seasons? After watching Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary (which I'm critical of for other reasons) and some of the extended clips from the news of the era, it makes me downright conspiratorial. The image of the 1960s newsman as a tool of the establishment is false -- Walter Cronkite called Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention a police state ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. I think that if old news programming became widely available, people would really question the nature of what they call "the news" these days -- Brian Williams or any of the other talking heads would *never* do that now.
Back in the day when you rented physical video tapes, I'm sure I watched some shitty movies. But unlike Netflix, I didn't rent 3 tapes and then watch 1/3 of each them and feel like I had just wasted 90 minutes.
I used to take my Walkman with me to classes every day -- something like 2 hours of listening time between walking, waiting, etc, and I maybe brought 1 extra cassette tape with me. Now it's like 6,000 songs on my phone and I can't listen to more than 3 in a row *on a playlist* without skipping, or just abandoning the playlist for something else.
The only place where I don't feel like this holds up is restaurant menus.
I would imagine that any traffic Comcast can't identify just gets dumped into a narrow, oversubscribed bandwidth category.
I think one risk Comcast, et al, face if net neutrality goes away is that there will be a lot of attempts to beat their shaping systems. I think Comcast would like extract their extra profit not from consumers but from data providers. It's one thing for Netflix to raise prices $1 / month for subscribers, it's another for Comcast to jack up prices to consumers directly -- that's bad PR for them.
So they will go after data providers, who will engage in various methods to evade shaping. The risk part comes in when it fucks up throughput for everyone and results in a completely unreliable internet experience.
Maybe it was a reverse translation problem. Cook said something that translated into Chinese translates most closely back as "cyberspace".
Is it really that awkward of a term? I mean they're all awkward, and at least that one has been around for a while and isn't the latest marketing buzzword.
I actually think he's right, and I know a number of successful people who seem successful because they are able to live life without many "extras".
A lot of them seem to be single, too, which I think is part of it. The financially successful people I know (and I mean people who did on their own, not through family money) all seem to live like paupers personally. Like whole chickens go on sale, so they buy 6 and live off chicken stew for 2 weeks. They drive pretty uncomfortable cars until they are unfixable. Entertainment consists of movies bought at garage sales or pawn shops.
You can't do any of that with a wife with other ideas about lifestyle.
I wish I could do it, but I differ somewhat philosophically from these people. They seem to find value in "bargains" and accumulating money, as if a bank balance provides them happiness. It doesn't work for me; I'd rather enjoy myself with a more involved and richer set of activities and more comfortable lifestyle choices.
I know too many people who were pretty successful and then got cancer or some other life-changing health problem and found themselves filled with regret about what they never did because they were concerned with saving money. And now they could never do anything with that money but give it away. I'd rather be in that situation barely solvent knowing that I'd lived a full life.
I think the risk isn't access to authentication (although the existential nature of that risk never goes away), but that any topographical mapping of your face good enough to do anything clever with is a level of biometric detail that could also be abused.
Facial recognition has gotten pretty good with just 2D photos. Look at what Facebook can do with a well-hinted database of photos. Do we really want high resolution topographic facial maps out there?
I think the big problem with technology and privacy is that there's some default idea that just because there isn't a well-defined risk or negative outcome from a technology, then there is no risk and we should just jump in, head first, and see what happens.
By the time we become aware of tangible risks, though, it's too late. The data is out there, the users are hooked (or tricked into being hooked) to the feature.
The naysayers will always say nay until they can talk directly to HAL-9000 or some kind of Commander Data type android. They will never acknowledge an "AI" as one unless it operates in one of the Hollywood human modes they're familiar with.
IMHO, this is part of the risk of AI -- it will be an emergent phenomenon arising out of apparently less intelligent automated systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just a sign that the era of free and unlimited porn is causing porn itself to lose luster, and they're just going after weirder and weirder fetishes to try to keep people interested in what amounts to the same mundane sex that rehashes the same sex positions. Shuffle around the various positions and then the obligatory cumshot.
It was luridly appealing when it was uncommon, now it's just banal. And so much is made with so little creativity or passion that you have to attach increasingly weird tags to it to attract viewers, otherwise people are just tired of it.
What's funny is I've seen the same videos tagged multi-posted with different tags. One tag says "incest" the other says "teen with older guy". I mean, it's all the same with different titles.
WRT incest, I'm sure it's one of the socially "prohibited" fetishes with broad appeal. There are probably enough people who have thought about sex with a relative (close or distant) that you can make find people willing to watch either because they've had the idea or they're just bored with everything else.
#1 is the best thing in this entire set of comments.
Over the years, I'd wager most of these employees have done a fair amount of effort in self-retraining for new and emerging technologies. If you never learned anything new at all, you'd be obsolete in six months.
IMHO, the emerging challenge is "what to invest time into"? You can make a substantial argument that for a broad part of the business world, on-premise IT is slowly evaporating and moving to cloud-based services, managed by someone else, up to and including the local desktop. I know it's popular (and in some ways valid) on Slashdot to slam cloud-everything as just "someone else's computer" and that many local workloads will remain local for the foreseeable future, but none of that changes the fact that investing in a particular skill set could wind up being a complete waste of time much quicker than it was 20, 10 or even 5 years ago.
Organizations that lack a coherent technology road map for how and what their computing structure will look like will also fail to understand what their staff's expected skills should be. When management chooses to hedge their own bets and not make commitments, why do they act surprised when their employees do the same and thus fail to be prepared for which last-minute technology change management will embrace?
It's compounded by the fact that many technologies have grown increasingly complex, and that the effort required to obtain "expertise" in past technologies is now insufficient for actual expertise in new technologies. And in some cases, advancements, walled gardens and lack of choice have eliminated knowledge-based expertise, and what's mostly needed is just implementation experience. And in some cases, that's the only way to gain knowledge expertise. There aren't manuals, books or classes which cover actually using a technology in practice or if they exist they are hopelessly outdated.
Yes, but their personal intent doesn't eliminate the public effects of their behavior.
If I'm entirely secure in my personal self image and decide that my choices in personal grooming and dress are driven entirely by own desire for comfort and convenience, should I act surprised when my coworkers complain that my slovenly appearance is a distraction?
The paradox of course being that women invest a great amount of effort into their personal appearance, outspending men by substantial amounts to the point of creating an entire industry devoted to female personal appearance -- hair stylists, cosmetics, fragrances and apparel.
With all that money, time and personal effort into their appearance it remains a mystery how and why men would notice their appearance? Isn't the entire purpose of all that effort to develop their visual presentation to be noticed?
And is it truly surprising when at least the clothing choices and fragrances are almost sure to result in what economists would call signaling of their sexual appeal?
I wonder how the misguided diet advice of low fat/low dietary cholesterol/high carbs in the late 1960s onward is reflected in this study.
I would guess that the general improvement of human metrics extended slightly past the dawn of that dietary advice (ie, the 1990s) and the drop in statistically broad improvement may not be a hard limit but a byproduct of bad nutrition advice which has turned into the obesity epidemic.
I'm also not sure that growing any taller is really of that much utility, either. It may be in a world defined physical combat, but its general utility is kind of limited because it implies greater nutritional demand. Maybe some distant future interstellar anthropologists will say something like:
"It's apparent from their overly large skeletons that these were a people who would not have been capable of organized long distance space flight. Their nutritional demands and excess mass would have consumed too much energy and literally crushed them to death when accelerating to hyperspace. We now understand that only species whose height doesn't exceed 12 Nzsrs and mass doesn't exceed 35 Pmbrs will ever become interstellar."
I hear the complaint made, but informally.
I think there's something about the very *idea* of being found sexually desirable that is objectionable to a fair number of women, even when it's not weirdly anti-social kinds of "looking".
It's a odd thing, because it's hard to know what the threshold is between an acceptable "you've caught my eye" attractiveness that might be flattering and "he looked at me" creepiness, because the threshold really varies based on individuals. But it's kind of an accusation made without respect to the variation in thresholds.
I think it's why some people who make innocent comments like "that dress looks nice on you" and get accused of harassment find themselves feeling defensive and befuddled. Every woman wants (and I suppose deserves) their own standard of personal comfort, but I don't think we can make a broadly enforced rule based on widely varying standards of personal comfort.
You can't define vandalism as everything from leaving footprints in the dust to burning a building down, depending on how the property owner feels about whether they have been vandalized. Personal feelings about it matter, but can't be used as a functional definition.
We need a rule that's widely understood and generous enough to not unduly punish truly innocuous or innocent behavior. Which unfortunately means some chunk of the female population will have to put up with having their sensibilities offended by some looks and probably even some kinds of touches, although I would expect the latter to have much more stringent standards.
The thought that occurred to me about the whole #metoo phenomenon is that I think what could possibly happen is that men treat all women as total strangers at arm's length unless women wind up blatantly offering complete sexual intimacy. Middle ground just won't be possible, so women will find themselves either mostly alienated or be forced to offer intimacy they don't want in order to get something like middle ground.
The disclaimer was just to avoid the usual critics who rather than critiquing the argument (which I'd welcome) would chose to falsely extend to support for physical assault, coercive sexual encounters, and so on. Looks and looks alone was the actual subject matter, so I wanted it make perfectly clear there no was no justification for other types of more obvious sexual harassment.
More broadly, I'm trying to build the foundation for defining a certain amount of female agency, free will and responsibility for their own actions that explains how and why women experience certain situations that make them uncomfortable.
Too much of this #metoo movement seems to give women the ability to act however they want in the gendered sexual dynamic without regard to whether their behavior catalyzes men, other women, or contributes to the situation's dynamics in some way.
I don't really think women are all that innocent, that naive or should be that free of any consequences for their own behavior. They no more live in a single-gender vacuum than men do, yet it seems to me that women are being given a pass to that says no matter what they do, say, how the dress or act can be held against them.
That's exactly how we *used* to treat women centuries ago (and still do in some cultures) but it came along with the idea that women were somehow intellectually and emotionally deficient, unable to really control their behavior, lacked an awareness of their behavior and needed protection from themselves and men. We gender segregated them into their own worlds where their were no inter-gender relationships and they were literally free of the consequences of their actions in mixed genders because they weren't allowed to be those situations.
Ah yes, the attempt to downplay and dismiss the concerns of sexual harassment. After all, if they are at fault, then who even needs to worry about any of their complaints?
It's not that any of the headline-grabbing complaints of sexual harassment aren't all legitimate harassment if they're true as described.
But it does seem like there are a lot of women who make a big deal about "being looked at" or other similar non-contact/non-verbal behavior as some kind of harassment. I don't think that challenging "being looked at" as an arbitrary and excessive definition of harassment is the same as denying sexual harassment exists.
Humans are sexual animals and reproduction is principal drive. Mate selection is driven significantly by visually identifiable physical attributes -- hips, bust, and so on, for example. It's just not realistic to expect that the human reproduction system is going to be switched off like a light switch.
In some ways, women are right -- certain "looks" by men really do amount to a kind of instinctive evaluation of women's suitability as a reproductive partner, but much of this isn't really anything remotely like a conscious choice to harass a woman. A lot of it is a reflexive response to a physical stimulus, such as the prominence and definition of breasts and hips/bottom in a woman's dress.
I realize this can be framed as "blaming women for how they dress" but in some ways that's exactly what it boils down to. Women's fashions aren't designed by women looking to minimize male reproductive instincts, they're designed by people who often look to maximize women's body characteristics, including busts and hips. Ask yourself why so many lesbians dress "like men" -- there maybe some kind of political choice in wanting to look like a mechanic, but there's definitely an aspect where they are explicitly choosing not to define their appearance in terms of reproductive appeal.
And the issue is further blurred by a certain narcissism inherent in many women -- they *want* to "look pretty", aka be visually appealing. I mean, if you're trying to be visually appealing and you choose the apparel that does so by highlighting your physical attributes which also highlight your reproductive advantages, why exactly were you expecting a man to never look at you in any way that suggested they recognized those same physical attributes?
I shouldn't have to end this little screed with this, but I will for the reactionaries anyway -- NONE of this justifies coercive or any kind of unwanted physical contact. I am ONLY explaining and critiquing the common and fairly narrow cases of women who complain that "being looked at" is a kind of harassment.
Participated in Mass Shootings: Looked very dead
It seems hard to believe now, but I find it kind of compelling because in the absence of any compelling evidence/information/communication to the contrary it seems like the "voice in your head" could possibly be thought of as a separate entity or at least something different than your animal impulses.
If you buy into any of the bicameral mind concept, it wasn't even much of an idea to form religions. They just didn't know any better because their assumed their voice of consciousness was a religious deity.
Both Amazon and Netflix have long crippled their search/sort features to mask how small and craptastic their catalogs are. Amazon on most platforms is slightly deceptive by including pay offerings in searches where you thought you were looking at prime content, but this is mostly because they also haven't sorted out a consistent user interface across platforms.
On the PC, Amazon Prime Video is too much like the store's interface. On embedded platforms (DVD, smart TV, etc) it's more Netflix-like but still weird and hard to navigate. I'm inclined to give them a slight pass as the embedded platforms are probably a nightmare to code for and they need to cram in both Prime browsing and pay per view functionality (which I have used a couple of times).
Does the Bitcoin ledger remain as computationally intensive as it is now once there are no more coins to mine? Will people bother with Bitcoin "ledger computing" once there's no coins to extract from the process?
My guess is that they coordinate this with further removal of end-user control/subscription/etc on the desktop side of Win 10.
This will make crapware disposable Arm Win10 machines palatable to most people when the alternative is paying Intel prices for basically the same OS experience.
It's also likely targeted at the education market and other similar ones that have taken up Chromebooks.
I'm not convinced it's about which "side" would win, but about the catharsis that would result.
Unfortunately I think that we're so far down the road of mistrust and hatred that it would probably have to get pretty close to actual civil war for people on both sides to see how far off the deep end they really are and what the consequences of continuing that path might mean.
It seems like it would be cheaper and we'd settle a lot of this shit for at least 50 years, maybe longer.
I had a queue like that when I did DVDs, but when streaming became more common I got lazy and did that instead of the discs and ultimately cancelled the disc plan because I wasn't watching them. Another reason I cancelled is that many of the old/rare/niche movies I wanted to watch went from "some delay" to "long delay" to "unavailable" and the disc service lost a lot of value to me.
Based on some basic back of the envelope calculations, I'd be better off just paying to stream content on-demand from wherever (amazon, itunes, etc) based on my actual volume of consumption.
It doesn't completely solve the paradox of choice, but it'd be kind of like renting VHS again. You're more inclined to accept what you choose because you paid a price to get it.
My theory (and this may just be own rehashing/reinvention of the Paradox of Choice) is that the ability to make alternative choices with near zero transaction costs leads to an unrealistic expectation of gratification.
With one VHS or one cassette and no easy way to obtain an alternative, I can either accept the gratification of something to watch/listen to or the alternative, which is nothing. At least in my mind, even a poor experience was better than no experience, even with the burden of some kind of buyer's remorse (ie, I should have rented a different movie or brought a different cassette).
With many choices, I expect that I will achieve an optimal level of gratification because I won't face any buyer's remorse and I expect that there is a choice which will achieve that optimal gratification. When it doesn't, I think the frustration of re-choosing and not achieving gratification masks the value of marginal gratification vs. no gratification.
It's the expectation that unlimited choice always equals optimal gratification that winds up being consistently disappointing.
I don't pirate but "not included in the offering" is Hollywood's major failure and essential manipulation.
The major TV networks alone had something like 1,500 hours of scripted entertainment per year. Probably at least 30 studio feature films per year. If you just think about a single 10 year period, that's enough entertainment to occupy even a picky person for years.
But where is it? You can barely find older films on streaming services, of if you do it's a minuscule fraction of what' out there. Older TV shows are almost non-existent.
We've been told "Oh vey, the rights are so difficult" and given some random high profile examples like "WKRP in Cincinnati" with all its music licensing problems. I don't think that's it, I think Hollywood is worried that if large back catalogs of programming become available it will kill new revenue for current programming or undermine the ability to essentially remake old concepts with updated slang, fashions and characterizations.
It also makes me wonder where old news programming is -- why isn't 60 Minutes available for streaming its old seasons? After watching Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary (which I'm critical of for other reasons) and some of the extended clips from the news of the era, it makes me downright conspiratorial. The image of the 1960s newsman as a tool of the establishment is false -- Walter Cronkite called Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention a police state ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. I think that if old news programming became widely available, people would really question the nature of what they call "the news" these days -- Brian Williams or any of the other talking heads would *never* do that now.
I think this is true.
Back in the day when you rented physical video tapes, I'm sure I watched some shitty movies. But unlike Netflix, I didn't rent 3 tapes and then watch 1/3 of each them and feel like I had just wasted 90 minutes.
I used to take my Walkman with me to classes every day -- something like 2 hours of listening time between walking, waiting, etc, and I maybe brought 1 extra cassette tape with me. Now it's like 6,000 songs on my phone and I can't listen to more than 3 in a row *on a playlist* without skipping, or just abandoning the playlist for something else.
The only place where I don't feel like this holds up is restaurant menus.
I would imagine that any traffic Comcast can't identify just gets dumped into a narrow, oversubscribed bandwidth category.
I think one risk Comcast, et al, face if net neutrality goes away is that there will be a lot of attempts to beat their shaping systems. I think Comcast would like extract their extra profit not from consumers but from data providers. It's one thing for Netflix to raise prices $1 / month for subscribers, it's another for Comcast to jack up prices to consumers directly -- that's bad PR for them.
So they will go after data providers, who will engage in various methods to evade shaping. The risk part comes in when it fucks up throughput for everyone and results in a completely unreliable internet experience.
Maybe it was a reverse translation problem. Cook said something that translated into Chinese translates most closely back as "cyberspace".
Is it really that awkward of a term? I mean they're all awkward, and at least that one has been around for a while and isn't the latest marketing buzzword.
I actually think he's right, and I know a number of successful people who seem successful because they are able to live life without many "extras".
A lot of them seem to be single, too, which I think is part of it. The financially successful people I know (and I mean people who did on their own, not through family money) all seem to live like paupers personally. Like whole chickens go on sale, so they buy 6 and live off chicken stew for 2 weeks. They drive pretty uncomfortable cars until they are unfixable. Entertainment consists of movies bought at garage sales or pawn shops.
You can't do any of that with a wife with other ideas about lifestyle.
I wish I could do it, but I differ somewhat philosophically from these people. They seem to find value in "bargains" and accumulating money, as if a bank balance provides them happiness. It doesn't work for me; I'd rather enjoy myself with a more involved and richer set of activities and more comfortable lifestyle choices.
I know too many people who were pretty successful and then got cancer or some other life-changing health problem and found themselves filled with regret about what they never did because they were concerned with saving money. And now they could never do anything with that money but give it away. I'd rather be in that situation barely solvent knowing that I'd lived a full life.
I think the risk isn't access to authentication (although the existential nature of that risk never goes away), but that any topographical mapping of your face good enough to do anything clever with is a level of biometric detail that could also be abused.
Facial recognition has gotten pretty good with just 2D photos. Look at what Facebook can do with a well-hinted database of photos. Do we really want high resolution topographic facial maps out there?
I think the big problem with technology and privacy is that there's some default idea that just because there isn't a well-defined risk or negative outcome from a technology, then there is no risk and we should just jump in, head first, and see what happens.
By the time we become aware of tangible risks, though, it's too late. The data is out there, the users are hooked (or tricked into being hooked) to the feature.
The naysayers will always say nay until they can talk directly to HAL-9000 or some kind of Commander Data type android. They will never acknowledge an "AI" as one unless it operates in one of the Hollywood human modes they're familiar with.
IMHO, this is part of the risk of AI -- it will be an emergent phenomenon arising out of apparently less intelligent automated systems.