Torchwood never had any promise as long as Russell T. Davies was involved. That man shouldn't be let anywhere near a science fiction series.
Agreed on the second sentence. The only good thing you can say about him is that he had the pull to bring back Who. The problem is, after that he should have stopped pulling...
(And let's not speak of Chris Chibnall. Ever...)
But Torchwood did show promise. The first couple are a bit of a wash, being packed full of character and concept intro, but the third introduced some heavy emotional/perceptual/self-examination concepts to the characters - primarily Owen, who started the episode as a very laddish prat, but was suddenly deeply affected by effectively participating in a rape. Unfortunately, Mr Little Red button comes along, and by the next episode Owen's a laddish prat again, feeling up Gwen in the freezer as Ianto's huge moral dilemma goes on the rampage - seemingly, just so Ianto can sulk for a couple of episodes before introducing Capt'n Jack to the delights of stopwatches.
And so it goes on, episode after episode. "Beep! Starting Windows..."
("Countrycide" was funny, though - am I the only one who spent the whole episode expecting Hillary Briss to pop up at the end? The whole thing had a very Royston Vasey look;-)
Give it time. But as for depth... since when was Doctor Who deep?!
It had its moments where it handled some fairly radical (for its time) themes. Environmentalism, the nature of self, slavery, unrestrained authority, the ambiguity of moral choice, etc. It wasn't all robot dogs and shrieking assistants;-)
Frankly, I think a lot of people are erroneously in awe of the new Doctor Who, see the mediocre special effects and believe the BBC hype.
I'd agree with you there, but I'm not one of them. It suffers the a bit of the same problem as Torchwood; it introduces deep stuff (particularly in the first series; the Doctor's loneliness and sometimes manic and flip method of dealing with it comes to mind) but then that's ignored until it's needed to fill a few unfilled seconds again. At least the Magic Reset Button doesn't get a continual workout.
To be honest, my biggest problem with the new Who is the continual re-hashing of the Daleks; the first time was fine, but the rest were unnecessary and rather forced.
... it would do the decent thing and commission something entirely new or re-make Blake's 7 and do a proper job of it this time round.
Umm, have you seenBlake's 7 recently? I have and, apart from bits of the first series, it's pretty much all camp badness. It no more deserves resuscitation than do On The Buses or Are You Being Served?...
(I may however be biased by certain members of my family and friends, who sometimes seem to be teetering on the edge of writing Blake's 7 slashfic of the B/A variety...)
The US panicked after Sputnik because the Soviets did something we hadn't gotten around to doing yet, and we were scared of them. We've landed on the moon.
Isn't the Great American Creed something like "doesn't matter what you could do 34 years ago; what can you do now?"
Do you, for one, welcome your Chinese moon overlords?
The US government and NASA have admitted they have no hope of returning men to the moon before the end of next decade at least. You've thrown away or forgotten so much necessary technology that you'd basically have to start again. I think, were the Chinese or Indians to land on the moon before you, it'd unleash such a wave of fear-driven xenophobic nationalism in the US that it'd make the current War Against Brown People That Have Nothing To Do With The Brown People Who Hurt You look like a kindergarten tiff...
The main byproduct of the enzymatic reaction is water.
And carbon, or at least a hydrocarbon group. Maybe a carboxyl group. Doesn't matter, all 3 are nastier than sugar.
Saying "the main byproduct of the enzymatic reaction is water" is a bit like saying "the main byproduct of firing a bullet is gas". It's true, but the other byproducts are the ones that get you.
Some people (*cough* Steve Wozniak *cough*) even see embedded firewall devices that run OpenBSD. They run entirely off flash memory.
As do I, if I look across the room right now. A mini VIA machine, bought originally to play with, that now boots a stripped-down OpenBSD off a read-only mounted IDE-connected CF card, running firewall & local DNS.
And the point of this article is *stripped down*. Unfortunately, the writer gets it all wrong, re-invents someone else's wheel, and doesn't really solve the problem (if my firewall still had GCC on it I wouldn't need to frack around like he suggests - but a compiler, like the X & Games packages, has no place on a firewall.)
Binary patches - or even binary updates to -current packages & the kernel, maybe located somewhere else in the install tree - would be nice. But I can understand why they don't, and I'm not going to hold it against Theo et al if they don't provide them. I'll just continue to do an in-place upgrade every 6 or 12 months, merging my script and config changes each time.
You might (this is just a theory I have...) be looking at things the wrong way. I wonder - have the music industry hoist themselves on their own petard?
For a long time from the beginning, singles were the lifeblood of the music industry. Songwriters, musicians, and performers were effectively the property of the record studio, indentured to turn out song after song after song after song. Take the next song off the pile from the songwriters, throw the studio musicians at it, and stand the current / next voice and face of the week up front to make the next single. Get enough together, and a studio could rotate them fast enough to have two or more different singles on the go each week - one at its peak, one on the way up, and another waiting behind it.
Young 'ns may not know this, but in the first heyday of the record industry - the 50's and 60's - people didn't have album collections - they had singles collections.
But then, somewhere around the late 50's - early 60's, the industry noticed that people became attached to artists - not songs, and not the studios. Studios took advantage of this, and started releasing whole albums of content - firstly as a compilation of hits, then adding a couple of new songs (which became the new singles for the next couple of weeks). What they didn't forsee was this slowing down the sales of singles. Eventually, to recapture those lost sales, artists - self contained artists, who could write & record their own stuff - were given a slightly longer leash; long enough to do their own thing with whole albums of content and build an even more loyal fanbase.
Loyalty to the artist had replaced loyalty to the studio. And there was much rejoicing...
Slightly later - it started in the mid-late 60's, hitting its stride in the 70's - the music industry realised that, despite the added $$$ they were getting up front from selling whole albums, this actually had the effect of slowing sales revenue. Sure, a top-selling album raked it in big to start with - but, with very few exceptions, there was a huge initial peak followed by a quick decline and long tail. Further causing grief was the fact that by the time they got around to releasing the next lot of singles from an album, most potential purchasers already owned it - and so were lost to the market.
Come the rise of the "2 good songs + 10 tracks of filler" album. This was the best of both worlds for the studios - 2 singles to sell + just enough reason for people to pay the extra for the album = single sales + album sales + a short "hot" time so they could rotate the next "big thing" into place quickly to start the whole cycle again.
Now, quickly ffwd to "modern" times. People are wise to the "2+10" formula of the average album, and are sick of it. Worse still, from the studios POV, they now have an alternative that shortcuts both the "release lots of singles quickly" and "release whole albums" formula - an alternative that started underground with IRC & FTP sites, hit the big time with Napster, was kept alive post-Napster by Kazaa/Limewire/Bearshare/etc, and continues today in the form of BT. The studios are struggling with the loss of singles and the loss of albums.
Where to now?
One obvious niche choice - ringtones. It's almost a new version of the singles formula - take lots of songs with "I want it now!" appeal, whack a top-dollar price on them, make them ridiculously simple to buy without the purchaser seeing the money leave their hands (until the next phone bill), and turn 'em over fast.
I'm surprised - only 200 hours? That's less than an hour a day...
I know several fixed-rate subcontractors & salaried workers that are expected to do at least 10 hrs / week unpaid work. That's 400 ~ 500 hours/yr right there, let alone the extra they are also "expected" to do when the shit hits the fan (i.e. their employer realises they they've cut too many people and aren't going to make targets...)
Compartmentalizing your life and writing off work as dead time (as far as high order needs is concerned) seems extremely unhealthy. Maybe you need a better job.
Maybe so. In fact, despite being one to strictly segment my work and personal life, I agree.
But just remember that for the 99.99% of people out there, the large organisation they're working for believes the exact opposite - that the 16 or 12 or 10 or whatever hours they're not working for them is dead time, wasted time, time that would be better spent working for them.
And that goes double for those people on a salary...
So what's the problem? They're blaming the reporting, not you - and, after all, it is your job to "check out the reporting", isn't it?
Sorry, maybe I'm just a bit narky on this subject. I had a job a while ago where week after week, month after month, year after year I'd get pulled up because the coversheets on my timesheet and job accounting reports were literally a sea of red, marking out dozens of supposed violations every day. Every time I got hauled up about this, I turned the page over to the actual reports and located the raw data for every single supposed "violation", showed how they were due to errors and incorrect assumptions in the incoming data and report generation, exactly where and how the errors were occurring, and exactly how to fix the data collection and reporting - or, failing that, the one thing they could do to prevent making the incorrect assumptions.
Their suggestion? To fiddle the system (which in fact broke other, less important, reports!) with the effect of slowing down my workrate, just so these particular reports came out "correct".
When I left that position 2 years later, it was still going on...
The problem, y'see, was the opposite to yours. In my case, the management's assumption was that the whole process of data collection and report generation was infallible. Despite repeatedly proving and explaining at least 100 times why it wasn't, it was still considered to be so.
Lousy acting, characters who were totally unengaging, the same story told half a dozen times with only the monsters changed.
So you're saying it's worse than Who, but better than Torchwood?;-)
Torchwood had promise. So much promise, so much of it squandered. Every single episode threw away a little bit more of it - push the reset button, Owen's now an arsehole again. Push the reset button, Gwen's now got a thing for Owen. Push the reset button, Ianto's now thinking about Jack & stopwatches. Push the reset button,...
Off the top of my head, the only one which didn't waste its promise like that was the "out of time" one. And that was ruined by the most repulsive sex scene you'll ever see outside of a "The Fat and The Furries" porn flick, and a trite ending for the young girl.
And the last storyline - a decent first episode*, ruined by a crap second one. Spend a whole episode building up the creepiest villan they've ever had, Bilis Manger, then waste him by just having him there to call up a poor copy of Dr Who CGI. Then they rip off an ending from the Bible...
What a total waste of brilliant concepts...
At least "Primeval" has that blonde bint - I presume she's some English pop-tart? - running around in her underwear in most episodes. And an internally consistent ongoing storyline. Personally, I'd rank "Primeval" right up there near New Who (though not for depth or staying power), and far far superior to "Torchwood".
-----
(* If you can overlook the "blood won't last 60 years, but pencil will?", "the man from the 'lectric will never find it there!", "hey Ianto, why'd you stop shooting Owen?", and "so, was Capt'n Jack shot down by the Jerries, or by his own men for being a poof?" plotholes.)
Unfortunately, the other fact of the matter is that those who claim that global warming is not human-induced are so indignant when their proposition is challenged that you have to seriously consider the source of, science of, objectivity of, and funding behind their assertions.
(Oops, forgot to say) Rate vs amount. To a large extent, the effects of volcanic CO2 release are ameliorated by concurrent release of silicates and other substances which absorb / react with CO2 to bind it back into the geological cycle. The assertion stands, however, that disregarding event peaks the ongoing rate of CO2 release by humankind far outstrips the ongoing rate of CO2 release caused by vulcanism.
A single volcanic erruption releases more CO2 than humanity has since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
I keep seeing / hearing this, but I've never actually found a reliable source to prove/disprove it.
On the other hand, I have (presumably reputable) textbooks which say things like "Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by about 25% since the beginning of the 19th century", "The rate of fossil-fuel burning is about 10 times less than the rate of CO2 exchange with the terrestrial biosphere but 100 times larger than the rate of CO2 release by volcanoes. Its effect on the atmosphere is disproportionately large, however, because this part of the global carbon cycle is not in balance", and "The anthropogenic CO2 source is much smaller than the rate at which CO2 is released by respiration and decay, but much larger than the rate at which CO2 is emitted by volcanoes. It therefore represents a substantial perturbation to the global carbon cycle". (Kump, Kasting & Crane, "The Earth System" 2nd ed, 2004)
So, who do I believe - 3 academic researchers and authors in the field, or some random dude on TV / Slashdot? I report, you decide...;-)
Because they've tried all those before and failed to get people to accept them? (Or worse, people have "just accepted" them?)
Water pollution - "My drinking water's OK, there's plenty more where that came from, and who gives a rats about some shitty little creek somewhere else? I'm OK Jack!"
Deforestation - "The trees in my yard are doing fine, and if a football field of rainforest really is disappearing every second, why can't we see big chunks of green being chomped out in satellite pictures of South America / South Asia? What do you mean I don't understand 'scale', you mean I need a magnifying glass and ruler to see pissy little bits disappearing each month? When you're saying it's happening every second?! Bullshit!"
Acid rain - (cf Water & Deforestation) "The government fixed that, didn't we? (No thanks to those goddamned commies in the UN). Besides, I never noticed it - my tap water tastes just the same, and my garden didn't get eaten away, did it? Can't have been too bad..."
Smog - "Yeah, well, what ya gonna do. Fuggedaboutit; hey look at those crazy Japanese wearin' those white masks to work!..."
Fossil fuels - "Haven't run out yet, have we? Didn't we find some new stuff up north somewhere anyway? Gas is so damned expensive though, thanks to those damned moo-slims; haven't they got like shitload billions of gallons over there? Where's ours, you ungrateful pricks? And what about them commie bastards down past Mexico; didn't we prop up their shitty little countries a while ago? Now the ungrateful so-and-sos are selling their oil to those grubby socialists in Yoo-rope and France and stuff instead of us. Bastards..."
--
Compared to that, global warming should be an easy sell. "Look, here's the temperature of the last 100,000 years. Yeah, it wiggles all over the place; yeah, it spikes a few times then drops down; yeah, it's generally going up anyway. But you see this fairly big step here? That's just after we got serious about digging coal out of the ground and burning it. See this wiggly bit up here, where all the other big spikes start to go down and this one doesn't? That's just after we started really getting serious about burning up oil; your grandparents might remember that time. And it's not going down again, is it? It's only getting hotter..."
Average Joe: "So how come last winter was so cold, and it's pissing down rain now?"
... precipitation levels in the semi-arid area in which I live have been, while not record highs, quite a bit higher than in the previous decade.
I don't think anybody who has even a semi-professional interest in science would doubt you, but 'one swallow does not a summer make', and 'for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'.
From a quick Google of 'rainfall record Sahara', it appears precipitation there is currently on the low side - about the 5th or 6th lowest in the last 100 years, and the even lower ones appear to have all been in the last 20 years.
(Note, I'm not claiming this is scientific, or even accurate - it's from Google, after all! My quick interpretation, at least once-removed from presumably actual accurately surveyed data, is just as anecdotal as your own observations - and just as valid in the grand scheme of discussions.)
Now, I'm not picking on you - humanity has this wonderful, amazing, frustrating ability to wave their arms at their own little bit of the world and say "look, nothing's wrong!" while, just over the horizon, the everything is disintegrating. The Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the Chinese did it. Countries do it as they bomb the everloving shit out of somewhere far away; populations do it as they watch it happen on TV. Farmers do it now, right up to the point where the salt crusts up from their parched and wind-stripped soils; city folk do it as they step over the homeless guy in the subway.
And you've only got to look at the postings in this thread. For every person posting that it's been the mildest/coolest/hottest/wettest/driest summer/winter in their little part of the world, there's another saying the opposite about their little part of the world (sometimes as little as a couple of thousand k's away!). Individually, these mean little - but taken overall, and added with some whole-of-globe measurements, they seem to be indicators - minor indicators - that something wobbly is going on.
How much of that wobble is our fault, and what the end result of it might be, is currently up for debate.
"The December 2006-February 2007 winter season temperature was marked by periods of unusually warm and cold conditions in the U.S., but the overall seasonal temperature was near average..."
Which itself fits in with some scientific models of the first-stage effects of Enhanced Greenhouse Effect - the system is considered metastable; positive feedback causes more extreme high/low swings around a stable average before the whole thing 'suddenly' shifts to a higher average temperature state, damping and settling down before the oscillations increase again.
('Suddenly' in quotes; these things are all relative...)
Having said that, your quote alone can't be taken as "proof" one way or another. For one, the North American continent is still just a specific small and isolated sample area; it pales into insignificance with the rest of the world's land and sea area. For another, the scientific models don't all agree; there is no scientific consensus on EGE, beyond a very general "well, the data seems to strongly (90%+ confidence) support the hypothesis that it's real, and that the effect is probably at least partly due to humanity".
All of these are valid arguments to use against socialism and socialists.
Assuming you're using "socialist" in its econo-political sense, I'd just like to point out (as a once card-carrying Socialist) that all of your arguments are equally valid against every other system proposed so far.
(Except maybe 'overweening bureaucracy' under L/libertarianism, but that's more than made up for by a doubling of the 'naivety' & 'completely failing to understand how the world works' quotients despite the evidence right in front of their noses today...)
'Socialists making another attempt to weaken the United States' is less a myth, more a ghost of Cold War propaganda.
People essentially just sit down and tweak the models until they get the results they expect, then use them to generate best case and worst case analysis. That folks, is hardly science.
So you're saying that coming up with a hypothesis, developing models to test it (real-world testing of the hypothesis as a whole being somewhat impractical in this case), and adjusting your hypothesis and models until they match real-world observed results isn't science?
(You've left yourself some slack, I see, by using the phrase "the results they expect". That's the hole in people's understanding / application of the scientific method. To a scientist, "the results they expect" are results that match up with reality. Non-scientists may feel differently...)
Here in New Zealand, we have just had a very cool summer, following on from a very cool winter. Where's some of that global warming stuff?
That's especially ludicrous since American industry was actually founded on the VIOLATION of English IP law - breaking the mercantilist system that attempted to limit the colonists to producing raw materials for, and buying finished products from, British companies.
A state of affairs which, too, outlasted its initial purpose and eventually became a hinderance to development of the aesthetic and scientific arts.
Google (or look on Wikipedia for) the story behind Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates Of Penzance" for an interesting little historical IP-related side story, set 100+ years after the American War of Independence.
... libertarians know that freedom can only exist when others act with Aristotelian moderation. Libertarianism is based on the belief that people left to their own will be the most prosperous and will be the most successful.
Ah, so real Libertarianism, the one you've elucidated so clearly and are defending so eloquently, is just as pie-in-the-sky and bereft of basic understanding of human nature as the previous and current incarnations of Communism?
Wake me up when Libertarians solve the basic problem of people acting like self-centred greedy fucks (or manufacturing constructs that allow them to avoid the problem of personally acting like self-centred greedy fucks) without regard for others. It seems like this is a necessity for the Libertarian philosopy to work, just as it's a necessity for Communism - real Communism, that is, not the forced "Communist" implementations that have happened so far, and definitely not the 50's-style bogeyman burnt in to the American psyche - to work.
the attitude that libertarians are a "fuck you I've got mine" lot is one of ignorance and stupidity. they are nothing of the sort. socialism tends far more towards this as socialism is basically "this is all you're going to get, fuck you" system.
See, that's what I mean. Try picking up a book by Marx or Engels sometime; you might learn something your schools didn't teach you.
Morningstar crumblers(ground beef substitute) tacos are actually quite tasty [...] warm them up, put the same seasoning that you would put on beef/chicken tacos [...] and make the rest of the taco the same.
However, I have gotten burned big-time from Apple this past year from buying TV shows. I have paid Apple way too much money to get several seasons of my favorite shows. Now when I try to convert those shows to watch on my 50" HDTV instead of my little 17" iMac, well, Stevie Jobs will not "let" me. What kind of crap is that?
Well, you started off well. You pointed out Apple's DRM sucks - not because of its (remarkably few) restrictions, but purely because it's DRM. I think we can all agree with that.
But then your rant about DRM on iTunes video falls down because, well, you forgot the ol' caveat emptor. You didn't check the DRM restrictions; maybe you just assumed they were the same as for audio? Just as Apple pointed out from the start that you could "bypass" the DRM on iTunes music by burning to CD (with the niggling little - but certainly not onerous - proviso that you can only burn a playlist X number of times), they pointed out from the start that you can't with iTunes video.
Simply : Apple always told you you can "bypass" the DRM in iTunes music, and even told you how. Likewise, they always told you you couldn't bypass the DRM in iTunes video.
Apple didn't screw / lie to / cheat you - you were caught out by your own assumptions. Sucks, yes, but it's nobody's fault but your own.
Seriously, if you get that upset when they've told you the truth all along, how do you fare with the outright lies printed on the box of almost every other piece of hardware or software?
The amount of commercial time on commercial broadcasters is heavily regulated by Ofcom
Just to compare this to the Australian experience. Here, the government regulates commercial broadcasters fairly loosely - much of the detail is left to "codes of practice" devised by a commercial entity comprised of a coalition of the commercial broadcasters.
With regards to commercial time, Government regulation limits advertising to a maximum of 16 minutes per hour. However, under the codes of practice, program sponsorship, sponsorship announcements at the beginning and end of programs, on-screen popup advertising during programs (provided it doesn't cover the whole screen), program & station promotions, voice-overs, government propaganda, etc, don't count as advertising!
That is, we get all of that - as well as 16 minutes of "counted" advertising per hour - for a total of 19~20 minutes per hour, plus whatever advertising popups we're subjected to during the running time of a program. And it's all spread through 5 advertising breaks per hour - meaning that even US programs, with their 3 or 4 ad breaks designed into the program, have an extra break or two cut in to them.
As a result, we get all of that in every prime-time program on every commercial channel. As well as that, we have no EPG on our digital channels (a 3rd-party company supplying a downloadable EPG for computers and a couple of PVR models is currently being sued into oblivion in the Federal Court by one of the networks - who, coincidentally, happen to own another company which "owns" all the program guide data in Australia), and a "digital action plan" which seems to consist of not upsetting the commercial FTA or PayTV broadcasters by changing the status quo too much, whilst allowing them to buy up all the major newspapers and media websites for a total stranglehold on wide media delivery in this country.
And never underestimate the annoyance factor of programs starting up to 20 minutes late - a common occurrence here - to the point where, later on in the evening, any particular program you're waiting to watch will likely just get randomly dropped to pull the schedule back into line before 6am.
How long do you think your status quo would last without (a) the buffer the BBC provides and (b) if the commercial broadcasters made a concerted long-term effort to loosen government regulation?
Quite frankly, I'd gladly give the government another AU$350-odd per year (and the right for jack-booted TV Licensing inspectors to knock politely on my door) to fund the ABC (and even the once-great but now fully commercial SBS), if it meant the end of even just half the crap we have to put up with here...
Slashdot Mirror
(And let's not speak of Chris Chibnall. Ever...)
But Torchwood did show promise. The first couple are a bit of a wash, being packed full of character and concept intro, but the third introduced some heavy emotional/perceptual/self-examination concepts to the characters - primarily Owen, who started the episode as a very laddish prat, but was suddenly deeply affected by effectively participating in a rape. Unfortunately, Mr Little Red button comes along, and by the next episode Owen's a laddish prat again, feeling up Gwen in the freezer as Ianto's huge moral dilemma goes on the rampage - seemingly, just so Ianto can sulk for a couple of episodes before introducing Capt'n Jack to the delights of stopwatches.
And so it goes on, episode after episode. "Beep! Starting Windows..."
("Countrycide" was funny, though - am I the only one who spent the whole episode expecting Hillary Briss to pop up at the end? The whole thing had a very Royston Vasey look
To be honest, my biggest problem with the new Who is the continual re-hashing of the Daleks; the first time was fine, but the rest were unnecessary and rather forced.Umm, have you seen Blake's 7 recently? I have and, apart from bits of the first series, it's pretty much all camp badness. It no more deserves resuscitation than do On The Buses or Are You Being Served?...
(I may however be biased by certain members of my family and friends, who sometimes seem to be teetering on the edge of writing Blake's 7 slashfic of the B/A variety...)
Do you, for one, welcome your Chinese moon overlords?
The US government and NASA have admitted they have no hope of returning men to the moon before the end of next decade at least. You've thrown away or forgotten so much necessary technology that you'd basically have to start again. I think, were the Chinese or Indians to land on the moon before you, it'd unleash such a wave of fear-driven xenophobic nationalism in the US that it'd make the current War Against Brown People That Have Nothing To Do With The Brown People Who Hurt You look like a kindergarten tiff...
Saying "the main byproduct of the enzymatic reaction is water" is a bit like saying "the main byproduct of firing a bullet is gas". It's true, but the other byproducts are the ones that get you.
If the junction is on a nice big heatsink, as is the case with power transistors, then the bonding wires go first.
Ever wonder what the "magic smoke" is really made of?
And the point of this article is *stripped down*. Unfortunately, the writer gets it all wrong, re-invents someone else's wheel, and doesn't really solve the problem (if my firewall still had GCC on it I wouldn't need to frack around like he suggests - but a compiler, like the X & Games packages, has no place on a firewall.)
Binary patches - or even binary updates to -current packages & the kernel, maybe located somewhere else in the install tree - would be nice. But I can understand why they don't, and I'm not going to hold it against Theo et al if they don't provide them. I'll just continue to do an in-place upgrade every 6 or 12 months, merging my script and config changes each time.
You might (this is just a theory I have ...) be looking at things the wrong way. I wonder - have the music industry hoist themselves on their own petard?
For a long time from the beginning, singles were the lifeblood of the music industry. Songwriters, musicians, and performers were effectively the property of the record studio, indentured to turn out song after song after song after song. Take the next song off the pile from the songwriters, throw the studio musicians at it, and stand the current / next voice and face of the week up front to make the next single. Get enough together, and a studio could rotate them fast enough to have two or more different singles on the go each week - one at its peak, one on the way up, and another waiting behind it.
Young 'ns may not know this, but in the first heyday of the record industry - the 50's and 60's - people didn't have album collections - they had singles collections.
But then, somewhere around the late 50's - early 60's, the industry noticed that people became attached to artists - not songs, and not the studios. Studios took advantage of this, and started releasing whole albums of content - firstly as a compilation of hits, then adding a couple of new songs (which became the new singles for the next couple of weeks). What they didn't forsee was this slowing down the sales of singles. Eventually, to recapture those lost sales, artists - self contained artists, who could write & record their own stuff - were given a slightly longer leash; long enough to do their own thing with whole albums of content and build an even more loyal fanbase.
Loyalty to the artist had replaced loyalty to the studio. And there was much rejoicing...
Slightly later - it started in the mid-late 60's, hitting its stride in the 70's - the music industry realised that, despite the added $$$ they were getting up front from selling whole albums, this actually had the effect of slowing sales revenue. Sure, a top-selling album raked it in big to start with - but, with very few exceptions, there was a huge initial peak followed by a quick decline and long tail. Further causing grief was the fact that by the time they got around to releasing the next lot of singles from an album, most potential purchasers already owned it - and so were lost to the market.
Come the rise of the "2 good songs + 10 tracks of filler" album. This was the best of both worlds for the studios - 2 singles to sell + just enough reason for people to pay the extra for the album = single sales + album sales + a short "hot" time so they could rotate the next "big thing" into place quickly to start the whole cycle again.
Now, quickly ffwd to "modern" times. People are wise to the "2+10" formula of the average album, and are sick of it. Worse still, from the studios POV, they now have an alternative that shortcuts both the "release lots of singles quickly" and "release whole albums" formula - an alternative that started underground with IRC & FTP sites, hit the big time with Napster, was kept alive post-Napster by Kazaa/Limewire/Bearshare/etc, and continues today in the form of BT. The studios are struggling with the loss of singles and the loss of albums.
Where to now?
One obvious niche choice - ringtones. It's almost a new version of the singles formula - take lots of songs with "I want it now!" appeal, whack a top-dollar price on them, make them ridiculously simple to buy without the purchaser seeing the money leave their hands (until the next phone bill), and turn 'em over fast.
I'm surprised - only 200 hours? That's less than an hour a day...
I know several fixed-rate subcontractors & salaried workers that are expected to do at least 10 hrs / week unpaid work. That's 400 ~ 500 hours/yr right there, let alone the extra they are also "expected" to do when the shit hits the fan (i.e. their employer realises they they've cut too many people and aren't going to make targets...)
But just remember that for the 99.99% of people out there, the large organisation they're working for believes the exact opposite - that the 16 or 12 or 10 or whatever hours they're not working for them is dead time, wasted time, time that would be better spent working for them.
And that goes double for those people on a salary...
So what's the problem? They're blaming the reporting, not you - and, after all, it is your job to "check out the reporting", isn't it?
Sorry, maybe I'm just a bit narky on this subject. I had a job a while ago where week after week, month after month, year after year I'd get pulled up because the coversheets on my timesheet and job accounting reports were literally a sea of red, marking out dozens of supposed violations every day. Every time I got hauled up about this, I turned the page over to the actual reports and located the raw data for every single supposed "violation", showed how they were due to errors and incorrect assumptions in the incoming data and report generation, exactly where and how the errors were occurring, and exactly how to fix the data collection and reporting - or, failing that, the one thing they could do to prevent making the incorrect assumptions.
Their suggestion? To fiddle the system (which in fact broke other, less important, reports!) with the effect of slowing down my workrate, just so these particular reports came out "correct".
When I left that position 2 years later, it was still going on...
The problem, y'see, was the opposite to yours. In my case, the management's assumption was that the whole process of data collection and report generation was infallible. Despite repeatedly proving and explaining at least 100 times why it wasn't, it was still considered to be so.
Stop being so sensitive, and do your damned job.
Torchwood had promise. So much promise, so much of it squandered. Every single episode threw away a little bit more of it - push the reset button, Owen's now an arsehole again. Push the reset button, Gwen's now got a thing for Owen. Push the reset button, Ianto's now thinking about Jack & stopwatches. Push the reset button,
Off the top of my head, the only one which didn't waste its promise like that was the "out of time" one. And that was ruined by the most repulsive sex scene you'll ever see outside of a "The Fat and The Furries" porn flick, and a trite ending for the young girl.
And the last storyline - a decent first episode*, ruined by a crap second one. Spend a whole episode building up the creepiest villan they've ever had, Bilis Manger, then waste him by just having him there to call up a poor copy of Dr Who CGI. Then they rip off an ending from the Bible...
What a total waste of brilliant concepts...
At least "Primeval" has that blonde bint - I presume she's some English pop-tart? - running around in her underwear in most episodes. And an internally consistent ongoing storyline. Personally, I'd rank "Primeval" right up there near New Who (though not for depth or staying power), and far far superior to "Torchwood".
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(* If you can overlook the "blood won't last 60 years, but pencil will?", "the man from the 'lectric will never find it there!", "hey Ianto, why'd you stop shooting Owen?", and "so, was Capt'n Jack shot down by the Jerries, or by his own men for being a poof?" plotholes.)
Unfortunately, the other fact of the matter is that those who claim that global warming is not human-induced are so indignant when their proposition is challenged that you have to seriously consider the source of, science of, objectivity of, and funding behind their assertions.
Righteousness != Right (on either side...)
(Oops, forgot to say) Rate vs amount. To a large extent, the effects of volcanic CO2 release are ameliorated by concurrent release of silicates and other substances which absorb / react with CO2 to bind it back into the geological cycle. The assertion stands, however, that disregarding event peaks the ongoing rate of CO2 release by humankind far outstrips the ongoing rate of CO2 release caused by vulcanism.
On the other hand, I have (presumably reputable) textbooks which say things like "Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by about 25% since the beginning of the 19th century", "The rate of fossil-fuel burning is about 10 times less than the rate of CO2 exchange with the terrestrial biosphere but 100 times larger than the rate of CO2 release by volcanoes. Its effect on the atmosphere is disproportionately large, however, because this part of the global carbon cycle is not in balance", and "The anthropogenic CO2 source is much smaller than the rate at which CO2 is released by respiration and decay, but much larger than the rate at which CO2 is emitted by volcanoes. It therefore represents a substantial perturbation to the global carbon cycle". (Kump, Kasting & Crane, "The Earth System" 2nd ed, 2004)
So, who do I believe - 3 academic researchers and authors in the field, or some random dude on TV / Slashdot? I report, you decide...
Because they've tried all those before and failed to get people to accept them? (Or worse, people have "just accepted" them?)
Water pollution - "My drinking water's OK, there's plenty more where that came from, and who gives a rats about some shitty little creek somewhere else? I'm OK Jack!"
Deforestation - "The trees in my yard are doing fine, and if a football field of rainforest really is disappearing every second, why can't we see big chunks of green being chomped out in satellite pictures of South America / South Asia? What do you mean I don't understand 'scale', you mean I need a magnifying glass and ruler to see pissy little bits disappearing each month ? When you're saying it's happening every second ?! Bullshit!"
Acid rain - (cf Water & Deforestation) "The government fixed that, didn't we? (No thanks to those goddamned commies in the UN). Besides, I never noticed it - my tap water tastes just the same, and my garden didn't get eaten away, did it? Can't have been too bad..."
Smog - "Yeah, well, what ya gonna do. Fuggedaboutit; hey look at those crazy Japanese wearin' those white masks to work!..."
Fossil fuels - "Haven't run out yet, have we? Didn't we find some new stuff up north somewhere anyway? Gas is so damned expensive though, thanks to those damned moo-slims; haven't they got like shitload billions of gallons over there? Where's ours, you ungrateful pricks? And what about them commie bastards down past Mexico; didn't we prop up their shitty little countries a while ago? Now the ungrateful so-and-sos are selling their oil to those grubby socialists in Yoo-rope and France and stuff instead of us. Bastards..."
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Compared to that, global warming should be an easy sell. "Look, here's the temperature of the last 100,000 years. Yeah, it wiggles all over the place; yeah, it spikes a few times then drops down; yeah, it's generally going up anyway. But you see this fairly big step here? That's just after we got serious about digging coal out of the ground and burning it. See this wiggly bit up here, where all the other big spikes start to go down and this one doesn't? That's just after we started really getting serious about burning up oil; your grandparents might remember that time. And it's not going down again, is it? It's only getting hotter..."
Average Joe: "So how come last winter was so cold, and it's pissing down rain now?"
From a quick Google of 'rainfall record Sahara', it appears precipitation there is currently on the low side - about the 5th or 6th lowest in the last 100 years, and the even lower ones appear to have all been in the last 20 years.
(Note, I'm not claiming this is scientific, or even accurate - it's from Google, after all! My quick interpretation, at least once-removed from presumably actual accurately surveyed data, is just as anecdotal as your own observations - and just as valid in the grand scheme of discussions.)
Now, I'm not picking on you - humanity has this wonderful, amazing, frustrating ability to wave their arms at their own little bit of the world and say "look, nothing's wrong!" while, just over the horizon, the everything is disintegrating. The Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the Chinese did it. Countries do it as they bomb the everloving shit out of somewhere far away; populations do it as they watch it happen on TV. Farmers do it now, right up to the point where the salt crusts up from their parched and wind-stripped soils; city folk do it as they step over the homeless guy in the subway.
And you've only got to look at the postings in this thread. For every person posting that it's been the mildest/coolest/hottest/wettest/driest summer/winter in their little part of the world, there's another saying the opposite about their little part of the world (sometimes as little as a couple of thousand k's away!). Individually, these mean little - but taken overall, and added with some whole-of-globe measurements, they seem to be indicators - minor indicators - that something wobbly is going on.
How much of that wobble is our fault, and what the end result of it might be, is currently up for debate.
('Suddenly' in quotes; these things are all relative...)
Having said that, your quote alone can't be taken as "proof" one way or another. For one, the North American continent is still just a specific small and isolated sample area; it pales into insignificance with the rest of the world's land and sea area. For another, the scientific models don't all agree; there is no scientific consensus on EGE, beyond a very general "well, the data seems to strongly (90%+ confidence) support the hypothesis that it's real, and that the effect is probably at least partly due to humanity".
(Except maybe 'overweening bureaucracy' under L/libertarianism, but that's more than made up for by a doubling of the 'naivety' & 'completely failing to understand how the world works' quotients despite the evidence right in front of their noses today...)
'Socialists making another attempt to weaken the United States' is less a myth, more a ghost of Cold War propaganda.
(You've left yourself some slack, I see, by using the phrase "the results they expect". That's the hole in people's understanding / application of the scientific method. To a scientist, "the results they expect" are results that match up with reality. Non-scientists may feel differently...)Look a couple of thousand k's to your left - Summer 2006 info, Summer 2007 summary.
Google (or look on Wikipedia for) the story behind Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates Of Penzance" for an interesting little historical IP-related side story, set 100+ years after the American War of Independence.
Day 1:
- RIAA: "You downloaded this song, and have kept it for 1 day. That'll be $0.99, please".
- You: (Looks at timestamp on file) "Uh, OK" (Hands over money, takes a swig of refreshing 'Memorade')
Day 2:- RIAA: "You downloaded this song, and have kept it for 2 days. That'll be $1.98, please".
- You: (Looks at timestamp on file) "Uh, OK" (Hands over money, takes a swig of refreshing 'Memorade')
Day 3:- RIAA: "You downloaded this song, and have kept it for 3 days. That'll be $2.97, please".
- You: (Looks at timestamp on file) "Uh, OK" (Hands over money, takes a swig of refreshing 'Memorade')
Day 4:Day 297:
Wake me up when Libertarians solve the basic problem of people acting like self-centred greedy fucks (or manufacturing constructs that allow them to avoid the problem of personally acting like self-centred greedy fucks) without regard for others. It seems like this is a necessity for the Libertarian philosopy to work, just as it's a necessity for Communism - real Communism, that is, not the forced "Communist" implementations that have happened so far, and definitely not the 50's-style bogeyman burnt in to the American psyche - to work.See, that's what I mean. Try picking up a book by Marx or Engels sometime; you might learn something your schools didn't teach you.
"I don't know why they call this stuff hamburger helper. It does just fine by itself, huh?"
But then your rant about DRM on iTunes video falls down because, well, you forgot the ol' caveat emptor. You didn't check the DRM restrictions; maybe you just assumed they were the same as for audio? Just as Apple pointed out from the start that you could "bypass" the DRM on iTunes music by burning to CD (with the niggling little - but certainly not onerous - proviso that you can only burn a playlist X number of times), they pointed out from the start that you can't with iTunes video.
Simply : Apple always told you you can "bypass" the DRM in iTunes music, and even told you how. Likewise, they always told you you couldn't bypass the DRM in iTunes video.
Apple didn't screw / lie to / cheat you - you were caught out by your own assumptions. Sucks, yes, but it's nobody's fault but your own.
Seriously, if you get that upset when they've told you the truth all along, how do you fare with the outright lies printed on the box of almost every other piece of hardware or software?
With regards to commercial time, Government regulation limits advertising to a maximum of 16 minutes per hour. However, under the codes of practice, program sponsorship, sponsorship announcements at the beginning and end of programs, on-screen popup advertising during programs (provided it doesn't cover the whole screen), program & station promotions, voice-overs, government propaganda, etc, don't count as advertising!
That is, we get all of that - as well as 16 minutes of "counted" advertising per hour - for a total of 19~20 minutes per hour, plus whatever advertising popups we're subjected to during the running time of a program. And it's all spread through 5 advertising breaks per hour - meaning that even US programs, with their 3 or 4 ad breaks designed into the program, have an extra break or two cut in to them.
As a result, we get all of that in every prime-time program on every commercial channel . As well as that, we have no EPG on our digital channels (a 3rd-party company supplying a downloadable EPG for computers and a couple of PVR models is currently being sued into oblivion in the Federal Court by one of the networks - who, coincidentally, happen to own another company which "owns" all the program guide data in Australia), and a "digital action plan" which seems to consist of not upsetting the commercial FTA or PayTV broadcasters by changing the status quo too much, whilst allowing them to buy up all the major newspapers and media websites for a total stranglehold on wide media delivery in this country.
And never underestimate the annoyance factor of programs starting up to 20 minutes late - a common occurrence here - to the point where, later on in the evening, any particular program you're waiting to watch will likely just get randomly dropped to pull the schedule back into line before 6am.
How long do you think your status quo would last without (a) the buffer the BBC provides and (b) if the commercial broadcasters made a concerted long-term effort to loosen government regulation?
Quite frankly, I'd gladly give the government another AU$350-odd per year (and the right for jack-booted TV Licensing inspectors to knock politely on my door) to fund the ABC (and even the once-great but now fully commercial SBS), if it meant the end of even just half the crap we have to put up with here...