Why would I buy something online and then drive to pick it up?
The only thing I can think of, would be: If I'm driving over there anyway, for my non-online purchases (groceries).
I have a few grocery stores that I visit fairly often, including one that I visit nearly every week. (None of them happen to be Wal-Mart but for the sake of the arugment, let's pretend one of them is.) I'm never going to buy beer or porkchops or bread online from Amazon, but if I were at my grocer's checkout, and after I ran my "discount" tracking-cookie consumer-analytics card, the checker were to say, "Oh, Mr. Sloppy, your online-shopping crap has arrived," and then it somehow got dumped into my cart, I guess that'd be pretty cool.
That just means my grocer is somehow the bulk shipping destination (a truck with a lot of peoples' orders pulls up to it, instead of driving all over the the neighborhood), and then they have to store it until I show up for my weekly visit, and..
..you know, this actually sounds like a lot of expense and trouble for them. I'm skeptical that it'd be cheaper. But if somehow it were cheaper than having a guy drive all over town delivering packages, ok, I'm game. (But you're right, I think. This ain't happening.)
This would be a lot more exciting when some other manufacturers do the same thing in a compatible form factor. Then you'd get a handheld the same way you get a desktop: go buy just the right parts for your situation.
"A Fairphone screen, a Foomeister I motherboard, a used Sorny RadioNIC that I found on eBay, a Brand X battery and oops I guess I didn't even bother with a camera on this one. Oh well, I didn't need one here. Wait, I just remembered have a 5 year old one sitting in a drawer, let's just throw that in." Later: "Shit, it got obsolete: time for a Foomeister II+ board, which has enough RAM to run the newest release of Netbuntroid."
But the only way we'll get there, is if this sells well enough that other manufacturers see a market for the form factor. It's hard to be optimistic about that.
I think that is disputed. Most don't think, "muahaha, crime!!" but it is believed they do think, "Cool, let's do seemingly harmless thing" which happens to be illegal.
I have a solution that will really DO SOMETHING about this nonsense:
Next election, I'm going to vote for Democrats or Republicans. If everyone else has the courage to join me in this, I think it should solve all our problems.
Imagine if we owned our personal information as a form of intellectual property
Ok, try doing that. Next time you're about to transmit your information to someone else, stop. Either don't send it at all, or send them cyphertext instead.
If Amazon wants to know how to descramble your zip code, they're going to have to make some kind of deal with you, wereby they become bound to the terms and conditions that you specify. I just hope that prior to making that deal, you don't get too impatient waiting for your packages.
Waitaminute. If an Indian watches a DRMed movie, he'll be required by law to have cracked it and ripped it? If I sell DRMed media to Indians, am I going to automatically be a conspirator, if my customer doesn't crack it?
There needs to be a DRM exception.
And I'd rather not discuss the consequences of such an exception.;-)
Even if ads are hosted by the site, there are a few other heuristics other than external requests, which makes filtering usually remain easy:
1) The web people generally don't even try to obscure the ad urls. e.g. Block urls containing "/ads/" and you'll get a lot of ads blocked while getting virtually no false positive blocks. Look at the top of easylist to get some idea of how incredibly easy it is to do, with simple matching.
2) Web ad image sizes tend to come in standard sizes that are rarely used for anything else. e.g. If something is 728x90, then it's an ad. While this might require a little more sophistication and expense than the above approach (e.g. the blocker has to actually be aware of the CSS that applies to an element, or might have to actually download an image in order to measure it), it's doable these days (though the oldschool proxy-based blockers from the 1990s, tended to usually not be smart enough).
Both of these could be countered, but AFAIK most webmasters don't bother. No serious conflict has really started yet, so blockers have kept their advantage. Maybe the reason people are getting their panties in a bunch about iOS9 is that they think things are about to change, and webmasters are going to start to fight back?
Someone please explain why iOS ad blocking is such big news. Ad blockers have been around since the 1990s and AFAIK it's been available on almost all other platforms for many years, and iOS was a lone exception, no? (And I'd be shocked if ad blocking through HTTP proxies weren't already a reasonably-easy option for iOS users before version 9, at least when they're at home or at work (though probably not "on the go").)
How is "iOS joins the rest of the world" a big story? I feel like I'm missing something important here.
Is it all just about the wider "oh, it's on!" Google-vs-Apple context?
Or are a disproportionate number of iOS users actually using it? (whereas up to now, most people haven't bothered.)
You are trying to solve the wrong problem. Just because your connection is too slow to realtime stream HD, does that mean you have a SD screen? If, in fact, your screen is low res, ok, then you have solved it correctly. But I don't think that's the case.
If you're watching your video on 1990s-or-later monitor (or a 200x-or-later "television"), then you still want high definition, and poor connectivity isn't really a barrier to that. Just let it download however long it takes to download. No matter how bad your Internet connection is, local storage and extremely-fast connections between that storage and your monitor is possible. So just let the hour of 1080p video take 4 hours to download, if that's how long it takes. Then watch it. Everyone wins.
Everyone wins, except those who insist that you stream in real time. Well, maybe they have an unrealistic and technologically backwards attitude. Tech is for solving problems, not creating them.
Realtime is usually an unnecessary burden. Sure: maybe not always unnecessary. Perhaps people in slow-Internet areas will have to pay a shitload of money for connectivity for, say, spoiler-proof sports streams. I am not discounting those people -- I'm just happy I'm not one of them.;-) But for the other 95% of video uses cases, realtime is nearly worthless. Not that it's bad, but it's not something you need or is worth going to a lot of trouble to keep. And it's definitely not worth sacrificing resolution!
The distasteful thing with transcoding is that it's a hack you shouldn't need, and therefore probably don't need. It's always going to be associated with some other problem: either a crappy player or maybe some network limitation (e.g. 2.4GHz wifi too slow (or too shared!) for your bitrate, and 5GHz can't reach).
The hack works around the problem, but necessarily reduces quality. So you get something that works (and that's good!) but the original problem remains, staring you in the face day after day, a constant reminder that you are missing out on modern technology.
So eventually you'll fix it, and then you won't need transcoding anymore. It should usually end with 1) "Hey, maybe my game console or tablet isn't well-suited to playing movies, because its ridiculous software limitations are deliberately-added defects intended to manipulate me into paying for some particular vendor's service instead of letting me take advantage of the wider market." or 2) "it's time for that part of the house to join the 21st century, so I'm going to get some Cat6 over there no matter how many crawlspace black widows do their 'you shall not pass' Gandalf impression."
I think I'd rather dodge this $4T bill by pointing out something in TFA that pissed me off.
At the top of the article is a picture of some godforsaken hellhole. My first thought was "holy shit, where is that horrible place? Is that somewhere on Venus?" Hovering over the image, told me the answer.
It says "Smog in New Mexico."
Yes, Albuquerque sometimes has a winter "inversion layer", bu there is no place anywhere in New Mexico that looks anything like that. On the worst day of the year during the worst forest fire ever, the sky doesn't look that bad, and hell no does any place in this state have a hundredth of that many tall buildings.
Click through the image credit to the wikipedia page, and they'll tell you it's Mexico City. But the TFA calls it "New Mexico," because some asshat retard who flunked first grade geography and got a job as an editorial intern at vice.com, doesn't know the difference. Oh, fuck YOU!
I suppose that if you get to send stuff up into space for experiments like this, everyone involved makes sure that you have your ducks in a row when it comes to basic science. Nevertheless, I have to ask: they kept both samples at exactly the same temperature, right?
And the microgravity one didn't have the whiskey frequently coming into contact with a stopper or cap, with the Earth gravity one having a constant layer of gas (air or CO2 or something) in between, right?
Right? I ass/u/me so.
(I do think think it's plausible they would taste different from gravity alone, but for some reason, it's hard for me to ignore fears of a botched experiment. There's something about the photo of two different containers, that makes me wonder if they were really stored the same way. I have to be wrong, though. Please, someone tell me I'm wrong.)
Communication is too basic to not be a commodity. If you have a software "vendor" then you're doing it wrong.
What is really getting fucked up here, is that we are using the names of these three companies in our discussion, rather than the names of standard protocols. Because the public isn't using standard protocols. That's intolerable.
I think it's good that they're moving toward digital. Analog downloads didn't seem to have enough fidelity. Sure, it was nice that if someone picked up the phone in the middle of your download, it'd still work and you would just have a noisy blur in the texture on some wall, but video games these days are more about art, so we need to protect the artists' vision.
That explanation might be the best. It could even be a safety issue. "You want to be able to accelerate a mass to relativistic speeds, without a lot of screening and accountability? No way, Jose."
I wonder if the Prime Directive was deliberately intended to be a [non-blatantly] dumb idea that inevitably would result in problems and conflict (remember: this is entertainment). It shouldn't be a good idea. If it were a good idea, then it'd need to get broken in order to support drama.
Say there's some 11 year old newbie programmer. She hasn't done any of this yet, and hears, "a lot of people who are into the stuff you're into, are on a place called Slashdot." Yeah, let's agree that our position is: fuck off, newbie, go get your learning and inspiration somewhere else.
I remember reading articles kind of like this, a few decades ago in "COMPUTE!" magazine and similar things. The topics were even old then, and some graybeard from the 1960s might have scoffed with "oh, I was doing that 10-20 years ago." Well, guess what, 1960s graybeard: maybe you didn't leave enough accessible notes, much less, code. And yes, someone can look at (or imagine) results, and make up how they'll do it, without needing to know how you did it. But maybe some kid wants to learn from your mistakes and successes.
Anybody who writes up decent problems and solutions is welcome, IMHO. I don't give a fuck if it's stuff we were doing decades ago. And honestly, most of that source code isn't around anyway. And when I think of my 1980s code, even if I had my old source, you sure-as-fuck wouldn't want to try to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I can think of, would be: If I'm driving over there anyway, for my non-online purchases (groceries).
I have a few grocery stores that I visit fairly often, including one that I visit nearly every week. (None of them happen to be Wal-Mart but for the sake of the arugment, let's pretend one of them is.) I'm never going to buy beer or porkchops or bread online from Amazon, but if I were at my grocer's checkout, and after I ran my "discount" tracking-cookie consumer-analytics card, the checker were to say, "Oh, Mr. Sloppy, your online-shopping crap has arrived," and then it somehow got dumped into my cart, I guess that'd be pretty cool.
That just means my grocer is somehow the bulk shipping destination (a truck with a lot of peoples' orders pulls up to it, instead of driving all over the the neighborhood), and then they have to store it until I show up for my weekly visit, and ..
..you know, this actually sounds like a lot of expense and trouble for them. I'm skeptical that it'd be cheaper. But if somehow it were cheaper than having a guy drive all over town delivering packages, ok, I'm game. (But you're right, I think. This ain't happening.)
This would be a lot more exciting when some other manufacturers do the same thing in a compatible form factor. Then you'd get a handheld the same way you get a desktop: go buy just the right parts for your situation.
"A Fairphone screen, a Foomeister I motherboard, a used Sorny RadioNIC that I found on eBay, a Brand X battery and oops I guess I didn't even bother with a camera on this one. Oh well, I didn't need one here. Wait, I just remembered have a 5 year old one sitting in a drawer, let's just throw that in." Later: "Shit, it got obsolete: time for a Foomeister II+ board, which has enough RAM to run the newest release of Netbuntroid."
But the only way we'll get there, is if this sells well enough that other manufacturers see a market for the form factor. It's hard to be optimistic about that.
I think that is disputed. Most don't think, "muahaha, crime!!" but it is believed they do think, "Cool, let's do seemingly harmless thing" which happens to be illegal.
Anyone else just get an email from .. Software Hut?! What is this, Amiga Nostalgia Day?
(This might be a first, BTW: I'm usually annoyed by unsolicited email, but this one made me smile.)
And yet, there is diversity and disagreement within the different candidates' campaign promises.
As opposed to the other kind of Javascript.
I have a solution that will really DO SOMETHING about this nonsense:
Next election, I'm going to vote for Democrats or Republicans. If everyone else has the courage to join me in this, I think it should solve all our problems.
"Take my people to the stars."
Ok, try doing that. Next time you're about to transmit your information to someone else, stop. Either don't send it at all, or send them cyphertext instead.
If Amazon wants to know how to descramble your zip code, they're going to have to make some kind of deal with you, wereby they become bound to the terms and conditions that you specify. I just hope that prior to making that deal, you don't get too impatient waiting for your packages.
Waitaminute. If an Indian watches a DRMed movie, he'll be required by law to have cracked it and ripped it? If I sell DRMed media to Indians, am I going to automatically be a conspirator, if my customer doesn't crack it?
There needs to be a DRM exception.
And I'd rather not discuss the consequences of such an exception. ;-)
Even if ads are hosted by the site, there are a few other heuristics other than external requests, which makes filtering usually remain easy:
1) The web people generally don't even try to obscure the ad urls. e.g. Block urls containing "/ads/" and you'll get a lot of ads blocked while getting virtually no false positive blocks. Look at the top of easylist to get some idea of how incredibly easy it is to do, with simple matching.
2) Web ad image sizes tend to come in standard sizes that are rarely used for anything else. e.g. If something is 728x90, then it's an ad. While this might require a little more sophistication and expense than the above approach (e.g. the blocker has to actually be aware of the CSS that applies to an element, or might have to actually download an image in order to measure it), it's doable these days (though the oldschool proxy-based blockers from the 1990s, tended to usually not be smart enough).
Both of these could be countered, but AFAIK most webmasters don't bother. No serious conflict has really started yet, so blockers have kept their advantage. Maybe the reason people are getting their panties in a bunch about iOS9 is that they think things are about to change, and webmasters are going to start to fight back?
Someone please explain why iOS ad blocking is such big news. Ad blockers have been around since the 1990s and AFAIK it's been available on almost all other platforms for many years, and iOS was a lone exception, no? (And I'd be shocked if ad blocking through HTTP proxies weren't already a reasonably-easy option for iOS users before version 9, at least when they're at home or at work (though probably not "on the go").)
How is "iOS joins the rest of the world" a big story? I feel like I'm missing something important here.
Is it all just about the wider "oh, it's on!" Google-vs-Apple context?
Or are a disproportionate number of iOS users actually using it? (whereas up to now, most people haven't bothered.)
The legal term is "bomb paraphernalia."
You are trying to solve the wrong problem. Just because your connection is too slow to realtime stream HD, does that mean you have a SD screen? If, in fact, your screen is low res, ok, then you have solved it correctly. But I don't think that's the case.
If you're watching your video on 1990s-or-later monitor (or a 200x-or-later "television"), then you still want high definition, and poor connectivity isn't really a barrier to that. Just let it download however long it takes to download. No matter how bad your Internet connection is, local storage and extremely-fast connections between that storage and your monitor is possible. So just let the hour of 1080p video take 4 hours to download, if that's how long it takes. Then watch it. Everyone wins.
Everyone wins, except those who insist that you stream in real time. Well, maybe they have an unrealistic and technologically backwards attitude. Tech is for solving problems, not creating them.
Realtime is usually an unnecessary burden. Sure: maybe not always unnecessary. Perhaps people in slow-Internet areas will have to pay a shitload of money for connectivity for, say, spoiler-proof sports streams. I am not discounting those people -- I'm just happy I'm not one of them. ;-) But for the other 95% of video uses cases, realtime is nearly worthless. Not that it's bad, but it's not something you need or is worth going to a lot of trouble to keep. And it's definitely not worth sacrificing resolution!
The distasteful thing with transcoding is that it's a hack you shouldn't need, and therefore probably don't need. It's always going to be associated with some other problem: either a crappy player or maybe some network limitation (e.g. 2.4GHz wifi too slow (or too shared!) for your bitrate, and 5GHz can't reach).
The hack works around the problem, but necessarily reduces quality. So you get something that works (and that's good!) but the original problem remains, staring you in the face day after day, a constant reminder that you are missing out on modern technology.
So eventually you'll fix it, and then you won't need transcoding anymore. It should usually end with 1) "Hey, maybe my game console or tablet isn't well-suited to playing movies, because its ridiculous software limitations are deliberately-added defects intended to manipulate me into paying for some particular vendor's service instead of letting me take advantage of the wider market." or 2) "it's time for that part of the house to join the 21st century, so I'm going to get some Cat6 over there no matter how many crawlspace black widows do their 'you shall not pass' Gandalf impression."
..aaand now they've fixed it.
I think I'd rather dodge this $4T bill by pointing out something in TFA that pissed me off.
At the top of the article is a picture of some godforsaken hellhole. My first thought was "holy shit, where is that horrible place? Is that somewhere on Venus?" Hovering over the image, told me the answer.
It says "Smog in New Mexico."
Yes, Albuquerque sometimes has a winter "inversion layer", bu there is no place anywhere in New Mexico that looks anything like that. On the worst day of the year during the worst forest fire ever, the sky doesn't look that bad, and hell no does any place in this state have a hundredth of that many tall buildings.
Click through the image credit to the wikipedia page, and they'll tell you it's Mexico City. But the TFA calls it "New Mexico," because some asshat retard who flunked first grade geography and got a job as an editorial intern at vice.com, doesn't know the difference. Oh, fuck YOU!
I suppose that if you get to send stuff up into space for experiments like this, everyone involved makes sure that you have your ducks in a row when it comes to basic science. Nevertheless, I have to ask: they kept both samples at exactly the same temperature, right?
And the microgravity one didn't have the whiskey frequently coming into contact with a stopper or cap, with the Earth gravity one having a constant layer of gas (air or CO2 or something) in between, right?
Right? I ass/u/me so.
(I do think think it's plausible they would taste different from gravity alone, but for some reason, it's hard for me to ignore fears of a botched experiment. There's something about the photo of two different containers, that makes me wonder if they were really stored the same way. I have to be wrong, though. Please, someone tell me I'm wrong.)
Communication is too basic to not be a commodity. If you have a software "vendor" then you're doing it wrong.
What is really getting fucked up here, is that we are using the names of these three companies in our discussion, rather than the names of standard protocols. Because the public isn't using standard protocols. That's intolerable.
I think it's good that they're moving toward digital. Analog downloads didn't seem to have enough fidelity. Sure, it was nice that if someone picked up the phone in the middle of your download, it'd still work and you would just have a noisy blur in the texture on some wall, but video games these days are more about art, so we need to protect the artists' vision.
That explanation might be the best. It could even be a safety issue. "You want to be able to accelerate a mass to relativistic speeds, without a lot of screening and accountability? No way, Jose."
I wonder if the Prime Directive was deliberately intended to be a [non-blatantly] dumb idea that inevitably would result in problems and conflict (remember: this is entertainment). It shouldn't be a good idea. If it were a good idea, then it'd need to get broken in order to support drama.
I'm reminded of Asimov's laws of robots.
Damn, what a sad attitude to see.
Say there's some 11 year old newbie programmer. She hasn't done any of this yet, and hears, "a lot of people who are into the stuff you're into, are on a place called Slashdot." Yeah, let's agree that our position is: fuck off, newbie, go get your learning and inspiration somewhere else.
I remember reading articles kind of like this, a few decades ago in "COMPUTE!" magazine and similar things. The topics were even old then, and some graybeard from the 1960s might have scoffed with "oh, I was doing that 10-20 years ago." Well, guess what, 1960s graybeard: maybe you didn't leave enough accessible notes, much less, code. And yes, someone can look at (or imagine) results, and make up how they'll do it, without needing to know how you did it. But maybe some kid wants to learn from your mistakes and successes.
Anybody who writes up decent problems and solutions is welcome, IMHO. I don't give a fuck if it's stuff we were doing decades ago. And honestly, most of that source code isn't around anyway. And when I think of my 1980s code, even if I had my old source, you sure-as-fuck wouldn't want to try to read it.
Are you saying that if I send them an .swf file, they'll say, "no, send us the source, and we'll audit it and then compile it ourselves?"
Because if they don't do that, then they're not vetting jack shit.
(Putting aside the fact that Flash ads have mercifully fallen out of fashion in the last few years.)
I have heard of people skipping ads, but asking to have them repeated? Must be the Superbowl.