I work at DirecTV. We really really want to carry local channels in every market, we just can't yet. Every damn day I work on some kind of upgrade aimed at carrying more locals.
And yes, if enough people in an area petition, they get moved up the list of where we go next...we've don't about the top 50 markets and want to try to do them roughly in order, but we have definitely skipped a few to move to areas with more subscribers/interest.
This is basically stated in the article, but this will never work. They have no jurisdiction over a huge amount of the spammers - even a national do not e-mail list wouldn't stop overseas spammers.
Speaking of overseas spammers, it seems that the high cost of long distance telephone calls is one of the few things that keeps me from getting telemarketer solicitations from people based in, say, thailand. While it doesn't look like this is going to happen anytime soon, if international calling prices dropped significantly due to, say, VoIP, would we end up getting a bunch of calls from overseas selling us penis enlargers or mini rc cars?
Have you ever in your life heard of a market externality? Or a monopoly? Do you have any idea how bad these things can be? Obviously not.
As for your argument that this is a war against freedom, you need to understand that radio has always been regulated, from the content available to who owns can broadcast on what frequency. To say that what exists now is based on market forces, but that laws passed to change how it is are anti-market is totally wrong. Maybe it would be nice to just blow it all up and start over and see where "free market" takes us, but it sure as hell isn't going to happen.
Oh, and how in the world is a "free market" the purest form of democracy in existence? Voting with your wallet means people with larger wallets...get more votes. Not democracy my friend. Not at all. Anyway, in a democracy, the power comes from the people, not the corporations. I think you're thinking of a different political system.
There is a slight difference this year...they have Keenan McCardell of the Bucs play Charlie Garner of the Raiders. McCardell actually had some idea of how to play the game, while Garner supposedly had an offensive strategy of "give the ball to Charlie Garner".
Course, I'm still hoping the streak holds up, but I won't hold my breath.
Speaking of network play, ever since the game subspace came out, I've been hoping against hope that someone would be able to make a massively multiplayer game of that sort using the Star Control ships. While the SC2 story was truly excellent, I continued to play ship vs ship with my friends for quite a while after finishing the game, and I can imagine that many hours could be flushed down the toilet with an online version of the melee mode.
Best thing about sims online so far...
on
Virtual Simerica
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Home invasion robberies. I join a home in the game, and all it is is a box with 7 weight sets while my housemates just sit and pump iron all day. I ask them why, and the answer is "if we build up our muscles we can raid other peoples houses and beat them up and rob them". Give the game a month, and you'll just have roving gangs of thugs. I can't wait.
Sure, but the whole problem, which exists at all levels of buisness and government, is shortsightedness, or at least mortgaging the future. Just because the microsoft products are better now and free now doesn't mean they'll be free later (or better, but I won't argue that). This will cost poor old india tons of money in the long run, but in the short run some minister looks good, and India saves a buck now that they'll pay back 100 fold in 5, 10, or 20 years, because they will be trapped. Of course, they are a country, not a corporation, so maybe they plan on just pirating anything new and telling microsoft to go screw themselves, but I doubt it.
You are 100% correct that laws do not create morality, but 100% wrong in assuming that since everyone and their mom are pirating movies that it's somehow OK. You wan't reasons people do this, and don't just shoplift the movies? Here you go:
1.) It's super easy, no one is watching you, or guarding the merchandise in any way. 2.) It's seemingly anonymous. 3.) It's completely safe, no one knows anyone who has ever been arrested for this. 4.) The perception that "no one is getting hurt", or "you're only hurting big, evil companies" which is patently untrue, but still something that makes stealing much easier to swallow for the average joe.
It's like creating a prisoners dillema style game in which you have no penalty or even chance for penalty for performing the negative (but most profitable) actions. This has nothing to do with the morality, it has everything to do with the ease and safety of the actions. You could compare it with the way people act when driving, versus when just walking around interacting normally. A little bit of anonymity, and less fear of repurcussions, and people act like the biggest jerks (or idiots) in the world. Almost no one would walk the way people drive, and almost no one would shoplift the way they steal online, but that doesn't in any way make it right.
I work for directv. Directv/Hughes hemorrhage money, right now we're at a point where we may very well not be losing money by the beginning of next year, which I still think is wishful thinking but hey, I'm not in charge. Either way, GM needs cash to pay back their pension fund that they borrowed from, and GM shareholders want them to dump this money losing side buisness to theoretically help the main GM stock.
I think the point is that Blondie24 was just given the rules and told to go play against itself, and then after it practiced for 6 months they sicked the final program on MSN checkers and it ended up being a top 5% player
I don't see any context issues here. In "this and all our freedoms", "this" refers to freedom of speech, and "all our freedoms" should refer to every other one, including ones that were taken away or changed by the patriot act.
The first one is in the introductory paragraph (comparing Nemesis to Undiscovered Country). He doesn't bother to note that when he starts counting later, but thats where it is. I almost posted this same comment before I read it again. Definately poorly written.
How, exactly, did they "evaluate" two mouse buttons? I ask because it seems to me that the usability of two mouse buttons has nothing to do with the mouse and everything to do with the design of the software. So if apple (or whoever else's software they used) did a poor job of implementing uses for the second mouse button, then of course it would slow people down. It still seems a lot easier to remember "right click for menu" than to have to move the mouse to go hunt for the menu - why would that be any easier to remember where it is?
In your quake example, how do you move your character around? By pressing keyboard keys. Do you just use one? How do you remember which is which? Do you really think it's slowing you down? I'm sorry, but this doesn't make any sense to me. Some things *can* become second nature, even in the world of oppresive computers.
The theory of carrying capacity as you state it has been around at least since 1798, when Thomas Malthus published his "Essays on the Principle of Population".
The problem with the theory was, and will remain, the idea that resources really only grow linearly. Human agricultural technology has repeatedly increased the carrying capacity of land well beyond the expected linear growth that would have long ago resulted in us passing the expected carrying capacity of the land. Malthus himself seemed to expect to see us pass the carrying capacity of the land within a few generations of his life - not much different than more recent predictions of the same doom and gloom by people like professor Paul Ehrlich at stanford in his book Population Bomb.
This is not to say that I don't think the potential for this to happen isn't there, just that the theoretical linear/exponential relationship between resources and population growth is flawed. Looking only at agricultural and population growth, the "first world" nations have extremely low population growth relative to their total agricultural potential. Population growth is only rampant in areas of low development, for a myriad of reasons, such as high infant mortality rates, the need for more family help to farm and insurance against losing one or two children, lack of birth control, etc etc. But it all boils down to cost benefit analysis. When you have to pay to educate your kids, and their usefulness does not outweigh their cost, you stop having them in large amounts. Ok, at this point I'm rambling, but my point is made. Production is not automatically linear, and population growth is not automatically exponential, for human beings. And this was just as wrong in 1798 as it is now.
Take one green grape (not seedless) and cut it width wise, leaving the skin on one side intact so it forms a sort of hinge. When you lay it in the microwave it should look like a pair of breasts.
Run the microwave for 10-15 seconds. The grape will spark and then burst into flames. Many all-nighters in college were punctuated with breaks to show people this wonderous phenomenon in the dorm microwaves, and now you too can try it at home. yay.
I'll bite. Wouldn't the men flying the planes have something to do with what happened to our friends, regardless of what you refer to as (and very likely man not be) " sheer incompetance and gross negelect" on the part of the US intelligence services? I have yet to see anything that screams "they knew! and they didn't care!". Please, find me that first before forgetting who is really to blame.
If they are really only blocking child porn sites, maybe it wouldn't be that great of an idea for Aussies to be talking about getting around it, unless having or viewing the child porn is perfectly ok, if you can find a way to it. Also, if the list is not available, how do they even know a site exists/is blocked to test their methods?
You're 100% right that global warming is not "All Bad"(TM). But while their may be benefits to certian locales, the net effect will be negative, if only because of two things:
1) Desertification. As the earth warms, the desert areas will do nothing but expand, decreasing the amount of arable land on the planet. While this could be replaced by increased productivity in, say, Michigan or Canada or wherever, if temperatures just rise and rise and rise...you eventually get to the desertification of even Michigan. Not good.
2) Rising water levels. Though we haven't seen much of it yet, if ocean levels rise, then thats another sink that the overall land resources on the earth will just spiral into. Maybe it will make my home in Los Angeles beachfront property, but overall it will be a Bad Thing for the earth/humanity/whatever.
You make some interesting points, but you seem to miss the fact that none of those things were done by capitalism, they were done by government mandated controls.
Also, as a fellow card carrying mensa member, it's spelled Tolerance. Maybe I need to rethink my membership.
Juvenal was writing history - not about his own time.
Either way, a hundred years before Julius Caesar there were bread lines, started by Tiberius Graccus. It all went downhill from there, for a whole lot of reasons - but you can't blame the bread and circuses on Julius or the later empire - he inherited that, and tried to reform it.
If I put out a book that was nothing but paragraphs of faulkner alternating with paragraphs of hemingway, I'd still be violating both of those copyrights. Same thing here. I guess the level of mixing could alter the content sufficiently (alternating words or even letters probably would be indistinguishable garbage), but these mp3s are pretty identifiable.
Without spot beam, a satellite company already broadcasts all their locals everywhere, and just has to set their cards so that people in NY can't see Kansas City channels and vice versa. Changing the legislation would basically give echostar a huge, albeit perhaps short lived, advantage in that they'd already have all the contracts, etc together to broadcast local channels for everywhere, they'd just have to flip a switch. Local cable companies wouldn't be able to just start showing them everywhere, nor would Directv (assuming the merger doesn't go through) since we use the spot beam.
If the merger did go through, then its just a matter of even *more* local channels being boradcast conus, to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
CCIA
666 11th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Strange that the people going after microsoft have a 666 address. You'd think it would be the other way around.
I work at DirecTV. We really really want to carry local channels in every market, we just can't yet. Every damn day I work on some kind of upgrade aimed at carrying more locals.
And yes, if enough people in an area petition, they get moved up the list of where we go next...we've don't about the top 50 markets and want to try to do them roughly in order, but we have definitely skipped a few to move to areas with more subscribers/interest.
This is basically stated in the article, but this will never work. They have no jurisdiction over a huge amount of the spammers - even a national do not e-mail list wouldn't stop overseas spammers.
Speaking of overseas spammers, it seems that the high cost of long distance telephone calls is one of the few things that keeps me from getting telemarketer solicitations from people based in, say, thailand. While it doesn't look like this is going to happen anytime soon, if international calling prices dropped significantly due to, say, VoIP, would we end up getting a bunch of calls from overseas selling us penis enlargers or mini rc cars?
Have you ever in your life heard of a market externality? Or a monopoly? Do you have any idea how bad these things can be? Obviously not.
As for your argument that this is a war against freedom, you need to understand that radio has always been regulated, from the content available to who owns can broadcast on what frequency. To say that what exists now is based on market forces, but that laws passed to change how it is are anti-market is totally wrong. Maybe it would be nice to just blow it all up and start over and see where "free market" takes us, but it sure as hell isn't going to happen.
Oh, and how in the world is a "free market" the purest form of democracy in existence? Voting with your wallet means people with larger wallets...get more votes. Not democracy my friend. Not at all. Anyway, in a democracy, the power comes from the people, not the corporations. I think you're thinking of a different political system.
There is a slight difference this year...they have Keenan McCardell of the Bucs play Charlie Garner of the Raiders. McCardell actually had some idea of how to play the game, while Garner supposedly had an offensive strategy of "give the ball to Charlie Garner".
Course, I'm still hoping the streak holds up, but I won't hold my breath.
Speaking of network play, ever since the game subspace came out, I've been hoping against hope that someone would be able to make a massively multiplayer game of that sort using the Star Control ships. While the SC2 story was truly excellent, I continued to play ship vs ship with my friends for quite a while after finishing the game, and I can imagine that many hours could be flushed down the toilet with an online version of the melee mode.
Home invasion robberies. I join a home in the game, and all it is is a box with 7 weight sets while my housemates just sit and pump iron all day. I ask them why, and the answer is "if we build up our muscles we can raid other peoples houses and beat them up and rob them". Give the game a month, and you'll just have roving gangs of thugs. I can't wait.
Sure, but the whole problem, which exists at all levels of buisness and government, is shortsightedness, or at least mortgaging the future. Just because the microsoft products are better now and free now doesn't mean they'll be free later (or better, but I won't argue that). This will cost poor old india tons of money in the long run, but in the short run some minister looks good, and India saves a buck now that they'll pay back 100 fold in 5, 10, or 20 years, because they will be trapped. Of course, they are a country, not a corporation, so maybe they plan on just pirating anything new and telling microsoft to go screw themselves, but I doubt it.
(300-45)/300=.85
or, $2.48bn on revenues of $2.89bn
$2.48/2.89=.85 as well
85% of their revenue is profit.
You are 100% correct that laws do not create morality, but 100% wrong in assuming that since everyone and their mom are pirating movies that it's somehow OK. You wan't reasons people do this, and don't just shoplift the movies? Here you go:
1.) It's super easy, no one is watching you, or guarding the merchandise in any way.
2.) It's seemingly anonymous.
3.) It's completely safe, no one knows anyone who has ever been arrested for this.
4.) The perception that "no one is getting hurt", or "you're only hurting big, evil companies" which is patently untrue, but still something that makes stealing much easier to swallow for the average joe.
It's like creating a prisoners dillema style game in which you have no penalty or even chance for penalty for performing the negative (but most profitable) actions. This has nothing to do with the morality, it has everything to do with the ease and safety of the actions. You could compare it with the way people act when driving, versus when just walking around interacting normally. A little bit of anonymity, and less fear of repurcussions, and people act like the biggest jerks (or idiots) in the world. Almost no one would walk the way people drive, and almost no one would shoplift the way they steal online, but that doesn't in any way make it right.
I work for directv. Directv/Hughes hemorrhage money, right now we're at a point where we may very well not be losing money by the beginning of next year, which I still think is wishful thinking but hey, I'm not in charge. Either way, GM needs cash to pay back their pension fund that they borrowed from, and GM shareholders want them to dump this money losing side buisness to theoretically help the main GM stock.
I think the point is that Blondie24 was just given the rules and told to go play against itself, and then after it practiced for 6 months they sicked the final program on MSN checkers and it ended up being a top 5% player
I don't see any context issues here. In "this and all our freedoms", "this" refers to freedom of speech, and "all our freedoms" should refer to every other one, including ones that were taken away or changed by the patriot act.
The first one is in the introductory paragraph (comparing Nemesis to Undiscovered Country). He doesn't bother to note that when he starts counting later, but thats where it is. I almost posted this same comment before I read it again. Definately poorly written.
How, exactly, did they "evaluate" two mouse buttons? I ask because it seems to me that the usability of two mouse buttons has nothing to do with the mouse and everything to do with the design of the software. So if apple (or whoever else's software they used) did a poor job of implementing uses for the second mouse button, then of course it would slow people down. It still seems a lot easier to remember "right click for menu" than to have to move the mouse to go hunt for the menu - why would that be any easier to remember where it is?
In your quake example, how do you move your character around? By pressing keyboard keys. Do you just use one? How do you remember which is which? Do you really think it's slowing you down? I'm sorry, but this doesn't make any sense to me. Some things *can* become second nature, even in the world of oppresive computers.
The theory of carrying capacity as you state it has been around at least since 1798, when Thomas Malthus published his "Essays on the Principle of Population".
The problem with the theory was, and will remain, the idea that resources really only grow linearly. Human agricultural technology has repeatedly increased the carrying capacity of land well beyond the expected linear growth that would have long ago resulted in us passing the expected carrying capacity of the land. Malthus himself seemed to expect to see us pass the carrying capacity of the land within a few generations of his life - not much different than more recent predictions of the same doom and gloom by people like professor Paul Ehrlich at stanford in his book Population Bomb.
This is not to say that I don't think the potential for this to happen isn't there, just that the theoretical linear/exponential relationship between resources and population growth is flawed. Looking only at agricultural and population growth, the "first world" nations have extremely low population growth relative to their total agricultural potential. Population growth is only rampant in areas of low development, for a myriad of reasons, such as high infant mortality rates, the need for more family help to farm and insurance against losing one or two children, lack of birth control, etc etc. But it all boils down to cost benefit analysis. When you have to pay to educate your kids, and their usefulness does not outweigh their cost, you stop having them in large amounts. Ok, at this point I'm rambling, but my point is made. Production is not automatically linear, and population growth is not automatically exponential, for human beings. And this was just as wrong in 1798 as it is now.
Take one green grape (not seedless) and cut it width wise, leaving the skin on one side intact so it forms a sort of hinge. When you lay it in the microwave it should look like a pair of breasts.
Run the microwave for 10-15 seconds. The grape will spark and then burst into flames. Many all-nighters in college were punctuated with breaks to show people this wonderous phenomenon in the dorm microwaves, and now you too can try it at home. yay.
Moby, I listened to Pearl Jam, I knew Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam was a friend of mine. Moby, you are no Pearl Jam.
I'll bite. Wouldn't the men flying the planes have something to do with what happened to our friends, regardless of what you refer to as (and very likely man not be) " sheer incompetance and gross negelect" on the part of the US intelligence services? I have yet to see anything that screams "they knew! and they didn't care!". Please, find me that first before forgetting who is really to blame.
If they are really only blocking child porn sites, maybe it wouldn't be that great of an idea for Aussies to be talking about getting around it, unless having or viewing the child porn is perfectly ok, if you can find a way to it. Also, if the list is not available, how do they even know a site exists/is blocked to test their methods?
You're 100% right that global warming is not "All Bad"(TM). But while their may be benefits to certian locales, the net effect will be negative, if only because of two things:
1) Desertification. As the earth warms, the desert areas will do nothing but expand, decreasing the amount of arable land on the planet. While this could be replaced by increased productivity in, say, Michigan or Canada or wherever, if temperatures just rise and rise and rise...you eventually get to the desertification of even Michigan. Not good.
2) Rising water levels. Though we haven't seen much of it yet, if ocean levels rise, then thats another sink that the overall land resources on the earth will just spiral into. Maybe it will make my home in Los Angeles beachfront property, but overall it will be a Bad Thing for the earth/humanity/whatever.
You make some interesting points, but you seem to miss the fact that none of those things were done by capitalism, they were done by government mandated controls.
Also, as a fellow card carrying mensa member, it's spelled Tolerance. Maybe I need to rethink my membership.
Juvenal was writing history - not about his own time.
Either way, a hundred years before Julius Caesar there were bread lines, started by Tiberius Graccus. It all went downhill from there, for a whole lot of reasons - but you can't blame the bread and circuses on Julius or the later empire - he inherited that, and tried to reform it.
If I put out a book that was nothing but paragraphs of faulkner alternating with paragraphs of hemingway, I'd still be violating both of those copyrights. Same thing here. I guess the level of mixing could alter the content sufficiently (alternating words or even letters probably would be indistinguishable garbage), but these mp3s are pretty identifiable.
Without spot beam, a satellite company already broadcasts all their locals everywhere, and just has to set their cards so that people in NY can't see Kansas City channels and vice versa. Changing the legislation would basically give echostar a huge, albeit perhaps short lived, advantage in that they'd already have all the contracts, etc together to broadcast local channels for everywhere, they'd just have to flip a switch. Local cable companies wouldn't be able to just start showing them everywhere, nor would Directv (assuming the merger doesn't go through) since we use the spot beam.
If the merger did go through, then its just a matter of even *more* local channels being boradcast conus, to everyone.