People who answer polls are notorious for giving different answers, based on how the question was phrased. In this case, I think most of the people who wouldn't give up their cell phones assumed that the "million pounds" was just rhetorical hyperbole. Now, if you actually walked up to somebody and offered to give them that much money on the spot, I'll bet 99% of them would agree to give up using cell phones. Indeed, that's probably the least of what you could get people to do!
Dude, you are the classic "Everybody's like me" Slashdot Asshat. You're willing to spend huge amounts on HDTV hardware and cable, and you're still lecturing me on the economics of PVRs. Sure, if I still had cable, I'd want a PVR (it's a waste to have cable if you can't find and record all the good shit that's on channel 133 at 3 am). But I refuse to spend the money. A small screen and a Netflix subscription is all I need.
Yeah, most of (but not all) the creativity has migrated to cable. But I'm not going to spend $70 a month to see it on cable, when I can wait a few months and see in Netflix for $15 a month.
Excuse me? An arcology would be a very bad place to put a vertical farm. The structure of the arcology would cut the farm off from wind and sun, its two main sources of energy.
Anyway, the point of an arcology is to minimize the "footprint" of urban zones, not to create totally self-sufficient entities.
I prefer to think that New York is considering vertical farms because they're getting ready to install a spindizzy.
and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely
Why not? Because TV listings want to be free?
I can't see anyone needing an XML TV listings feed unless they have cable or satellite. Old fashioned newspaper (or web) listings are perfectly adequate if you only get a half-dozen TV stations. (If they're not, you need to get out more anyway.) It's when you have access to dozens of channels that you need high-tech help to filter out the stuff you want to watch from the firehose of crap. (Excuse the image!) So if you're paying $50/month, you shouldn't complain at having to pay few extra bucks for a feed. Of course, a lot of people will complain anyway, but a lot of people have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
What would really kill such a service is the same thing that killed the Zap2It service: people will subscribe and repurpose the stream for commercial use, just like they did for the Zap2It feed. Why is that fatal? Because the data has to come from somewhere. Unless you're going to sit down and write your own summaries of thousands of TV shows, you're going to use existing summaries. And if you do, then you have to have permission from whoever wrote these summaries. That's permission you're not going to get if you can't guarantee that nobody will repurpose and resell your data.
Rather than a million screen scrapers each hitting various listing sites, better one screen scraper sharing the resulting data with a million video rebels. This solution would probably leave everyone happier.
Except for the owners of the data being scraped, who would each issue a takedown notice faster than you can say, "So sue me!"
OK, so BSD technology is key to making OS X work. Still doesn't make it the "same OS". That's like saying a cockatoo is the same as a dinosaur, just because it's got dinosaur genes.
People don't use OS X because of its BSD-ness — they do it because they like all the fancy features that Apple has built onto the OS. Developers who want to create OS X apps don't code against BSD APIs — they code against various Apple APIs. Yes, those APIs are built on a BSD foundation, but they could have just as easily been built on a System V foundation.
I recently had occasion to study the structure of OS X, because my department has a Mac lying around, and we were thinking it would be handy for hosting a TWiki. I discovered a lot of radical changes in the basic architecture of the system (file system layout; administrative tools; command line conventions) that made my experience with Unix and Linux pretty irrelevant. I admit I haven't used a BSD-based system in a couple of decades, but the BSD I recall was closer to the System V-derived Unixes I still work with (Solaris, IRIX, UnixWare) than it is to this (basically new) OS that Apple has created.
I ended up running the TWiki on a Fedora system. And Fedora, even though it contains no Unix libraries at all, is much closer (indeed, almost identical) to the Unix systems I'm familiar with.
So basically you're saying that desktop Linux needs more time. As I recall, all the enthusiasm for Linux as a Windows alternative started around the beginning of 2000. (That was when Borland, which previously had offered only Windows development tools, hired me to help document Linux versions of their tools.) So in effect you're saying we've been "almost there" for seven years. Not encouraging.
Please. OS X is not BSD. It's a mostly new OS that was built on top of NextStep, which in turn was re-engineered from the Mach OS (ironic name, that). Mach uses BSD libraries, but that doesn't make every OS based on it BSD.
If you had a lawyer representing you, then you were not in small claims court, contrary to what you said in your blog. Nor was it an appeal. It was a retrial in municipal court. And decisions in municipal court are subject to appeal.
Now it may be that you don't have my basis for appeal. But that has nothing to do with the small claims system. It has to do with the laws under which the case was decided.
Many things are wrong with the American court system. It's too arcane, and it's stacked in favor of people with deep pockets. But the part of the court system you're attacking is actually one of the few aspects of the system that serves folks with limited resources. You think it treated you unfairly -- but people who lose court cases rarely think otherwise.
You have every right to criticize the court system -- God knows there is plenty to criticize. But criticism needs to he based on a solid understanding of the institution you're criticizing. The angry sense of injury you're relying on is a poor substitute.
If you really think your rights hare been trampled on, you should contact a civil liberties group (try http://www.aclunc.org/ ) and ask them to help you file an appeal. But if they tell you it's a waste of time, you should put away your indignation for a second, and ask them to explain why this is so. And listen carefully this time. You might still think you've been screwed over, but at least you'll have some solid facts to back your claims.
I'm not going to comment on the merits of your dispute with Kaplan. But I find your characterization of the small claims process to be very strange. From your blog:
I will also never have recourse to object to the second ruling because small claims cases, when they are appealed, are simply heard before another judge in small claims court. It is more of a re-trial than an appeal. Having exhausted that route, I will never have the opportunity to take this to a real appellate court where my first amendment rights might be protected.
Have you even talked to a lawyer? If your had, you'd know that Small Claims verdicts can be appealed to Superior Court.
Since the money came out of their pocket and not mine, I assume they didn't quit that easily.
Guess again. What did the cell cost? A few hundred bucks at most. It would cost the credit card company more than that to have a lawyer pry the information out of the phone company. Never mind the cost of actually going after the thief. Much cheaper to write it off. And with 24% interest on credit cards, they can certainly afford to do that.
The indy channels disappeared a long time ago. What you think of as "indy" channels are just the media monopolies doing odd stuff to try to capture niche audiences. The real indy channels went away when the MMs used their clout to force the cable companies to buy big bundles of channels. ("If you want to carry the local Fox station, you have to carry our new FX channel too. Yes, we know there's nothing on it yet. We'll worry about that later.") That left no room for all the weird little cable channels you used to see: the channels run by obscure religious sects, the public-domain movie channels (I saw the entire work of Ed Wood on one of those!), the Flat Earth society channel, the origami fetish channel...
Of course, these bundles aren't cheap, which is why cable rates are so ridiculous.
I think the folks that want alacart (I insist on spelling it that way, given the context) aren't interested in saving money or "protecting" their kids. They are just are pissed off that some of their money is going to pay for "un-Christian" content. In other words, this is just another lame "culture wars" battle that has no relation to the real world.
Should an evacuation be necessary, at least we know the Shuttle can carry them all.
The ISS crew would be very nervous if they had to rely on the shuttle for emergency evacuation. Even when it's not grounded (and not killing its crew), the shuttle fleet doesn't visit the station that often. Good thing somebody thought to supply the ISS with a stash of Soyuz capsules for emergencies.
I've seen the lamest stuff moderated "informative". But this is a new low: an obvious joke taken as informational.
Our basic problem is that our moderator pool sucks. It was a big mistake to move it to the very middle of the bell curve (rated by how much you participate), since that cuts out all the regular users with a stake in keeping up a quality site. Instead we get moderators (like this one) who barely read the items they moderate.
I said as much to CmdrTaco in an email exchange. His answer: people need to metamoderate more.
My response was that I used to metamoderate as often as I was allowed. It was fun. But now moderations are so lame, I can barely bring myself to do it. The fact is, if you have a lot of idiots moderating, kicking a few out of the pool makes no difference. The internet has an infinite supply of idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
People who answer polls are notorious for giving different answers, based on how the question was phrased. In this case, I think most of the people who wouldn't give up their cell phones assumed that the "million pounds" was just rhetorical hyperbole. Now, if you actually walked up to somebody and offered to give them that much money on the spot, I'll bet 99% of them would agree to give up using cell phones. Indeed, that's probably the least of what you could get people to do!
Dude, you are the classic "Everybody's like me" Slashdot Asshat. You're willing to spend huge amounts on HDTV hardware and cable, and you're still lecturing me on the economics of PVRs. Sure, if I still had cable, I'd want a PVR (it's a waste to have cable if you can't find and record all the good shit that's on channel 133 at 3 am). But I refuse to spend the money. A small screen and a Netflix subscription is all I need.
Yeah, most of (but not all) the creativity has migrated to cable. But I'm not going to spend $70 a month to see it on cable, when I can wait a few months and see in Netflix for $15 a month.
No, but a copyright on a document summarizing those facts does have an owner.
Excuse me? An arcology would be a very bad place to put a vertical farm. The structure of the arcology would cut the farm off from wind and sun, its two main sources of energy.
Anyway, the point of an arcology is to minimize the "footprint" of urban zones, not to create totally self-sufficient entities.
I prefer to think that New York is considering vertical farms because they're getting ready to install a spindizzy.
I can't see anyone needing an XML TV listings feed unless they have cable or satellite. Old fashioned newspaper (or web) listings are perfectly adequate if you only get a half-dozen TV stations. (If they're not, you need to get out more anyway.) It's when you have access to dozens of channels that you need high-tech help to filter out the stuff you want to watch from the firehose of crap. (Excuse the image!) So if you're paying $50/month, you shouldn't complain at having to pay few extra bucks for a feed. Of course, a lot of people will complain anyway, but a lot of people have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
What would really kill such a service is the same thing that killed the Zap2It service: people will subscribe and repurpose the stream for commercial use, just like they did for the Zap2It feed. Why is that fatal? Because the data has to come from somewhere. Unless you're going to sit down and write your own summaries of thousands of TV shows, you're going to use existing summaries. And if you do, then you have to have permission from whoever wrote these summaries. That's permission you're not going to get if you can't guarantee that nobody will repurpose and resell your data.
Sigh. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238993&thresho ld=2&commentsort=3&mode=nested&cid=19569869
Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. Taking it a little further: if OS X is a kind of BSD, then Vista is a kind of MS-DOS!
OK, so BSD technology is key to making OS X work. Still doesn't make it the "same OS". That's like saying a cockatoo is the same as a dinosaur, just because it's got dinosaur genes.
People don't use OS X because of its BSD-ness — they do it because they like all the fancy features that Apple has built onto the OS. Developers who want to create OS X apps don't code against BSD APIs — they code against various Apple APIs. Yes, those APIs are built on a BSD foundation, but they could have just as easily been built on a System V foundation.
I recently had occasion to study the structure of OS X, because my department has a Mac lying around, and we were thinking it would be handy for hosting a TWiki. I discovered a lot of radical changes in the basic architecture of the system (file system layout; administrative tools; command line conventions) that made my experience with Unix and Linux pretty irrelevant. I admit I haven't used a BSD-based system in a couple of decades, but the BSD I recall was closer to the System V-derived Unixes I still work with (Solaris, IRIX, UnixWare) than it is to this (basically new) OS that Apple has created.
I ended up running the TWiki on a Fedora system. And Fedora, even though it contains no Unix libraries at all, is much closer (indeed, almost identical) to the Unix systems I'm familiar with.
So basically you're saying that desktop Linux needs more time. As I recall, all the enthusiasm for Linux as a Windows alternative started around the beginning of 2000. (That was when Borland, which previously had offered only Windows development tools, hired me to help document Linux versions of their tools.) So in effect you're saying we've been "almost there" for seven years. Not encouraging.
Please. OS X is not BSD. It's a mostly new OS that was built on top of NextStep, which in turn was re-engineered from the Mach OS (ironic name, that). Mach uses BSD libraries, but that doesn't make every OS based on it BSD.
...why BSD has any hope of success where Linux has failed?
If you had a lawyer representing you, then you were not in small claims court, contrary to what you said in your blog. Nor was it an appeal. It was a retrial in municipal court. And decisions in municipal court are subject to appeal.
Now it may be that you don't have my basis for appeal. But that has nothing to do with the small claims system. It has to do with the laws under which the case was decided.
Many things are wrong with the American court system. It's too arcane, and it's stacked in favor of people with deep pockets. But the part of the court system you're attacking is actually one of the few aspects of the system that serves folks with limited resources. You think it treated you unfairly -- but people who lose court cases rarely think otherwise.
You have every right to criticize the court system -- God knows there is plenty to criticize. But criticism needs to he based on a solid understanding of the institution you're criticizing. The angry sense of injury you're relying on is a poor substitute.
If you really think your rights hare been trampled on, you should contact a civil liberties group (try http://www.aclunc.org/ ) and ask them to help you file an appeal. But if they tell you it's a waste of time, you should put away your indignation for a second, and ask them to explain why this is so. And listen carefully this time. You might still think you've been screwed over, but at least you'll have some solid facts to back your claims.
Yeah, yeah, I read TFP too. It happens to be wrong. Google "small claims appeal California."
Have you even talked to a lawyer? If your had, you'd know that Small Claims verdicts can be appealed to Superior Court.
Did you read the book? See the movie? The whale got him.
The indy channels disappeared a long time ago. What you think of as "indy" channels are just the media monopolies doing odd stuff to try to capture niche audiences.
The real indy channels went away when the MMs used their clout to force the cable companies to buy big bundles of channels. ("If you want to carry the local Fox station, you have to carry our new FX channel too. Yes, we know there's nothing on it yet. We'll worry about that later.") That left no room for all the weird little cable channels you used to see: the channels run by obscure religious sects, the public-domain movie channels (I saw the entire work of Ed Wood on one of those!), the Flat Earth society channel, the origami fetish channel...
Of course, these bundles aren't cheap, which is why cable rates are so ridiculous.
I think the folks that want alacart (I insist on spelling it that way, given the context) aren't interested in saving money or "protecting" their kids. They are just are pissed off that some of their money is going to pay for "un-Christian" content. In other words, this is just another lame "culture wars" battle that has no relation to the real world.
That's the theory. The reality is that the metamod system doesn't seem to do much to weed out bad moderators.
If by "group think", you mean objective criticism by their recognized peers, than you're right.
So, screwing with the mod system is OK, as long as it's funny? Then you'll be amused, rather than offended, when I call you an asshole.
So instead of being stupid, they're gaming the system? Oh, now I feel much better...
I've seen the lamest stuff moderated "informative". But this is a new low: an obvious joke taken as informational.
Our basic problem is that our moderator pool sucks. It was a big mistake to move it to the very middle of the bell curve (rated by how much you participate), since that cuts out all the regular users with a stake in keeping up a quality site. Instead we get moderators (like this one) who barely read the items they moderate.
I said as much to CmdrTaco in an email exchange. His answer: people need to metamoderate more.
My response was that I used to metamoderate as often as I was allowed. It was fun. But now moderations are so lame, I can barely bring myself to do it. The fact is, if you have a lot of idiots moderating, kicking a few out of the pool makes no difference. The internet has an infinite supply of idiots.
Rob never responded.