I started reading - and actually wound up subscribing to - Fantastic Four when I spotted issue # 8 on the magazine rack at a local convenience store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1961 (the issue that introduced the Puppet Master and his blind, sculptress stepdaughter Alicia, who would swiftly become Ben Grimm's beloved). I was 9 years old, and utterly captivated by this bold, new take on the superhero genre. DC comics had become tiresomely formulaic, thanks to the Comics Code Authority and the generally-repressive social atmosphere, and the quarrelsome, wisecracking FF was a welcome anodyne to the tepidity of Superman, and the campy, cartoonish Batman of the time.
Plus Jack Kirby, the most exciting artist in comics, did the pencils!
I continued to follow the FF throughout the 1960s, until Kirby abruptly decamped to DC. For my tastes, the title never recovered from his departure - oh, and rock'n'roll, girls, and marijuana had captured my attention by then, anyway, so I turned away from comics for the next three decades. (The death of Superman brought me back - but it was the Batman titles that kept me colllecting.)
In the new century, when digital effects technology finally made it possible to make comic book superhero movies look convincing, I was pleased to see Marvel jump in with both feet - and Stan Lee always made a cameo appearance, which was a custom of which very I much approved.
When, he made a couple of guest appearances on Kevin Smith's reality series Comic Book Men, Stan the Man seemed to be in surprisingly good health for a man fast approaching a century of existence. He walked under his own power, and his speech was that of a man in possession of all his marbles. And his gentle humor, enthusiasm for life in general and comics in particular, and his great personal warmth were all still in full evidence, more than 5 decades after I first encountered his work.
Much like the man himself, both Stan's editorials in the end pages of the comics he wrote and his replies to letters from readers were always relentlessly positive and aspirational. I admired that. He always encouraged creativity in those around him - and I admired that, too. Most importantly, he spent his working life doing what he loved.
I mightily envied him that.
Just half an hour ago, when I read about his passing, I couldn't help crying. It was inevitable, of course, but that didn't lessen the blow for me.
Sooner or later, we all die. I just hoped the Universe would make an exception for Stan...
Only that editor msmash appears to have "corrected" Motherboard's proper use of the apostrophe following the plural word "targets" by inserting it between the second "t" and the pluralizer "s" - thus publicly displaying her ignorance of proper English punctuation.
Can't you reimage your phone like you can a real computer? Or do the companies restrict you from doing even that?
Yes, you can - if you drive an Android device (although many users don't know how to access the bootloader to do what's called a "factory reset"). You can even replace your phone's OS with a third-party substitute that doesn't load it down with crapware to begin with.
Assuming your phone's carrier permits you to do that, of course. Many of them will not allow you to unlock the bootloader of a brand-new phone. (In the U.S., they can legally require you to be current on your payments for at least 3 months before they're obligated to reveal the unlock code to you.) If you didn't purchase it as part of a contract, however, you're free to do so.
Unless it's an iPhone. Then, not only can't you install a third-party OS, but, whenever they upgrade iOS to a new version, there'll be an unknowably-long period before a "jailbreak" is available for it. (Some older devices - the iPad 2 I inherited when my mom died, for instance - can't be jailbroken at all, if they've been upgraded to the latest version of iOS that's available for 32-bit CPUs. It's not so much a technical hurdle, as it is a lack of interest in working on hacks for what they regard as obsolete devices on the part of jailbreaking developers. Since none of those folks get paid for that, it's hard to criticize them for focusing on newer devices with a bigger user base - and I only use mine as an ereader, anyway.)
However:
Might be a way to start fresh so even the trackers wouldn't be around.
If your carrier sold you that phone (as per the rogue's gallery listed as "not responding" in TFS), there's a 100% chance that those trackers are baked into the "factory reset" firmware - in which case, they'll be seeing you again, RSN...
You're essentially comparing an apple to a grocery store...
Prompting PPH to reply:
A grocery store that is all out of apples. So if that's what you wanted...
It's not, though. The bug described in TFS is a product of users closing the camera app - or shutting off their Pixel - before it has fully finished processing an HD photo. (Note that some users discover that the"missing" photo turns up in their gallery - which is to say "in their Google Camera/pictures directory - "a day or so later." Which very likely means "within seconds," but the user in question didn't actually bother to look there until a day or so later.)
So the grocery store in my simile isn't "all out of apples," after all. The display case for apples is empty at the time the shopper looks at it, but there are plenty of apples in the stockroom, and all it takes is a little patience - a very little patience - on the shopper's part until the display case is restocked.
BTW - I wasn't actually criticizing you. If I had had points, I'd've given you a +1 Funny upmod. But I was all out, so I went into Literalist Fuckhead mode, and replied to your post, instead...
... my Rolleiflex has ever failed to save a picture.
The differences between your rollie and a Pixel include the fact that the rollie is a one-trick pony (in addition to the fact that your rollie uses actual film), whereas the Pixel is a general-purpose computer integrated with an cell phone and a digital camera - er, sorry, I meant "and digital cameras."
The rollie takes photos. Full stop.
You're essentially comparing an apple to a grocery store...
The uncanny valley comes to mind. In some scenes the face droops a bit too much for it to be unrealistic. He's done similar ones on his channel in which the problems are more clear, fitting one face on another is possible but not invisible.
And there's a least one driving scene where his face is visibly out of proportion to both his body and the face of his girlfriend (who's in the passenger's seat next to him). It looks like he's wearing a Young Harrison Ford Halloween Mask (tm)...
Perhaps I'm cynical, but it used to be that when I bought a computer game I didn't need to have a server active to play it. Now, even single user play, when available, requires activation which can be disabled whenever the vendor gets tired of supporting the game. To me this looks like setting up music to work the same way.
Perhaps that's because you don't understand - and apparently don't wish to understand - that this has nothing whatever to do with controlling where you, as a consumer, get your music. And, since you're not a songwriter, you don't grasp the economics of songwriting as a profession - and appear to be resistant to learning anything about the subject.
I say that, because I've already twice explained what this legislation does and does not do from a consumer perspective, and yet you insist on changing the subject, while pretending that we're talking about the same issue.
We're not. We haven't been. And I'm unwilling to continue to discuss this "threat" you claim to perceive that has nothing whatever to do with the legislation about which TFS and my original post were concerned.
Do the record companies wish they could do away with the illusion of consumers "owning the music" they purchase copies of? I'm sure they do. But they haven't managed to do so in more than 100 years of recorded music's history, and I see no signs that they'll succeed in doing so any time soon, regardless of how much money Disney bestows on politicians around the globe. I say that, both because the music industry's major players aren't making any effort to impose such a model on their customers, and because those major players are not the only players in the marketplace.
There are indie labels, artist-owned labels, and collectives aplenty out there, too. And they know better than to try - because attempting to take the music they "own" away from their own customers is an excellent way to drive those customers away. (The fact that those customers own copies of the music those players' artists produce, doesn't in any way mean they own the music itself. That has always firmly remained the property of the labels, publishers, and artists themselves - or rather, it's theirs until their copyrights expire and it enters the public domain. That's what "copyright" means: the right to make and sell copies. And, just as you can own and enjoy the right to resell a copy of a work - including a musical recording - doesn't mean you have any rights whatsoever to the actual music itself.)
The underlying composition belongs jointly to the songwriter(s) and his/her/their publishing company. That's a legacy of the 19th century, when the only way music was or could be distributed to consumers was in the form of sheet music and/or player piano rolls. Then commercial radio came along, and new legislation was adopted to ensure that songwriters and their publishers continued to be able to make money from their work, even as sheet music sales declined to the point of near-irrelevance. In the 21st century, the distribution models have changed again - but the central problem remains: how to ensure that songwriters will continue to be paid for their work, so that they can afford to continue to write songs for a living.
Royalties for public performance and recording are still the solution to that problem. The question then became: how to collect and distribute those royalties in the new age of streaming, where broadcast radio is in steep decline, because Internet-based streaming has siphoned off its customers. This legislation attempts to answer that question in a way that's fairer than the previous attempt turned out to be. It does not in any way affect the actual ownership of the songs themselves, because that hasn't changed. All it does is create a legal framework for a mechanism to ensure that songwriters, publishers - and now producers, as well - get paid for their work.
One thing I'm pretty sure you don't understand at al
Garbage. Under the old system if I bought a record I could play it over and over until the groves wore out. With the streaming you're supposed to pay each time you listen to it. If this is a better deal for the artists (dubious) it's only because the price has been jacked up for the benefit of all the parasites.
Did you even bother to read my post?
This new authority and royalty structure has nothing to do with music-for-purchase. If you want to buy music for your own collection, you can still do that from a number of sources: CDs, digital download services (as opposed to digital streaming services, which is what TFS and my post address), or, in many cases, direct from the artists themselves. This legislation imposes no barriers whatsoever to your purchase, nor does it have anything to do with purchased music. Full stop.
What it does accomplish is to put the collection and administration of songwriter royalties from streaming service plays on a more equal basis with the existing royalty structure for broadcast radio. Full stop.
Tell me: do you rail about how listening to the fucking radio deprives you of the right to own the music it broadcasts?
No?
Then you have zero basis to complain about this new legislation somehow depriving you of that right. It doesn't.
The question itself reminds me of the first two lines of Augustus De Morgan's poem Siphonaptera:
Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(All four lines quoted here, because, of course they are... )
TFS (and, undoubtedly, TFA from which it's cribbed) quotes some music industry flack thusly:
better deal for music artists
Prompting slack_justyb to point out:
In all fairness, this bill has been worked on since Bush II days, around 2006-ish. This whole effort has mostly been decided between private parties and a few key congressional representatives.
It's almost like people forget that important law takes years, compromises between a multitude of interested parties, and bipartisanship.
The fact is that this law is a better deal for artists.
It's also a better deal - a much better deal - for record companies, and "rights holders" (which includes both "descendents who had nothing to do with writing or recording the works on which they're going to be paid royalties," and "people who bought the publishing rights to dead artists' back catalogues" and their descendents, etc.). But that's a baby/bathwater thing. Pay the actual artists more than a tiny fraction of a cent for their work, and those other folks will, inevitably, also get paid.
What this legislation does - beside the copyright extensions that got tacked onto it - is to increase royalties for digitally-streamed music significantly. That's a way-overdue acknowledgement that the method by which popular music is ephemerally distributed to consumers has drastically changed since the days when the only choices were AM or FM. Those 20th-century distribution technologies are increasingly obsolete, and I wouldn't bet on them still being around a decade or two from now (because RF bandwidth is increasingly precious).
Under the old legal framework, radio stations paid a per-play royalty on every song they broadcast - to the performing rights organization which represents the songwriter(s) and publisher of those songs. Performers got zilch (unless they were performing live, and the radio station was broadcasting their performance - it's all very messy and complicated). Each PRO (the two bigs are BMI and ASCAP) calculates its own formula for distributing them, and each PRO takes a rake-off, which, theoretically, pays for its direct expenses to collect, administer, and distribute those royalties.
Now a new administering body will be created to collect and distribute royalties for streaming plays. (Yay?) But - and this really is new and improved - the organization that collects and distributes royalties for which no payee can be located will be controlled by artists, not PROs. That means no more giant, largely-unaccountable slush funds which generally benefit only those PROs. In the new regime, that slush fund will belong to (and, at least theoretically, be accountable to) the artists themselves.
So - just maybe - this will mean a better deal for artists, because (again, in the absence of a functionting administrative body - which has yet to be created), in theory, it will mean the end of the kind of "Hollywood accounting" that for decades has routinely screwed so many working songwriters out of any significant payout for recordings of the music they wrote.
(Full disclosure: I am a songwriter, and a member of ASCAP. I have never seen a dime in royalties for my work, though - and, at this point, I probably never will. Nonetheless, I think this is an improvement over the previous system. I do not, however, approve of the Disney-authored extension of copyright term to the life of the artist plus 90 years. I think it's reasonable that an artist's surviving spouse benefit from his/her work for a relatively-short period after he/she dies, because it is routinely the case that sales of a popular artist's work see a significant - most often short-term - post-mortem boost. If you've ever known or been the spouse of a professional musician, you'll understand the sacrifices that relationship entails, and that loyalty deserves to be rewarded. Without it, there's many a songwriter who would have had to give it up, and get a "real" job, instead... )
but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.
Prompting ShanghaiBill to respond:
My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.
There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.
It's hard to argue with that logic - except I'm a Project Fi customer, who pays Google for my service. And I can't say I'm satisfied with their customer support at all.
I recently bricked my Nexus 6. While I wrestled with trying to raise it from the dead, I simply wanted to forward calls made to my number to my wife's phone.
Because Project Fi is the carrier for both phones, Google's support people - who are all Indian, and thus contractors to whom Google has outsourced their support calls - claimed it was "not possible" to forward my incoming calls to her phone. Every one of them (and I made it two rungs up the management chain, before the last guy essentially hung up on me, mid-sentence) gave me the same, obviously-canned response.
Now that's pure, industrial grade, 100% bullshit. It should be trivial to do - check a box on a web form, type in a forwarding number, and let me get on with life. But those contractor drones clearly don't have the authority to do anything other than read from boilerplate scripts, and they were adamantly unwilling to push the issue up the chain of command to actual, direct Google employees.
I think that's a data point in favor of an "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" attitude on Google's part. According to you, customers of their advertising services get high-quality support. I can assure you from personal experience that the same is not true for Project Fi customers.
(This is not a slam at India or Indians. Every company seems to outsource to them for customer service these days, and that strategy can only be based on cost considerations. You get what you pay for - and it doesn't make good business sense to pay Western wages for humans to simply read from scripts. I don't blame the frontline support people for that - I blame Google for not allowing them to escalate support queries to actual technicians... )
That's all excellent background information on Lockheed's track record on actually delivering on their promises - and it's utterly unsurprising.
Lockheed is, first and foremost, a defense contractor. Its corporate culture directly reflects that fact - which is why it insists on being paid to do anything and everything any project requires, very much including fixing its own design and production blunders.
In the defense contracting world, every contract is made on a cost-plus reimbursement basis. Essentially, that means the federal government is required to pay the full cost for all materials, labor, and services the contractor employs to fulfill it, plus a fixed percentage of those expenses (usually 15%) as the contractor's profit.
Of course, no private corporation or entity would agree to such a contract, absent a literal gun to its head, because cost-plus amounts to an open invitation to the contractor to inflate its costs as much as possible. Worse still, it's a rare cost-plus deal, indeed, that includes any meaningful penalties for cost overruns - regardless of how large they might be - or for late delivery of the contracted-for product. (Which means all the incentives are for the contractor to over-promise and under-deliver to the maximum extent possible, and none of them reward the contractor for delivering on time and under budget.)
This determinedly-counterproductive contracting model is a heritage of WWII, when the defense industry couldn't dependably predict in advance what its total costs for a given contract would be, because it couldn't rely on the cost - or availability - of raw materials to remain stable for the life of a contract, and the supply of dependable, qualified employees was equally problematic. It proved so lucrative, that once that war ended, the defense industry insisted on maintaining the cost-plus model - and, since the military paid zero attention to costs (the money to pay contractors didn't come out of its operating budget, so, again, it had no incentive to care), and Congress also didn't care (because the defense industry was always extremely generous to legislators, not just in campaign contributions, but in paying for luxurious "junkets" to country clubs for conferences that always happened to include lots of free hookers and high-quality booze), neither objected to continuing the practice.
In their defense, it was the beginning of the Cold War era, and the USSR's acquisition first of nuclear weapons technology (principally from the Rosenberg/Greenglass spy ring), then thermonuclear weapons, created a siege mentality in Washington. When the Soviets developed working ICBMs, that pervasive fear ratcheted up to 11, then blew the knob off the amp.
Since there was a mere handful of defense firms capable of designing and building heavy launch vehicles, there weren't a lot of alternative sources to which the feds could turn, so the status remained quo for well over half a century, and Congress basically accepted being hostage to the industry giants as inevitable - even desirable.
Enter SpaceX.
After Musk's rocket company successfully launched its first booster, the Falcon 1, into orbit in 2009, then orbited a satellite for its first commercial custormer, NASA became convinced that it had the expertise, the resources, and the will to compete with Lockheed in the launch vehicle market - at least to the extent that it agreed to let SpaceX attempt to send a half-dozen resupply missions to the ISS. The absolutely key thing about that contract was that it was not made on a cost-plus basis. Instead, SpaceX would get paid only if it succeeded in launching supply missions to the ISS, and, moreover, it would only be paid on a per-mission basis (which is to say t
For years we heard people complain about cable channel packages. "They're making me pay for dozens of channels I never watch. Why can't this be a la carte?"
Well, that's essentially what we are getting--a la carte channels. It's streaming services rather than channels from a cable company, but now it's a different bill for each channel. And it sucks. So we (some of us) just to to torrents.
Mmm - that's kind of a major oversimplification.
The fact is that the major streaming services all now produce their own, often superb, content - and they use their exclusive distribution rights to those programs to attract paying customers. Those programs simply aren't available via cable or satellite TV subscriptions, and they never were.
If that compelling streaming service content was also via cable/satellite subscription, and those companies changed those subscriptions to an à-la-carte model, your attempt to conflate the two might hold water. And we'd have an opportunity to see whether that option works or not.
Instead, however, you're conflating apples and inkwells, and complaining that apples aren't tasty, because inkwells are also crunchy, but they don't taste nearly as good as apples.
The fact is that each of those streaming services features an array of proprietary and non-proprietary content that's every bit as vast and varied as any cable subscription offers (except in the case of CBS All-Access, which proposes to give its customers far too little original content for far too high a price).
Minus the sports channels, that is.
And that takes us to the reason the cable/satellite operators still stubbornly insist on clinging to their service tiers model: all the stuff that's not part of the most basic package costs the MSO's money to purchase. So, to take the National Geographic channels as an example, because their programming is considered "premium" (which is to say "prestigious") content by the cable companies (even though the absolute number of viewers they command is surprisingly small), NG demands fees from the distributors that are ridiculously high. So the cable/satellite services bundle them with expensive sports channel offerings - because, although the cost-to-carry some sports (the Olympics, for example, or boxing title matches) is high, those costs averaged across an entire tier of sports programming are not. The thing is, though - and this is key to their business model - sports junkies have conclusively demonstrated that they're willing to suffer chronic highway robbery to get their fix. So they'll pay that premium, 3rd-tier subscription fee, month upon month, in order to watch the games/matches/competitions they crave. And their willingness to pay through the nose for sports subsidizes the distributors' cost-to-carry for the NG channels.
Meanwhile, those of us who don't give a rat's ass about sports are forced to pay danegeld for them, in order to get the NG channels' content that we do want.
Or pirate them, instead - assuming they're available via torrents. Oftentimes, however, they're not.
Meanwhile, Netflix offers a huge library of movies, plus its own, award-winning, original programming. Hulu has TV re-runs galore - plus award-winnning series of its own. And Amazon's library includes movies, TV re-runs, and, increasingly, prestige and/or popular original series, to boot.
So, characterizing the multiplying streaming service landscape as in any way equivalent to a still-non-existent à-la-carte model for cable programming is pure, industrial-grade bullshit. None of the streaming services offers an à-la-carte experience. Instead, their model can best be described as "take it or leave it" - although, to be strictly fair, they at least skip the "tiered-service" awfulness. And they each offer an entire ecosystem of programming, each of which is different than its competitors.
It's worthy of mention, however, that Amazon Video often contracts to
Nope. It's completely about access. People don't want to have to subscribe to 10 different services, and go searching through 10 different services because of some contractual agreement that nobody outside of the lawyers and content producers know about.
So they'll go to the one place they know they'll find it, with the benefit of having extremely low cost: The Pirate Bay.
While I think your explanation of the motives for bittorrent piracy is incomplete, my real disagreement is with your conclusion. Have you actually tried acessing TPB recently?
The MPAA and the TV folks (at least, I assume it's their doing) have their third-world contractors DDoS-ing the living shit out of it. If you use a standard browser, it's all but inaccessible - although it's easy enough via Tor. They also have those same hirelings barfing screen after screen of bullshit torrents that contain only malware all over the movie sections.
Pretty much all of that activity is coming from India, of course, because it's not illegal there to deliberately obstruct website access or distribute malware on a for-hire basis.
The thing is, while it is unquestionably a Federal felony to do either of those things in the USA - and masterminding an international conspiracy to DDoS websites and deliberately distribute malware is arguably an even more serious crime - every U.S. law enforcement agency deliberately turns a blind eye to this asshattery, because Hollywood's income must be protected at all costs, despite fairly clear evidence that bittorrent piracy doesn't diminish their profits in any meaningful way.
Which, of course, doesn't keep business journals like Forbes from uncritically parroting the MPAA's claims to the contrary, because facts simply don't matter any more.
It's not really that simple. Hypothesis and theory are a bit ill defined.
The best definition, closest to what is generally used in practice, is that a theory is some kind of logical and/or mathematical framework that provides some explanatory power. A hypothesis is a specific prediction, that can, at least in principle, be tested by experiment.
A good theory should make predictions (generate hypotheses) that can be tested.
Eddington's eclipse expedition tested the hypothesis that starlight would be deflected near the eclipsed sun. This hypothesis is a consequence of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Merriam-Webster's usage note on the distinction argues, in general, for a definition of the two terms that's a bit closer to mine than yours.
That's not to say you're wrong, nor am I claiming that M-W's note entirely disagrees with the distinction you draw. In fact, your contention that the two terms are "ill-defined" is spot-on, and not everyone in the scientific community uses the term "hypothesis" as I defined it. But many do, and the M-W note concludes that, while theories can and do prompt proposals for experiments to test one or another ramification or effect of the theory itself - and that it is perfectly proper to call those proposals "hypotheses" - my characterization of the word "hypothesis" as meaning "a proposed model that may, over time, and with sufficient experimental confirmation, graduate to the status of a theory" is the definition the note's unidentified author considers the best-accepted one.
Again, though, that doesn't make the definition you put forward in any way wrong or misleading. Instead, the M-W note makes it clear that, as you stated, the distinction drawn between the two terms is not a clear, bright line, even among equally-qualified scientists.
OTOH, my clash with that pretentious twit was an earnest of how the jargon of philosophy discards the term "hypothesis" altogether, in favor of watering down the meaning of the word "theory" to the point where it's essentially indistinguishable from "brainfart"...
It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
Which prompted Smidge204 to inquire:
So Quantum Mechanics is a theory, then? Because we've moved a step beyond "intense scrutiny and testing" and we're well into practical real-world applications.
Exactly so - just as is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (which, at least on the macro scale, has yet to be falsified more than a century after he first published it) is still referred to as a theory by every physicist, astronomer, cosmologist, and scientific journal on the planet. The same is true of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and there are plenty of other examples to which I could point, as well.
The confusion arises mainly because, in popular usage, the two terms are, in fact, pretty much interchangeable. It's pretty rare, in fact, to see the term hypothesis at all in, say, science reporting for a general audience. And the way it's employed in TV and movies broadens the popular definition to near-meaninglessness.
That millenial dipshit with whom I crossed rhetorical blades has only an undergraduate degree, btw, so it's not like his credential is all that impressive. And his blithering (which he insisted on calling a "theory") was essentially just warmed-over Derrida, wrapped in obfuscatory language, drizzled with poorly-constructed grammar, and floating on a thick, gooey bed of pretention.
Kinda like Derrida's own bullshit, come to think of it - although the Father of Deconstructionism employed better grammar than my quasi-intellectual foil seemed capable of...
That QM makes little sense or doesn't fit other theories is irrelevant. That it makes predictions that are verifiable makes it a scientific HYPOTHESIS.
FTFY, Falconnan.
Actual scientists don't use "hypothesis" and "theory" as interchangable terms.
A theory has been experimentally tested via a procession of repeatable, well-controlled experiments, and has not been falsified in the process. It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
A hypothesis, by contrast, is an idea that might or might not have been preliminarily tested before it's presented to its natural constituency, but that has yet to be subjected to serious experimentation (especially by scientists other than whoever proposed it in the first place). Or that has been so tested, but only recently, or only by experiments whose resuts were inconclusive, or which have since been established to have had flaws in design or execution that cast doubt on their reported outcomes.
I recently had occasion to try to explain this to a smug millenial with a degree in philosophy. His response was that I was mean-spirited, and would I please cut it out...
It is important to keep in mind that NZ is a party to the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing partnership (the others being the USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia). Why that's important is that the agreement between them specifies that any intelligence developed by any of the parties is made freely available to the others, both in regular summary reports, and in full, upon request.
What that means on a practical level is that any data NZ's Customs folks uncover in their search of arrivals' devices that they decide might be of interest to any one of their three national intelligence-gathering organizations is automagically rendered to them. They, in turn, make that data available to the other four signatories' national spies. As Edward Snowden's massive document dump revealed, a key goal of the alliance is to enable the signatories to thwart the limits their own laws place on surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities directed at their own citizens and legal residents. (Appropriately enough, the NZ Herald ran an in-depth report on the subject in its March 5, 2015 edition. It makes for interesting reading, both because its viewpoint is a non-U.S. one, and because it traces the kind of egregious, systematic overreach that the port-of-entry personal electronics search policy TFS exemplifies specifically to the administration of NZ's National Party leader and (now-former) Prime Minister John Key.)
As an example of how the Five Eyes alliance enables its signatories' end-run around their own citizens' privacy protections, Snowden likes to point to a routine tactic that he, as an IT contractor for the NSA, personally witnessed every day: when an NSA analyst wants to look at the phone record metadata, web browsing history, email, and/or other "signals intercept" intelligence on a citizen of the USA who currently resides within its borders - which it is legally forbidden to do without first obtaining a FISA court warrant - he or she need only inform GCHQ (Britain's version of the NSA) of that desire. One of GCHQ's analysts then uses the spy tech that the NSA shares with GCHQ - often the exact same program the NSA person is running - to look up the requested record in GCHQ's database, and helpfully sends a copy of the results to his or her NSA counterpart.
Employing the narrowest possible interpretation of both countries' legal strictures, the search itself is not technically forbidden by U.S. law, because the actual surveillance and initial data acquisition was performed by GCHQ (albeit on the NSA's request), and that organization is not bound by U.S. statutes or Constitutional prohibitions on searches and seizures conducted without the shield of a judicial warrant. And the fact that GCHQ's analyst shared the results with the one from the NSA is, likewise, not illegal, for the same reason.
That kind of data sharing, which is based on the sketchiest possible interpretation of the respective nations' laws, happens thousands of times per day - and it works both ways.
Or, rather, I should say it works all five ways...
Before the WWW we already had similar systems, like Gopher and text based WAIS.
The parent simply mixed up "consumer level internet access, based on WWW/HTTP" with "the internet".
Yes we did.
WAIS never really worked very well (because it came along about the same time that the web did, and the latter sucked all the oxygen out of the academic computing environment's interest in it), and Gopher always was a nightmare of non-functional links and endless waits for it to timeout when it hit one of them.
And I believe I pretty definitively made your second point for you - with sufficient historical context included to establish exactly how far from the facts his assertion strays, and that understanding that history is important, if you want to grasp why he's mistaken.
When the WWW was born, the only entrenched interests were networks like AOL and Compuserv, none of which had the political or economic clout to stifle competition. The web, at that point, was pretty useless anyway, and likely not viewed as competition, per se.
<lecturemode>
Not true.
TBL announced the WWW - and posted source code for it - in late 1989. It instantly took the high-energy particle physics research community by storm (because he worked for CERN, and developed the first iteration of HTML there). However, the only graphical browser in the world at that time was the one he built as a proof of concept - and it ran only on NeXT cubes. Everyone else had to settle for using Lynx, a character-mode browser.
That was less of an impediment to its spread than you might think, both because NeXT machines were wildly popular among high-energy particle physicists (they were, after all, the most powerful personal computers available at the time), and because, outside of the academic/research particle physics and academic computer science communities, the dominant Internet access paradigm at the time was via dial-up, terminal emulation session, where user applications pretty much only ran on the ISP's host machines. Oh, and you had to buy (and your ISP had to support) a US Robotics proprietary-technology modem to get speeds above 9600 baud.
But it is profoundly incorrect to claim that the Web was simply a curiosity at the time. Folks who had Internet accounts then (mine was via Netcom - one of the first commercial ISPs) were tremendously excited when the existence of this new technology exploded out of the HEPP academic hothouse (via Usenet, of course). And we weren't the only ones, either. Any number of tech companies built websites right away - and many of them were actually useful to us. In particular, since I was working as a freelance LAN administrator and networking consultant at the time, I regularly made use of both Novell's and Compaq's sites to download drivers, patches, and documentation - and was grateful as hell to be able to do so.
That's because my colleagues and compeers who didn't have Internet accounts were forced to download those same resources via CompuServe's balky, and determinedly-user-unfriendly, forum portals. Meanwhile, I had gleefully uninstalled the CompuServe client from my own computers, and permanently kissed the monthly CompuServe tax goodbye.
One of the things that made the Internet so attractive an alternative to CompuServe and the <shudder> odious techno-leech called AOL was that, in those days, it was still subject to the restrictions on commercial traffic imposed by the NSFnet's backbone content policies. (NSFnet was the default Internet backbone for the USA. As a project the sole funding source for which was the National Science Foundation, its use policies naturally prohibited commercial messages from traversing it, because federal agencies were, quite rightly, forbidden by law from endorsing any commercial product or service - and basically every packet sent over the 'net wound up traversing NSFnet, because it was the only backbone provider in the USA.) So, no advertising (outside of Usenet spammers) or pay-for-content services were permitted on the 'net.
The first graphical browser for Windows users (which also swiftly was ported to the Mac and AmigaOS platforms) was cobbled together in early 1993 by two grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (one of whom went on become a billionaire venture capitalist, while the other one didn't). They called it Mosaic, and man was it ever primitive - but it was free, and open-source (even though that was not yet a term of art), and by using a shim (the name of which escapes me at the moment), you could even get it to run on your dial-up, terminal-emulation-mode account. And, as lame as it was, it was the coolest thing in computing, and all the hax0r kids had to have it.
Someone who has points please mod parent +1 Informative.
Yes, people could easily find these documents for themselves - but most of us are lazy, easily distracted, and focused on other things. Providing these links is a useful public service.
Slashdot Mirror
I started reading - and actually wound up subscribing to - Fantastic Four when I spotted issue # 8 on the magazine rack at a local convenience store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1961 (the issue that introduced the Puppet Master and his blind, sculptress stepdaughter Alicia, who would swiftly become Ben Grimm's beloved). I was 9 years old, and utterly captivated by this bold, new take on the superhero genre. DC comics had become tiresomely formulaic, thanks to the Comics Code Authority and the generally-repressive social atmosphere, and the quarrelsome, wisecracking FF was a welcome anodyne to the tepidity of Superman, and the campy, cartoonish Batman of the time.
Plus Jack Kirby, the most exciting artist in comics, did the pencils!
I continued to follow the FF throughout the 1960s, until Kirby abruptly decamped to DC. For my tastes, the title never recovered from his departure - oh, and rock'n'roll, girls, and marijuana had captured my attention by then, anyway, so I turned away from comics for the next three decades. (The death of Superman brought me back - but it was the Batman titles that kept me colllecting.)
In the new century, when digital effects technology finally made it possible to make comic book superhero movies look convincing, I was pleased to see Marvel jump in with both feet - and Stan Lee always made a cameo appearance, which was a custom of which very I much approved.
When, he made a couple of guest appearances on Kevin Smith's reality series Comic Book Men, Stan the Man seemed to be in surprisingly good health for a man fast approaching a century of existence. He walked under his own power, and his speech was that of a man in possession of all his marbles. And his gentle humor, enthusiasm for life in general and comics in particular, and his great personal warmth were all still in full evidence, more than 5 decades after I first encountered his work.
Much like the man himself, both Stan's editorials in the end pages of the comics he wrote and his replies to letters from readers were always relentlessly positive and aspirational. I admired that. He always encouraged creativity in those around him - and I admired that, too. Most importantly, he spent his working life doing what he loved.
I mightily envied him that.
Just half an hour ago, when I read about his passing, I couldn't help crying. It was inevitable, of course, but that didn't lessen the blow for me.
Sooner or later, we all die. I just hoped the Universe would make an exception for Stan ...
scsirob rejoined:
Flacks, pundits, lawyers and other propagandists lies don't make climate alarmist numbers any more credible.
Nor do they make anthropically-mediated climate change deniers any less risible.
Again, what, exactly, is your point ... ?
scsirob vouchsafed:
Alarmists have a track record of cherry picking data.
As do flacks, pundits, lawyers and all other propagandists.
Your point being ... ?
In response to the observation:
mark-t inquired:
What more does anyone need to say?
Only that editor msmash appears to have "corrected" Motherboard's proper use of the apostrophe following the plural word "targets" by inserting it between the second "t" and the pluralizer "s" - thus publicly displaying her ignorance of proper English punctuation.
Imagine my surprise ...
smooth wombat inquired:
Can't you reimage your phone like you can a real computer? Or do the companies restrict you from doing even that?
Yes, you can - if you drive an Android device (although many users don't know how to access the bootloader to do what's called a "factory reset"). You can even replace your phone's OS with a third-party substitute that doesn't load it down with crapware to begin with.
Assuming your phone's carrier permits you to do that, of course. Many of them will not allow you to unlock the bootloader of a brand-new phone. (In the U.S., they can legally require you to be current on your payments for at least 3 months before they're obligated to reveal the unlock code to you.) If you didn't purchase it as part of a contract, however, you're free to do so.
Unless it's an iPhone. Then, not only can't you install a third-party OS, but, whenever they upgrade iOS to a new version, there'll be an unknowably-long period before a "jailbreak" is available for it. (Some older devices - the iPad 2 I inherited when my mom died, for instance - can't be jailbroken at all, if they've been upgraded to the latest version of iOS that's available for 32-bit CPUs. It's not so much a technical hurdle, as it is a lack of interest in working on hacks for what they regard as obsolete devices on the part of jailbreaking developers. Since none of those folks get paid for that, it's hard to criticize them for focusing on newer devices with a bigger user base - and I only use mine as an ereader, anyway.)
However:
Might be a way to start fresh so even the trackers wouldn't be around.
If your carrier sold you that phone (as per the rogue's gallery listed as "not responding" in TFS), there's a 100% chance that those trackers are baked into the "factory reset" firmware - in which case, they'll be seeing you again, RSN ...
oldgraybeard proclaimed:
hiding and staying installed.
No. No, they're not doing that. Not even. Not at all.
If you had actually bothered to read TFA - or even TFS - you'd know that.
But, what am I saying? A slashdotter with an ID near the 3M mark actually reading the article? Or the summary, for that matter?
I know, I know - ludicrous, right?
Sorry to interrupt your stream-of-consciousness ranting. By all means, do carry on blathering ...
oxygen-rich liquid water exist IN Uranus? (sorry I couldn't help myself)
Hey, nwaack! FTFY ...
I pointed out:
You're essentially comparing an apple to a grocery store ...
Prompting PPH to reply:
A grocery store that is all out of apples. So if that's what you wanted ...
It's not, though. The bug described in TFS is a product of users closing the camera app - or shutting off their Pixel - before it has fully finished processing an HD photo. (Note that some users discover that the"missing" photo turns up in their gallery - which is to say "in their Google Camera /pictures directory - "a day or so later." Which very likely means "within seconds," but the user in question didn't actually bother to look there until a day or so later.)
So the grocery store in my simile isn't "all out of apples," after all. The display case for apples is empty at the time the shopper looks at it, but there are plenty of apples in the stockroom, and all it takes is a little patience - a very little patience - on the shopper's part until the display case is restocked.
BTW - I wasn't actually criticizing you. If I had had points, I'd've given you a +1 Funny upmod. But I was all out, so I went into Literalist Fuckhead mode, and replied to your post, instead ...
PPH observed:
The differences between your rollie and a Pixel include the fact that the rollie is a one-trick pony (in addition to the fact that your rollie uses actual film), whereas the Pixel is a general-purpose computer integrated with an cell phone and a digital camera - er, sorry, I meant "and digital cameras."
The rollie takes photos. Full stop.
You're essentially comparing an apple to a grocery store ...
guruevi observed:
The uncanny valley comes to mind. In some scenes the face droops a bit too much for it to be unrealistic. He's done similar ones on his channel in which the problems are more clear, fitting one face on another is possible but not invisible.
And there's a least one driving scene where his face is visibly out of proportion to both his body and the face of his girlfriend (who's in the passenger's seat next to him). It looks like he's wearing a Young Harrison Ford Halloween Mask (tm) ...
HiThere insisted:
Perhaps I'm cynical, but it used to be that when I bought a computer game I didn't need to have a server active to play it. Now, even single user play, when available, requires activation which can be disabled whenever the vendor gets tired of supporting the game. To me this looks like setting up music to work the same way.
Perhaps that's because you don't understand - and apparently don't wish to understand - that this has nothing whatever to do with controlling where you, as a consumer, get your music. And, since you're not a songwriter, you don't grasp the economics of songwriting as a profession - and appear to be resistant to learning anything about the subject.
I say that, because I've already twice explained what this legislation does and does not do from a consumer perspective, and yet you insist on changing the subject, while pretending that we're talking about the same issue.
We're not. We haven't been. And I'm unwilling to continue to discuss this "threat" you claim to perceive that has nothing whatever to do with the legislation about which TFS and my original post were concerned.
Do the record companies wish they could do away with the illusion of consumers "owning the music" they purchase copies of? I'm sure they do. But they haven't managed to do so in more than 100 years of recorded music's history, and I see no signs that they'll succeed in doing so any time soon, regardless of how much money Disney bestows on politicians around the globe. I say that, both because the music industry's major players aren't making any effort to impose such a model on their customers, and because those major players are not the only players in the marketplace.
There are indie labels, artist-owned labels, and collectives aplenty out there, too. And they know better than to try - because attempting to take the music they "own" away from their own customers is an excellent way to drive those customers away. (The fact that those customers own copies of the music those players' artists produce, doesn't in any way mean they own the music itself. That has always firmly remained the property of the labels, publishers, and artists themselves - or rather, it's theirs until their copyrights expire and it enters the public domain. That's what "copyright" means: the right to make and sell copies. And, just as you can own and enjoy the right to resell a copy of a work - including a musical recording - doesn't mean you have any rights whatsoever to the actual music itself.)
The underlying composition belongs jointly to the songwriter(s) and his/her/their publishing company. That's a legacy of the 19th century, when the only way music was or could be distributed to consumers was in the form of sheet music and/or player piano rolls. Then commercial radio came along, and new legislation was adopted to ensure that songwriters and their publishers continued to be able to make money from their work, even as sheet music sales declined to the point of near-irrelevance. In the 21st century, the distribution models have changed again - but the central problem remains: how to ensure that songwriters will continue to be paid for their work, so that they can afford to continue to write songs for a living.
Royalties for public performance and recording are still the solution to that problem. The question then became: how to collect and distribute those royalties in the new age of streaming, where broadcast radio is in steep decline, because Internet-based streaming has siphoned off its customers. This legislation attempts to answer that question in a way that's fairer than the previous attempt turned out to be. It does not in any way affect the actual ownership of the songs themselves, because that hasn't changed. All it does is create a legal framework for a mechanism to ensure that songwriters, publishers - and now producers, as well - get paid for their work.
One thing I'm pretty sure you don't understand at al
HiThere snorted:
Garbage. Under the old system if I bought a record I could play it over and over until the groves wore out. With the streaming you're supposed to pay each time you listen to it. If this is a better deal for the artists (dubious) it's only because the price has been jacked up for the benefit of all the parasites.
Did you even bother to read my post?
This new authority and royalty structure has nothing to do with music-for-purchase. If you want to buy music for your own collection, you can still do that from a number of sources: CDs, digital download services (as opposed to digital streaming services, which is what TFS and my post address), or, in many cases, direct from the artists themselves. This legislation imposes no barriers whatsoever to your purchase, nor does it have anything to do with purchased music. Full stop.
What it does accomplish is to put the collection and administration of songwriter royalties from streaming service plays on a more equal basis with the existing royalty structure for broadcast radio. Full stop.
Tell me: do you rail about how listening to the fucking radio deprives you of the right to own the music it broadcasts?
No?
Then you have zero basis to complain about this new legislation somehow depriving you of that right. It doesn't.
Full stop.
The question itself reminds me of the first two lines of Augustus De Morgan's poem Siphonaptera:
Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(All four lines quoted here, because, of course they are ... )
TFS (and, undoubtedly, TFA from which it's cribbed) quotes some music industry flack thusly:
better deal for music artists
Prompting slack_justyb to point out:
In all fairness, this bill has been worked on since Bush II days, around 2006-ish. This whole effort has mostly been decided between private parties and a few key congressional representatives.
It's almost like people forget that important law takes years, compromises between a multitude of interested parties, and bipartisanship.
The fact is that this law is a better deal for artists.
It's also a better deal - a much better deal - for record companies, and "rights holders" (which includes both "descendents who had nothing to do with writing or recording the works on which they're going to be paid royalties," and "people who bought the publishing rights to dead artists' back catalogues" and their descendents, etc.). But that's a baby/bathwater thing. Pay the actual artists more than a tiny fraction of a cent for their work, and those other folks will, inevitably, also get paid.
What this legislation does - beside the copyright extensions that got tacked onto it - is to increase royalties for digitally-streamed music significantly. That's a way-overdue acknowledgement that the method by which popular music is ephemerally distributed to consumers has drastically changed since the days when the only choices were AM or FM. Those 20th-century distribution technologies are increasingly obsolete, and I wouldn't bet on them still being around a decade or two from now (because RF bandwidth is increasingly precious).
Under the old legal framework, radio stations paid a per-play royalty on every song they broadcast - to the performing rights organization which represents the songwriter(s) and publisher of those songs. Performers got zilch (unless they were performing live, and the radio station was broadcasting their performance - it's all very messy and complicated). Each PRO (the two bigs are BMI and ASCAP) calculates its own formula for distributing them, and each PRO takes a rake-off, which, theoretically, pays for its direct expenses to collect, administer, and distribute those royalties.
Now a new administering body will be created to collect and distribute royalties for streaming plays. (Yay?) But - and this really is new and improved - the organization that collects and distributes royalties for which no payee can be located will be controlled by artists, not PROs. That means no more giant, largely-unaccountable slush funds which generally benefit only those PROs. In the new regime, that slush fund will belong to (and, at least theoretically, be accountable to) the artists themselves.
So - just maybe - this will mean a better deal for artists, because (again, in the absence of a functionting administrative body - which has yet to be created), in theory, it will mean the end of the kind of "Hollywood accounting" that for decades has routinely screwed so many working songwriters out of any significant payout for recordings of the music they wrote.
(Full disclosure: I am a songwriter, and a member of ASCAP. I have never seen a dime in royalties for my work, though - and, at this point, I probably never will. Nonetheless, I think this is an improvement over the previous system. I do not, however, approve of the Disney-authored extension of copyright term to the life of the artist plus 90 years. I think it's reasonable that an artist's surviving spouse benefit from his/her work for a relatively-short period after he/she dies, because it is routinely the case that sales of a popular artist's work see a significant - most often short-term - post-mortem boost. If you've ever known or been the spouse of a professional musician, you'll understand the sacrifices that relationship entails, and that loyalty deserves to be rewarded. Without it, there's many a songwriter who would have had to give it up, and get a "real" job, instead ... )
lgw complained:
but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.
Prompting ShanghaiBill to respond:
My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.
There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.
It's hard to argue with that logic - except I'm a Project Fi customer, who pays Google for my service. And I can't say I'm satisfied with their customer support at all.
I recently bricked my Nexus 6. While I wrestled with trying to raise it from the dead, I simply wanted to forward calls made to my number to my wife's phone.
Because Project Fi is the carrier for both phones, Google's support people - who are all Indian, and thus contractors to whom Google has outsourced their support calls - claimed it was "not possible" to forward my incoming calls to her phone. Every one of them (and I made it two rungs up the management chain, before the last guy essentially hung up on me, mid-sentence) gave me the same, obviously-canned response.
Now that's pure, industrial grade, 100% bullshit. It should be trivial to do - check a box on a web form, type in a forwarding number, and let me get on with life. But those contractor drones clearly don't have the authority to do anything other than read from boilerplate scripts, and they were adamantly unwilling to push the issue up the chain of command to actual, direct Google employees.
I think that's a data point in favor of an "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" attitude on Google's part. According to you, customers of their advertising services get high-quality support. I can assure you from personal experience that the same is not true for Project Fi customers.
(This is not a slam at India or Indians. Every company seems to outsource to them for customer service these days, and that strategy can only be based on cost considerations. You get what you pay for - and it doesn't make good business sense to pay Western wages for humans to simply read from scripts. I don't blame the frontline support people for that - I blame Google for not allowing them to escalate support queries to actual technicians ... )
That's all excellent background information on Lockheed's track record on actually delivering on their promises - and it's utterly unsurprising.
Lockheed is, first and foremost, a defense contractor. Its corporate culture directly reflects that fact - which is why it insists on being paid to do anything and everything any project requires, very much including fixing its own design and production blunders.
In the defense contracting world, every contract is made on a cost-plus reimbursement basis. Essentially, that means the federal government is required to pay the full cost for all materials, labor, and services the contractor employs to fulfill it, plus a fixed percentage of those expenses (usually 15%) as the contractor's profit.
Of course, no private corporation or entity would agree to such a contract, absent a literal gun to its head, because cost-plus amounts to an open invitation to the contractor to inflate its costs as much as possible. Worse still, it's a rare cost-plus deal, indeed, that includes any meaningful penalties for cost overruns - regardless of how large they might be - or for late delivery of the contracted-for product. (Which means all the incentives are for the contractor to over-promise and under-deliver to the maximum extent possible, and none of them reward the contractor for delivering on time and under budget.)
This determinedly-counterproductive contracting model is a heritage of WWII, when the defense industry couldn't dependably predict in advance what its total costs for a given contract would be, because it couldn't rely on the cost - or availability - of raw materials to remain stable for the life of a contract, and the supply of dependable, qualified employees was equally problematic. It proved so lucrative, that once that war ended, the defense industry insisted on maintaining the cost-plus model - and, since the military paid zero attention to costs (the money to pay contractors didn't come out of its operating budget, so, again, it had no incentive to care), and Congress also didn't care (because the defense industry was always extremely generous to legislators, not just in campaign contributions, but in paying for luxurious "junkets" to country clubs for conferences that always happened to include lots of free hookers and high-quality booze), neither objected to continuing the practice.
In their defense, it was the beginning of the Cold War era, and the USSR's acquisition first of nuclear weapons technology (principally from the Rosenberg/Greenglass spy ring), then thermonuclear weapons, created a siege mentality in Washington. When the Soviets developed working ICBMs, that pervasive fear ratcheted up to 11, then blew the knob off the amp.
Since there was a mere handful of defense firms capable of designing and building heavy launch vehicles, there weren't a lot of alternative sources to which the feds could turn, so the status remained quo for well over half a century, and Congress basically accepted being hostage to the industry giants as inevitable - even desirable.
Enter SpaceX.
After Musk's rocket company successfully launched its first booster, the Falcon 1, into orbit in 2009, then orbited a satellite for its first commercial custormer, NASA became convinced that it had the expertise, the resources, and the will to compete with Lockheed in the launch vehicle market - at least to the extent that it agreed to let SpaceX attempt to send a half-dozen resupply missions to the ISS. The absolutely key thing about that contract was that it was not made on a cost-plus basis. Instead, SpaceX would get paid only if it succeeded in launching supply missions to the ISS, and, moreover, it would only be paid on a per-mission basis (which is to say t
For years we heard people complain about cable channel packages. "They're making me pay for dozens of channels I never watch. Why can't this be a la carte?"
Well, that's essentially what we are getting--a la carte channels. It's streaming services rather than channels from a cable company, but now it's a different bill for each channel. And it sucks. So we (some of us) just to to torrents.
Mmm - that's kind of a major oversimplification.
The fact is that the major streaming services all now produce their own, often superb, content - and they use their exclusive distribution rights to those programs to attract paying customers. Those programs simply aren't available via cable or satellite TV subscriptions, and they never were.
If that compelling streaming service content was also via cable/satellite subscription, and those companies changed those subscriptions to an à-la-carte model, your attempt to conflate the two might hold water. And we'd have an opportunity to see whether that option works or not.
Instead, however, you're conflating apples and inkwells, and complaining that apples aren't tasty, because inkwells are also crunchy, but they don't taste nearly as good as apples.
The fact is that each of those streaming services features an array of proprietary and non-proprietary content that's every bit as vast and varied as any cable subscription offers (except in the case of CBS All-Access, which proposes to give its customers far too little original content for far too high a price).
Minus the sports channels, that is.
And that takes us to the reason the cable/satellite operators still stubbornly insist on clinging to their service tiers model: all the stuff that's not part of the most basic package costs the MSO's money to purchase. So, to take the National Geographic channels as an example, because their programming is considered "premium" (which is to say "prestigious") content by the cable companies (even though the absolute number of viewers they command is surprisingly small), NG demands fees from the distributors that are ridiculously high. So the cable/satellite services bundle them with expensive sports channel offerings - because, although the cost-to-carry some sports (the Olympics, for example, or boxing title matches) is high, those costs averaged across an entire tier of sports programming are not. The thing is, though - and this is key to their business model - sports junkies have conclusively demonstrated that they're willing to suffer chronic highway robbery to get their fix. So they'll pay that premium, 3rd-tier subscription fee, month upon month, in order to watch the games/matches/competitions they crave. And their willingness to pay through the nose for sports subsidizes the distributors' cost-to-carry for the NG channels.
Meanwhile, those of us who don't give a rat's ass about sports are forced to pay danegeld for them, in order to get the NG channels' content that we do want.
Or pirate them, instead - assuming they're available via torrents. Oftentimes, however, they're not.
Meanwhile, Netflix offers a huge library of movies, plus its own, award-winning, original programming. Hulu has TV re-runs galore - plus award-winnning series of its own. And Amazon's library includes movies, TV re-runs, and, increasingly, prestige and/or popular original series, to boot.
So, characterizing the multiplying streaming service landscape as in any way equivalent to a still-non-existent à-la-carte model for cable programming is pure, industrial-grade bullshit. None of the streaming services offers an à-la-carte experience. Instead, their model can best be described as "take it or leave it" - although, to be strictly fair, they at least skip the "tiered-service" awfulness. And they each offer an entire ecosystem of programming, each of which is different than its competitors.
It's worthy of mention, however, that Amazon Video often contracts to
MachineShedFred opined:
Nope. It's completely about access. People don't want to have to subscribe to 10 different services, and go searching through 10 different services because of some contractual agreement that nobody outside of the lawyers and content producers know about.
So they'll go to the one place they know they'll find it, with the benefit of having extremely low cost: The Pirate Bay.
While I think your explanation of the motives for bittorrent piracy is incomplete, my real disagreement is with your conclusion. Have you actually tried acessing TPB recently?
The MPAA and the TV folks (at least, I assume it's their doing) have their third-world contractors DDoS-ing the living shit out of it. If you use a standard browser, it's all but inaccessible - although it's easy enough via Tor. They also have those same hirelings barfing screen after screen of bullshit torrents that contain only malware all over the movie sections.
Pretty much all of that activity is coming from India, of course, because it's not illegal there to deliberately obstruct website access or distribute malware on a for-hire basis.
The thing is, while it is unquestionably a Federal felony to do either of those things in the USA - and masterminding an international conspiracy to DDoS websites and deliberately distribute malware is arguably an even more serious crime - every U.S. law enforcement agency deliberately turns a blind eye to this asshattery, because Hollywood's income must be protected at all costs, despite fairly clear evidence that bittorrent piracy doesn't diminish their profits in any meaningful way.
Which, of course, doesn't keep business journals like Forbes from uncritically parroting the MPAA's claims to the contrary, because facts simply don't matter any more.
Or so I hear.
Anyway, Tor ...
ceoyoyo opined:
It's not really that simple. Hypothesis and theory are a bit ill defined.
The best definition, closest to what is generally used in practice, is that a theory is some kind of logical and/or mathematical framework that provides some explanatory power. A hypothesis is a specific prediction, that can, at least in principle, be tested by experiment.
A good theory should make predictions (generate hypotheses) that can be tested.
Eddington's eclipse expedition tested the hypothesis that starlight would be deflected near the eclipsed sun. This hypothesis is a consequence of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Merriam-Webster's usage note on the distinction argues, in general, for a definition of the two terms that's a bit closer to mine than yours.
That's not to say you're wrong, nor am I claiming that M-W's note entirely disagrees with the distinction you draw. In fact, your contention that the two terms are "ill-defined" is spot-on, and not everyone in the scientific community uses the term "hypothesis" as I defined it. But many do, and the M-W note concludes that, while theories can and do prompt proposals for experiments to test one or another ramification or effect of the theory itself - and that it is perfectly proper to call those proposals "hypotheses" - my characterization of the word "hypothesis" as meaning "a proposed model that may, over time, and with sufficient experimental confirmation, graduate to the status of a theory" is the definition the note's unidentified author considers the best-accepted one.
Again, though, that doesn't make the definition you put forward in any way wrong or misleading. Instead, the M-W note makes it clear that, as you stated, the distinction drawn between the two terms is not a clear, bright line, even among equally-qualified scientists.
OTOH, my clash with that pretentious twit was an earnest of how the jargon of philosophy discards the term "hypothesis" altogether, in favor of watering down the meaning of the word "theory" to the point where it's essentially indistinguishable from "brainfart" ...
Regarding the defintion of the term I stated:
It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
Which prompted Smidge204 to inquire:
So Quantum Mechanics is a theory, then? Because we've moved a step beyond "intense scrutiny and testing" and we're well into practical real-world applications.
Exactly so - just as is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (which, at least on the macro scale, has yet to be falsified more than a century after he first published it) is still referred to as a theory by every physicist, astronomer, cosmologist, and scientific journal on the planet. The same is true of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and there are plenty of other examples to which I could point, as well.
The confusion arises mainly because, in popular usage, the two terms are, in fact, pretty much interchangeable. It's pretty rare, in fact, to see the term hypothesis at all in, say, science reporting for a general audience. And the way it's employed in TV and movies broadens the popular definition to near-meaninglessness.
That millenial dipshit with whom I crossed rhetorical blades has only an undergraduate degree, btw, so it's not like his credential is all that impressive. And his blithering (which he insisted on calling a "theory") was essentially just warmed-over Derrida, wrapped in obfuscatory language, drizzled with poorly-constructed grammar, and floating on a thick, gooey bed of pretention.
Kinda like Derrida's own bullshit, come to think of it - although the Father of Deconstructionism employed better grammar than my quasi-intellectual foil seemed capable of ...
That QM makes little sense or doesn't fit other theories is irrelevant. That it makes predictions that are verifiable makes it a scientific HYPOTHESIS.
FTFY, Falconnan.
Actual scientists don't use "hypothesis" and "theory" as interchangable terms.
A theory has been experimentally tested via a procession of repeatable, well-controlled experiments, and has not been falsified in the process. It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
A hypothesis, by contrast, is an idea that might or might not have been preliminarily tested before it's presented to its natural constituency, but that has yet to be subjected to serious experimentation (especially by scientists other than whoever proposed it in the first place). Or that has been so tested, but only recently, or only by experiments whose resuts were inconclusive, or which have since been established to have had flaws in design or execution that cast doubt on their reported outcomes.
I recently had occasion to try to explain this to a smug millenial with a degree in philosophy. His response was that I was mean-spirited, and would I please cut it out ...
It is important to keep in mind that NZ is a party to the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing partnership (the others being the USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia). Why that's important is that the agreement between them specifies that any intelligence developed by any of the parties is made freely available to the others, both in regular summary reports, and in full, upon request.
What that means on a practical level is that any data NZ's Customs folks uncover in their search of arrivals' devices that they decide might be of interest to any one of their three national intelligence-gathering organizations is automagically rendered to them. They, in turn, make that data available to the other four signatories' national spies. As Edward Snowden's massive document dump revealed, a key goal of the alliance is to enable the signatories to thwart the limits their own laws place on surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities directed at their own citizens and legal residents. (Appropriately enough, the NZ Herald ran an in-depth report on the subject in its March 5, 2015 edition. It makes for interesting reading, both because its viewpoint is a non-U.S. one, and because it traces the kind of egregious, systematic overreach that the port-of-entry personal electronics search policy TFS exemplifies specifically to the administration of NZ's National Party leader and (now-former) Prime Minister John Key.)
As an example of how the Five Eyes alliance enables its signatories' end-run around their own citizens' privacy protections, Snowden likes to point to a routine tactic that he, as an IT contractor for the NSA, personally witnessed every day: when an NSA analyst wants to look at the phone record metadata, web browsing history, email, and/or other "signals intercept" intelligence on a citizen of the USA who currently resides within its borders - which it is legally forbidden to do without first obtaining a FISA court warrant - he or she need only inform GCHQ (Britain's version of the NSA) of that desire. One of GCHQ's analysts then uses the spy tech that the NSA shares with GCHQ - often the exact same program the NSA person is running - to look up the requested record in GCHQ's database, and helpfully sends a copy of the results to his or her NSA counterpart.
Employing the narrowest possible interpretation of both countries' legal strictures, the search itself is not technically forbidden by U.S. law, because the actual surveillance and initial data acquisition was performed by GCHQ (albeit on the NSA's request), and that organization is not bound by U.S. statutes or Constitutional prohibitions on searches and seizures conducted without the shield of a judicial warrant. And the fact that GCHQ's analyst shared the results with the one from the NSA is, likewise, not illegal, for the same reason.
That kind of data sharing, which is based on the sketchiest possible interpretation of the respective nations' laws, happens thousands of times per day - and it works both ways.
Or, rather, I should say it works all five ways ...
angel'o'sphere observed:
Before the WWW we already had similar systems, like Gopher and text based WAIS. The parent simply mixed up "consumer level internet access, based on WWW/HTTP" with "the internet".
Yes we did.
WAIS never really worked very well (because it came along about the same time that the web did, and the latter sucked all the oxygen out of the academic computing environment's interest in it), and Gopher always was a nightmare of non-functional links and endless waits for it to timeout when it hit one of them.
And I believe I pretty definitively made your second point for you - with sufficient historical context included to establish exactly how far from the facts his assertion strays, and that understanding that history is important, if you want to grasp why he's mistaken.
Hey, I'm a storyteller. It's what we do ...
StikyPad stated:
When the WWW was born, the only entrenched interests were networks like AOL and Compuserv, none of which had the political or economic clout to stifle competition. The web, at that point, was pretty useless anyway, and likely not viewed as competition, per se.
<lecturemode>
Not true.
TBL announced the WWW - and posted source code for it - in late 1989. It instantly took the high-energy particle physics research community by storm (because he worked for CERN, and developed the first iteration of HTML there). However, the only graphical browser in the world at that time was the one he built as a proof of concept - and it ran only on NeXT cubes. Everyone else had to settle for using Lynx, a character-mode browser.
That was less of an impediment to its spread than you might think, both because NeXT machines were wildly popular among high-energy particle physicists (they were, after all, the most powerful personal computers available at the time), and because, outside of the academic/research particle physics and academic computer science communities, the dominant Internet access paradigm at the time was via dial-up, terminal emulation session, where user applications pretty much only ran on the ISP's host machines. Oh, and you had to buy (and your ISP had to support) a US Robotics proprietary-technology modem to get speeds above 9600 baud.
But it is profoundly incorrect to claim that the Web was simply a curiosity at the time. Folks who had Internet accounts then (mine was via Netcom - one of the first commercial ISPs) were tremendously excited when the existence of this new technology exploded out of the HEPP academic hothouse (via Usenet, of course). And we weren't the only ones, either. Any number of tech companies built websites right away - and many of them were actually useful to us. In particular, since I was working as a freelance LAN administrator and networking consultant at the time, I regularly made use of both Novell's and Compaq's sites to download drivers, patches, and documentation - and was grateful as hell to be able to do so.
That's because my colleagues and compeers who didn't have Internet accounts were forced to download those same resources via CompuServe's balky, and determinedly-user-unfriendly, forum portals. Meanwhile, I had gleefully uninstalled the CompuServe client from my own computers, and permanently kissed the monthly CompuServe tax goodbye.
One of the things that made the Internet so attractive an alternative to CompuServe and the <shudder> odious techno-leech called AOL was that, in those days, it was still subject to the restrictions on commercial traffic imposed by the NSFnet's backbone content policies. (NSFnet was the default Internet backbone for the USA. As a project the sole funding source for which was the National Science Foundation, its use policies naturally prohibited commercial messages from traversing it, because federal agencies were, quite rightly, forbidden by law from endorsing any commercial product or service - and basically every packet sent over the 'net wound up traversing NSFnet, because it was the only backbone provider in the USA.) So, no advertising (outside of Usenet spammers) or pay-for-content services were permitted on the 'net.
The first graphical browser for Windows users (which also swiftly was ported to the Mac and AmigaOS platforms) was cobbled together in early 1993 by two grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (one of whom went on become a billionaire venture capitalist, while the other one didn't). They called it Mosaic, and man was it ever primitive - but it was free, and open-source (even though that was not yet a term of art), and by using a shim (the name of which escapes me at the moment), you could even get it to run on your dial-up, terminal-emulation-mode account. And, as lame as it was, it was the coolest thing in computing, and all the hax0r kids had to have it.
Me includ
MrKaos noted:
I found some some documentation: The getting started, Introduction to the specification.
There are some other things that look interesting Introduction to Linked Data, Expressing ID and, Manipulating linked data.
Someone who has points please mod parent +1 Informative.
Yes, people could easily find these documents for themselves - but most of us are lazy, easily distracted, and focused on other things. Providing these links is a useful public service.
Thank you, MrKaos ...