Hi AC. Maybe you should read the post. I'm mostly referring to TV shows. If I miss the air date, how do I watch the season opener of Battlestar? I can't. I have to wait for the DVDs.
I work in emergency humanitarian aid and I spend 9 months out of the year overseas, mostly in Africa, sometimes the mid East and SE Asia. I get somewhere between a few days to a few weeks between assignments. I want to watch the first six episodes of this season's Heroes so I get what's going on this season. Tell me how I do that.
Please, tell me again about my weak rationalizations and how I should get get a job to pay for content.
There's a certain point in my consumption of media where things just became absurd. And then I became a pirate.
It's similar each time I go to buy a car. I'm there at the lot because I want to buy something but first, I have to deal with the first enemy, the salesman. I usually know exactly what I want but almost but not quite invariably, he tries to sell me something else first. Then he tries to sell me a couple things I don't want before I can manage to leave. I looked up your inventory and the inventory of your competitors before I came, don't try to BS me. I have Edmunds and AutoTrader right here on my phone, why make me distrust you by lying to me? This is changing, but not fast enough for my tastes.
The movie/TV industry is the same way. They're either trying to sell me what I want in a way that I don't want them or don't sell what I want at all.
First, let's get this notion of having to sit down at a certain time to watch a TV show out of the way. It's an obsolete mode of thinking. We started with primitive VHS, but now we have DVRs and even those will eventually be replaced by streaming.
I find it remarkable that the torrent of a popular show is usually up within minutes of the show airing. Lately, even the HD versions are up lickety split.
Yet, despite the pirates offering a mostly superior product (commercial free, 720/1080p), I have yet to torrent a single episode that I can watch on Hulu instead. But then again, once Hulu's not allowed to stream an episode that I "missed," guess where I am? You got it, TPB. There's a months long gap between "legit" online availability and the DVDs being released where I physically can't access the content.
That's if it's even online in the first place. Show me where I can watch The Big Bang Theory online. I can't. Thus, I will download it.
And man, I would pay for this if I could. In fact, I did. Then I gave up. I rented video on iTunes for a while until I realized what a sham it was. It's not that I didn't want to pay, (though the prices are way too high for TV episodes), its that once I pay, I don't want to be told when, where, and how I can watch or otherwise be forced to pay for the same content again. This is why Blockbuster is gasping its last breath and NetFlix is standing over its dying body.
I could potentially be the best consumer the movie/TV industry has, but instead, I became the enemy for no other reason than the industry treated me as such.
This stuff about complex contract systems and embargoed air dates is a product of a system that's no longer appropriate for the technology of today, much less the near future. And you know what, this is THEIR problem, not ours (the consumers). They're paid the big bucks to solve the problem before it gets to us, instead of just passing the problem along to us. I really couldn't give a shit about the contract between Warner Bros and HBO. That's really not my problem and by making it my problem, you, the content provider are my problem. Thus, I will torrent.
I want to pay. But you have to give me what I want, not what you think I want.
Wasn't aware of this. Nice feature. But as I mentioned in my original post, this isn't really user discoverable. It's like when you hit Win+R or M for the first time in front of someone who's been using XP for years. "How'd you do that?"
I compute primarily in either OS X or Linux environments and long ago abandoned XP except for games. I've been playing with the Win7 beta and it might replace my Hackintosh as my primary desktop.
The part you quoted doesn't even reference the religious beliefs of what constituted "light" and "dark" which refutes your concept. Read the rest of the article.
Okay dude, I keep telling you that your definition of "Dark Ages" is very different from the one I learned in university, but if you insist, I'm not going to fight you.
Aw, screw it. I started a big long description, then went to look it up on Wiki and they do a much better job anyways.
There were plenty of cultural achievements of the time, as well. Warfare, trade and political systems advanced quite well, there just weren't acknowledged as such.
And if all that doesn't do it for you, you still have the option of looking at the old XP list.
No, you don't, or if there is, it's not easily user discoverable.
Windows lists down. When I get a list view on Win7, I get 3 columns, which would be okay, I suppose, but it tracks across rows, whic is an incredibly dumb way to organize that list. Its much easier to find something alphabetically in a list form than a 3 column paragraph form.
The way its done now, I have to read several columns until I find what I want. It's a very slow search pattern.
The idea of a "Dark Ages" as popularly envisioned has been thoroughly discredited. It's more an concept invented by early renaissance guys who thought Rome was cool.
For the last few years, guys with the slightest connection to anything even remotely connected to the climate and weather are being called "climate scientists" or "climate change expert." Huh?
No, I do mean the people.
I'm specifically referring to the people of the United States, who simply don't get out enough to know how good it can be.
Sometimes, the government doing a bit of the work to get things started can be a positive thing for everyone. Fast, cheap, unrestricted broadband, both wire and wireless in those countries that have them didn't just happen due to competition. In those cases, government agencies laid some standards, got everyone on board, and got them started.
The South Koreans got out of a war that demolished the entire continent (a war that is still technically ON) just 55 years ago. Now, those guys can watch live TV on their phones. In the subway. And I can't get above 2Mbps on a hard line in my home. WTF is that man?
I'm just waiting for the typical blowhard "You guys simply don't know how BIG America is!" reponse.
This is a prime example of the mistake people of any nation state thinking that any company, particularly one that's granted a local monopoly will in any way, shape or form act in the consumer's best interest.
Yes and no. I read the post and the poster displays an incomplete understanding of the what he's talking about. In some ways, he's wrong, but mostly he's incomplete. I suppose my reply was incomplete for no other reason that I was being a jerk and dismissive.
The first paragraph, nothing inherently wrong there.
The second paragraph about "we think" things have been experimentally verified is where it starts to go off the rails. Relativity and quantum mechanics have both predicted, verified and repeatable results of both experiments and observations.
I'm going to use relativity for a moment here because the OP states that he thinks something is "wrong" with relativity or somehow stands weaker footing than quantum mechanics, specifically because he believes that devices have not been built to explore and demonstrate. No.
Going back to my previous example, relativity predicts that for the velocity and orbit of a GPS satellite, there will be a time dilation amounting to a very small fraction of a second. There MUST be compensation for this discrepancy, otherwise, your GPS unit would be off by about 10kms a DAY. Is this an experiment? No, it's even better. The experimental confirmations took place before. This is an everyday practical application of the Theory of Relativity. We know that in these conditions, what we know holds to be true. There is nothing inherently wrong with either relativity or QM, because in their respective spheres, they work.
The fundamental concept that Areyoukiddingme is misunderstanding is that scientific endeavors are not predicated on the concept that the ideas of the present, and by association the past, are wrong. Newton's ideas as laid in the Principia are as fundamentally sound today as they were during his time. However, at the extremes of mass and speed, it starts to fray at the edges. Does that mean he was wrong? Negative. His understanding was incomplete, which is a very different thing from wrong. As Newton himself was standing on the shoulders of giants, others would build on his theories, all the way up to Einstein and those who followed him.
This is a very important nuance - the elimination of errors in our understanding is a side effect of the purpose of science, which is to increase our understanding. This is a constructive, not a destructive intellectual process.
If you've got a GPS, either in your car or on your phone, you're seeing the benefits of our understanding of relativity. Relativity predicts that the clocks on GPS satellites have to be adjusted due to its speed, otherwise the system would be useless. The system works with clock adjustments, therefore, the prediction has been confirmed. How is this any less of a confirmation about its predictive power, thus strength, than working semiconductors?
Okay, I get that string theory is much more elegant and being merely and engineer, mathematically well over my head, but this is getting a little ridiculous. I'm having a difficult time recognizing string theory as science.
Has string theory truly helped us understand anything better? If it has improved our understanding, what predictions of physical phenomena have come of this increased understanding of the physical universe? If your theory can only explain, not predict, aka No Predictive Power, then it is no better than pop psychology.
If the energy states required to test the theory are at a scale that is not physically measurable, what are we really talking about? That's not physics, man. That's metaphysics.
A lot of smart guys or no, string theory has yet to offer anything of real scientific vale and shouldn't be considered science until it does. Science has pumped decades of its best minds into this and its time we said enough. Those hundreds of PhDs should be considered PhDs in math, not physics.
There's a very clear difference between taking what is not yours from what is meant to be private and abusing a public good. The former is a crime in most societies but the latter, as much as it may become of a tragedy, is not.
Take the condiments and napkins at McDonald's (pun not intended). At what point does taking too many ketchup packets and napkins become theft? What if I just buy a coke but take 10 packets of ketchup? (Note to those outside the US, these are free in most US fast food joints)
A wiki is by definition open to the public. Using their bandwidth is not the same as walking into an unlocked house, going to the fridge and taking a bottle of ketchup. It's more like abusing the ketchup counter at McDonald's.
I am making an effort not to be judgmental about your friend.
A long time ago, I was an infantry officer in the Army during peacetime. As a soldier in the combat arms who has never seen combat, you PRAY for war. You want to experience for yourself all of those things that you've heard about, read about, watched on screen. Everything.
After you experience all or some of those things, the rational person should pray that it doesn't happen again.
There's a lot of reasons men "volunteer" for redeployment. I have a relative in the Marines who manipulated circumstances to go to Afghanistan, just months after returning from Iraq. I chose not to call him out on it but he likes to allow people to believe that he saw more action than he really did, which I believe was not much at all. Like a lot of young men in his position, he feels he missed out. His buddies think he's the real deal but I know better. He hasn't had his fill and he won't until reality slaps him in the face.
Is your friend REALLY like that or is it what you're ascribing to him because he can't really express how he feels or what he's done?
Or is maybe that he lets you believe these things because he thinks that's how he should come across?
Maybe he allows you to think these things because the guy's embarrassed to admit that he hasn't done all of these things you think he's done.
There are very few people who have a pathological need for combat. These are the guys who need to be very closely supervised and if the chain of command has a clue, they'll be aware of it. But most of the time, as much as a someone could come across this way, they're usually volunteering for another reason, be it guilt, ignorance, or otherwise.
Little boys have been shooting each other with imaginary guns since guns have been around.
Before then, they used to play with sticks and pretended they were sword.
But, no, let's not be killing each other in games. Let's [b]strategize[/b] instead. Go play some chess where the killing is abstracted and the point is to assassinate the king instead.
Let's not pretend that playing games that allow us to kill and defeat the enemy hasn't been with us since time immemorial and isn't a part of the human condition.
And that last quote about the "enemy." WTF? You don't think those guys were humans with families, either?
It's not just stuff like this. There's an obvious digital divide in the OR. You can tell the difference between people who can quickly and intuitively grasp the difference between camera angles and on screen manipulation and those who don't. Age is a huge factor.
I don't understand, who's complaining all that loudly about this? This is a perfectly reasonable request from Redmond. What type of person gets upset that they're being asked to perform a clean install of pre-release software if they've been using the beta of a closed, commercial operating system???
Wow, this post dredged up some memories. I didn't even play AD&D but I bought the boxed sets of Plansecape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer because I found the settings to be so fascinating.
No, he DEFINITELY has a right to that money as well. This guy is getting shot at with golden bullets. He should be upset that they're contacting his clients but at the end of the day, the damages that a good, creative legal team can grab is going to make it worth his while.
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Hi AC. Maybe you should read the post. I'm mostly referring to TV shows. If I miss the air date, how do I watch the season opener of Battlestar? I can't. I have to wait for the DVDs.
I work in emergency humanitarian aid and I spend 9 months out of the year overseas, mostly in Africa, sometimes the mid East and SE Asia. I get somewhere between a few days to a few weeks between assignments. I want to watch the first six episodes of this season's Heroes so I get what's going on this season. Tell me how I do that.
Please, tell me again about my weak rationalizations and how I should get get a job to pay for content.
10 goto cbs.com.
20 Look for a link called InnerTube.
30 Watch all you want.
40 And it's free.
50 You no longer have a reason to bitch.
http://www.cbs.com/video/?showname=primetime/big_bang_theory#video
60 STFU if you don't know WTF you're talking about.
There's a certain point in my consumption of media where things just became absurd. And then I became a pirate.
It's similar each time I go to buy a car. I'm there at the lot because I want to buy something but first, I have to deal with the first enemy, the salesman. I usually know exactly what I want but almost but not quite invariably, he tries to sell me something else first. Then he tries to sell me a couple things I don't want before I can manage to leave. I looked up your inventory and the inventory of your competitors before I came, don't try to BS me. I have Edmunds and AutoTrader right here on my phone, why make me distrust you by lying to me? This is changing, but not fast enough for my tastes.
The movie/TV industry is the same way. They're either trying to sell me what I want in a way that I don't want them or don't sell what I want at all.
First, let's get this notion of having to sit down at a certain time to watch a TV show out of the way. It's an obsolete mode of thinking. We started with primitive VHS, but now we have DVRs and even those will eventually be replaced by streaming.
I find it remarkable that the torrent of a popular show is usually up within minutes of the show airing. Lately, even the HD versions are up lickety split.
Yet, despite the pirates offering a mostly superior product (commercial free, 720/1080p), I have yet to torrent a single episode that I can watch on Hulu instead. But then again, once Hulu's not allowed to stream an episode that I "missed," guess where I am? You got it, TPB. There's a months long gap between "legit" online availability and the DVDs being released where I physically can't access the content.
That's if it's even online in the first place. Show me where I can watch The Big Bang Theory online. I can't. Thus, I will download it.
And man, I would pay for this if I could. In fact, I did. Then I gave up. I rented video on iTunes for a while until I realized what a sham it was. It's not that I didn't want to pay, (though the prices are way too high for TV episodes), its that once I pay, I don't want to be told when, where, and how I can watch or otherwise be forced to pay for the same content again. This is why Blockbuster is gasping its last breath and NetFlix is standing over its dying body.
I could potentially be the best consumer the movie/TV industry has, but instead, I became the enemy for no other reason than the industry treated me as such.
This stuff about complex contract systems and embargoed air dates is a product of a system that's no longer appropriate for the technology of today, much less the near future. And you know what, this is THEIR problem, not ours (the consumers). They're paid the big bucks to solve the problem before it gets to us, instead of just passing the problem along to us. I really couldn't give a shit about the contract between Warner Bros and HBO. That's really not my problem and by making it my problem, you, the content provider are my problem. Thus, I will torrent.
I want to pay. But you have to give me what I want, not what you think I want.
Wasn't aware of this. Nice feature. But as I mentioned in my original post, this isn't really user discoverable. It's like when you hit Win+R or M for the first time in front of someone who's been using XP for years. "How'd you do that?"
I compute primarily in either OS X or Linux environments and long ago abandoned XP except for games. I've been playing with the Win7 beta and it might replace my Hackintosh as my primary desktop.
The part you quoted doesn't even reference the religious beliefs of what constituted "light" and "dark" which refutes your concept. Read the rest of the article.
Okay dude, I keep telling you that your definition of "Dark Ages" is very different from the one I learned in university, but if you insist, I'm not going to fight you.
Aw, screw it. I started a big long description, then went to look it up on Wiki and they do a much better job anyways.
There were plenty of cultural achievements of the time, as well. Warfare, trade and political systems advanced quite well, there just weren't acknowledged as such.
And if all that doesn't do it for you, you still have the option of looking at the old XP list.
No, you don't, or if there is, it's not easily user discoverable.
Windows lists down. When I get a list view on Win7, I get 3 columns, which would be okay, I suppose, but it tracks across rows, whic is an incredibly dumb way to organize that list. Its much easier to find something alphabetically in a list form than a 3 column paragraph form.
The way its done now, I have to read several columns until I find what I want. It's a very slow search pattern.
The idea of a "Dark Ages" as popularly envisioned has been thoroughly discredited. It's more an concept invented by early renaissance guys who thought Rome was cool.
That's not a bad point.
For the last few years, guys with the slightest connection to anything even remotely connected to the climate and weather are being called "climate scientists" or "climate change expert." Huh?
Yeah man. Every parallel universe is missing a tall, skinny half Kenyan dude because in this universe, we have The One.
No, I do mean the people. I'm specifically referring to the people of the United States, who simply don't get out enough to know how good it can be. Sometimes, the government doing a bit of the work to get things started can be a positive thing for everyone. Fast, cheap, unrestricted broadband, both wire and wireless in those countries that have them didn't just happen due to competition. In those cases, government agencies laid some standards, got everyone on board, and got them started. The South Koreans got out of a war that demolished the entire continent (a war that is still technically ON) just 55 years ago. Now, those guys can watch live TV on their phones. In the subway. And I can't get above 2Mbps on a hard line in my home. WTF is that man? I'm just waiting for the typical blowhard "You guys simply don't know how BIG America is!" reponse.
This is a prime example of the mistake people of any nation state thinking that any company, particularly one that's granted a local monopoly will in any way, shape or form act in the consumer's best interest.
Yes and no. I read the post and the poster displays an incomplete understanding of the what he's talking about. In some ways, he's wrong, but mostly he's incomplete. I suppose my reply was incomplete for no other reason that I was being a jerk and dismissive.
The first paragraph, nothing inherently wrong there.
The second paragraph about "we think" things have been experimentally verified is where it starts to go off the rails. Relativity and quantum mechanics have both predicted, verified and repeatable results of both experiments and observations.
I'm going to use relativity for a moment here because the OP states that he thinks something is "wrong" with relativity or somehow stands weaker footing than quantum mechanics, specifically because he believes that devices have not been built to explore and demonstrate. No.
Going back to my previous example, relativity predicts that for the velocity and orbit of a GPS satellite, there will be a time dilation amounting to a very small fraction of a second. There MUST be compensation for this discrepancy, otherwise, your GPS unit would be off by about 10kms a DAY. Is this an experiment? No, it's even better. The experimental confirmations took place before. This is an everyday practical application of the Theory of Relativity. We know that in these conditions, what we know holds to be true. There is nothing inherently wrong with either relativity or QM, because in their respective spheres, they work.
The fundamental concept that Areyoukiddingme is misunderstanding is that scientific endeavors are not predicated on the concept that the ideas of the present, and by association the past, are wrong. Newton's ideas as laid in the Principia are as fundamentally sound today as they were during his time. However, at the extremes of mass and speed, it starts to fray at the edges. Does that mean he was wrong? Negative. His understanding was incomplete , which is a very different thing from wrong. As Newton himself was standing on the shoulders of giants, others would build on his theories, all the way up to Einstein and those who followed him.
This is a very important nuance - the elimination of errors in our understanding is a side effect of the purpose of science, which is to increase our understanding. This is a constructive, not a destructive intellectual process.
Huh?
If you've got a GPS, either in your car or on your phone, you're seeing the benefits of our understanding of relativity. Relativity predicts that the clocks on GPS satellites have to be adjusted due to its speed, otherwise the system would be useless. The system works with clock adjustments, therefore, the prediction has been confirmed. How is this any less of a confirmation about its predictive power, thus strength, than working semiconductors?
Okay, I get that string theory is much more elegant and being merely and engineer, mathematically well over my head, but this is getting a little ridiculous. I'm having a difficult time recognizing string theory as science.
Has string theory truly helped us understand anything better? If it has improved our understanding, what predictions of physical phenomena have come of this increased understanding of the physical universe? If your theory can only explain, not predict, aka No Predictive Power, then it is no better than pop psychology.
If the energy states required to test the theory are at a scale that is not physically measurable, what are we really talking about? That's not physics, man. That's metaphysics.
A lot of smart guys or no, string theory has yet to offer anything of real scientific vale and shouldn't be considered science until it does. Science has pumped decades of its best minds into this and its time we said enough. Those hundreds of PhDs should be considered PhDs in math, not physics.
There's a very clear difference between taking what is not yours from what is meant to be private and abusing a public good. The former is a crime in most societies but the latter, as much as it may become of a tragedy, is not.
Take the condiments and napkins at McDonald's (pun not intended). At what point does taking too many ketchup packets and napkins become theft? What if I just buy a coke but take 10 packets of ketchup? (Note to those outside the US, these are free in most US fast food joints)
A wiki is by definition open to the public. Using their bandwidth is not the same as walking into an unlocked house, going to the fridge and taking a bottle of ketchup. It's more like abusing the ketchup counter at McDonald's.
I am making an effort not to be judgmental about your friend.
A long time ago, I was an infantry officer in the Army during peacetime. As a soldier in the combat arms who has never seen combat, you PRAY for war. You want to experience for yourself all of those things that you've heard about, read about, watched on screen. Everything.
After you experience all or some of those things, the rational person should pray that it doesn't happen again.
There's a lot of reasons men "volunteer" for redeployment. I have a relative in the Marines who manipulated circumstances to go to Afghanistan, just months after returning from Iraq. I chose not to call him out on it but he likes to allow people to believe that he saw more action than he really did, which I believe was not much at all. Like a lot of young men in his position, he feels he missed out. His buddies think he's the real deal but I know better. He hasn't had his fill and he won't until reality slaps him in the face.
Is your friend REALLY like that or is it what you're ascribing to him because he can't really express how he feels or what he's done?
Or is maybe that he lets you believe these things because he thinks that's how he should come across?
Maybe he allows you to think these things because the guy's embarrassed to admit that he hasn't done all of these things you think he's done.
There are very few people who have a pathological need for combat. These are the guys who need to be very closely supervised and if the chain of command has a clue, they'll be aware of it. But most of the time, as much as a someone could come across this way, they're usually volunteering for another reason, be it guilt, ignorance, or otherwise.
Horse puckey.
Little boys have been shooting each other with imaginary guns since guns have been around.
Before then, they used to play with sticks and pretended they were sword.
But, no, let's not be killing each other in games. Let's [b]strategize[/b] instead. Go play some chess where the killing is abstracted and the point is to assassinate the king instead.
Let's not pretend that playing games that allow us to kill and defeat the enemy hasn't been with us since time immemorial and isn't a part of the human condition.
And that last quote about the "enemy." WTF? You don't think those guys were humans with families, either?
It's not just stuff like this. There's an obvious digital divide in the OR. You can tell the difference between people who can quickly and intuitively grasp the difference between camera angles and on screen manipulation and those who don't. Age is a huge factor.
Wait... What?!?
Your backup data integrity check is to wipe your drive and hope that everything works? What happens if it doesn't work?
I don't understand, who's complaining all that loudly about this? This is a perfectly reasonable request from Redmond. What type of person gets upset that they're being asked to perform a clean install of pre-release software if they've been using the beta of a closed, commercial operating system???
Maim kill burn, maim kill burn?
Wow, this post dredged up some memories. I didn't even play AD&D but I bought the boxed sets of Plansecape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer because I found the settings to be so fascinating.
No, he DEFINITELY has a right to that money as well. This guy is getting shot at with golden bullets. He should be upset that they're contacting his clients but at the end of the day, the damages that a good, creative legal team can grab is going to make it worth his while.