The typing aspect was off. The elite hackers I have known (I'm spelling it correctly because these people would have disdained 13375p33k) had serious keyboard skills.
Bob Frankston, the guy who actually implemented VisiCalc (his partner Dan Bricklin, the company head who came up with the idea, is far better known), is the best typist I have ever met; he could type CODE at 100 WPM in his prime. (That's faster then all but a small number of people can type standard English text, and typing code is harder because of all the punctuation.) Richard Stallman was no slouch at the keyboard before carpal tunnel syndrome took its toll; sadly there was a period when he was almost completely unable to type.
Those people, and the other serious hackers that I have had the pleasure of observing, were not one finger typists. They had taken the time to learn how to type, not just for speed but because it makes the process of typing effortless. It removes some of the friction between thought and its realization, an important skill for somebody who wants to get code into the computer.
We don't have DAB in the US. We have HD Radio instead, which is a completely different system.
DAB and its successor DAB+ replace the analog signal with a digital one. Much like digital TV, the DAB broadcast can carry multiple channels of audio. DAB uses the not-very-good MP2 codec; DAB+ replaces it with HE-AAC. The standard for the transmission stream is published by ETSI.
HD Radio augments the analog signal with digital subchannels. They are broadcast in pedestals on both sides of the analog carrier (they look like noise on a spectrum display), and those pedestals can wipe out reception of stations on adjacent channels. (That's only rarely an issue on FM, but it's a much bigger deal on AM radio which also has a version of HD Radio.) HD Radio uses a non-standard proprietary codec and the format of the transmission stream is also proprietary. Because only part of the channel is used for digital data, an HD Radio channel carries fewer digital subchannels than DAB+ does.
There are two reasons that probably drove the FCC's approval of HD Radio. One is that it coexists with analog broadcasts rather than eliminating them. The other is a bias in favor of locally developed technology, something that also informed the choice of ATSC television rather than DVB-T.
Further consolidation of cell companies is stalled for now. AT&T's proposed buyout of T-Mobile was blocked on antitrust grounds. The more recent attempts at a merger of T-Mobile and Sprint fell apart because the sides couldn't agree on who would run the company. (Softbank, the big Japanese company that now owns Sprint, wanted to retain control, but pretty much everybody else wants the Sprint management to go away and have the T-Mobile people run it.) I don't think AT&T or Verizon will be allowed to make any major acquisitions, but T-Mobile - Sprint will return and happen eventually.
Comcast NBC Universal is already huge and probably won't be allowed to merge with anybody. But we could see activity among the others, either merging with each other or perhaps joining forces with Netflix or other streaming companies.
You can download some Netflix movies now and take them with you on trips; it's available in the mobile apps and the Windows 10 app. Sadly it's only a small fraction of their catalog, though all Netflix originals are included.
Netflix does have an incentive to drive down bandwidth. But they also seem to be aware of the need to maintain quality. In the past they cut bandwidth by developing improvements to their H.264 codec, and more recently by switching to VP9 if the user's equipment is compatible. I expect that they will be among the first adopters of AV1 when it is ready. YouTube also has an incentive to cut bandwidth and has driven improvements in codec technology.
Torrents (and ripped DVDs and Blu-Ray discs) still have the advantage for the other reasons you cite. You can store the files without restriction, convert them to other formats, and edit the video.
Wreck-It Ralph was Disney, not Pixar. It was a success but not a blockbuster: $189 million gross domestic, $471 million worldwide, with a $165 million production budget. Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/m...
Some of Pixar's sequels have also been fine films. I think Toy Story 3 was the best of that series, and I'm looking forward to Incredibles 2. I do think that Toy Story 4 will be going to the well one time too many.
Cars and its sequels a special case. Even the first one wasn't very good (the backgrounds were the most memorable thing about it) and it's gone downhill from there. But they are a merchandising bonanza; over $10 billion worth of Cars toys have been sold, making it one of the top movie franchises for merchandise sales. (Star Wars is the leader, followed by Frozen and Harry Potter, but Cars is not far behind.) The Cars movies (and the TV shows, and the Planes spinoff movies that are made by Disney's TV animation division DisneyToon) are really just a way to sell toys; they would be profitable even if you eliminate all the ticket revenue.
Disney isn't buying the network but it is buying the studio. So the OP about reducing the number of studios to three is correct, whether or not the studio-less Fox broadcast network survives.
How the Fox network will avoid a slow death is unclear. It could double down on sports and news, commission a bunch of cheap reality shows, or fade away into being a rerun network like the various third-tier networks (MeTV, MyNetworkTV, etc).
Fox won't disappear immediately because of its existing programming. But it will be harder for them to acquire new scripted shows going forward. The captive studios either won't sell them shows or will only offer them second-rate programs, and many of the non-network studios have deals with streaming networks now.
HBO is part of Time Warner. That is too big a buyout for Netflix to finance, plus it would come with a bunch of properties (all those cable channels, and until a few years ago magazines) that are outside of their core business. Buying HBO alone would have been a nice deal for Netflix but TW is unlikely to want to sell it.
Now that the deal with AT&T is off the table, I suppose a merger of Netflix and Time Warner isn't out of the question, treating the two companies are equals or nearly so, followed by a selloff of some assets like Turner Sports and perhaps some of the cable channels. There are some potential difficulties, like the fact that HBO Go is partly in competition with Netflix, but I could see them doing a tiered thing where HBO Go would get you HBO shows immediately and Netflix would get them all a couple of years later, and perhaps a higher priced Netflix+ that merges HBO Go programming into Netflix.
No phone will ever support simultaneous voice and data on CDMA. The underlying technology doesn't support it, and Qualcomm has no plans to upgrade CDMA to include that capability. Fortunately, LTE networks are improving. Within a few years carriers will probably start turning off CDMA service, starting in major cities, and go LTE-only. (They'll start in the cities because that's where the pressure on spectrum availability is most severe.)
Some people are using it. Apple Pay (popular), Samsung Pay (somewhat popular), and Android Pay (not very popular so far) are all out there.
Perhaps more importantly, the next generation of transit payment systems will use NFC. Chicago, Portland, and Salt Lake City already allow NFC payments. New York, Boston, and Seattle all will in the future.
Sure, there is some environmental impact to internet porn. But just as the impact of mainstream streaming video is lower than that of video rentals and purchased disks, the impact of streamed porn is lower. The preponderance of flesh-colored pixels doesn't change that.
Franken has already announced his intention to resign, and the governor has named his successor. He's just waiting until he can resign without dire consequences. Resigning just before the vote on the heinous Republican tax proposal would be a very bad idea, as the Republican leadership of the Senate would delay seating his replacement until after the vote and thus make it easier to pass the bill.
There are people out there who don't get it. I once witnessed a guy saying, as he observed a breastfeeding woman, "I don't want to see that. That's not what they're for." It's possible that it was an attempt at humor but I don't think it was.
Being for little kids is their primary purpose; babies eat from them. (Visual and tactile pleasure is secondary, though not insignificant.) But not on US television.
T-Mobile could decide who got zero rated. But that's not what they are currently doing so far as I know; they're accepting everyone who applies for the zero rating of streaming music and video. The program would be much more problematic if they were refusing to let companies participate or charging them for participation, and the existence of it does have the problem that it makes it easier for them to do those things in the future.
My opinion is that T-Mobile is not currently doing anything that convinces me that Binge On should be disallowed. But continued oversight is needed to make sure that they don't do those things. That oversight is why we have an FCC, leaving aside the fact that the current head doesn't want the agency to do its duty.
Charging the patrons 35 cents per pledge is excessive. What Patreon should do is charge them 35 cents per MONTH, and then do the sensible thing and put through only one charge transaction per month no matter how many creators the patron supports. Those charge transactions are what create most of their monthly costs.
Presumably the point of the 35 cent per pledge fee is to cover transaction costs. But Patreon can aggregate those for patrons that pledge money to more than one creator each month, and simply put through one charge transaction that covers all the pledges. (They're running their business badly if they're not already doing that.) Patreon would have gotten a lot less pushback if they had instituted a single monthly fee to patrons, and would still get enough revenue to cover their processing costs. Other than what they pay the payment processor, their per-pledge cost should be minimal because it's all automated.
As for the 2.9%, they could have continued to charge that to the creators as they do now. Putting transaction fees on the customer can be done - Brown Paper Tickets does, for example - but trying to change the model mid-stream just causes resentment.
T-Mobile's Binge On is relatively non-problematic because it singles out an entire class of content (streaming video), not a single provider of content. Any streaming video source is welcome to participate so long as it's willing to cooperate with the terms and restrict the bandwidth of its streaming video, and so far as I know the streaming companies are not charged anything for being part of the program.
Singling out streaming video is not an unalloyed benefit for the customer. Customers get the benefit of video not counting against their data allowance, but in exchange T-Mobile gets the ability to throttle or completely block video first if the network gets congested. Customers are less likely to complain because they're getting it for free.
AT&T's unlimited streaming of DirectTV content, in contrast, was highly problematic. First, it privileged one specific provider of streaming video. To make matters worse, the privileged provider happens to be owned by AT&T. That program gave DirecTV (ie, AT&T's own content) a distinct competitive advantage over Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and everybody else.
Tunnels have been built before the Boring Company. That venture is about making them easier and less costly to build so we can feasibly make more of them.
And increasing technology. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a post-apocalypse society to work its way back up to our current level of technology, or even to sustain any level higher than the Stone Age, because the remaining resources for the Iron Age or the Bronze Age are no longer extractable with those levels of technology. All the easy to mine sources have already been exhausted.
That includes energy. Restarting the Machine Age would be challenging because we've already gotten to all the easy coal and oil. What remains can't be mined or drilled with 19th century tech. Our current renewable sources also require a high degree of technological sophistication; that restarting civilization couldn't make solar panels or wind turbines that work nearly as well as current ones. Nor batteries; it could make lead acid batteries by melting down existing lead and reusing it but not by mining new lead (see the mining problem) and couldn't make fancier things like lithium-ion at all.
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The typing aspect was off. The elite hackers I have known (I'm spelling it correctly because these people would have disdained 13375p33k) had serious keyboard skills.
Bob Frankston, the guy who actually implemented VisiCalc (his partner Dan Bricklin, the company head who came up with the idea, is far better known), is the best typist I have ever met; he could type CODE at 100 WPM in his prime. (That's faster then all but a small number of people can type standard English text, and typing code is harder because of all the punctuation.) Richard Stallman was no slouch at the keyboard before carpal tunnel syndrome took its toll; sadly there was a period when he was almost completely unable to type.
Those people, and the other serious hackers that I have had the pleasure of observing, were not one finger typists. They had taken the time to learn how to type, not just for speed but because it makes the process of typing effortless. It removes some of the friction between thought and its realization, an important skill for somebody who wants to get code into the computer.
We don't have DAB in the US. We have HD Radio instead, which is a completely different system.
DAB and its successor DAB+ replace the analog signal with a digital one. Much like digital TV, the DAB broadcast can carry multiple channels of audio. DAB uses the not-very-good MP2 codec; DAB+ replaces it with HE-AAC. The standard for the transmission stream is published by ETSI.
HD Radio augments the analog signal with digital subchannels. They are broadcast in pedestals on both sides of the analog carrier (they look like noise on a spectrum display), and those pedestals can wipe out reception of stations on adjacent channels. (That's only rarely an issue on FM, but it's a much bigger deal on AM radio which also has a version of HD Radio.) HD Radio uses a non-standard proprietary codec and the format of the transmission stream is also proprietary. Because only part of the channel is used for digital data, an HD Radio channel carries fewer digital subchannels than DAB+ does.
There are two reasons that probably drove the FCC's approval of HD Radio. One is that it coexists with analog broadcasts rather than eliminating them. The other is a bias in favor of locally developed technology, something that also informed the choice of ATSC television rather than DVB-T.
The production of The Simpsons would move over. I expect that the Fox broadcast network will retain control of the broadcast rights for a while.
Further consolidation of cell companies is stalled for now. AT&T's proposed buyout of T-Mobile was blocked on antitrust grounds. The more recent attempts at a merger of T-Mobile and Sprint fell apart because the sides couldn't agree on who would run the company. (Softbank, the big Japanese company that now owns Sprint, wanted to retain control, but pretty much everybody else wants the Sprint management to go away and have the T-Mobile people run it.) I don't think AT&T or Verizon will be allowed to make any major acquisitions, but T-Mobile - Sprint will return and happen eventually.
CBS is another potential merger partner. Maybe CBS-Warner Bros, bringing together the two partners of The CW?
Comcast NBC Universal is already huge and probably won't be allowed to merge with anybody. But we could see activity among the others, either merging with each other or perhaps joining forces with Netflix or other streaming companies.
You can download some Netflix movies now and take them with you on trips; it's available in the mobile apps and the Windows 10 app. Sadly it's only a small fraction of their catalog, though all Netflix originals are included.
Netflix does have an incentive to drive down bandwidth. But they also seem to be aware of the need to maintain quality. In the past they cut bandwidth by developing improvements to their H.264 codec, and more recently by switching to VP9 if the user's equipment is compatible. I expect that they will be among the first adopters of AV1 when it is ready. YouTube also has an incentive to cut bandwidth and has driven improvements in codec technology.
Torrents (and ripped DVDs and Blu-Ray discs) still have the advantage for the other reasons you cite. You can store the files without restriction, convert them to other formats, and edit the video.
Wreck-It Ralph was Disney, not Pixar. It was a success but not a blockbuster: $189 million gross domestic, $471 million worldwide, with a $165 million production budget. Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/m...
Some of Pixar's sequels have also been fine films. I think Toy Story 3 was the best of that series, and I'm looking forward to Incredibles 2. I do think that Toy Story 4 will be going to the well one time too many.
Cars and its sequels a special case. Even the first one wasn't very good (the backgrounds were the most memorable thing about it) and it's gone downhill from there. But they are a merchandising bonanza; over $10 billion worth of Cars toys have been sold, making it one of the top movie franchises for merchandise sales. (Star Wars is the leader, followed by Frozen and Harry Potter, but Cars is not far behind.) The Cars movies (and the TV shows, and the Planes spinoff movies that are made by Disney's TV animation division DisneyToon) are really just a way to sell toys; they would be profitable even if you eliminate all the ticket revenue.
Disney isn't buying the network but it is buying the studio. So the OP about reducing the number of studios to three is correct, whether or not the studio-less Fox broadcast network survives.
How the Fox network will avoid a slow death is unclear. It could double down on sports and news, commission a bunch of cheap reality shows, or fade away into being a rerun network like the various third-tier networks (MeTV, MyNetworkTV, etc).
Fox won't disappear immediately because of its existing programming. But it will be harder for them to acquire new scripted shows going forward. The captive studios either won't sell them shows or will only offer them second-rate programs, and many of the non-network studios have deals with streaming networks now.
HBO is part of Time Warner. That is too big a buyout for Netflix to finance, plus it would come with a bunch of properties (all those cable channels, and until a few years ago magazines) that are outside of their core business. Buying HBO alone would have been a nice deal for Netflix but TW is unlikely to want to sell it.
Now that the deal with AT&T is off the table, I suppose a merger of Netflix and Time Warner isn't out of the question, treating the two companies are equals or nearly so, followed by a selloff of some assets like Turner Sports and perhaps some of the cable channels. There are some potential difficulties, like the fact that HBO Go is partly in competition with Netflix, but I could see them doing a tiered thing where HBO Go would get you HBO shows immediately and Netflix would get them all a couple of years later, and perhaps a higher priced Netflix+ that merges HBO Go programming into Netflix.
No, they didn't. Lucas himself did that with the prequels. Disney is doing a decent job of picking up the pieces.
No phone will ever support simultaneous voice and data on CDMA. The underlying technology doesn't support it, and Qualcomm has no plans to upgrade CDMA to include that capability. Fortunately, LTE networks are improving. Within a few years carriers will probably start turning off CDMA service, starting in major cities, and go LTE-only. (They'll start in the cities because that's where the pressure on spectrum availability is most severe.)
Some people are using it. Apple Pay (popular), Samsung Pay (somewhat popular), and Android Pay (not very popular so far) are all out there.
Perhaps more importantly, the next generation of transit payment systems will use NFC. Chicago, Portland, and Salt Lake City already allow NFC payments. New York, Boston, and Seattle all will in the future.
Sure, there is some environmental impact to internet porn. But just as the impact of mainstream streaming video is lower than that of video rentals and purchased disks, the impact of streamed porn is lower. The preponderance of flesh-colored pixels doesn't change that.
Franken has already announced his intention to resign, and the governor has named his successor. He's just waiting until he can resign without dire consequences. Resigning just before the vote on the heinous Republican tax proposal would be a very bad idea, as the Republican leadership of the Senate would delay seating his replacement until after the vote and thus make it easier to pass the bill.
There are people out there who don't get it. I once witnessed a guy saying, as he observed a breastfeeding woman, "I don't want to see that. That's not what they're for." It's possible that it was an attempt at humor but I don't think it was.
Being for little kids is their primary purpose; babies eat from them. (Visual and tactile pleasure is secondary, though not insignificant.) But not on US television.
T-Mobile could decide who got zero rated. But that's not what they are currently doing so far as I know; they're accepting everyone who applies for the zero rating of streaming music and video. The program would be much more problematic if they were refusing to let companies participate or charging them for participation, and the existence of it does have the problem that it makes it easier for them to do those things in the future.
My opinion is that T-Mobile is not currently doing anything that convinces me that Binge On should be disallowed. But continued oversight is needed to make sure that they don't do those things. That oversight is why we have an FCC, leaving aside the fact that the current head doesn't want the agency to do its duty.
Charging the patrons 35 cents per pledge is excessive. What Patreon should do is charge them 35 cents per MONTH, and then do the sensible thing and put through only one charge transaction per month no matter how many creators the patron supports. Those charge transactions are what create most of their monthly costs.
Presumably the point of the 35 cent per pledge fee is to cover transaction costs. But Patreon can aggregate those for patrons that pledge money to more than one creator each month, and simply put through one charge transaction that covers all the pledges. (They're running their business badly if they're not already doing that.) Patreon would have gotten a lot less pushback if they had instituted a single monthly fee to patrons, and would still get enough revenue to cover their processing costs. Other than what they pay the payment processor, their per-pledge cost should be minimal because it's all automated.
As for the 2.9%, they could have continued to charge that to the creators as they do now. Putting transaction fees on the customer can be done - Brown Paper Tickets does, for example - but trying to change the model mid-stream just causes resentment.
T-Mobile's Binge On is relatively non-problematic because it singles out an entire class of content (streaming video), not a single provider of content. Any streaming video source is welcome to participate so long as it's willing to cooperate with the terms and restrict the bandwidth of its streaming video, and so far as I know the streaming companies are not charged anything for being part of the program.
Singling out streaming video is not an unalloyed benefit for the customer. Customers get the benefit of video not counting against their data allowance, but in exchange T-Mobile gets the ability to throttle or completely block video first if the network gets congested. Customers are less likely to complain because they're getting it for free.
AT&T's unlimited streaming of DirectTV content, in contrast, was highly problematic. First, it privileged one specific provider of streaming video. To make matters worse, the privileged provider happens to be owned by AT&T. That program gave DirecTV (ie, AT&T's own content) a distinct competitive advantage over Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and everybody else.
Here in the US they pretty much all do. But there are electrified freight lines in Europe.
Tunnels have been built before the Boring Company. That venture is about making them easier and less costly to build so we can feasibly make more of them.
And increasing technology. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a post-apocalypse society to work its way back up to our current level of technology, or even to sustain any level higher than the Stone Age, because the remaining resources for the Iron Age or the Bronze Age are no longer extractable with those levels of technology. All the easy to mine sources have already been exhausted.
That includes energy. Restarting the Machine Age would be challenging because we've already gotten to all the easy coal and oil. What remains can't be mined or drilled with 19th century tech. Our current renewable sources also require a high degree of technological sophistication; that restarting civilization couldn't make solar panels or wind turbines that work nearly as well as current ones. Nor batteries; it could make lead acid batteries by melting down existing lead and reusing it but not by mining new lead (see the mining problem) and couldn't make fancier things like lithium-ion at all.