Thanks. Your wikipedia quotation is UNSOURCED and therefore invalid. For all I know you grabbed the quote from Alex Jones & he pulled it from his anus? Try to find a REPUTABLE source to backup your claims. Thanks.
>>>it seems to be the Republicans who've been the biggest culprits these past 10 years or so.
In my state (see post below) it was the Democrats that rammed-through these machines. The Repubs/Libertarians were opposed to the e-voting due to ease-of-vote hijacking. So..... why do you think the Republicans are the biggest culprits when they were the ones opposed to the idea? Sources please.
They were also joined by the MD-LP, because they knew e-voting could be easily hijacked. They felt the existed paper ballots worked just fine. Of course the Democrats have a ~70% majority in the Legislature, so they just rammed it through anyway (as they do with virtually everything). The Repub and Libertarian concerns have been proved correct 12 years later.
>>>>>(3) I don't waste my money on cable, and therefore never watch Fox News >> >>I was not aware that Fox News was no longer being broadcast OTA.
Well now you know. It was *never* broadcast over the air. You seem to be confusing Local news with the cable channel. They are not the same thing; completely separate.
Same in the U.S. (60%) but there's a maximum amount on how much you can get, so high paid professionals don't get any more than a union factory worker.
I could have got a job but didn't feel like it. Getting paid 600/week watching downloaded lectures/book/videos is more interesting than 1000/week of boring work.
I collected unemployment for two years (separated by a decade), because I decided it was better to be paid $600 a week downloading & watching college lectures/books/movies, rather than $1000 a week doing actual work that I found boring.
Thank you bleeding-heart communo-socialists; you paid me to encourage sloth. Fools.:-)
"Needs 5 years experience with Pascal." (edits resume to change C++ to Pascal). It's a catch-22 where they want people to have experience but they can't gain experience if they never needed Pascal previously. What former-sorority girls or fratboys - now HR people - don't comprehend is that if you are a programmer, you are a programmer. It matters not what language you are using.
I guess you taint heard the news. Netflix and Hulu will soon start blocking people who don't have cable. So it's $15 for streaming the latest TV episodes + 60-70 for cable.
>>> At that rate, it costs $0.30 an episode per viewer, or about $4 a season. Your $400 is off by 2 orders of magnitude.
I have a pet peeve. Know what it is? People who can't read. I said $400 for *8* seasons (104 hours worth of entertainment per the person I was replying to). Not just one. And we don't have to guess at the cost or involve complicated math: AMAZON.COM Doctor Who Season Set ~$50. BBC Your 4 dollar estimate is ridiculous, especially when you can see the pricetag right in front of you.
1 or 2 current shows don't make-up for the ~20 shows we had in the 90s. Hell even Syfy barely carries sci-fi or fantasy. Canceled SG1, SGA, SGU. Canceled BSG (okay it concluded). Canceled the excellent Caprica. Canceled Eureka. SFTV is in a sad state right now.
>>>A lot of people watch shows with continuing story lines now: Lost, True Blood, Breaking Bad, The Wire
Yeah but they don't get 10% and higher ratings like TNG (and TOS) got. Those Gene Roddenberry-created shows allowed a viewer to "jump in" at any point.
>>>season 3 is great, but it gets soap-opera'y by season 7,
By that point the viewer will either like the show and be into the characters, or say "turn this crap off" somewhere around season 4. BTW if you like DS9 you should like B5 too. DS9's creators had the B5 bible on hand and basically copied it..... so might as well watch the original show. (I like both DS9 and B5 equally.)
So any reason to buy this discounted RIM tablet? I don't really see the need when I have a desktop, a laptop, and an internet-capable phone. The tablet seems pointless.
TOS may be campy, but it's first season is one of Trek's best. Why? Because it was written by lots of science fiction authors, rather than the standard TV crap writer. (NOTE: Season 1 is also best-watched in production number order, not airdate order. The storyline will make more sense then.)
Actually Voyager's first two years aren't that bad... it has many of the same writers as TNG. But the show gradually lost its best writers as they went-off to other projects, and the quality plummeted.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Voyager's last episode.;-) And I liked the follow-on series Enterprise. Season 1 and season 4 were the best of that show.
Not everybody likes the same thing. If you insist upon Star Trek, I'd start with TNG because Gene Roddenberry purposely made each episode a stand-alone story. According to his wife Majel he thought continuing stories alienated the viewers (because they would be lost).
I'd start with some of season 1's better episodes (because they establish character backgrounds), skip the writer's strike-damaged season 2, and then continue onward from there.
Or you could just start with season 3 which I thought was the best of all of them. Almost every episode is a winner.
Probably not a fan of Babylon 5 either. (Or novels.) I know it sucks when shows make you have to remember plot details over the course of an entire season, but hey, that doesn't mean the show is bad.;-)
B5 and DS9 still rank up there as my favorite SF shows. Add-in Hercules and Xena and the X-Files and seaQuest (year one) and earth2 and Buffy and Twilight Zone and Outer Limits..... and the 90s was an awesome decade for fantasy/science fiction television. Most of it was produced off-network as individually-funded shows (syndicated). It's a shame the syndication market died out. CW/MyNetworkTV is a poor substitute..... the independent channels died out.
$7 for 104 hours? That's equivalent to eight seasons of Doctor Who..... which costs about 3 million dollars to produce just one episode. The Season Set DVDs would be $400 alone...... WAY higher than your unrealistic $7 estimate.
I thought slashdot inserted those logos automatically when you typed digital" as a keyword? And speaking of newbies:
>>>It's summer, it's endless summer...
It's called Endless September not summer. The term "september" refers to the point when a bunch of college kids got internet accounts, and started spamming a bunch of messages to Usenet forums w/o regard to polite netiquette. The summertime used to be a haven from all the college kids (since they were home w/o a connection).
The "eternal" refers to when people started getting internet at home. Then it was as if September never ended... a continuous supply of clueless newbies.
Buying devices w/o TW's feature won't help to defeat it. If the patent works as well as it claims, it operates similar to Macrovision by deliberately introducing video errors. With Macrovision the errors prevented analog copying, and with TW's new patent the errors prevent playback at any speed faster than 1.
Of course these digital errors won't harm my Super VHS at all. Being analog it ignores all digital trickery/flags.
>>>[Basic is] $20 per month. Want anything more and it's $48.99 per month for ESPN, HGTV, USA, A&E, TNT, etc.
I wish cable operated more like Dish. They have multiple tiers, rather than suddenly jump a huge amount in price. (BTW $49 is cheap. Comcast charges my area $60 for just one TV! nuts.)
$15 - basic $25 - family $35 - America's Top100 (150 if you include both East and West feeds) and so on. You get to decide how much you want to spend, and save some money.
>>>already they have doubled rates (at some point, they were half, right?) and yet we still have crap on the networks.
In the 90s cable was cheap (25-to-30 dollars) because channels were just airing reruns of broadcast television. Once they started producing original shows like Sliders, Stargate, Haven, Deadliest Catch, La Femme Nikita, The Closer (et cetera), they needed more money, and so the channels increased their per-home subscriber fee.
The average used to be 30 cents and now it's about 70 cents. Naturally those costs were passed to the customer by raising rates to 65-70 dollars. The subscriber fees doubled, and so too did the monthly fee. All to produce new shows.
Advertising is the only thing that makes TV affordable. The BBC provides 3 channels of newly produced ad-free content, but also charge ~$250 per year. Multiply that by a 70 channel basic package, minus the 20 noncable broadcast channels, and you have a bill of $4250/year for your ad free CATV. (Almost 6 times the current ad-supported cost.)
QUOTE: "By utilizing, for example, digital embedded cue-tones for advertisement insertion, a device in the network ⦠could use these points (i.e., the cue-tones) to selectively remove I-Frames/IDR-Frames to prevent trick modes during ads (or other portions) but not from the program being watched. Thus, consumers can be substantially prevented from skipping, fast forwarding and rewinding through video that the provider would like the consumer to view, such as advertisements, specific carriage agreement requirements, etc.," Time Warner Cable wrote in the patent.
Sounds like it would prevent ANY digital device from fast-forwarding, due to the deliverate introduction of errors. If that's accurate the only device which would not be bothered by MPEG Iframe errors is on analog Super VHS VCR. (Not HD but neither's my tv, so I don't really care.)
(whoosh). The point I was making with my PC v. Apple and Honda v. Acura and Dodge v. Chrysler comparison was this: A spacesuit can be made for half the cost of a Nasa suit, and yet still be JUST as reliable.
My PC cost are mere $500 and is still going strong 10 years later. I could have spent twice as much on a non-generic brand, but would not have gotten anymore out of it. (Same principle applies to my 25 year old Dodge versus a Chrysler, or my 15 year old Honda versus an Acura. Spending less doesn't automatically mean less lifespan/reliability.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. Your wikipedia quotation is UNSOURCED and therefore invalid. For all I know you grabbed the quote from Alex Jones & he pulled it from his anus? Try to find a REPUTABLE source to backup your claims. Thanks.
>>>it seems to be the Republicans who've been the biggest culprits these past 10 years or so.
In my state (see post below) it was the Democrats that rammed-through these machines. The Repubs/Libertarians were opposed to the e-voting due to ease-of-vote hijacking. So..... why do you think the Republicans are the biggest culprits when they were the ones opposed to the idea? Sources please.
They were also joined by the MD-LP, because they knew e-voting could be easily hijacked. They felt the existed paper ballots worked just fine. Of course the Democrats have a ~70% majority in the Legislature, so they just rammed it through anyway (as they do with virtually everything). The Repub and Libertarian concerns have been proved correct 12 years later.
>>>>>(3) I don't waste my money on cable, and therefore never watch Fox News
>>
>>I was not aware that Fox News was no longer being broadcast OTA.
Well now you know. It was *never* broadcast over the air. You seem to be confusing Local news with the cable channel. They are not the same thing; completely separate.
Same in the U.S. (60%) but there's a maximum amount on how much you can get, so high paid professionals don't get any more than a union factory worker.
I could have got a job but didn't feel like it. Getting paid 600/week watching downloaded lectures/book/videos is more interesting than 1000/week of boring work.
I collected unemployment for two years (separated by a decade), because I decided it was better to be paid $600 a week downloading & watching college lectures/books/movies, rather than $1000 a week doing actual work that I found boring.
Thank you bleeding-heart communo-socialists; you paid me to encourage sloth. Fools. :-)
"Needs 5 years experience with Pascal." (edits resume to change C++ to Pascal). It's a catch-22 where they want people to have experience but they can't gain experience if they never needed Pascal previously. What former-sorority girls or fratboys - now HR people - don't comprehend is that if you are a programmer, you are a programmer. It matters not what language you are using.
I guess you taint heard the news. Netflix and Hulu will soon start blocking people who don't have cable. So it's $15 for streaming the latest TV episodes + 60-70 for cable.
>>> At that rate, it costs $0.30 an episode per viewer, or about $4 a season. Your $400 is off by 2 orders of magnitude.
I have a pet peeve. Know what it is? People who can't read. I said $400 for *8* seasons (104 hours worth of entertainment per the person I was replying to). Not just one. And we don't have to guess at the cost or involve complicated math:
AMAZON.COM
Doctor Who Season Set
~$50.
BBC
Your 4 dollar estimate is ridiculous, especially when you can see the pricetag right in front of you.
1 or 2 current shows don't make-up for the ~20 shows we had in the 90s. Hell even Syfy barely carries sci-fi or fantasy. Canceled SG1, SGA, SGU. Canceled BSG (okay it concluded). Canceled the excellent Caprica. Canceled Eureka. SFTV is in a sad state right now.
>>>A lot of people watch shows with continuing story lines now: Lost, True Blood, Breaking Bad, The Wire
Yeah but they don't get 10% and higher ratings like TNG (and TOS) got. Those Gene Roddenberry-created shows allowed a viewer to "jump in" at any point.
>>>season 3 is great, but it gets soap-opera'y by season 7,
By that point the viewer will either like the show and be into the characters, or say "turn this crap off" somewhere around season 4. BTW if you like DS9 you should like B5 too. DS9's creators had the B5 bible on hand and basically copied it..... so might as well watch the original show. (I like both DS9 and B5 equally.)
So any reason to buy this discounted RIM tablet? I don't really see the need when I have a desktop, a laptop, and an internet-capable phone. The tablet seems pointless.
TOS may be campy, but it's first season is one of Trek's best. Why? Because it was written by lots of science fiction authors, rather than the standard TV crap writer. (NOTE: Season 1 is also best-watched in production number order, not airdate order. The storyline will make more sense then.)
Actually Voyager's first two years aren't that bad... it has many of the same writers as TNG. But the show gradually lost its best writers as they went-off to other projects, and the quality plummeted.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Voyager's last episode. ;-) And I liked the follow-on series Enterprise. Season 1 and season 4 were the best of that show.
Not everybody likes the same thing.
If you insist upon Star Trek, I'd start with TNG because Gene Roddenberry purposely made each episode a stand-alone story. According to his wife Majel he thought continuing stories alienated the viewers (because they would be lost).
I'd start with some of season 1's better episodes (because they establish character backgrounds), skip the writer's strike-damaged season 2, and then continue onward from there.
Or you could just start with season 3 which I thought was the best of all of them. Almost every episode is a winner.
>>>Please not Deep Space 9!
Probably not a fan of Babylon 5 either. (Or novels.) I know it sucks when shows make you have to remember plot details over the course of an entire season, but hey, that doesn't mean the show is bad. ;-)
B5 and DS9 still rank up there as my favorite SF shows. Add-in Hercules and Xena and the X-Files and seaQuest (year one) and earth2 and Buffy and Twilight Zone and Outer Limits..... and the 90s was an awesome decade for fantasy/science fiction television. Most of it was produced off-network as individually-funded shows (syndicated). It's a shame the syndication market died out. CW/MyNetworkTV is a poor substitute..... the independent channels died out.
>>> ~$7/year
$7 for 104 hours? That's equivalent to eight seasons of Doctor Who..... which costs about 3 million dollars to produce just one episode. The Season Set DVDs would be $400 alone...... WAY higher than your unrealistic $7 estimate.
I thought slashdot inserted those logos automatically when you typed digital" as a keyword? And speaking of newbies:
>>>It's summer, it's endless summer...
It's called Endless September not summer. The term "september" refers to the point when a bunch of college kids got internet accounts, and started spamming a bunch of messages to Usenet forums w/o regard to polite netiquette. The summertime used to be a haven from all the college kids (since they were home w/o a connection).
The "eternal" refers to when people started getting internet at home. Then it was as if September never ended... a continuous supply of clueless newbies.
Side note: My Antenna TV is free. :-)
Buying devices w/o TW's feature won't help to defeat it. If the patent works as well as it claims, it operates similar to Macrovision by deliberately introducing video errors. With Macrovision the errors prevented analog copying, and with TW's new patent the errors prevent playback at any speed faster than 1.
Of course these digital errors won't harm my Super VHS at all.
Being analog it ignores all digital trickery/flags.
>>>[Basic is] $20 per month. Want anything more and it's $48.99 per month for ESPN, HGTV, USA, A&E, TNT, etc.
I wish cable operated more like Dish. They have multiple tiers, rather than suddenly jump a huge amount in price. (BTW $49 is cheap. Comcast charges my area $60 for just one TV! nuts.)
$15 - basic
$25 - family
$35 - America's Top100 (150 if you include both East and West feeds)
and so on.
You get to decide how much you want to spend, and save some money.
>>>already they have doubled rates (at some point, they were half, right?) and yet we still have crap on the networks.
In the 90s cable was cheap (25-to-30 dollars) because channels were just airing reruns of broadcast television. Once they started producing original shows like Sliders, Stargate, Haven, Deadliest Catch, La Femme Nikita, The Closer (et cetera), they needed more money, and so the channels increased their per-home subscriber fee.
The average used to be 30 cents and now it's about 70 cents. Naturally those costs were passed to the customer by raising rates to 65-70 dollars. The subscriber fees doubled, and so too did the monthly fee. All to produce new shows.
Advertising is the only thing that makes TV affordable. The BBC provides 3 channels of newly produced ad-free content, but also charge ~$250 per year. Multiply that by a 70 channel basic package, minus the 20 noncable broadcast channels, and you have a bill of $4250/year for your ad free CATV. (Almost 6 times the current ad-supported cost.)
QUOTE: "By utilizing, for example, digital embedded cue-tones for advertisement insertion, a device in the network ⦠could use these points (i.e., the cue-tones) to selectively remove I-Frames/IDR-Frames to prevent trick modes during ads (or other portions) but not from the program being watched. Thus, consumers can be substantially prevented from skipping, fast forwarding and rewinding through video that the provider would like the consumer to view, such as advertisements, specific carriage agreement requirements, etc.," Time Warner Cable wrote in the patent.
Sounds like it would prevent ANY digital device from fast-forwarding, due to the deliverate introduction of errors.
If that's accurate the only device which would not be bothered by MPEG Iframe errors is on analog Super VHS VCR. (Not HD but neither's my tv, so I don't really care.)
(whoosh). The point I was making with my PC v. Apple and Honda v. Acura and Dodge v. Chrysler comparison was this: A spacesuit can be made for half the cost of a Nasa suit, and yet still be JUST as reliable.
My PC cost are mere $500 and is still going strong 10 years later. I could have spent twice as much on a non-generic brand, but would not have gotten anymore out of it. (Same principle applies to my 25 year old Dodge versus a Chrysler, or my 15 year old Honda versus an Acura. Spending less doesn't automatically mean less lifespan/reliability.)