DISCLAIMER: I am not a city engineer, but I've spent far too much spare time researching these issues.
They take longer for two main reasons: in heavy traffic, a full roundabout is either constantly moving, or dead stopped like a parking lot. In either case, you can't get in because everyone is bumper-to-bumper.
The heavy traffic scenario is where city planners fail hard, because they too easily forget that roundabouts still shuffle the same number of vehicles into the same congested streets. If these get backed up, so does the roundabout.
There are, fundamentally, three solutions to traffic, and nobody wants to implement them:
a. less cars b. more lanes c. less concentration in commercial and industrial sectors
Solution A requires vastly improved public transit, for which no city official wants to shoulder the cost, or more telework which employers are still reluctant to undertake. Solution B requires expropriation to make room, and often leads to complicated entry/exit ramps, and all that costs a shitload of money. Solution C depends on Solution A, so we're doubly screwed.
if I am not sure whether to turn or not, I can just take another spin around the circle until I see the street sign
You are quite possibly the only person smart enough to do this. Most people just panic and jerk the wheel without looking.
I believe all the alleged benefits of roundabouts can be matched by properly timed lights, combined with vehicle sensors that don't suck. Computing power has become so cheap that even a two-dollar PIC chip could probably handle sufficiently advanced logic for traffic. An intersection that detects cars from a distance could preemptively switch the lights when there is no cross traffic.
The downside is we would need smarter city engineers to program them. Having met the person in charge of that in my (large capital) city, she confirmed my initial assumption that they only hire the best and brightest self-righteous retards for the job.
Every time I hear a sob story like this, I can't help but wonder why employees tolerate this kind of abuse. If the job is going to shit, LEAVE! If you have any saleable skills, you can take them elsewhere. I'm not saying they need to unionize, but almost... If game developers stood shoulder-to-shoulder and said no to hostile work environments, the industry would be forced to adapt. It sounds very much like these people are afraid to say no. You'll say "but what about the house" ? Fuck the house! What good is a house when you spend every waking moment at work, eating advil by the handful ? Fuck the house, and fuck the job. You have better things to do in life than pad some greedy sociopath's stock options.
Conversely, if Rockstar needs 110 man-hours a week for every coder, they should hire 2 extra coders to meet the demand. If that breaks the budget, fuck the project, it's an unprofitable project. If it can't be profitable while adhering to reasonable work conditions and timelines, then it should not be undertaken in the first place. If a guy called me tomorrow and said he wanted a Facebook killer for $50, I'd cheerfully invite him to die in a fucking fire. No, scratch that, I'd go to his house and beat him to death with a Chia Pet for even proposing such a ridiculous venture. Game devs need to learn to do the same thing. Democracy only works if you have the brass balls to stick to your guns.
To be fair, they've been introducing some pretty big changes in 2.6.38 and 39, enough that I am reluctant to upgrade from 2.6.36 on any servers because it's just been changing TOO quickly and I'm afraid of new bugs.
That just doesn't sound like the type of open-source project that would succeed, because social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle. Either you build a big network and sell the eyeballs, or you fade into obscurity before anyone even notices.
Even Wikipedia has better info than that paid article:P
UL: Underwriters Lab - a safety testing outfit CE: Conformité Européenne (french) - Europe's equivalent of the UL TUV: Technischer Überwachungsverein - German safety org like the above two FCC: Federal Communications Commission - they license, test and certify radio equipment (cell phones, wifi, etc) RoHS: Restriction of Hazardous Substances - a European law restricting hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and a few others ENERGY STAR: A set of energy efficiency standards primarily featured in the US, British Commonwealth nations, and parts of Europe. They are typically much stricter than national requirements.
At the end of the day though, most of these are just marketing stickers. Yes, they require some degree of certification, but it's kind of like getting your MCSE or A+. Not having the cert does not necessarily mean your device will blow up or pop breakers, it just means the mfg didn't pay their fee to get certified. For big mainstream appliances it's kind of dumb to not have it, but on most smaller gadgets it's a non-issue.
Oh, nice. Management finally read the "Complete Idiots guide to posting as AC".
I've watched too many companies struggle after losing a star employee. Not just someone who's good at their job, but also good at a bunch of tangentially-related duties too. The coder with a background in corporate accounting, or the sysadmin with people skills, these hybrids are often the backbone of a small business, but the pigeonholing nature of management often fails to recognize that extra value. You can replace them with a regular, boring, single-minded IT guy, sure, but the new guy won't do all that extra stuff that was taken for granted.
Given that a significant part of any IT skillset is problem-solving, usually the guy with the most diverse knowledge base is also the most creative and resourceful one. He might not be so great at coding, and he probably relies on Google a lot for server admin, but he'll be the one to save your hide when disaster strikes, because he understands how all the pieces fit together and can attack a problem from all angles at once.
That's the kind of IT guy you'll miss when he's gone, and once the new husks run out of ideas 7 minutes into the crisis, that's the guy you'll be calling for help, and it won't be cheap.
No one is prepared to change how they live. The problem is that these abuses of power are forcing us to change our ways, to better suit the corporate interests that now dominate every government.
Push hard enough, and even the Xbox Live folks will get pissed off and fight back. It's going to take a hell of a disaster to get the average citizen motivated, but it will happen, that much is certain.
It is unintrusive, because I don't notice it. I fire up a Steam game, it works. I can't say the same for several titles I've purchased via retail, where the game disc installed a toxic cocktail of rootkit-style kernel drivers, or barked about the presence of Daemon Tools. Most of the time, I had to go hunt down a crack anyway, just to get the DRM to shut up and let me enjoy the products I've legally bought and paid for.
I don't see the video industry any differently. In the end, the consumers get what they want, and it's up to the providers to bend over backwards to accomodate them.
Aspiring 3D artists probably wouldn't be calling their "clients" on the cell phone in my lobby to assess how many DVDs they need to buy for that week's batch of the latest Iron Man rip. They also wouldn't brag about how this "doesn't affect welfare benefits / income tax".
I have no qualms with casual copying, go ahead and burn that movie, burn my music, burn whatever, and swap discs with your friends. I draw the line when burning copyrighted material becomes a business, because that actually IS a lost sale. If someone is willing to pay $10 to some random fraudster for a movie, but they won't spend that same $10 on a legally distributed DVD, I call bullshit.
Earlier today the WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back
Three popular plugins. Yes, they're popular, I've used all three on several sites.
THAT'S IT! That is the extent of the damage. Three plugin authors whose passwords were exposed. Nobody "gained access to [...] the plugin repository". Dear submitter, go back to kindergarten and learn to read. It's in the first two goddamned sentences.
This place has gone to the dogs... where the hell is a guy supposed to get his tech news anymore ?
Don't delude yourself. Without these high-profile vandals, we'd all be running around with "1-2-3-4-5" as our password, ripe for the real bad guys to plunder. At least these pranksters are raising awareness while causing relatively small damage.
I'm still amazed at the frequency of these high-profile breaches, mostly because developers and business owners should know better by now, but that's largely because I easily forget the fact that most people are terminally stupid. I distinctly recall one morning when I walked into the office around 11 a.m., all the guys were huddled over the boss' desk, staring at the results of a SQL injection attack. By the crack of noon, the vandalism was cleaned up, and I had written a 10-line script to prevent future SQL attacks across our entire cluster of web servers, hosting hundreds of sites. It really is that easy in 99.9% of all cases, I mean we're dealing with web sites here. You're either GETting a page or POSTing data. If a developer can't be bothered to sanitize their numbers and escape their strings before passing them to the database, that person deserves to get hacked and then sued for quackery. You can literally automate the whole process. Sure it "wastes" a few CPU cycles, much like deadbolts "waste" an inch of door jamb space.
If 2011 is the year of the digital vandal, I say bring it on. These days it takes a disaster to shake people out of their catatonic mental state anyway.
You just negated your own argument. Sorry, man, do not pass go. Do not collect 200 karma.
Law enforcement needs to decide on a firm, reliable way to identify those responsible for cybercrime, to punish them and ONLY them, not the people who happen to be providing service along the way.
Do they shut down the power company every time the crooked DEA finds a grow op ? No, because the power company is simply providing a service irrespective of usage. We need to start treating the internet like any other utility, since that's what it has become. Want a site shut down ? Track the IP, look up Whois, call the ISP, follow procedure. Randomly and illegally seizing property is NOT going to solve any problem. It will only incite more to rebel against the broken legal system.
Go ahead FBI, ruin someone's business and livelihood over fabricated evidence and feeble-minded assumptions, but don't act surprised when that ex-entrepreneur shows up at your doorstep with a bottle of jack and a loaded shotgun. Actions have consequences, and abuse of power merits the harshest consequences of all.
I think they are pissy because they dont stand up well to the competition.
Before reading the article, that was my assumption as well, but we are both wrong. IMHO, the complaint is legitimate, as Sysmark's results seem to contradict even basic common-sense metrics like "how long does it take to perform task XYZ". Whatever measurements they use, it seems the weighting has been intentionally skewed to give misleading results. Like the example in TFA, where Sysmark says an old Core-2 QX9770 with DDR2 matches an i7-965 with DDR3, even though simple task-oriented tests prove the i7 stomps the Core 2 with 25% to 38% lead, clock-for-clock.
If the stated purpose of Sysmark is to help identify the relative performance of a whole system, then it fails miserably. It tries to sell itself as a real-world test yet does not reflect real-world results.
If I were the leader of XYZZY, and a foreign nation were dropping drone-bombs on XYZZY, it probably wouldn't take very long for me to consider retaliating against that nation, perhaps by sending my army to attack theirs.
I swear, if Harper starts copying this bullshit, I'm gonna send a drone to his house. Oh, wait... his supporters already ARE drones. *ba-dum-tss*
In an ideal world, IT should be consulted while shopping around for hosted services, because they are still the ones who will get called when things go sideways. It can be as simple as "Hey Bill, I'm trying to do XYZ. Do you think XYZcloud.com is a valid option ?" and I'll take a few minutes to look them up, scout for reviews, maybe even call them up to gauge their smarts. At the same time, if I think you're jumping through unnecessary hoops, I might propose a simpler solution.
Most IT problems boil down to poor communication, not money. You can adjust to a small budget, you can't adjust to mismanaged expectations.
Day 1: Writes a flawed solution that's "close enough". Day 2: Patches up his C.V., takes the frenetic chick from the staffing agency out for a nice power dinner. Day 3-9: Sits on the product, prepares his colleague to take over responsibilities. Day 10: Delivers the finished solution early in exchange for a bonus. Days 11-21: Performs a dozen job interviews thanks to staffing agent. Day 22: Starts a new job, leaving the idiot manager behind to deal with the fallout.
Of course there are less dramatic ways to deal with it, but if intelligence and forethought are not valued traits in your organisation, the only sane thing to do is walk. Management is supposed to be a two-way conversation, if that's not the case, then your manager doesn't deserve to have you on his team.
You're bang on the money, and this is what the industry doesn't get. As a different example, I've spent more money on Steam in the past year, than I had on boxed games in the ten years prior. Why ? Because they give me what I want, how I want it, where I want it.
I can count on one hand the number of hours I spend watching TV shows every week, the wife maybe twice as many. Our cable TV bill was close to $300 a month. So, 5 bucks an hour for TV shows seems a bit much, but this is how the cableco designed it, as each show is on a different channel, in a different bundle, and it actually worked out cheaper to get the "everything" package than to cherry-pick the proper bundles. We decided this was not worth the money, so we canceled it. Now I just download those same shows off the net and pay nothing. Actually, even when we had cable, I still downloaded a lot of the shows because it was easier and more convenient than programming the DVR, and there is nothing more irritating than a super loud tampon ad jammed right after a tense scene.
Torrent sites and Usenet are great, but they're inconvenient. If the media industry could figure out a way to deliver the content at high download speeds, easily automated, and no DRM, I would happily pay maybe a dollar per hour of programming. Yeah, a dollar. If it's only streamed then 50 cents per hour. It has to be better than torrents, which means streaming + downloading (no time-restricted DRM bullshit), subscription so I don't have to go searching for new episodes every week, all past episodes available indefinitely, no ads, no fakes, no nonsense. For the estimated 60 hours we watch, that's $60 per month. For the time I spend hunting out torrents, checking release sites, and administering my seedbox, $60 would be money well spent. Those who are too cheap to pay the buck can and will continue to seek out torrents, but some of us have better things to do.
To look at it from the distributor's side, I'll take an example show that I watch: Conan. Four nights a week, one hour shows. That's 16 hours per month (roughly). Times 1.3 million viewers, would bring in 1.3 million dollars per episode. Assuming his ratings don't improve, it's still well over $200 million per year. Even if they split this 50/50 with the distribution company, I'd still hazard a guess that it's significantly more than they're currently earning. Not too bad for a geeky late night talk show, don't you think ? Guys like Letterman and *cringe* Leno bring in three to four times as many viewers. If that's not profitable, someone needs to shoot the accountants.
The UK probably likes this arrangement, because it's easier to ship someone off than have to deal with the issue themselves.
No, I'm not trying to be funny. I am genuinely that pessimistic about the UK government, because I'm watching the same shit happen to Canada, one Neo-Con at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
That requires cops that aren't terminally stupid, a rare luxury in the western world.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a city engineer, but I've spent far too much spare time researching these issues.
They take longer for two main reasons: in heavy traffic, a full roundabout is either constantly moving, or dead stopped like a parking lot. In either case, you can't get in because everyone is bumper-to-bumper.
The heavy traffic scenario is where city planners fail hard, because they too easily forget that roundabouts still shuffle the same number of vehicles into the same congested streets. If these get backed up, so does the roundabout.
There are, fundamentally, three solutions to traffic, and nobody wants to implement them:
a. less cars
b. more lanes
c. less concentration in commercial and industrial sectors
Solution A requires vastly improved public transit, for which no city official wants to shoulder the cost, or more telework which employers are still reluctant to undertake. Solution B requires expropriation to make room, and often leads to complicated entry/exit ramps, and all that costs a shitload of money. Solution C depends on Solution A, so we're doubly screwed.
if I am not sure whether to turn or not, I can just take another spin around the circle until I see the street sign
You are quite possibly the only person smart enough to do this. Most people just panic and jerk the wheel without looking.
I believe all the alleged benefits of roundabouts can be matched by properly timed lights, combined with vehicle sensors that don't suck. Computing power has become so cheap that even a two-dollar PIC chip could probably handle sufficiently advanced logic for traffic. An intersection that detects cars from a distance could preemptively switch the lights when there is no cross traffic.
The downside is we would need smarter city engineers to program them. Having met the person in charge of that in my (large capital) city, she confirmed my initial assumption that they only hire the best and brightest self-righteous retards for the job.
Every time I hear a sob story like this, I can't help but wonder why employees tolerate this kind of abuse. If the job is going to shit, LEAVE! If you have any saleable skills, you can take them elsewhere. I'm not saying they need to unionize, but almost... If game developers stood shoulder-to-shoulder and said no to hostile work environments, the industry would be forced to adapt. It sounds very much like these people are afraid to say no. You'll say "but what about the house" ? Fuck the house! What good is a house when you spend every waking moment at work, eating advil by the handful ? Fuck the house, and fuck the job. You have better things to do in life than pad some greedy sociopath's stock options.
Conversely, if Rockstar needs 110 man-hours a week for every coder, they should hire 2 extra coders to meet the demand. If that breaks the budget, fuck the project, it's an unprofitable project. If it can't be profitable while adhering to reasonable work conditions and timelines, then it should not be undertaken in the first place. If a guy called me tomorrow and said he wanted a Facebook killer for $50, I'd cheerfully invite him to die in a fucking fire. No, scratch that, I'd go to his house and beat him to death with a Chia Pet for even proposing such a ridiculous venture. Game devs need to learn to do the same thing. Democracy only works if you have the brass balls to stick to your guns.
To be fair, they've been introducing some pretty big changes in 2.6.38 and 39, enough that I am reluctant to upgrade from 2.6.36 on any servers because it's just been changing TOO quickly and I'm afraid of new bugs.
Well, Windows 7 *is* much faster than Vista.
Sarcasm fail.
That just doesn't sound like the type of open-source project that would succeed, because social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle. Either you build a big network and sell the eyeballs, or you fade into obscurity before anyone even notices.
Even Wikipedia has better info than that paid article :P
UL: Underwriters Lab - a safety testing outfit
CE: Conformité Européenne (french) - Europe's equivalent of the UL
TUV: Technischer Überwachungsverein - German safety org like the above two
FCC: Federal Communications Commission - they license, test and certify radio equipment (cell phones, wifi, etc)
RoHS: Restriction of Hazardous Substances - a European law restricting hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and a few others
ENERGY STAR: A set of energy efficiency standards primarily featured in the US, British Commonwealth nations, and parts of Europe. They are typically much stricter than national requirements.
At the end of the day though, most of these are just marketing stickers. Yes, they require some degree of certification, but it's kind of like getting your MCSE or A+. Not having the cert does not necessarily mean your device will blow up or pop breakers, it just means the mfg didn't pay their fee to get certified. For big mainstream appliances it's kind of dumb to not have it, but on most smaller gadgets it's a non-issue.
If you ever bump into Mr. Jones, have him email me. I wanna buy this man a fuckin' BEER! :D
Because stupid people are everywhere, and they are breeding at alarming rates ?
Oh, nice. Management finally read the "Complete Idiots guide to posting as AC".
I've watched too many companies struggle after losing a star employee. Not just someone who's good at their job, but also good at a bunch of tangentially-related duties too. The coder with a background in corporate accounting, or the sysadmin with people skills, these hybrids are often the backbone of a small business, but the pigeonholing nature of management often fails to recognize that extra value. You can replace them with a regular, boring, single-minded IT guy, sure, but the new guy won't do all that extra stuff that was taken for granted.
Given that a significant part of any IT skillset is problem-solving, usually the guy with the most diverse knowledge base is also the most creative and resourceful one. He might not be so great at coding, and he probably relies on Google a lot for server admin, but he'll be the one to save your hide when disaster strikes, because he understands how all the pieces fit together and can attack a problem from all angles at once.
That's the kind of IT guy you'll miss when he's gone, and once the new husks run out of ideas 7 minutes into the crisis, that's the guy you'll be calling for help, and it won't be cheap.
Oh.
My.
Jebus.
I fell off the damn chair laughing. Now I gotta find a ticket for that Toronto concert! EPIC!
No one is prepared to change how they live. The problem is that these abuses of power are forcing us to change our ways, to better suit the corporate interests that now dominate every government.
Push hard enough, and even the Xbox Live folks will get pissed off and fight back. It's going to take a hell of a disaster to get the average citizen motivated, but it will happen, that much is certain.
It is unintrusive, because I don't notice it. I fire up a Steam game, it works. I can't say the same for several titles I've purchased via retail, where the game disc installed a toxic cocktail of rootkit-style kernel drivers, or barked about the presence of Daemon Tools. Most of the time, I had to go hunt down a crack anyway, just to get the DRM to shut up and let me enjoy the products I've legally bought and paid for.
I don't see the video industry any differently. In the end, the consumers get what they want, and it's up to the providers to bend over backwards to accomodate them.
Aspiring 3D artists probably wouldn't be calling their "clients" on the cell phone in my lobby to assess how many DVDs they need to buy for that week's batch of the latest Iron Man rip. They also wouldn't brag about how this "doesn't affect welfare benefits / income tax".
I have no qualms with casual copying, go ahead and burn that movie, burn my music, burn whatever, and swap discs with your friends. I draw the line when burning copyrighted material becomes a business, because that actually IS a lost sale. If someone is willing to pay $10 to some random fraudster for a movie, but they won't spend that same $10 on a legally distributed DVD, I call bullshit.
Earlier today the WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back
Three popular plugins. Yes, they're popular, I've used all three on several sites.
THAT'S IT! That is the extent of the damage. Three plugin authors whose passwords were exposed. Nobody "gained access to [...] the plugin repository". Dear submitter, go back to kindergarten and learn to read. It's in the first two goddamned sentences.
This place has gone to the dogs... where the hell is a guy supposed to get his tech news anymore ?
Don't delude yourself. Without these high-profile vandals, we'd all be running around with "1-2-3-4-5" as our password, ripe for the real bad guys to plunder. At least these pranksters are raising awareness while causing relatively small damage.
I'm still amazed at the frequency of these high-profile breaches, mostly because developers and business owners should know better by now, but that's largely because I easily forget the fact that most people are terminally stupid. I distinctly recall one morning when I walked into the office around 11 a.m., all the guys were huddled over the boss' desk, staring at the results of a SQL injection attack. By the crack of noon, the vandalism was cleaned up, and I had written a 10-line script to prevent future SQL attacks across our entire cluster of web servers, hosting hundreds of sites. It really is that easy in 99.9% of all cases, I mean we're dealing with web sites here. You're either GETting a page or POSTing data. If a developer can't be bothered to sanitize their numbers and escape their strings before passing them to the database, that person deserves to get hacked and then sued for quackery. You can literally automate the whole process. Sure it "wastes" a few CPU cycles, much like deadbolts "waste" an inch of door jamb space.
If 2011 is the year of the digital vandal, I say bring it on. These days it takes a disaster to shake people out of their catatonic mental state anyway.
(unless it's been bugged)
You just negated your own argument. Sorry, man, do not pass go. Do not collect 200 karma.
Law enforcement needs to decide on a firm, reliable way to identify those responsible for cybercrime, to punish them and ONLY them, not the people who happen to be providing service along the way.
Do they shut down the power company every time the crooked DEA finds a grow op ? No, because the power company is simply providing a service irrespective of usage. We need to start treating the internet like any other utility, since that's what it has become. Want a site shut down ? Track the IP, look up Whois, call the ISP, follow procedure. Randomly and illegally seizing property is NOT going to solve any problem. It will only incite more to rebel against the broken legal system.
Go ahead FBI, ruin someone's business and livelihood over fabricated evidence and feeble-minded assumptions, but don't act surprised when that ex-entrepreneur shows up at your doorstep with a bottle of jack and a loaded shotgun. Actions have consequences, and abuse of power merits the harshest consequences of all.
I think they are pissy because they dont stand up well to the competition.
Before reading the article, that was my assumption as well, but we are both wrong. IMHO, the complaint is legitimate, as Sysmark's results seem to contradict even basic common-sense metrics like "how long does it take to perform task XYZ". Whatever measurements they use, it seems the weighting has been intentionally skewed to give misleading results. Like the example in TFA, where Sysmark says an old Core-2 QX9770 with DDR2 matches an i7-965 with DDR3, even though simple task-oriented tests prove the i7 stomps the Core 2 with 25% to 38% lead, clock-for-clock.
If the stated purpose of Sysmark is to help identify the relative performance of a whole system, then it fails miserably. It tries to sell itself as a real-world test yet does not reflect real-world results.
If I were the leader of XYZZY, and a foreign nation were dropping drone-bombs on XYZZY, it probably wouldn't take very long for me to consider retaliating against that nation, perhaps by sending my army to attack theirs.
I swear, if Harper starts copying this bullshit, I'm gonna send a drone to his house. Oh, wait... his supporters already ARE drones. *ba-dum-tss*
Both.
In an ideal world, IT should be consulted while shopping around for hosted services, because they are still the ones who will get called when things go sideways. It can be as simple as "Hey Bill, I'm trying to do XYZ. Do you think XYZcloud.com is a valid option ?" and I'll take a few minutes to look them up, scout for reviews, maybe even call them up to gauge their smarts. At the same time, if I think you're jumping through unnecessary hoops, I might propose a simpler solution.
Most IT problems boil down to poor communication, not money. You can adjust to a small budget, you can't adjust to mismanaged expectations.
Smart I.T. guy:
Day 1: Writes a flawed solution that's "close enough".
Day 2: Patches up his C.V., takes the frenetic chick from the staffing agency out for a nice power dinner.
Day 3-9: Sits on the product, prepares his colleague to take over responsibilities.
Day 10: Delivers the finished solution early in exchange for a bonus.
Days 11-21: Performs a dozen job interviews thanks to staffing agent.
Day 22: Starts a new job, leaving the idiot manager behind to deal with the fallout.
Of course there are less dramatic ways to deal with it, but if intelligence and forethought are not valued traits in your organisation, the only sane thing to do is walk. Management is supposed to be a two-way conversation, if that's not the case, then your manager doesn't deserve to have you on his team.
You're bang on the money, and this is what the industry doesn't get. As a different example, I've spent more money on Steam in the past year, than I had on boxed games in the ten years prior. Why ? Because they give me what I want, how I want it, where I want it.
I can count on one hand the number of hours I spend watching TV shows every week, the wife maybe twice as many. Our cable TV bill was close to $300 a month. So, 5 bucks an hour for TV shows seems a bit much, but this is how the cableco designed it, as each show is on a different channel, in a different bundle, and it actually worked out cheaper to get the "everything" package than to cherry-pick the proper bundles. We decided this was not worth the money, so we canceled it. Now I just download those same shows off the net and pay nothing. Actually, even when we had cable, I still downloaded a lot of the shows because it was easier and more convenient than programming the DVR, and there is nothing more irritating than a super loud tampon ad jammed right after a tense scene.
Torrent sites and Usenet are great, but they're inconvenient. If the media industry could figure out a way to deliver the content at high download speeds, easily automated, and no DRM, I would happily pay maybe a dollar per hour of programming. Yeah, a dollar. If it's only streamed then 50 cents per hour. It has to be better than torrents, which means streaming + downloading (no time-restricted DRM bullshit), subscription so I don't have to go searching for new episodes every week, all past episodes available indefinitely, no ads, no fakes, no nonsense. For the estimated 60 hours we watch, that's $60 per month. For the time I spend hunting out torrents, checking release sites, and administering my seedbox, $60 would be money well spent. Those who are too cheap to pay the buck can and will continue to seek out torrents, but some of us have better things to do.
To look at it from the distributor's side, I'll take an example show that I watch: Conan. Four nights a week, one hour shows. That's 16 hours per month (roughly). Times 1.3 million viewers, would bring in 1.3 million dollars per episode. Assuming his ratings don't improve, it's still well over $200 million per year. Even if they split this 50/50 with the distribution company, I'd still hazard a guess that it's significantly more than they're currently earning. Not too bad for a geeky late night talk show, don't you think ? Guys like Letterman and *cringe* Leno bring in three to four times as many viewers. If that's not profitable, someone needs to shoot the accountants.
The UK probably likes this arrangement, because it's easier to ship someone off than have to deal with the issue themselves.
No, I'm not trying to be funny. I am genuinely that pessimistic about the UK government, because I'm watching the same shit happen to Canada, one Neo-Con at a time.
Says so right in TFA: 5683 lines up with the letters L-O-V-E
You know, because chicks use phones too.