For what that costs a night, I'd rather stay at the Dolphin Bay Hotel in Hilo, Hawaii for a week. The scent of orchids carried on the mild trade winds beats anything on plasma or sitting hunched over a desk with a laptop, regardless of bandwidth.
With all of our jobs being outsourced to sweatshops overseas, the "Room of the Future" is that cardboard box that the massage chair came in, and digging for scraps in the dumpster, out behind the Hilton.
How else do you support those executives at the top that produce nothing of substance (and sorry folks, "business decisions" are not items of substance) yet pay these guys a Mil a year and up? They sit on each others Boards, upping each other's compensation, all enjoying the cash flow circle jerk.
There's (at least) three ways; theft, lawsuits, and slavery.
The theft happens in places like manipulating the stock markets and shuffling around nonexistent commodities like Enron, or something as simple as lobbying the government to allow usury rates of >30% on credit cards, or allowing state-run lotteries and casinos. Or, if you're thinking big, invading another country on false pretenses to steal their resources.
The lawsuits we are seeing with SCO are a good example of the second method. Granted, it's one corporation taking from another in this case, but the cost of that will be passed down to consumers or compensated for with unemployment because of less working capital. That expense rarely impacts executive compensation, which is preserved at all costs. Money moves around, yet produces nothing of substance. Maybe this really belongs under theft, because that's what it is.
And then there is slavery. Sure, these people don't work "for free". But even in the US's past, the slaves were still fed, clothed and sheltered. You can't kill 'em off or there will be no slaves left to produce those items of substance. But when the profit is made from those items, only enough is put back to the slave population keep the system working. It's happening in Mexico, in Indonesia, in India, and in the US migrant worker camps from the Midwest to California. This is, of course, nothing new. The US was made possible through the exploitation of others. We saw a bit of change here after the post-war boom of the '50s and again in the '90s for a few years but when "money" sees this happening, it moves to quickly remedy the situation, usually by installing a Republican run government.
Here in Indianapolis, there's an area north of the city where they are building these huge, multi-million dollar houses. Hundreds of them. Where does this money come from? Is it necessary? Steven Hilbert, who ran Conseco has this huge mansion. He was ran out of the company for fraud and theft yet he's got his castle. And you've now got this army of VP weasels that all think that they too deserve to take one to on hundred million a year and bury in in the ground so they, the trophy wife, and the trust fund kids can live like kings. Instead of taking the working capital and putting it back into the company, letting people make a working wage, they instead believe that they should, indeed deserve, to surround themselves with rewards of their greed and cunning.
That money has to come from someplace, and that's from the backs of those with no other option but to be enslaved, or starve. This can't last forever, but it's end is not coming soon. At least not until the lease on their new Hummer H2 runs out. At least that's what Rush told me: It's a good thing.
But if you made a set top box with a moderate to large subscribed content on demand, how could you do an interface without stepping on this patent?
On the other hand, if a browser saved bookmarks up on the server itsn't that the same thing?
So....
If in OS X, iSync saves bookmarks for IE or Safari on your iDisk, and some of those could certainly be bookmarks to online games and video that you subscribe to,
isn't that "A user-specific, persistent "favorites" list, to be stored at the headend" and "An auto-scrolling UI for managing that favorites list, provided by the STB"?
Would it only violate the patent if you set your iBook on top of your TV?
One has always had to pay for that sort of information.
$12.95 a month to hit a TV listings database? ...an expectation that you could get tv guide data completely for free.
It's NOT "completely free". Looking at the site, a TiVo costs $250-$350. Plus, I'm providing viewing stats that they are selling for profit.
The leech & mooch cultures are the companies that follow the "Buy a big ticket item, plus pay a monthly charge or we turn it off" model. It's all about playing the customer/consumer for a sucker. Tivo, XM, Sirius... Death by a thousand ($10.00) cuts.
DirecTV, although high priced, sells the dish pretty cheap and that's much more content than just your month of local listings.
- And last time I looked, titantv.com had "free" tv listings. I checked, there's nothing good on tonight...
I wasn't trying to be funny, I was being angry, bitter, and dissapointed in a future that I thought would work better without paying a tax for every little thing imaginable, plus be monitored while I do it. How much is enough?
- I have a 1st gen tivo that's unsubscribed and it's a doorstop that continually bitches that it wants money. In no money mode, it should act like a nice, full featured vcr. Let me set my own times, channel etc. with no gripes about paying up. Yeah, I know it's TiVo's commerce model. Screw TiVo's commerce model.
- Having to press a fast forward button like a lab rat every 4.5 minutes to bypass commercials isn't a very pleasant activity.
- It's digital data. I should be able to hit the thing on my local net and pull data without making hacking the tivo my hobby. These functional limitations are completly artificial. Sure, I could figure it out, but what's that time worth?
I don't have to fill my fridge with freon every two months. I could figure out how to do that too. But I don't want to. I'm glad that Amana hasn't adpoted the media biz model or we'd be hunted down for stealing "cold".
I bought it. It -can- do it. It should, out of the box. If I wanted a vhs copy, I would have used a vcr.
- I had subscribed to DirecTV for years. For >50$ a month, and going up, you get 150 channels of content that are >50% commercials. Late night, it's more like 70% with all of the infomercial filler time -that I'm paying for-.
I've pushed myself away from the table and said I've had enough.
How long must we continue to suckle the corporate snoot and say "Yum!"?
I just tried it with my address and got this: - Maps & Directions You have reached a page that is experiencing problems or a location where a page does not exist. Try again later or visit our home page at maps.msn.com or maps.msn.co.uk
Great choice in location service providers. Microsoft rules.
You buy a TiVo box for a few hundred, pay a few hundred more for the subscription that doesn't really pay for content, just indexing and the privilege of them not disabling the box that you paid for. All of this in order to watch commercial-filled television that you are also paying your sat or cable company even more money for, all tied up in a DRM wrapper.
Now, they are collecting your stats, your private life (as collected on the box you paid for, perhaps continually), and selling it. And people here think it's great because (at least today) it's not directly tied to your name.
...now we have tons of choices and tons of features Sure. 2 bucks for this, a buck for that, another three for this. They still charge extra for TouchTone support. All just to set a few bits in your record in the switch. And it takes hours, if not days, for those bits to get flipped. Yeah, it's great.
If there's any aspect of customer service that is seen as a "benefit" in the US telecom industry, it's is perceived as a system fault and an unnecessary expense, corrected immediately, and the cost to eliminate the benefit is added as a surcharge on your bill. The stock price rises.01% and the top execs all get a 1 Mil bonus for the quarter for cost containment.
Raw Power vs. Massive Storage Raw Power is a classic but I thought that Massive Storage was far too commercial and derivative. Many claim that it's what caused the breakup of the Stooges, something Iggy Pop denies to this day.
There's an endless number of "love songs" on the radio these days, as there has been for countless decades. It's been the overriding theme in popular music. Yet, I don't see everyone falling in love with each other.
We've been avoiding any typical genres with our game tranquility.
Apple's review said this about us: If you've watched those old movies or TV shows that fantasized about what our lives might be like in the future, you've probably seen people playing futuristic games in ultramodern settings. And you may have thought, "Wow. I want to play those games. I want to be there."
Guess what? You're there. The game's called tranquility, and it represents an entirely new kind of game.
We use the term "game" loosely to describe tranquility, because it's like nothing you've ever played before. And while it does have definitive objectives, it's also a highly sensual environment that you can enjoy without pursuing any kind of goal at all. In fact, if you want to, you can just bounce around to music. "
Doesn't sound like a typical title does it? But it's a hard sell.
It appears that, at least in the US, if it doesn't have a gun, or a car, or a spaceship, or little puppets running around, the mainstream game market sees it as "pointless", even if pointlessness is pretty much the concept behind most games anyway.
Another part of the problem might be that the money men, the guys running the publishers, are too Type A to be able to comprehend something where the goal isn't to dominate and vanquish your opponent. That's why we see mostly things like Quake and GTA clones. Beyond that, it's the 10,001th version of Breakout or Tetris.
Sure, some things slip through the cracks like the Sims series but that took them like ten years and even then, they keep pushing variants of the same idea.
Slashdot Mirror
For what that costs a night,
I'd rather stay at the Dolphin Bay Hotel in Hilo, Hawaii for a week.
The scent of orchids carried on the mild trade winds beats anything on plasma or sitting hunched over a desk with a laptop, regardless of bandwidth.
With all of our jobs being outsourced to sweatshops overseas,
the "Room of the Future" is that cardboard box that the massage
chair came in, and digging for scraps in the dumpster, out behind the Hilton.
How else do you support those executives at the top that produce nothing of substance
(and sorry folks, "business decisions" are not items of substance) yet pay these guys
a Mil a year and up? They sit on each others Boards, upping each other's compensation,
all enjoying the cash flow circle jerk.
There's (at least) three ways; theft, lawsuits, and slavery.
The theft happens in places like manipulating the stock markets and shuffling around
nonexistent commodities like Enron, or something as simple as lobbying the government
to allow usury rates of >30% on credit cards, or allowing state-run lotteries and casinos.
Or, if you're thinking big, invading another country on false pretenses to steal their resources.
The lawsuits we are seeing with SCO are a good example of the second method. Granted, it's
one corporation taking from another in this case, but the cost of that will be passed down to
consumers or compensated for with unemployment because of less working capital. That
expense rarely impacts executive compensation, which is preserved at all costs.
Money moves around, yet produces nothing of substance. Maybe this really belongs
under theft, because that's what it is.
And then there is slavery. Sure, these people don't work "for free". But even in the US's
past, the slaves were still fed, clothed and sheltered. You can't kill 'em off or there will be
no slaves left to produce those items of substance. But when the profit is made from those
items, only enough is put back to the slave population keep the system working. It's
happening in Mexico, in Indonesia, in India, and in the US migrant worker camps from
the Midwest to California. This is, of course, nothing new. The US was made possible
through the exploitation of others. We saw a bit of change here after the post-war boom
of the '50s and again in the '90s for a few years but when "money" sees this happening,
it moves to quickly remedy the situation, usually by installing a Republican run government.
Here in Indianapolis, there's an area north of the city where they are building these huge,
multi-million dollar houses. Hundreds of them. Where does this money come from?
Is it necessary? Steven Hilbert, who ran Conseco has this huge mansion. He was ran out
of the company for fraud and theft yet he's got his castle. And you've now got this army
of VP weasels that all think that they too deserve to take one to on hundred million a year
and bury in in the ground so they, the trophy wife, and the trust fund kids can live like kings.
Instead of taking the working capital and putting it back into the company, letting people make
a working wage, they instead believe that they should, indeed deserve, to surround themselves
with rewards of their greed and cunning.
That money has to come from someplace, and that's from the backs of those with no other option
but to be enslaved, or starve. This can't last forever, but it's end is not coming soon. At least not
until the lease on their new Hummer H2 runs out. At least that's what Rush told me: It's a good thing.
No worries. Wouldn't apply to you.
...some consumer level video editing program.
/. every day. You're welcome.
Well then it's an educational article because FCP is a pro level video editor.
You learn something new on
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
When Apple releases OS X Panther, it will give Microsoft a few months of new innovations to work on.
But...it's so much fun. And besides, they suck!
But if you made a set top box with a moderate to large subscribed content on demand,
how could you do an interface without stepping on this patent?
On the other hand, if a browser saved bookmarks up on the server itsn't that the same thing?
So....
If in OS X, iSync saves bookmarks for IE or Safari on your iDisk,
and some of those could certainly be bookmarks to
online games and video that you subscribe to,
isn't that
"A user-specific, persistent "favorites" list, to be stored at the headend"
and
"An auto-scrolling UI for managing that favorites list, provided by the STB"?
Would it only violate the patent if you set your iBook on top of your TV?
I've never understood it. Never. Neither did Mom.
One has always had to pay for that sort of information .
...an expectation that you could get tv guide data completely for free.
$12.95 a month to hit a TV listings database?
It's NOT "completely free".
Looking at the site, a TiVo costs $250-$350. Plus, I'm providing viewing stats that they are selling for profit.
The leech & mooch cultures are the companies that follow the "Buy a big ticket item, plus pay a monthly charge or we turn it off" model.
It's all about playing the customer/consumer for a sucker. Tivo, XM, Sirius... Death by a thousand ($10.00) cuts.
DirecTV, although high priced, sells the dish pretty cheap and that's much more content than just your month of local listings.
-
And last time I looked, titantv.com had "free" tv listings. I checked, there's nothing good on tonight...
I wasn't trying to be funny, I was being angry, bitter,
and dissapointed in a future that I thought would work
better without paying a tax for every little thing imaginable,
plus be monitored while I do it. How much is enough?
- I have a 1st gen tivo that's unsubscribed and it's a doorstop that
continually bitches that it wants money.
In no money mode, it should act like a nice, full featured vcr.
Let me set my own times, channel etc. with no gripes about paying up.
Yeah, I know it's TiVo's commerce model. Screw TiVo's commerce model.
- Having to press a fast forward button like a lab rat every
4.5 minutes to bypass commercials isn't a very pleasant activity.
- It's digital data. I should be able to hit the thing on my local
net and pull data without making hacking the tivo my hobby.
These functional limitations are completly artificial.
Sure, I could figure it out, but what's that time worth?
I don't have to fill my fridge with freon every two months.
I could figure out how to do that too. But I don't want to.
I'm glad that Amana hasn't adpoted the media biz model or
we'd be hunted down for stealing "cold".
I bought it. It -can- do it. It should, out of the box.
If I wanted a vhs copy, I would have used a vcr.
- I had subscribed to DirecTV for years. For >50$ a month, and going up,
you get 150 channels of content that are >50% commercials.
Late night, it's more like 70% with all of the infomercial filler time -that I'm paying for-.
I've pushed myself away from the table and said I've had enough.
How long must we continue to suckle the corporate snoot and say "Yum!"?
using a computer you had to pay several hundred for..
Hey, I resent that. I use a Mac and paid thousands.
mappoint.com?
I just tried it with my address and got this:
- Maps & Directions
You have reached a page that is experiencing problems or a location where a page does not exist.
Try again later or visit our home page at maps.msn.com or maps.msn.co.uk
Great choice in location service providers.
Microsoft rules.
You buy a TiVo box for a few hundred, pay a few hundred
more for the subscription that doesn't really pay
for content, just indexing and the privilege of them
not disabling the box that you paid for. All of this in
order to watch commercial-filled television that you
are also paying your sat or cable company even more
money for, all tied up in a DRM wrapper.
Now, they are collecting your stats, your private life
(as collected on the box you paid for, perhaps continually),
and selling it. And people here think it's great because
(at least today) it's not directly tied to your name.
Boy, that TV must be really great stuff.
Under Bush, we will get the Depression all right, but a telecom TVA ain't happening.
One Bell System - it works
$ _
...now we have tons of choices and tons of features
Sure. 2 bucks for this, a buck for that, another three for this.
They still charge extra for TouchTone support.
All just to set a few bits in your record in the switch.
And it takes hours, if not days, for those bits to get flipped.
Yeah, it's great.
If there's any aspect of customer service that is seen as a "benefit" in the .01% and the top execs all get a
US telecom industry, it's is perceived as a system fault and an unnecessary
expense, corrected immediately, and the cost to eliminate the benefit is added as
a surcharge on your bill. The stock price rises
1 Mil bonus for the quarter for cost containment.
Raw Power vs. Massive Storage
Raw Power is a classic but I thought that Massive Storage was far too commercial and derivative.
Many claim that it's what caused the breakup of the Stooges, something Iggy Pop denies to this day.
There's an endless number of "love songs" on the radio these
days, as there has been for countless decades. It's been the
overriding theme in popular music. Yet, I don't see everyone
falling in love with each other.
Why is Limbaugh so popular with the American public?
Simple:
"The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."
- Frank Zappa
It's probably because Microsoft indeed sucks and most of us have had first hand experience of that suckness, at least more than once.
We've been avoiding any typical genres with our game tranquility.
Apple's review said this about us:
If you've watched those old movies or TV shows that fantasized about what our lives might be like in the future,
you've probably seen people playing futuristic games in ultramodern settings. And you may have thought,
"Wow. I want to play those games. I want to be there."
Guess what? You're there. The game's called tranquility, and it represents an entirely new kind of game.
We use the term "game" loosely to describe tranquility, because it's like nothing you've ever played before.
And while it does have definitive objectives, it's also a highly sensual environment that you can enjoy without
pursuing any kind of goal at all. In fact, if you want to, you can just bounce around to music. "
Doesn't sound like a typical title does it? But it's a hard sell.
It appears that, at least in the US, if it doesn't have a gun, or a car, or a spaceship, or little puppets running
around, the mainstream game market sees it as "pointless", even if pointlessness is pretty much the concept
behind most games anyway.
Another part of the problem might be that the money men, the guys running the publishers, are too Type A to be
able to comprehend something where the goal isn't to dominate and vanquish your opponent. That's why we
see mostly things like Quake and GTA clones. Beyond that, it's the 10,001th version of Breakout or Tetris.
Sure, some things slip through the cracks like the Sims series but that took them like ten years and even then,
they keep pushing variants of the same idea.
I was there too for a while.
Lucent just really "The Labs" anymore is it?
Well, I guess it started going away in spirit after the divestiture in '84.