I've always thought it would be cool as shit to be able to use a cell phone as a personal universal remote. If all the manufacturers got on board and came up with some sort of standards, your phone could scan for devices, you select the device, it pairs up, and the relevant virtual remote loads up ready to roll, as elaborate or as simple as necessary or desired.
Would be nice, anyway. Hell, it could end the stand-alone remote entirely for a lot of people...
All the more reason for us good little consumers to go upgrade the television every few years like we do with our cellphones, computers, and now, tablets and e-readers.
3D obviously wasn't the moneymaker the TV industry was hoping for, so now "Smart TV" is the new gimmick. HDTV's have already saturated the market, and margins are already razor thin, even with everything being done in China.
I'll take tech with a modular system of easily replaceable components over a unified device in almost every situation. There are many HTPC's out there on the market at virtually any price-point. Hell, a modern game console is enough for most people's needs, and the 360/PS3 is what, like $250 bucks now? You can probably pick up a used one for $150, and make any damn TV a "Smart TV"...
I don't know about that, I've got a 32" Samsung LCD I bought back in 2006 that's still going strong. Cost me $1600 new, compared to the $1000 the 55" cost that ended up taking it's place, so it wasn't cheap, but it's not nearly as bad as the Sanyos and Visios and shit I see people replacing every other year.
Still, I get what you're saying. My grandmother's ancient console TV in the basement worked from the day they bought it in the 60's until they sold it in the early 2000's. I doubt a single appliance or device I've bought within the last 10 years will last even half that.
Absolutely -- being embarrassed in the locker room crowd at your high school is a problem that is temporary, limited, and soon forgotten by everybody involved.
Except for, you know, the kids that are on the receiving end of that treatment. Given that kids are throwing themselves off of bridges and hanging themselves in their closets over this shit, I think you're being a little obtuse when you say it "is a problem that is temporary, limited, and soon forgotten".
As someone that grew up morbidly obese, believe me, I know what it means to be bullied incessantly. Some of the things I went through over 25 years ago still haunt me to this day. You may forget about it, but the people on the receiving end, we never do. We try to deal with it, because we have to, but we never forget.
But I guarantee you he didn't undergo anything as publicly humiliating as his own malicious and hate-filled public attack on Rick Santorum.
Really? You can guarantee that?
All those kids that kill themselves year after year over bullying and harassment must just be imagining their torments, I guess.
Santorum is a piece of shit that is reaping what he's sown. If his statements were about blacks, instead of homosexuals, there would be no one defending him, but because homophobia is the most acceptable form of bigotry in the far right, it's poor Santorum and the big bad Google. Dan Savage didn't attack Santorum because he's a Christian. Savage attacked Santorum because he's a bigot. There are plenty of Christians out there that are not bigots trying to shove religious considerations into secular laws.
Kevin Smith made Clerks for less than $20,000 and it went on to make $20 million in the box office, not to mention millions in home media and network sales and the launching of his career.
I get just as much entertainment from user submissions on Youtube as I do from huge blockbusters these days. I think the only people terrified of a "Hollywood-less" future is Hollywood itself.
No, it will just get driven to other areas, the people will slowly move, and the cat and mouse game will continue.
Taking down Megaupload will do the same thing for digital locker sites that taking Napster down did for music piracy...that is, nothing. For a while there will be confusion while the masses react and a billion different services will rise up to take their place. When Napster got shut down, people just migrated to direct P2P like Limewire, Kazaa, Toadnode, Bearshare. When those started getting shut down, people moved on to torrents. When torrents started to get riskier, they moved to digital locker sites like Megaupload. Now that megaupload is gone, people will just start moving to one of the dozens of other sites out there. The content is still out there, on billions of hard drives all over the world. All it takes is someone fixing the links.
No, all this will accomplish is make the pirates obfuscate their activity more, which will make it harder for the MAFIAA to track/prove. The game continues.
This. CNN didn't even cover it before the plans for the blackout solidified, and even then, there was only a couple articles in their "tech" section. Until the actual blackout on January 18th, then they actually had an article on the main page about it, and the article was pretty simplistic at that. The actual reasons for opposing SOPA were all but ignored...
At least they admitted their parent company, Time Warner, was a supporter of SOPA/PIPA. It got all of a single line in the article, but they admitted it. How many other "news" organizations admitted their own involvement in the creation of these bills?
This entire situation only got coverage in the MSM when they were forced to cover it due to the opposition online. If not for the blackout, they wouldn't have said a word, despite the fact that there was serious opposition going on for weeks before that point...
Oh, I'll bet any amount of money you could find a lawyer to argue that point, and that there also exists a clueless enough judge to agree with the assertion.
You must have far more faith in the integrity of our courts than I...
To get my way? I just want to be left the fuck alone! I want the government to stop listening in on my fucking phone calls, stop scraping my instant messages, stop trying to give me the fucking finger in the ass routine every time I have the audacity to get on an airplane, stop handing over my fucking tax dollars to goddamned Wall Street bankers, stop allowing these parasites we call "corporations" to put slaves across the world to work and bring their wares here for nothing while 1 in 5 of us are either unemployed or underemployed, stop allowing our infrastructure here to fucking fall apart while we're helping other countries build....
The government has been wiping it's ass with the Bill of Rights for decades, but the last few years or so they've been ramping up. They see the writing on the wall. They know the jig is up, so they're making their last ditch cash/power grabs while enough people still have the faith in their government necessary to facilitate it. Once that's gone, it's all over. The locusts will pick up and move on to greener pastures while we fucking eat each other. The Occupy protests are going to look like a block party a year from now.
I understand your point, I really do, but I truly believe it's too late for that now. We're stuck in a positive feedback loop. There's only going to be more civil disobedience, resulting in more of our rights being taken away, resulting in more civil disobedience, resulting in more rights taken away, resulting in more civil disobedience...you get my point. You may not share my opinions, but to be honest, I'd rather be prepared for that eventuality than not, and since buying more than 7 days worth of food or owning multiple guns is probably enough to get you on some government watch list (if me simply talking about my extreme dissatisfaction with my government as of late isn't enough), I'm probably fucked. But I am not going to be a victim.
But no, rather than accept that the country will always be messy and that we should do the best we can, you want to burn it all down.
No, I will not accept that. You want people to just shrug their shoulders and say "Meh, shit's fucked up, shit's always been fucked up, so fuck it?" Bullshit all over that. You be as complacent as you fucking want. I know we can do better.
I don't want it to come to that point, I really don't. But like I said, I will not be a victim. I'm not going to sit idly by and watch our right to privacy be taken away, our right to free speech taken away, our right to freely move about the country taken away, our right to be secure both in our person and property taken away. Our own government has been doing this to us at a fever pitch for the last fucking decade, not fucking Al Qaeda, not Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, not Iran, not China. This was our own fucking government doing this bullshit, across all three branches, and the people just repeated the same old litany "Well, if it makes us safer..."
Fuck that bullshit. No more. Put your hands over your ears and keep repeating "it's not that bad, it's not that bad, it's not that bad..." if that's what you want to do, but forgive me and the millions of other people that actually believe in something better for not being quite ready to bend over and get fucked with the rest of the cattle.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Revolution is our birthright as American citizens. Bloodless if possible, bloody if necessary. It is obvious that our government has been twisted against the people it is supposed to be representative of.
I don't want to hurt anyone, but I will not be a victim. This isn't Iraq, and we're not terrified villagers living in stone age conditions. The people have been asleep for a long time, lulled into a false sense of security by greed and manipulation, but they're finally beginning to wake up, and it's about fucking time...
It seems clear to me now that the last shred of what made this country great died on 9/11. The terrorists attacked us, but we finished the job all on our own.
I read a good analogy on another thread concerning megaupload...
Imagine you own a storage unit in a large complex. Now, a few other people are storing illegal contraband in their storage unit, but that's just a few out of hundreds, and most people are perfectly law-abiding. The police get wind that there's contraband in one of the units. They react by putting police tape up across the front of the entire storage unit complex, confiscate everything, legal and illegal alike, and torch it all...just to be sure they got all the contraband.
Another good one I heard: Imagine a full parking garage. One of the cars in the parking garage was used in the commission of a bank robbery. The cops don't want to be bothered trying to figure out which car it was specifically, so instead they impound the entire garage full of cars permanently and tell all the owners they have no recourse. They get the car they were after, but in the process infringe upon the rights of everyone else.
Both of those do a good job of explaining how law abiding citizens will be totally screwed by shit like SOPA/PIPA. At Megaupload, there were millions of legitimate users doing nothing wrong, but all their shit is taken, too, no trial, no recourse, no chance to ever get their totally legal content back, just because other people broke the law. If it were a physical structure, like the storage unit or garage in the above analogies, nobody would argue that the public would go apeshit, but because it's a web site and a bunch of 1's and 0's people don't conceptualize it like that, but that's what it is.
I would sooner live in a world where blockbuster films were uneconomical to produce, and therefore simply didn't exist, than one where the internet miracle is smothered.
Goddamned right. Quality films would still be produced. Clerks, for instance, which cost less than $30,000 to make and went on to make 10 times that in the theater, not to mention 15 years of VHS, DVD and Bluray sales. Chasing Amy only cost $250,000 and made almost 50 times that in the box office.
Yeah, we may not see $150,000,000 movies like Transformers but, honestly, I'm cool with that. Besides, more than anything now I find hours of entertainment on Youtube watching home-made videos. Probably a big reason why they're chomping at the bit to find some way to shut it down, because Lord knows if they're not standing in between the viewer and the content creator, getting their piece, it's a goddamned tragedy.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they start rebooting/remaking everything.
I've always thought it would be cool as shit to be able to use a cell phone as a personal universal remote. If all the manufacturers got on board and came up with some sort of standards, your phone could scan for devices, you select the device, it pairs up, and the relevant virtual remote loads up ready to roll, as elaborate or as simple as necessary or desired.
Would be nice, anyway. Hell, it could end the stand-alone remote entirely for a lot of people...
All the more reason for us good little consumers to go upgrade the television every few years like we do with our cellphones, computers, and now, tablets and e-readers.
3D obviously wasn't the moneymaker the TV industry was hoping for, so now "Smart TV" is the new gimmick. HDTV's have already saturated the market, and margins are already razor thin, even with everything being done in China.
I'll take tech with a modular system of easily replaceable components over a unified device in almost every situation. There are many HTPC's out there on the market at virtually any price-point. Hell, a modern game console is enough for most people's needs, and the 360/PS3 is what, like $250 bucks now? You can probably pick up a used one for $150, and make any damn TV a "Smart TV"...
I don't know about that, I've got a 32" Samsung LCD I bought back in 2006 that's still going strong. Cost me $1600 new, compared to the $1000 the 55" cost that ended up taking it's place, so it wasn't cheap, but it's not nearly as bad as the Sanyos and Visios and shit I see people replacing every other year.
Still, I get what you're saying. My grandmother's ancient console TV in the basement worked from the day they bought it in the 60's until they sold it in the early 2000's. I doubt a single appliance or device I've bought within the last 10 years will last even half that.
Won't someone think of the children?!?!?!!?!
lol
They have far more success with their software anyway. Look at how well Star Wars: Galaxies is doing!
I'm confused which side of this issue you're on.
More of that obtuseness, bro. I suspect it's deliberate, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt by spelling it out: Not that bigot Santorum's.
Hope that's simple enough for you.
Absolutely -- being embarrassed in the locker room crowd at your high school is a problem that is temporary, limited, and soon forgotten by everybody involved.
Except for, you know, the kids that are on the receiving end of that treatment. Given that kids are throwing themselves off of bridges and hanging themselves in their closets over this shit, I think you're being a little obtuse when you say it "is a problem that is temporary, limited, and soon forgotten".
As someone that grew up morbidly obese, believe me, I know what it means to be bullied incessantly. Some of the things I went through over 25 years ago still haunt me to this day. You may forget about it, but the people on the receiving end, we never do. We try to deal with it, because we have to, but we never forget.
You're forgetting the military. He's collected far more money from active-duty military families than any other candidate.
He may not have the popularity of the other candidates in the Mainstream Media (who all but ignore him anyway, and always have) but his "main base" is much more than just "college students in Iowa". He just stomped the shit out of Santorum in Maine, and wasn't very far behind Romney.
But I guarantee you he didn't undergo anything as publicly humiliating as his own malicious and hate-filled public attack on Rick Santorum.
Really? You can guarantee that?
All those kids that kill themselves year after year over bullying and harassment must just be imagining their torments, I guess.
Santorum is a piece of shit that is reaping what he's sown. If his statements were about blacks, instead of homosexuals, there would be no one defending him, but because homophobia is the most acceptable form of bigotry in the far right, it's poor Santorum and the big bad Google. Dan Savage didn't attack Santorum because he's a Christian. Savage attacked Santorum because he's a bigot. There are plenty of Christians out there that are not bigots trying to shove religious considerations into secular laws.
Kevin Smith made Clerks for less than $20,000 and it went on to make $20 million in the box office, not to mention millions in home media and network sales and the launching of his career.
I get just as much entertainment from user submissions on Youtube as I do from huge blockbusters these days. I think the only people terrified of a "Hollywood-less" future is Hollywood itself.
No, it will just get driven to other areas, the people will slowly move, and the cat and mouse game will continue.
Taking down Megaupload will do the same thing for digital locker sites that taking Napster down did for music piracy...that is, nothing. For a while there will be confusion while the masses react and a billion different services will rise up to take their place. When Napster got shut down, people just migrated to direct P2P like Limewire, Kazaa, Toadnode, Bearshare. When those started getting shut down, people moved on to torrents. When torrents started to get riskier, they moved to digital locker sites like Megaupload. Now that megaupload is gone, people will just start moving to one of the dozens of other sites out there. The content is still out there, on billions of hard drives all over the world. All it takes is someone fixing the links.
No, all this will accomplish is make the pirates obfuscate their activity more, which will make it harder for the MAFIAA to track/prove. The game continues.
This. CNN didn't even cover it before the plans for the blackout solidified, and even then, there was only a couple articles in their "tech" section. Until the actual blackout on January 18th, then they actually had an article on the main page about it, and the article was pretty simplistic at that. The actual reasons for opposing SOPA were all but ignored...
At least they admitted their parent company, Time Warner, was a supporter of SOPA/PIPA. It got all of a single line in the article, but they admitted it. How many other "news" organizations admitted their own involvement in the creation of these bills?
This entire situation only got coverage in the MSM when they were forced to cover it due to the opposition online. If not for the blackout, they wouldn't have said a word, despite the fact that there was serious opposition going on for weeks before that point...
some ellaborate plan by the techies
Maybe they get paid by the hour? This is Ubisoft we're talking about...
I think it's obvious to all that these guys just want the power to kill any website they wish with little oversight...
Arguing ridiculous ideas like this demonstrates that they are pretty much the last people we should hand over the power to do so.
Apparently you've never heard of this church...
Oh, I'll bet any amount of money you could find a lawyer to argue that point, and that there also exists a clueless enough judge to agree with the assertion.
You must have far more faith in the integrity of our courts than I...
To get my way? I just want to be left the fuck alone! I want the government to stop listening in on my fucking phone calls, stop scraping my instant messages, stop trying to give me the fucking finger in the ass routine every time I have the audacity to get on an airplane, stop handing over my fucking tax dollars to goddamned Wall Street bankers, stop allowing these parasites we call "corporations" to put slaves across the world to work and bring their wares here for nothing while 1 in 5 of us are either unemployed or underemployed, stop allowing our infrastructure here to fucking fall apart while we're helping other countries build....
The government has been wiping it's ass with the Bill of Rights for decades, but the last few years or so they've been ramping up. They see the writing on the wall. They know the jig is up, so they're making their last ditch cash/power grabs while enough people still have the faith in their government necessary to facilitate it. Once that's gone, it's all over. The locusts will pick up and move on to greener pastures while we fucking eat each other. The Occupy protests are going to look like a block party a year from now.
I understand your point, I really do, but I truly believe it's too late for that now. We're stuck in a positive feedback loop. There's only going to be more civil disobedience, resulting in more of our rights being taken away, resulting in more civil disobedience, resulting in more rights taken away, resulting in more civil disobedience...you get my point. You may not share my opinions, but to be honest, I'd rather be prepared for that eventuality than not, and since buying more than 7 days worth of food or owning multiple guns is probably enough to get you on some government watch list (if me simply talking about my extreme dissatisfaction with my government as of late isn't enough), I'm probably fucked. But I am not going to be a victim.
But no, rather than accept that the country will always be messy and that we should do the best we can, you want to burn it all down.
No, I will not accept that. You want people to just shrug their shoulders and say "Meh, shit's fucked up, shit's always been fucked up, so fuck it?" Bullshit all over that. You be as complacent as you fucking want. I know we can do better.
I don't want it to come to that point, I really don't. But like I said, I will not be a victim. I'm not going to sit idly by and watch our right to privacy be taken away, our right to free speech taken away, our right to freely move about the country taken away, our right to be secure both in our person and property taken away. Our own government has been doing this to us at a fever pitch for the last fucking decade, not fucking Al Qaeda, not Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, not Iran, not China. This was our own fucking government doing this bullshit, across all three branches, and the people just repeated the same old litany "Well, if it makes us safer..."
Fuck that bullshit. No more. Put your hands over your ears and keep repeating "it's not that bad, it's not that bad, it's not that bad..." if that's what you want to do, but forgive me and the millions of other people that actually believe in something better for not being quite ready to bend over and get fucked with the rest of the cattle.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Revolution is our birthright as American citizens. Bloodless if possible, bloody if necessary. It is obvious that our government has been twisted against the people it is supposed to be representative of.
I don't want to hurt anyone, but I will not be a victim. This isn't Iraq, and we're not terrified villagers living in stone age conditions. The people have been asleep for a long time, lulled into a false sense of security by greed and manipulation, but they're finally beginning to wake up, and it's about fucking time...
It seems clear to me now that the last shred of what made this country great died on 9/11. The terrorists attacked us, but we finished the job all on our own.
China? Wouldn't be surprised...
You want to read a hysterical article about that place, check this out.
A guy basically pretended to be mentally handicapped and trolled the fuck out of everyone there, to include Ken Ham, the guy who created the place.
Not a very politically correct article, but fucking awesome anyway...
I read a good analogy on another thread concerning megaupload...
Imagine you own a storage unit in a large complex. Now, a few other people are storing illegal contraband in their storage unit, but that's just a few out of hundreds, and most people are perfectly law-abiding. The police get wind that there's contraband in one of the units. They react by putting police tape up across the front of the entire storage unit complex, confiscate everything, legal and illegal alike, and torch it all...just to be sure they got all the contraband.
Another good one I heard: Imagine a full parking garage. One of the cars in the parking garage was used in the commission of a bank robbery. The cops don't want to be bothered trying to figure out which car it was specifically, so instead they impound the entire garage full of cars permanently and tell all the owners they have no recourse. They get the car they were after, but in the process infringe upon the rights of everyone else.
Both of those do a good job of explaining how law abiding citizens will be totally screwed by shit like SOPA/PIPA. At Megaupload, there were millions of legitimate users doing nothing wrong, but all their shit is taken, too, no trial, no recourse, no chance to ever get their totally legal content back, just because other people broke the law. If it were a physical structure, like the storage unit or garage in the above analogies, nobody would argue that the public would go apeshit, but because it's a web site and a bunch of 1's and 0's people don't conceptualize it like that, but that's what it is.
I would sooner live in a world where blockbuster films were uneconomical to produce, and therefore simply didn't exist, than one where the internet miracle is smothered.
Goddamned right. Quality films would still be produced. Clerks, for instance, which cost less than $30,000 to make and went on to make 10 times that in the theater, not to mention 15 years of VHS, DVD and Bluray sales. Chasing Amy only cost $250,000 and made almost 50 times that in the box office.
Yeah, we may not see $150,000,000 movies like Transformers but, honestly, I'm cool with that. Besides, more than anything now I find hours of entertainment on Youtube watching home-made videos. Probably a big reason why they're chomping at the bit to find some way to shut it down, because Lord knows if they're not standing in between the viewer and the content creator, getting their piece, it's a goddamned tragedy.
Fuck 'em.