I get the basic channels for free. How? Simple, I have cable internet and phone over which basic cable comes through unfiltered. When I asked the installer about it he told me they do not have filters for that range. Since that gets me my locals, weather being most important, its all good.
What is really sad. I was paying for basic cable. I subscribed to the basic service using the website for 12.95 a month. Then come January someone at work mentioned that their cable bill went up by $5.00 and they say increases in internet charges too. Other people later chimed in to say similar. Well I did check my bill and lo and behold, I was now being charged 17.95 for basic cable. I called, cancelled it, and still have it all because my televisions can read it just fine. Best part about it, on their website it is still 12.95 but I cannot get it. Seems the local version of the same provider could care less about the web site pricing.
TL;DR. Cable is killing itself because the right hand doesn't let the left hand in on what it is doing. Worse, they have tried to follow this combo model where they aim for over one hundred a month in combined charges. I am at 62 now with phone and internet (16/4 btw) and still have more TV than I want.
I do know one thing, more people would drop cable and sat like a rock if you could stream HBO; there are people at work who get HBO and Cable simply for Game of Thrones!) and other "premium" channels.
A side note, my cable lists a cap of 250g a month. I haven't hit that cap yet but I am wondering if the improved show quality (1080p) offered by some services will push me over.
TV schedules need to revolve around me, not some schedule determined in a room in NYC or LA. Once a provider can time shift all their content then they will have value to me, but probably not as much as they will want to charge.
There will always be climate change. The problem being, each agency seems to have its own criteria for determining what constitutes an issue, what contributes to the issue, and what examples there exist of the problem.
Sorry, but I come to realize anything coming out of the UN requires increased scrutiny. Just look at the wording, they refuse still to be locked down. They have learned their lesson after the fear mongering following spectacular events like Katrina. Words like "likely", "hard to gauge", "extreme", and more.
Its a FUD festival.
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before. We certainly cannot know the types of rain storms across major portions of this world much over a hundred years ago, let alone hurricane/typhoon frequency simply because no had the ability to find them all.
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
I have twenty terabyte backups NIGHTLY. I am required to keep certain tables (files by another name) for seven years but fortunately not all of it has to be online. I have over twenty terabytes I have to have backed up each night and a specific number of these backups available both on and off site. I have copies of quarterly and yearly complete backups I have too keep.
Show me a disk solution that is even remotely affordable. Cheap disk, maybe if you don't have any real amount of data and are not legally bound to keep it.
Beyond having usable applications Linux aficionados need to acknowledge the fact that the majority of people just want the damn to work and they don't want to have to try very hard to get things to work that don't.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but worker friendly means something entirely different in the US versus China. I would go as far as saying there are a enough differences between Europe and the US that settling on the terms is difficult.
Pay? Hours? Benefits? Shift?
Can we throw in the type of job and modify those parameters?
To be frank the forty hour work week is an aberration. It certainly sounds great, I haven't had one in a dozen years. For some jobs it might make sense. Yet does it have to be across five days a week or can it be done in four or seven?
They could even redirect some of the ire unto the law and government itself by simply stating that now all new Apple products come with three years Applecare. There are all sorts of marketing buzzwords and such that they can and will employ. Then you can turn around and watch forums erupt with people complaining about the cost up against those who say "its for your best interest" and like... and eventually everyone will just accept the new base price.
I have the second generation iPad, a Kindle Fire, and a Kindle Touch.
It amazes me how fast that iPad's weight starts to be noticed. Perhaps its the overall size of the tablet, however after experiencing the iPad I bought the Fire and then last week the Touch.
Get me a device the size of the touch but in color and you will have something... until then its an expensive toy just asking to be broken. I cannot count the number of posts on some popular Apple sites about people either dropping their iPad or their kids doing it all to see it break.
because reviving old species might be the least valuable service. We can already combine material to get the egg we need who is to say that sometime down the road a fully artificial womb would not be viable and allow for replication of any specie?
it certainly is not valid in all. Hell a five day work week isn't exactly valid for many either. I regularly put in past forty hours in IT but I can tell you this, it certainly doesn't feel like it all that much.
With very manual labor jobs I can see issues being raised. However I see more problems occurring the more hours worked in a row than how many in a week as threat to safety, accuracy, and whatnot. I know I am pretty much need a few hours after a long stretch.
Then again I started out on a farm, forty hours would have been a blessing.
but your four suggestions require a rational regime to be in power. I am not sure you can find many in the world who are rational, especially in that part of the world. I would go as far to suggest few in the West meet the criteria but they are certainly closer.
Unfortunately being nice doesn't work in the real world. The bad guys simply see it as weakness to be endlessly exploited.
So about your list.
1) they would never believe it and they need as a bogeyman more than as a friend to keep their own people in line.
2) I bet the list would not stop at Mossad, I am quite sure there are many other world powers involved. Why just pick on them?
3) Reign them in? Hell they have shown more restraint that we have when it comes to world affairs. What do you expect them to do? They suffer nearly daily rocket launches from supposedly "peaceful areas" watch nearly daily speeches from Iran about wiping them off the face of the Earth, and they are one of the few states to have been invaded by their neighbors yet survived. Please don't throw the plight of the Palestinians in on this, no one else there wants them anywhere but where they are now.
4) Until you have rational leadership in Iran you cannot have normal anything.
if your going to be a police state then by all means do it right.
I guess they will need a black market for gasoline as well. Do they have seat belt laws? Baby seat laws? Why stop at not letting gas up because of lack of insurance. There are all so many wonderfully invasive things they can do.
How many attempts are these supposed sites allowing? If someone has a one in a million chance to determine my password how much of a threat is that to me if the site that requires the password only allows a few attempts before it locks the account?
I work on a system with ten character passwords, not case sensitive but numbers can be used, yet I don't worry about someone cracking the system. Its not like they are going to have unrestricted access to try and multiple failures lock accounts.
I do like multiple word passwords as it tends to not lead to people using little yellow stickies near their desk to record their passwords or keep them as reminders in their email.
a life saved today may cost hundred if not thousands in the future if sovereign states continue on such course as it may induce people to invest their money in safer environments.
Then there is this whole transfer of cost to nations that do pay the costs associated with drug research. How is this different than rising countries who get manufactures to build plants in their country and declare that intellectual property must be surrendered?
Eventually you produce a situation where the risks of losing the investment curtails the activities you need to go forward. You cannot expect companies and people to pour billions into research if it can effectively be stolen or co-opted.
This is no different than when Greece changed laws regarding bonds they had already sold. They induce a new and more severe level of risk in the market which not only harms their chances to borrow but the chances of others to borrow.
Sovereign states bear a greater responsibility to uphold property rights. If they don't like the price Bayer charges they should be able to buy the right to produce and sell it within their country. If it cost you a billion to develop something; not including the costs of other failed but related attempts; would you feel inclined to do it again if I summarily declared you only deserve a hundred million for it? What about 1 billion plus half a million more? Where do we draw the line.
Yes it can be claimed to have been done for a good cause, but as I started out this post, you save a dollar today only to cost yourself ten times that later.
there are so many regulations that complying with them all is an undue burden on business. The recent Dodd-Frank rules have not been fully implemented but if the numbers are to be believed they are close two twenty two MILLION hours of time required to comply. This all money being spent not producing anything!
Now go add in all the tax laws, all the environmental regulations you listed, the work laws, various state and even obscure local laws, and it comes clear very quickly that it isn't that America business is non competitive by choice. The economy as with business is victim of the inability of Washington DC to get anything done.
Ever since Enron we have had one knee jerk over reaction followed by another. Worse, the same people writing the rules tend to be involved directly with those who are subject to them. Hell we even put some of the people who violate the rules into positions of power.
Subsidies and protectionism are all part of the same coin. It all comes down to using political power to protect those they like and punish those they do not like. Show me how many politically oriented families who come away from Washington poorer than they started.
a game spanning only two 360K disks that had hundreds of stars and planets, Easter eggs, and a great story, really hasn't been equaled. Even with just two diskettes they were able to know where you had been on planets. You could move the story for the most part at your own pace and some of the conversations with various races were down right hilarious.
Starlight 2 while not as good had some great ideas as well, especially a race which had three distinct personalities.
Sometimes I think that game designers were far more creative early on because the constraints of the systems were so great. They could not hide behind flash effects and graphics.
I think some people have the wrong view on why we don't do things that we have done before. The simplest reason is, been there, done that.
As in, the challenge has been met. Now lets find a new challenge. Is there a compelling reason to go to the floor of the ocean? The moon? Yeah it would be cool and there is good science in both, but is there a need.
Back in the fifties and sixties, if not the seventies, it was about East versus West. Funny how an arms race turned into a game of one up man ship along peaceful lines.
With so many citizens on the dole do you really expect them to care?
It is happening to OTHER people. Not them. That is how they think. The government if giving them money to eat, giving them money when they don't earn any, giving them money if they don't make enough, paying for their health care, their transit passes, and their cell phones.
Do you think they don't mind giving up stuff, the trade off seems to be only inconveniencing people who are flying, you know those who have their own money. You are out of touch with how many people think now
both the RNC and DNC hated it, oh the RNC liked it for the fact it helped them win control of the House but they resented the fact that those people didn't have the decency to go away. When the RNC tried to gain control, either directly or through sycophants they kept getting rebuffed.
That is why I found the OWS so distressing. It was a fake protest, one that the politicians could control. Nothing made this more obvious than having "unions" suddenly appear to add their voice; you notice how fast these same people vanished? When the real down and out people showed up they were scorned (the homeless and such). The OWS was needed when the previous "Tea Party" counter protests organized by unions; complete with bus loads paid for by the same; came to Washington but only trashed the place and didn't put up real numbers, nor did they have any lasting group - it all faded away as any generated for the moment organization does.
Washington and their press sycophants are desperate to shut down or vilify any true protest to the status quo. Wall Street toes the line because they love their money and Washington politicians love the same.
The Democrats need a true grass roots organization similar to the Tea Party to spring up. The problem is again, how can they tell when it truly from the grass roots and not manufactured. The key to knowing will be how those in power react to it and how the press reacts.
Simple rule : If the politicians and press both lap it up then its probably not real.
that way we don't have an international super committee which will bow to every petty demand that is brought before it. However even national ccTLDs arent immune as the US and other governments are not beyond threatening other countries, even allies (see the recent witch hunt after swiss bank accounts)
Really think about it, an international group would most likely be within the domain of the UN and that would result is so many attempts to filter content that the internet we know now could never exist.
of entitled jerks. It ain't to change in ten odd years, if anything it will get worse. Too many people want to have no responsibility for their actions and unless your an authority; in some cases that won't matter; they certainly aren't going to care what you think.
We are living through a generation where people are told its not their fault, its not their responsibility, we will take care of you, we will take of that, and so on. That does beat down one's self worth and you lose your self respect you soon won't respect others
I seem to recall American politicians telling us how they will implement a cost beneficial health care system which the Europeans are now having difficulty with because....
WE WILL DO IT RIGHT.
If anything American journalists simply parrot Washington DC. I don't care which news agency they are part of, they want to be inside and will report as needed to keep that position.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the basic channels for free. How? Simple, I have cable internet and phone over which basic cable comes through unfiltered. When I asked the installer about it he told me they do not have filters for that range. Since that gets me my locals, weather being most important, its all good.
What is really sad. I was paying for basic cable. I subscribed to the basic service using the website for 12.95 a month. Then come January someone at work mentioned that their cable bill went up by $5.00 and they say increases in internet charges too. Other people later chimed in to say similar. Well I did check my bill and lo and behold, I was now being charged 17.95 for basic cable. I called, cancelled it, and still have it all because my televisions can read it just fine. Best part about it, on their website it is still 12.95 but I cannot get it. Seems the local version of the same provider could care less about the web site pricing.
TL;DR. Cable is killing itself because the right hand doesn't let the left hand in on what it is doing. Worse, they have tried to follow this combo model where they aim for over one hundred a month in combined charges. I am at 62 now with phone and internet (16/4 btw) and still have more TV than I want.
I do know one thing, more people would drop cable and sat like a rock if you could stream HBO; there are people at work who get HBO and Cable simply for Game of Thrones!) and other "premium" channels.
A side note, my cable lists a cap of 250g a month. I haven't hit that cap yet but I am wondering if the improved show quality (1080p) offered by some services will push me over.
TV schedules need to revolve around me, not some schedule determined in a room in NYC or LA. Once a provider can time shift all their content then they will have value to me, but probably not as much as they will want to charge.
More doom and gloom. Doom and Gloom.
There will always be climate change. The problem being, each agency seems to have its own criteria for determining what constitutes an issue, what contributes to the issue, and what examples there exist of the problem.
Sorry, but I come to realize anything coming out of the UN requires increased scrutiny. Just look at the wording, they refuse still to be locked down. They have learned their lesson after the fear mongering following spectacular events like Katrina. Words like "likely", "hard to gauge", "extreme", and more.
Its a FUD festival.
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before. We certainly cannot know the types of rain storms across major portions of this world much over a hundred years ago, let alone hurricane/typhoon frequency simply because no had the ability to find them all.
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
I have twenty terabyte backups NIGHTLY. I am required to keep certain tables (files by another name) for seven years but fortunately not all of it has to be online. I have over twenty terabytes I have to have backed up each night and a specific number of these backups available both on and off site. I have copies of quarterly and yearly complete backups I have too keep.
Show me a disk solution that is even remotely affordable. Cheap disk, maybe if you don't have any real amount of data and are not legally bound to keep it.
and there is that pesky little problem of the other countries being able to threaten corporations and banks so that you would have no commerce.
Avatar reads as if someone based it on cliff notes from Alan Dean Foster's Midworld novel
Beyond having usable applications Linux aficionados need to acknowledge the fact that the majority of people just want the damn to work and they don't want to have to try very hard to get things to work that don't.
Oh, make it pretty too.
Scary isn't it?
Yet no one in Washington truly wants to stop this train wreck. Maybe we can get lucky, get fusion to work, and sell it to pay off our debts.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but worker friendly means something entirely different in the US versus China. I would go as far as saying there are a enough differences between Europe and the US that settling on the terms is difficult.
Pay? Hours? Benefits? Shift?
Can we throw in the type of job and modify those parameters?
To be frank the forty hour work week is an aberration. It certainly sounds great, I haven't had one in a dozen years. For some jobs it might make sense. Yet does it have to be across five days a week or can it be done in four or seven?
but yeah, I think they would.
They could even redirect some of the ire unto the law and government itself by simply stating that now all new Apple products come with three years Applecare. There are all sorts of marketing buzzwords and such that they can and will employ. Then you can turn around and watch forums erupt with people complaining about the cost up against those who say "its for your best interest" and like ... and eventually everyone will just accept the new base price.
I have the second generation iPad, a Kindle Fire, and a Kindle Touch.
It amazes me how fast that iPad's weight starts to be noticed. Perhaps its the overall size of the tablet, however after experiencing the iPad I bought the Fire and then last week the Touch.
Get me a device the size of the touch but in color and you will have something... until then its an expensive toy just asking to be broken. I cannot count the number of posts on some popular Apple sites about people either dropping their iPad or their kids doing it all to see it break.
because reviving old species might be the least valuable service. We can already combine material to get the egg we need who is to say that sometime down the road a fully artificial womb would not be viable and allow for replication of any specie?
it certainly is not valid in all. Hell a five day work week isn't exactly valid for many either. I regularly put in past forty hours in IT but I can tell you this, it certainly doesn't feel like it all that much.
With very manual labor jobs I can see issues being raised. However I see more problems occurring the more hours worked in a row than how many in a week as threat to safety, accuracy, and whatnot. I know I am pretty much need a few hours after a long stretch.
Then again I started out on a farm, forty hours would have been a blessing.
but your four suggestions require a rational regime to be in power. I am not sure you can find many in the world who are rational, especially in that part of the world. I would go as far to suggest few in the West meet the criteria but they are certainly closer.
Unfortunately being nice doesn't work in the real world. The bad guys simply see it as weakness to be endlessly exploited.
So about your list.
1) they would never believe it and they need as a bogeyman more than as a friend to keep their own people in line.
2) I bet the list would not stop at Mossad, I am quite sure there are many other world powers involved. Why just pick on them?
3) Reign them in? Hell they have shown more restraint that we have when it comes to world affairs. What do you expect them to do? They suffer nearly daily rocket launches from supposedly "peaceful areas" watch nearly daily speeches from Iran about wiping them off the face of the Earth, and they are one of the few states to have been invaded by their neighbors yet survived. Please don't throw the plight of the Palestinians in on this, no one else there wants them anywhere but where they are now.
4) Until you have rational leadership in Iran you cannot have normal anything.
if your going to be a police state then by all means do it right.
I guess they will need a black market for gasoline as well. Do they have seat belt laws? Baby seat laws? Why stop at not letting gas up because of lack of insurance. There are all so many wonderfully invasive things they can do.
How many attempts are these supposed sites allowing? If someone has a one in a million chance to determine my password how much of a threat is that to me if the site that requires the password only allows a few attempts before it locks the account?
I work on a system with ten character passwords, not case sensitive but numbers can be used, yet I don't worry about someone cracking the system. Its not like they are going to have unrestricted access to try and multiple failures lock accounts.
I do like multiple word passwords as it tends to not lead to people using little yellow stickies near their desk to record their passwords or keep them as reminders in their email.
a life saved today may cost hundred if not thousands in the future if sovereign states continue on such course as it may induce people to invest their money in safer environments.
Then there is this whole transfer of cost to nations that do pay the costs associated with drug research. How is this different than rising countries who get manufactures to build plants in their country and declare that intellectual property must be surrendered?
Eventually you produce a situation where the risks of losing the investment curtails the activities you need to go forward. You cannot expect companies and people to pour billions into research if it can effectively be stolen or co-opted.
This is no different than when Greece changed laws regarding bonds they had already sold. They induce a new and more severe level of risk in the market which not only harms their chances to borrow but the chances of others to borrow.
Sovereign states bear a greater responsibility to uphold property rights. If they don't like the price Bayer charges they should be able to buy the right to produce and sell it within their country. If it cost you a billion to develop something; not including the costs of other failed but related attempts; would you feel inclined to do it again if I summarily declared you only deserve a hundred million for it? What about 1 billion plus half a million more? Where do we draw the line.
Yes it can be claimed to have been done for a good cause, but as I started out this post, you save a dollar today only to cost yourself ten times that later.
there are so many regulations that complying with them all is an undue burden on business. The recent Dodd-Frank rules have not been fully implemented but if the numbers are to be believed they are close two twenty two MILLION hours of time required to comply. This all money being spent not producing anything!
Now go add in all the tax laws, all the environmental regulations you listed, the work laws, various state and even obscure local laws, and it comes clear very quickly that it isn't that America business is non competitive by choice. The economy as with business is victim of the inability of Washington DC to get anything done.
Ever since Enron we have had one knee jerk over reaction followed by another. Worse, the same people writing the rules tend to be involved directly with those who are subject to them. Hell we even put some of the people who violate the rules into positions of power.
Subsidies and protectionism are all part of the same coin. It all comes down to using political power to protect those they like and punish those they do not like. Show me how many politically oriented families who come away from Washington poorer than they started.
a game spanning only two 360K disks that had hundreds of stars and planets, Easter eggs, and a great story, really hasn't been equaled. Even with just two diskettes they were able to know where you had been on planets. You could move the story for the most part at your own pace and some of the conversations with various races were down right hilarious.
Starlight 2 while not as good had some great ideas as well, especially a race which had three distinct personalities.
Sometimes I think that game designers were far more creative early on because the constraints of the systems were so great. They could not hide behind flash effects and graphics.
I think some people have the wrong view on why we don't do things that we have done before. The simplest reason is, been there, done that.
As in, the challenge has been met. Now lets find a new challenge. Is there a compelling reason to go to the floor of the ocean? The moon? Yeah it would be cool and there is good science in both, but is there a need.
Back in the fifties and sixties, if not the seventies, it was about East versus West. Funny how an arms race turned into a game of one up man ship along peaceful lines.
With so many citizens on the dole do you really expect them to care?
It is happening to OTHER people. Not them. That is how they think. The government if giving them money to eat, giving them money when they don't earn any, giving them money if they don't make enough, paying for their health care, their transit passes, and their cell phones.
Do you think they don't mind giving up stuff, the trade off seems to be only inconveniencing people who are flying, you know those who have their own money. You are out of touch with how many people think now
both the RNC and DNC hated it, oh the RNC liked it for the fact it helped them win control of the House but they resented the fact that those people didn't have the decency to go away. When the RNC tried to gain control, either directly or through sycophants they kept getting rebuffed.
That is why I found the OWS so distressing. It was a fake protest, one that the politicians could control. Nothing made this more obvious than having "unions" suddenly appear to add their voice; you notice how fast these same people vanished? When the real down and out people showed up they were scorned (the homeless and such). The OWS was needed when the previous "Tea Party" counter protests organized by unions; complete with bus loads paid for by the same; came to Washington but only trashed the place and didn't put up real numbers, nor did they have any lasting group - it all faded away as any generated for the moment organization does.
Washington and their press sycophants are desperate to shut down or vilify any true protest to the status quo. Wall Street toes the line because they love their money and Washington politicians love the same.
The Democrats need a true grass roots organization similar to the Tea Party to spring up. The problem is again, how can they tell when it truly from the grass roots and not manufactured. The key to knowing will be how those in power react to it and how the press reacts.
Simple rule : If the politicians and press both lap it up then its probably not real.
Black Company is very good but never leave out Dread Empire
that way we don't have an international super committee which will bow to every petty demand that is brought before it. However even national ccTLDs arent immune as the US and other governments are not beyond threatening other countries, even allies (see the recent witch hunt after swiss bank accounts)
Really think about it, an international group would most likely be within the domain of the UN and that would result is so many attempts to filter content that the internet we know now could never exist.
of entitled jerks. It ain't to change in ten odd years, if anything it will get worse. Too many people want to have no responsibility for their actions and unless your an authority; in some cases that won't matter; they certainly aren't going to care what you think.
We are living through a generation where people are told its not their fault, its not their responsibility, we will take care of you, we will take of that, and so on. That does beat down one's self worth and you lose your self respect you soon won't respect others
I seem to recall American politicians telling us how they will implement a cost beneficial health care system which the Europeans are now having difficulty with because....
WE WILL DO IT RIGHT.
If anything American journalists simply parrot Washington DC. I don't care which news agency they are part of, they want to be inside and will report as needed to keep that position.