I was concerned for a while about how Netflix would handle the transition from media being consumed primarily on disc, to being consumed over a network. It looks like they're handling the change extremely well.
What I'd absolutely love to see would be the protocol used to do the streaming to be released, and for there to be some sort of option in the TV's set up to specify your own server if you're so inclined. Then, the TV could stream movies from your computer by itself.
I had no idea our friend Mr. Beckerman was such a big deal beyond Slashdot, and the people he represents. Mainly because the general public is so woefully uninformed on matters such as this.
SageTV can work with 4DTV receivers, for what that's worth -- although, obviously, to record multiple channels, they'd need to be on the same satellite or you'd need multiple dishes. And, having multiple BUDs in the back yard isn't something people are probably willing to do.
I added several interesting sections with proper citations to an article about a chemical compound. Coming back later, they had all been removed and the article was down to about half its former size. The talk pages mentioned the removal in passing, but didn't give much of a reason for it, other than someone apparently didn't like what I'd written.
I haven't bothered since. The article is about 1/2 as useful now, for what it's worth -- now it has all of the "what" but none of the "why" that makes it important.
One of these days, any international travel might risk you being apprehended by on the basis that something you posted online is illegal in that country and you have been found guilty in absentia!
I think that's already happened. Something about the German government prosecuting in absentia, a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. for selling Nazi memorabilia and artifacts on eBay, then nabbing him when he got off the plane on a vacation.
It's entirely possible I have some details wrong, but it's not the first time I've heard of this occurring.
I took a few Genetics and Biology courses in college. The thing that shocked me is the fact that anyone ever actually gets pregnant in the first place, let alone carries a fetus to term.
Between 50 and 80% of all eggs that are fertilized are spontaneously aborted, and only about 10% of women who have that happen are aware of the miscarriage. Fertilized eggs, of course, represent a fairly high barrier to entry in the first place: both the sperm and the egg have to have the correct genetic material and have it relatively stable, the egg has to actually be released at the right time, the sperm have to be able to swim and have a functioning acrosome, etc. I think one of the things I learned was that, on average, it takes something like 20 attempts on average during the correct time in a woman's cycle to generate a fetus that won't spontaneously abort in the first month. (Law of averages, of course--some more, some less.)
If we were just getting by on 150M/mL, let's drop that down to half. Now only 1 in 40 attempts won't be flushed out with the next cycle...say nothing of later miscarriages.
Freaky stuff, huh? I guess the only way it works is that there's so many of us, having sex all the time.
2. I think the combined incidence rate of complete male pseudohermaphroditism (46XY karyotype with full female morphology and normal female development, but there's a pair of testicles hiding somewhere) + a couple of other factors like a defective Testicular Development Factor (46XY with no testicles hiding anywhere), is in the 1 in 100,000 range.
Low enough that you'll probably never run into one in your life. Then again, you wouldn't know it until you tried to reproduce with them, never were able to, had genetic testing done, and figured out what had happened.
I'm wondering if both species are taking a hit and becoming more androgynous.. not just males. Like the business woman who wants to be a man, or the man that plays with dolls and wants to be a woman.
It's too early to be a biological response, I imagine (I'm in my mid-twenties, which means that this started to be noticed about the time I was born, which means it probably was around a little longer than that) but it's probably a cultural response. Gender roles are no longer as rigid as they once were, and a larger number of people recognize, value and desire some level of masculine traits in women, and some traditionally feminine traits in men, because of the greater level of perceived fitness they provide.
The real test will be when my generation starts to reproduce, and when those children begin to select mates -- so, probably 30 years from now.
DD-WRT seems to support it in theory, but almost twelve hours of keyboard time later, I was still unable to get it working with a Hurricane Electric tunnel despite following the instructions on multiple places to the letter.
Pretty much like everything else I've seen. IPv6 stacks are happy to install on any machine and generate themselves fe80:: addresses, but expecting them to actually do anything is another matter.
I second this post, and I'll even sign my name to it. Plus, what part of the videos being posted for free, for anyone, on a public site isn't good enough?
There's speculation it's produced naturally in the brain. The brain produces other things like it, and has enzymes that are capable of producing it, but we don't know if it does because, well, studying its production in a live subject would be lethal. (Brain biopsy isn't a fun procedure, and the pineal gland is vital to continued living.)
It's a subtle difference from what you said -- I also believe it is, but we can't say for sure.
I forget the statistics, but let's admit it -- it's highly likely that BitTorrent developers, on all platforms all know, understand and encourage the fact that some enormous fraction (far above half) of total BitTorrent traffic is used to illegally distribute copyrighted content.
I'm not going to make a value judgment on that for the purposes of this post, although I have an opinion on its moral correctness -- but many of the features introduced by BitTorrent clients (protocol encryption being the biggest example) seem to exist solely because BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs.
BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs because it is hugely taxing on network infrastructure, and is almost always being used to do something illegal. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone I know has downloaded Linux ISOs over BitTorrent, but a colleague's recent purchase of as many 1TB hard drives as his SATA controller will support for the express purpose of "downloading every Bluray rip he can find" is, I believe, reflective of the general use of the protocol. Maybe not its intended use, but certainly its defacto use.
BitTorrent developers have to realize that their protocol is almost exclusively for illegal purposes. By constantly adding features to "get around" restrictions placed by ISPs on the protocol, they're actively supporting such activity.
It is insane to think that broadband shouldn't be oversold by a contention ratio. Why shouldn't it? Almost every ISP advertises speeds "up to X megabits per second", key word being "up to". Most people even in normal use will never see those speeds -- because their usage habits never require it of the system. Or if they do, it's for a fraction of the time that a BitTorrent session will max out a connection. The most taxing thing I've done that I can think of is load a page of several hundred ~1MB photographs in Firefox. It took a long time to download, but that's only a 200MB transfer that happened once -- not someone downloading multiple HD movie rips at all hours of the day, all the time.
If the majority of BT usage was for legal purposes, the traffic using the protocol would drop down to near-zero and it wouldn't be an issue. It's only come up because of the connections to illegal activity.
What we need is a legal solution to the problem. Let people use their connections for whatever they want -- we just need a more reliable way to punish those who break the law, and to do so more reliably. The exact mechanics of this solution can be debated from now until the end of the Universe -- but a technical solution to a social problem will never be successful. Whether it's a change in business models, more policing, aggressive prosecution of large-scale Internet distributors, or something else, there needs to be a change on the human side of things.
Otherwise, they're likely right -- the Internet, in its current state, will not survive. And it will be BitTorrent's fault.
>>>I don't think that the music, movie, newsprint, magazine, and publishing industries are quite ready for the Internet to be the first place people like me go. We don't see their billboards, we don't get drawn in by the shiny displays, we buzz past their commercials on our DVR's. We learn online, and we know how to research. Marketing is wasted on us.>>>
I've actually noticed advertising becoming much more entertaining in its own right in the last year or so. Right about the time DVR really took off mainstream. I never, never, never watched or at least paid attention to an advertisement, but I found myself not only watching, but FOCUSING on an advertisement the other day. And at the end of the ad, I immediately used my laptop to go to the web site they told me to go to, and watch.......more advertisements from their company.
It would bring me an enormous amount of pleasure if a Slashdot server admin pulled the IP associated with your comment and forwarded it to your local police department. You're bragging about being able to gain illegal access to someone's computer account in public, after all.
I noticed a bunch of replies below mine about how if you really have to make a fuss, you should phrase it positively about 'protecting the company' and that with your in-house counsel via e-mail. I agree with that suggestion. Ultimately, the decision whether it's acceptable or not is off your head, but you'll have raised your concerns.
You're getting paid to do a job, and you're not going to be personally liable should anything go wrong anyway. Why bother having an ethics dilemma? Are you really going to walk out of your job over violating the terms of service of a few web sites?
It's not your job to worry about the ethics of the situation, that's probably not even your boss's job -- it's somewhere in your corporate legal department, the Board, or an Ethics or HR department perhaps. But not the programming department. Unless you're a member of ACM, in which case you're encouraged to voluntarily abide by their code of professional ethics, just do what you're being paid to do and ask fewer questions.
Given that nobody will be injured by your actions (you can't use 'just following orders' to justify war crimes, etc.) there's no problem. And if they sue you, the boss and the company are going to be at fault, but not you personally.
I don't think his insurance covers it -- he wasn't in a flood-prone area so probably didn't have flood insurance, and standard homeowners doesn't cover flood damage.
Carbon-fiber and under 1500 lbs. to fit in the light-sport category is very interesting. I wish there was a picture, though -- does the rear mounted propeller provide the thrust while on the ground as well as in the air?
The engine and engine-driven accessories in my previous ground vehicle came in weighing nearly 900 lbs (yay 1980s diesels!), so they must be doing something pretty creative to get the entire thing to weigh only a little more than that.
I assume that the target market for this type of vehicle isn't the lay driver who wants a "flying car" to dodge traffic and be cool, it's the private pilot who wants to be able to fly somewhere and not have to worry about ground transportation at the receiving end.
If I were a pilot, that's what would keep me from actually using a small plane to get around -- because unless my business was at the airport, I'd be stuck.
I've had mine for almost two years, and I paid full-retail unsubsidized price ($749) for mine. While that may have been a mistake, I've gotten my money's worth out of it. The trouble is, that it has so rapidly degraded once the 1-year warranty expired, I'm holding off on purchasing another until I physically cannot make mine function anymore. I don't want to be on contract, but I need the features that are only offered on a contract plan (tethering, etc.)
My phone is less than two years old. It was replaced once with a brand new phone already within two months of using it -- it developed some sort of OS problem which I was told to hold a certain combination of buttons to perform a hard-reflash, which would effectively reset my phone to when it was created in the factory. Apparently, however, this was known to destroy some AT&T additions to the firmware and render the phone a brick for all intents and purposes, even following AT&T's own directions. Okay, cool.
The new phone hasn't been treated badly. I don't drop it, I don't submerge it in water. The touchscreen is completely unresponsive (well, it responds to any touch on its surface by either ending the active call, or if on a Windows interface, by pressing the Start button.) The MMS and SMS routinely lose their own settings and I have to manually reset them in order to send/receive those message. Tethering works one in ten times, depending on the alignment of the moon and the stars. The screen half-refreshes, leaving segments of predictive text entry on my homescreen, hours-old confirmations below my text messages, etc. It occasionally vibrates like it's receiving a call when there is literally nothing going on. It turns itself on from standby like it's receiving something important, then doesn't show me anything. Occasionally, it decides not to ring -- or display any notification at all -- that a call happened other than telling me I have a new voicemail message. Then it won't clear the voicemail after I've listened to and deleted it, without pressing the reboot button on the phone.
While this one is by far the worst, I've never owned a phone that didn't piss me off with a slow user interface, buggy options, and half-assed hardware on any carrier. I've owned Kyocera, Samsung, Nokia and HTC devices and they all are terrible. I've extensively used the iPhone and I even think it is terrible, although it's a half-step ahead of the other options right now. There does not exist a single product on the market today that is RELIABLE today. It'd be like if every phone came with a feature where you could receive fellatio at no charge, instantly on command, whenever you wanted with nobody knowing it was happening. Except 50% of the time, you end up with bruises and bitemarks, and the rest of the time it stops half-way through leaving you hanging.
All because carriers are greedy.
Re:Folks won't replace things that aren't broken
on
Bad Signs For Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
Especially because satellite radio in many cases sounds worse than the FM station playing the same song.
The extra digital compression done to squeeze 200-some channels of space into a couple of S-band transponder channels makes it about quality-equal to radio stations in the 89MHz band at BEST.
Slashdot Mirror
About six months worth. ($200 mil/day)
I was concerned for a while about how Netflix would handle the transition from media being consumed primarily on disc, to being consumed over a network. It looks like they're handling the change extremely well.
What I'd absolutely love to see would be the protocol used to do the streaming to be released, and for there to be some sort of option in the TV's set up to specify your own server if you're so inclined. Then, the TV could stream movies from your computer by itself.
Weren't they already?
I had no idea our friend Mr. Beckerman was such a big deal beyond Slashdot, and the people he represents. Mainly because the general public is so woefully uninformed on matters such as this.
Kudos!
SageTV can work with 4DTV receivers, for what that's worth -- although, obviously, to record multiple channels, they'd need to be on the same satellite or you'd need multiple dishes. And, having multiple BUDs in the back yard isn't something people are probably willing to do.
I added several interesting sections with proper citations to an article about a chemical compound. Coming back later, they had all been removed and the article was down to about half its former size. The talk pages mentioned the removal in passing, but didn't give much of a reason for it, other than someone apparently didn't like what I'd written.
I haven't bothered since. The article is about 1/2 as useful now, for what it's worth -- now it has all of the "what" but none of the "why" that makes it important.
I think that's already happened. Something about the German government prosecuting in absentia, a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. for selling Nazi memorabilia and artifacts on eBay, then nabbing him when he got off the plane on a vacation.
It's entirely possible I have some details wrong, but it's not the first time I've heard of this occurring.
I took a few Genetics and Biology courses in college. The thing that shocked me is the fact that anyone ever actually gets pregnant in the first place, let alone carries a fetus to term.
Between 50 and 80% of all eggs that are fertilized are spontaneously aborted, and only about 10% of women who have that happen are aware of the miscarriage. Fertilized eggs, of course, represent a fairly high barrier to entry in the first place: both the sperm and the egg have to have the correct genetic material and have it relatively stable, the egg has to actually be released at the right time, the sperm have to be able to swim and have a functioning acrosome, etc. I think one of the things I learned was that, on average, it takes something like 20 attempts on average during the correct time in a woman's cycle to generate a fetus that won't spontaneously abort in the first month. (Law of averages, of course--some more, some less.)
If we were just getting by on 150M/mL, let's drop that down to half. Now only 1 in 40 attempts won't be flushed out with the next cycle...say nothing of later miscarriages.
Freaky stuff, huh? I guess the only way it works is that there's so many of us, having sex all the time.
2. I think the combined incidence rate of complete male pseudohermaphroditism (46XY karyotype with full female morphology and normal female development, but there's a pair of testicles hiding somewhere) + a couple of other factors like a defective Testicular Development Factor (46XY with no testicles hiding anywhere), is in the 1 in 100,000 range.
Low enough that you'll probably never run into one in your life. Then again, you wouldn't know it until you tried to reproduce with them, never were able to, had genetic testing done, and figured out what had happened.
It's too early to be a biological response, I imagine (I'm in my mid-twenties, which means that this started to be noticed about the time I was born, which means it probably was around a little longer than that) but it's probably a cultural response. Gender roles are no longer as rigid as they once were, and a larger number of people recognize, value and desire some level of masculine traits in women, and some traditionally feminine traits in men, because of the greater level of perceived fitness they provide.
The real test will be when my generation starts to reproduce, and when those children begin to select mates -- so, probably 30 years from now.
DD-WRT seems to support it in theory, but almost twelve hours of keyboard time later, I was still unable to get it working with a Hurricane Electric tunnel despite following the instructions on multiple places to the letter.
Pretty much like everything else I've seen. IPv6 stacks are happy to install on any machine and generate themselves fe80:: addresses, but expecting them to actually do anything is another matter.
I second this post, and I'll even sign my name to it. Plus, what part of the videos being posted for free, for anyone, on a public site isn't good enough?
There's speculation it's produced naturally in the brain. The brain produces other things like it, and has enzymes that are capable of producing it, but we don't know if it does because, well, studying its production in a live subject would be lethal. (Brain biopsy isn't a fun procedure, and the pineal gland is vital to continued living.)
It's a subtle difference from what you said -- I also believe it is, but we can't say for sure.
I forget the statistics, but let's admit it -- it's highly likely that BitTorrent developers, on all platforms all know, understand and encourage the fact that some enormous fraction (far above half) of total BitTorrent traffic is used to illegally distribute copyrighted content.
I'm not going to make a value judgment on that for the purposes of this post, although I have an opinion on its moral correctness -- but many of the features introduced by BitTorrent clients (protocol encryption being the biggest example) seem to exist solely because BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs.
BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs because it is hugely taxing on network infrastructure, and is almost always being used to do something illegal. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone I know has downloaded Linux ISOs over BitTorrent, but a colleague's recent purchase of as many 1TB hard drives as his SATA controller will support for the express purpose of "downloading every Bluray rip he can find" is, I believe, reflective of the general use of the protocol. Maybe not its intended use, but certainly its defacto use.
BitTorrent developers have to realize that their protocol is almost exclusively for illegal purposes. By constantly adding features to "get around" restrictions placed by ISPs on the protocol, they're actively supporting such activity.
It is insane to think that broadband shouldn't be oversold by a contention ratio. Why shouldn't it? Almost every ISP advertises speeds "up to X megabits per second", key word being "up to". Most people even in normal use will never see those speeds -- because their usage habits never require it of the system. Or if they do, it's for a fraction of the time that a BitTorrent session will max out a connection. The most taxing thing I've done that I can think of is load a page of several hundred ~1MB photographs in Firefox. It took a long time to download, but that's only a 200MB transfer that happened once -- not someone downloading multiple HD movie rips at all hours of the day, all the time.
If the majority of BT usage was for legal purposes, the traffic using the protocol would drop down to near-zero and it wouldn't be an issue. It's only come up because of the connections to illegal activity.
What we need is a legal solution to the problem. Let people use their connections for whatever they want -- we just need a more reliable way to punish those who break the law, and to do so more reliably. The exact mechanics of this solution can be debated from now until the end of the Universe -- but a technical solution to a social problem will never be successful. Whether it's a change in business models, more policing, aggressive prosecution of large-scale Internet distributors, or something else, there needs to be a change on the human side of things.
Otherwise, they're likely right -- the Internet, in its current state, will not survive. And it will be BitTorrent's fault.
>>>I don't think that the music, movie, newsprint, magazine, and publishing industries are quite ready for the Internet to be the first place people like me go. We don't see their billboards, we don't get drawn in by the shiny displays, we buzz past their commercials on our DVR's. We learn online, and we know how to research. Marketing is wasted on us.>>>
I've actually noticed advertising becoming much more entertaining in its own right in the last year or so. Right about the time DVR really took off mainstream. I never, never, never watched or at least paid attention to an advertisement, but I found myself not only watching, but FOCUSING on an advertisement the other day. And at the end of the ad, I immediately used my laptop to go to the web site they told me to go to, and watch.......more advertisements from their company.
Just an aside.
It would bring me an enormous amount of pleasure if a Slashdot server admin pulled the IP associated with your comment and forwarded it to your local police department. You're bragging about being able to gain illegal access to someone's computer account in public, after all.
I think I addressed that point in my original post....
I noticed a bunch of replies below mine about how if you really have to make a fuss, you should phrase it positively about 'protecting the company' and that with your in-house counsel via e-mail. I agree with that suggestion. Ultimately, the decision whether it's acceptable or not is off your head, but you'll have raised your concerns.
You're getting paid to do a job, and you're not going to be personally liable should anything go wrong anyway. Why bother having an ethics dilemma? Are you really going to walk out of your job over violating the terms of service of a few web sites?
It's not your job to worry about the ethics of the situation, that's probably not even your boss's job -- it's somewhere in your corporate legal department, the Board, or an Ethics or HR department perhaps. But not the programming department. Unless you're a member of ACM, in which case you're encouraged to voluntarily abide by their code of professional ethics, just do what you're being paid to do and ask fewer questions.
Given that nobody will be injured by your actions (you can't use 'just following orders' to justify war crimes, etc.) there's no problem. And if they sue you, the boss and the company are going to be at fault, but not you personally.
I don't think his insurance covers it -- he wasn't in a flood-prone area so probably didn't have flood insurance, and standard homeowners doesn't cover flood damage.
Carbon-fiber and under 1500 lbs. to fit in the light-sport category is very interesting. I wish there was a picture, though -- does the rear mounted propeller provide the thrust while on the ground as well as in the air?
The engine and engine-driven accessories in my previous ground vehicle came in weighing nearly 900 lbs (yay 1980s diesels!), so they must be doing something pretty creative to get the entire thing to weigh only a little more than that.
I assume that the target market for this type of vehicle isn't the lay driver who wants a "flying car" to dodge traffic and be cool, it's the private pilot who wants to be able to fly somewhere and not have to worry about ground transportation at the receiving end.
If I were a pilot, that's what would keep me from actually using a small plane to get around -- because unless my business was at the airport, I'd be stuck.
Gmail Notifier stopped working on any of my systems about 3 months ago. I'm not sure why. "The service is temporarily unavailable" is all it tells me.
I've had mine for almost two years, and I paid full-retail unsubsidized price ($749) for mine. While that may have been a mistake, I've gotten my money's worth out of it. The trouble is, that it has so rapidly degraded once the 1-year warranty expired, I'm holding off on purchasing another until I physically cannot make mine function anymore. I don't want to be on contract, but I need the features that are only offered on a contract plan (tethering, etc.)
My phone is less than two years old. It was replaced once with a brand new phone already within two months of using it -- it developed some sort of OS problem which I was told to hold a certain combination of buttons to perform a hard-reflash, which would effectively reset my phone to when it was created in the factory. Apparently, however, this was known to destroy some AT&T additions to the firmware and render the phone a brick for all intents and purposes, even following AT&T's own directions. Okay, cool.
The new phone hasn't been treated badly. I don't drop it, I don't submerge it in water. The touchscreen is completely unresponsive (well, it responds to any touch on its surface by either ending the active call, or if on a Windows interface, by pressing the Start button.) The MMS and SMS routinely lose their own settings and I have to manually reset them in order to send/receive those message. Tethering works one in ten times, depending on the alignment of the moon and the stars. The screen half-refreshes, leaving segments of predictive text entry on my homescreen, hours-old confirmations below my text messages, etc. It occasionally vibrates like it's receiving a call when there is literally nothing going on. It turns itself on from standby like it's receiving something important, then doesn't show me anything. Occasionally, it decides not to ring -- or display any notification at all -- that a call happened other than telling me I have a new voicemail message. Then it won't clear the voicemail after I've listened to and deleted it, without pressing the reboot button on the phone.
While this one is by far the worst, I've never owned a phone that didn't piss me off with a slow user interface, buggy options, and half-assed hardware on any carrier. I've owned Kyocera, Samsung, Nokia and HTC devices and they all are terrible. I've extensively used the iPhone and I even think it is terrible, although it's a half-step ahead of the other options right now. There does not exist a single product on the market today that is RELIABLE today. It'd be like if every phone came with a feature where you could receive fellatio at no charge, instantly on command, whenever you wanted with nobody knowing it was happening. Except 50% of the time, you end up with bruises and bitemarks, and the rest of the time it stops half-way through leaving you hanging.
All because carriers are greedy.
Especially because satellite radio in many cases sounds worse than the FM station playing the same song.
The extra digital compression done to squeeze 200-some channels of space into a couple of S-band transponder channels makes it about quality-equal to radio stations in the 89MHz band at BEST.