He's getting: A show, for free, over the internet, Because he CAN'T get: The same show, for free, over broadcast
I think it would be hard to convince a judge of some fundamental right to watching TV, though perhaps not as hard in the United States.
And the TV folks make a lot of their money from advertising revenue, yet ads are pretty much the first thing stripped from the torrent shows.
if you give something away to 295,000,000 people in the US, is it reasonable to claim that the remaining 5,000,000 must pay for it (or, more specifically, be denied it), based on local topography alone?
Well, yes. The stations are under no obligation to provide their services to anyone. Of course, that makes for a pretty piss-poor business model. So they concentrate their broadcasting to areas of highest concentration, because where there are more eyeballs watching, there's more advertising revenue.
The Village Voice is free in New York City, but costs everyone else hard cash. Is that fair? No, but that business model works for them. It's certainly not illegal.
Because if you download high-res, commercial-free TV shows for, say a $1.00 a show, you won't be willing to shell out the $25.00 for a measly 6 episodes of the series later on.
The reason this is stupid is because it's not financially reasonable to offer DVD's for every TV show in their archive, so they just market the ones that are popular, thereby missing out huge profit potential. Oh well, until they get their shit together, torret it is.
We don't all secretly dream running Linux, and in fact several of us must fight the puke back when forced to deal with it (except KDE. I like KDE. I'd like it even more if it ran under Windows).
Abso-fucking-lutely. We *like* Windows, nay, we *prefer* Windows, but we don't like Microsoft and their software policies.
And surprise! a LOT of people feel this way. Until Linux-raving Lunatics get this through their thick skulls, they will never make inroads in the desktop user environment. The user interface is as important to the operating system as the file system.
Didn't even bother to mirror the pictures, huh. Somebody else's problem. Thanks a bunch for the text mirrors, though, so I can read how cool this must actually look.
What in the hell good is Google, MirrorDot or NYUD without pictures!?
I agree, which is why I reasoned the switch would do me good in the first place. I don't mean to be too critical of XP, but unfortunately the circumstances dictate that I switch back. As for the memory usage, I don't think XP handles it any differently than 2000 (after all, the core is essentially the same), but the added features of XP that I never use have to be paid for some how, and since switching I've noticed I have less memory to spare.
On a slighly related sidenote applicable to both OS's: I wish the Task Manager were more descriptive. Five "svchost" processes tells me exactly dick about what's actually going on. Since the Task Manager is a MS program, and the services processor is a MS program, why not give me something more than just "SYSTEM service" or "NETWORK service." Argh./rant
I just remembered why I went with XP in the first place: the built-in wireless capabilities. They definately did a good job with that. But I'd gladly trade manually entering my network's SSID to be able to comfortably run with *only* half a gig of RAM.
The fact is that XP, once configured close to Windows 2000's defaults, is actually quite a bit faster than Windows 2000, uses the same amount of memory, and still has all the features built-into XP.
I just finished creating the Ultimate SlipStream DVD-R a few weeks ago in order to upgrade my 2000 box to XP. I'm still not entirely sure why I thought it was necessary to upgrade to XP -- perhaps it was just time for a fresh new install, and I'd always wanted to create an unattended install DVD that automatically installed Office, Photoshop, etc. automatically.
Long story short: I hate XP. Really, it blows chunks. All the themes are turned off, everything is set to mimic 2000's behavior, all of the worthless background services are off, and yet this thing does not handle memory as well as XP. Having discussed this with other IT folk, I've frequently been asked, "How much RAM do you have?" Which is relavent, I suppose, because I only have half a gig. But that was more than enough for 2000.
Also, I've actually gotten a few BSOD's in XP (having disabled the auto-reboot "feature") and I *never* got them in 2000. I admit, it's hard to quantify the data because XP runs pretty good. Certainly better than anything besides 2000. But I have already started the process of rebuilding a new unattended W2k sp4 DVD, because frankly, I can't take this XP instability crap any longer.
He's a senior citizen that rescued a sick hiker near his residence in Wyoming. You may have read about this, if not there are more details here.
Harrison Ford may be the perfect guy. Rides his horses, good looking, humble... if it weren't for the Star Wars Holiday Special he made in 1978, he'd be perfect.
Bullshit. Coca-Cola could make the same argument about the government interfering with their ability to make a profit of Disanti water because, shucks, the public water utilities are hurting their ability to compete.
Communications, in this day and age, are as vital a resource as water and transportation. Leaving it in the hands of a few private organizations to implement when and where they see fit (e.g., when and where they can make a profit) is, to put it blundly, bullshit.
Put it in Iraq attached to a machine gun, calibrated to shoot at the sound of an AK-47 not an M16.
There's a lot of variables that can affect the sound of a fired weapon -- buildings, humidity, distance. If a sentry was set to auto-fire, it could accidentally target friendlies, which would be a Very Bad Thing.
The obvious solution is to make the sentry only target the noise, without actually firing. Have a camera mounted to the gun mount so the operator can select whether to shoot or not.
I thought of this a few years ago, and am kicking myself for not doing anything about it. My system actually had the audio sample distinguish among a database of gunshots, that way the sentry can distinguish "important" targets (like a.50 cal weapon) from less important targets (like a.38 handgun, for example). If you're under heavy fire from different directions, you want to take out the big guns first.
I hereby patent this idea, with all of Slashdot as witnesses.
put a table together with the product names, their suggested retail price, the type of media they use and/or built-in storage size, connectivity (Firewire/USB/etc) and their supported formats?
The problem is that new players are being added to the marketplace every day, so it would be a bitch to keep it updated. Also, a lot of the new players are coming out of S. Korea, China and Japan, but are only for domestic consumption, so unless you can read Japanese, Chinese or Korean, you're out of luck.
Little-known secret -- many of the "well-known" players are just rebranded Korean/Chinese units. The most egregious example of this is Jens of Sweden's MP-300, which is just a rebranded Nextway NMP-612T.
You can find a few retailers that sell out-of-country players on the 'net -- my personal favorite is Cool MP3 Store. They feature some of the latest and greatest stuff coming out of the East -- way cooler than mere iPod's or MuVo's. Checkoutsomeofthesebad-boys.
Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue.
Thanks for taking the inevitable pro-Gimp pile-on that resulted from saying this. I absolutely agree with you -- sub "windows" should be handled inside the application. I'm sure Adobe and Macromedia took a performance hit when they came up with code to embed these mini windows, but at least they understood that the dozens of potential dialogue windows would create organizational havoc on the task bar. Not to mention that it just looks ugly as sin.
Actually we really don't spend nearly as much per student as you think, but this has already been addressed in other responses. What hasn't been addressed is the fundamental difference in the responsibility of the parents in their children's education. I've had to teach in an inner-city (read: poor) school in Boston, and most of the parents either didn't care how or what their children were doing (either in school or out of school) or were too busy blaming the teachers for their children's poor grades. It never failed that at least once a week I would get a call from some parent disparaging the amount of homework I assigned. I felt like screaming, "Lady, do you want your kid to stay stupid?"
Of course, teachers are never given the benefit of the doubt. If a kid decided to punch a teacher, they'd get suspended for a few days. If a teacher hit back in defense, they'd get fired. Teachers were frequently told to stop sending troublemakers to the office -- in effect, keep them in your classroom, we don't want to deal with 'em. You end up spending more time disciplining students than teaching them -- a phenomenal waste of time and money.
I realize this is completely off-topic, so mods feel free to moderate me as such, but the geek in me cannot resist pointing out that it wasn't Spock who said your sig's quote "Do or do not... there is no try." It was Yoda.
Technology, industry and wealth are not necessarily zero-sum games.
Indeed they aren't. But there are a number of problems with your train of thought.
First, we're losing jobs far, far faster than we're gaining them. New technologies and industries are constantly being invented, but not at the Moore's law-pace some people would like. It took a hundred years for the textile industry to be completely exported. Automobiles took approximately 75 years. Televisions took about 30 years. Software's taken about 20.
Do you see a trend? The industries that are "coming to the rescue" are themselves staying on the shelf for shorter and shorter lifecycles. I hear "biotech" is the next answer. Where, oh where, are the biotech jobs, though? And when they do come, how long will they last?
The second, and perhaps larger problem is this: the types of "new industries" that are being created require more and more specialized education and training. Which isn't cheap monetarily, nor is it cheap in years required to get to that point.
I was tinkering with computers as a child, in high school I knew it was going to hit big, in college I honed my skills, and by the time I got out, all the nerds I was friends with were on Time Magazine covers. And in another decade it was basically all gone. So I've spent a lifetime honing my skills. I've got another 20-30 years to develop a new skillset (provided I've got the cash to spend on re-educating myself, which most out-sourced people don't have). So what do I pick? Biotech? Nanotechnology? Middle Eastern linguistics?
A textile working in the 19th century could lose his job and get another one in a completely different field with little to no extra education. A computer programmer needs about 5-10 years of experience to be solid in it. How much education do you think you need to go into bio-tech? A decade, unless you're just support staff (the first to get laid off or outsourced, by the way).
Please don't get me wrong. There are people in shit-poor countries that are competing head-to-head with our best and brightest, then going back to their crummy little apartment in a diseased section of a slum of a country. I give them all the credit in the world, and I am happy to see some of our money siphoned off. If they can do it better, fine.
I'm not suggesting we build a giant wall around us, stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and pretend nobody else is playing the game. But there is going to come a point in time where there simply isn't enough work to be had. And what happens then, as people fight tooth-and-nail over the scraps of service jobs that won't even provide a crappy living?
It would be pretty easy at this point to venture into Marx-Land, and I'll refrain from that but leave the question open. What does a civilization do when the sole value of a man's worth is his work, but there's not enough work to be had? This is the problem we faced during the Great Depression -- Roosevelt's solution was to get people working on anything at all, so long as they were working. It didn't work, though I suppose we've got plenty of nice parks and dams to show for it.
wouldn't you rather have multiple points of failure, than a single point of failure
No, because when you have multiple points of failure with no backup system in place, the unit is dead faster.
The other problem, from a reliability engineer's standpoint, is that it's much easier to implement preventative measures when there's less points of failure. The chances of your cord/LCD unit breaking are far, far greater under even normal wear-and-tear than the aluminum-housed player unit.
And as for getting a new remote... Well, that's $35 plus shipping, plus the hassle of having to find out where to order it, then order it, then wait for the order. And you might be so inclined, but what will more likely happen is that, after a year or two, the cord breaks, so you try and buy a part for a model that's been discontinued, then realize you might as well get the newer, prettier, smaller, sleeker, cheaper unit that's available at your local electronic store.
Slashdot Mirror
He's getting: A show, for free, over the internet, Because he CAN'T get: The same show, for free, over broadcast
I think it would be hard to convince a judge of some fundamental right to watching TV, though perhaps not as hard in the United States.
And the TV folks make a lot of their money from advertising revenue, yet ads are pretty much the first thing stripped from the torrent shows.
if you give something away to 295,000,000 people in the US, is it reasonable to claim that the remaining 5,000,000 must pay for it (or, more specifically, be denied it), based on local topography alone?
Well, yes. The stations are under no obligation to provide their services to anyone. Of course, that makes for a pretty piss-poor business model. So they concentrate their broadcasting to areas of highest concentration, because where there are more eyeballs watching, there's more advertising revenue.
The Village Voice is free in New York City, but costs everyone else hard cash. Is that fair? No, but that business model works for them. It's certainly not illegal.
Why are so uptight about this?
Because if you download high-res, commercial-free TV shows for, say a $1.00 a show, you won't be willing to shell out the $25.00 for a measly 6 episodes of the series later on.
The reason this is stupid is because it's not financially reasonable to offer DVD's for every TV show in their archive, so they just market the ones that are popular, thereby missing out huge profit potential. Oh well, until they get their shit together, torret it is.
We don't all secretly dream running Linux, and in fact several of us must fight the puke back when forced to deal with it (except KDE. I like KDE. I'd like it even more if it ran under Windows).
Abso-fucking-lutely. We *like* Windows, nay, we *prefer* Windows, but we don't like Microsoft and their software policies.
And surprise! a LOT of people feel this way. Until Linux-raving Lunatics get this through their thick skulls, they will never make inroads in the desktop user environment. The user interface is as important to the operating system as the file system.
Didn't even bother to mirror the pictures, huh. Somebody else's problem. Thanks a bunch for the text mirrors, though, so I can read how cool this must actually look.
What in the hell good is Google, MirrorDot or NYUD without pictures!?
Anyone else who's seen the trailer think that the bubble-gum chewing girl looks just like the young Natalie Portman in Leon?
So, so good.
Thanks a lot! That appears to be exactly what I was looking for.
Your experience is not typical.
/rant
I agree, which is why I reasoned the switch would do me good in the first place. I don't mean to be too critical of XP, but unfortunately the circumstances dictate that I switch back. As for the memory usage, I don't think XP handles it any differently than 2000 (after all, the core is essentially the same), but the added features of XP that I never use have to be paid for some how, and since switching I've noticed I have less memory to spare.
On a slighly related sidenote applicable to both OS's: I wish the Task Manager were more descriptive. Five "svchost" processes tells me exactly dick about what's actually going on. Since the Task Manager is a MS program, and the services processor is a MS program, why not give me something more than just "SYSTEM service" or "NETWORK service." Argh.
I just remembered why I went with XP in the first place: the built-in wireless capabilities. They definately did a good job with that. But I'd gladly trade manually entering my network's SSID to be able to comfortably run with *only* half a gig of RAM.
The fact is that XP, once configured close to Windows 2000's defaults, is actually quite a bit faster than Windows 2000, uses the same amount of memory, and still has all the features built-into XP.
I just finished creating the Ultimate SlipStream DVD-R a few weeks ago in order to upgrade my 2000 box to XP. I'm still not entirely sure why I thought it was necessary to upgrade to XP -- perhaps it was just time for a fresh new install, and I'd always wanted to create an unattended install DVD that automatically installed Office, Photoshop, etc. automatically.
Long story short: I hate XP. Really, it blows chunks. All the themes are turned off, everything is set to mimic 2000's behavior, all of the worthless background services are off, and yet this thing does not handle memory as well as XP. Having discussed this with other IT folk, I've frequently been asked, "How much RAM do you have?" Which is relavent, I suppose, because I only have half a gig. But that was more than enough for 2000.
Also, I've actually gotten a few BSOD's in XP (having disabled the auto-reboot "feature") and I *never* got them in 2000. I admit, it's hard to quantify the data because XP runs pretty good. Certainly better than anything besides 2000. But I have already started the process of rebuilding a new unattended W2k sp4 DVD, because frankly, I can't take this XP instability crap any longer.
Mr. Ford must be one fit senior citizen.
He's a senior citizen that rescued a sick hiker near his residence in Wyoming. You may have read about this, if not there are more details here.
Harrison Ford may be the perfect guy. Rides his horses, good looking, humble... if it weren't for the Star Wars Holiday Special he made in 1978, he'd be perfect.
I guess they kinda have a point.
Bullshit. Coca-Cola could make the same argument about the government interfering with their ability to make a profit of Disanti water because, shucks, the public water utilities are hurting their ability to compete.
Communications, in this day and age, are as vital a resource as water and transportation. Leaving it in the hands of a few private organizations to implement when and where they see fit (e.g., when and where they can make a profit) is, to put it blundly, bullshit.
Put it in Iraq attached to a machine gun, calibrated to shoot at the sound of an AK-47 not an M16.
.50 cal weapon) from less important targets (like a .38 handgun, for example). If you're under heavy fire from different directions, you want to take out the big guns first.
There's a lot of variables that can affect the sound of a fired weapon -- buildings, humidity, distance. If a sentry was set to auto-fire, it could accidentally target friendlies, which would be a Very Bad Thing.
The obvious solution is to make the sentry only target the noise, without actually firing. Have a camera mounted to the gun mount so the operator can select whether to shoot or not.
I thought of this a few years ago, and am kicking myself for not doing anything about it. My system actually had the audio sample distinguish among a database of gunshots, that way the sentry can distinguish "important" targets (like a
I hereby patent this idea, with all of Slashdot as witnesses.
If you made it to college, you were not left behind, and further attempts at monitoring citizens should be.
Does this sentence make sense to anyone else around here? Or rather...
This sentence make sense to anyone else around here does?
Here are some solutions to common Windows complaint-items (warning to the paranoid: links to REG and VBS files).
Disable programs stealing focus
Disable Windows keys on keyboard
Disable personalized menus (the dumb "CLICK HERE FOR MORE!" arrow in the start menu)
Disable personalized menus for IE favorites
More Windows tweaks (tons more) can be found here.
You do know that the Moonies, or rather more specifically, Sun Myung Moon, owns Wacom, right?
I know, I know. It's still a bad-ass product.
For anyone who hasn't yet read the book, you would do well for yourself not to read the posting of fuckhead_buddy above.
put a table together with the product names, their suggested retail price, the type of media they use and/or built-in storage size, connectivity (Firewire/USB/etc) and their supported formats?
The problem is that new players are being added to the marketplace every day, so it would be a bitch to keep it updated. Also, a lot of the new players are coming out of S. Korea, China and Japan, but are only for domestic consumption, so unless you can read Japanese, Chinese or Korean, you're out of luck.
Little-known secret -- many of the "well-known" players are just rebranded Korean/Chinese units. The most egregious example of this is Jens of Sweden's MP-300, which is just a rebranded Nextway NMP-612T.
You can find a few retailers that sell out-of-country players on the 'net -- my personal favorite is Cool MP3 Store. They feature some of the latest and greatest stuff coming out of the East -- way cooler than mere iPod's or MuVo's. Check out some of these bad-boys.
Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue.
Thanks for taking the inevitable pro-Gimp pile-on that resulted from saying this. I absolutely agree with you -- sub "windows" should be handled inside the application. I'm sure Adobe and Macromedia took a performance hit when they came up with code to embed these mini windows, but at least they understood that the dozens of potential dialogue windows would create organizational havoc on the task bar. Not to mention that it just looks ugly as sin.
Kim Peek Versus Ken Jennings on Jepordy
And here's your host for Jeopardy... Joseph Smith.
Actually we really don't spend nearly as much per student as you think, but this has already been addressed in other responses. What hasn't been addressed is the fundamental difference in the responsibility of the parents in their children's education. I've had to teach in an inner-city (read: poor) school in Boston, and most of the parents either didn't care how or what their children were doing (either in school or out of school) or were too busy blaming the teachers for their children's poor grades. It never failed that at least once a week I would get a call from some parent disparaging the amount of homework I assigned. I felt like screaming, "Lady, do you want your kid to stay stupid?"
Of course, teachers are never given the benefit of the doubt. If a kid decided to punch a teacher, they'd get suspended for a few days. If a teacher hit back in defense, they'd get fired. Teachers were frequently told to stop sending troublemakers to the office -- in effect, keep them in your classroom, we don't want to deal with 'em. You end up spending more time disciplining students than teaching them -- a phenomenal waste of time and money.
I realize this is completely off-topic, so mods feel free to moderate me as such, but the geek in me cannot resist pointing out that it wasn't Spock who said your sig's quote "Do or do not... there is no try." It was Yoda.
I know, I'm a huge nerd. But it was buggin' me.
And these aren't your standard everyday geeks. These are the hardcore ghetto types.
Where do you think they got their iPod's from?
Technology, industry and wealth are not necessarily zero-sum games.
Indeed they aren't. But there are a number of problems with your train of thought.
First, we're losing jobs far, far faster than we're gaining them. New technologies and industries are constantly being invented, but not at the Moore's law-pace some people would like. It took a hundred years for the textile industry to be completely exported. Automobiles took approximately 75 years. Televisions took about 30 years. Software's taken about 20.
Do you see a trend? The industries that are "coming to the rescue" are themselves staying on the shelf for shorter and shorter lifecycles. I hear "biotech" is the next answer. Where, oh where, are the biotech jobs, though? And when they do come, how long will they last?
The second, and perhaps larger problem is this: the types of "new industries" that are being created require more and more specialized education and training. Which isn't cheap monetarily, nor is it cheap in years required to get to that point.
I was tinkering with computers as a child, in high school I knew it was going to hit big, in college I honed my skills, and by the time I got out, all the nerds I was friends with were on Time Magazine covers. And in another decade it was basically all gone. So I've spent a lifetime honing my skills. I've got another 20-30 years to develop a new skillset (provided I've got the cash to spend on re-educating myself, which most out-sourced people don't have). So what do I pick? Biotech? Nanotechnology? Middle Eastern linguistics?
A textile working in the 19th century could lose his job and get another one in a completely different field with little to no extra education. A computer programmer needs about 5-10 years of experience to be solid in it. How much education do you think you need to go into bio-tech? A decade, unless you're just support staff (the first to get laid off or outsourced, by the way).
Please don't get me wrong. There are people in shit-poor countries that are competing head-to-head with our best and brightest, then going back to their crummy little apartment in a diseased section of a slum of a country. I give them all the credit in the world, and I am happy to see some of our money siphoned off. If they can do it better, fine.
I'm not suggesting we build a giant wall around us, stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and pretend nobody else is playing the game. But there is going to come a point in time where there simply isn't enough work to be had. And what happens then, as people fight tooth-and-nail over the scraps of service jobs that won't even provide a crappy living?
It would be pretty easy at this point to venture into Marx-Land, and I'll refrain from that but leave the question open. What does a civilization do when the sole value of a man's worth is his work, but there's not enough work to be had? This is the problem we faced during the Great Depression -- Roosevelt's solution was to get people working on anything at all, so long as they were working. It didn't work, though I suppose we've got plenty of nice parks and dams to show for it.
wouldn't you rather have multiple points of failure, than a single point of failure
No, because when you have multiple points of failure with no backup system in place, the unit is dead faster.
The other problem, from a reliability engineer's standpoint, is that it's much easier to implement preventative measures when there's less points of failure. The chances of your cord/LCD unit breaking are far, far greater under even normal wear-and-tear than the aluminum-housed player unit.
And as for getting a new remote... Well, that's $35 plus shipping, plus the hassle of having to find out where to order it, then order it, then wait for the order. And you might be so inclined, but what will more likely happen is that, after a year or two, the cord breaks, so you try and buy a part for a model that's been discontinued, then realize you might as well get the newer, prettier, smaller, sleeker, cheaper unit that's available at your local electronic store.