TV networks have no idea what to make of streaming technology. Some of them get the idea that they can use the Internet to extend their TV audience to people on the Internet, but are so divided on how to go about it no delivery model has emerged that is consistent enough to be usable by a make-it-simple company like Apple.
Even the simplest case, over-the-air network recent episodes, is a rickety hash. Sometimes you can stream the latest several episodes of a given show. Sometimes you have to wait a week, and sometimes your favorite show is just not available for streaming at all. Sometimes you have to "verify your cable provider" for an over-the-air show! Streaming could have been the OTA networks' natural way of extending their working commercial-sponsored business model to the huge audience of people who are semi-regular TV watchers who occasionally miss an episode.
Cable networks could capture the cord-cutter market by offering their content to existing subscription services. Some do, each with its own idiosyncratic interface, while most operate with the comforting assumption taht most people will pay a separate subscription fee for each cable channel they stream. And what about streaming by those who still subscribe to cable? You have to hope that the skimpy pulldown in the "Verify Your Provider" list will eventually include your own cable company.
Small wonder that today's busy young people just shrug and get into the habit of torrenting everything. And once you have gotten used to that model and its more consistent interface, they won't be back.
The real villains of this situation are not the Hawaiians, but a radical mainland organization called Deep Green Resistance. If you read Hawaiian news reports, you will see that a haole named Will Falk was all over the mountain, whipping up the protests. This is the organization's manifesto on the TMT, written by Falk himself: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015... As you see, Deep Green has a much larger agenda than just chasing the TMT out of Hawaii.
During the Nineties, the Greens tried an identical campaign here in Arizona, in an attempt to bring down the astronomy 'industry' in the state. Because we consist mainly of Republicans with guns, they were unsuccessful. I can still remember that one of their arguments at the time was "Send the new telescopes to Hawaii! They love astronomy there."
It's been a good news/bad news week for leftists. You're celebrating killing off the Thirty Meter Telescope, but now we're giving you GMO pigs to have a whole new set of nightmares about.
I agree that science trumps nationalism (no pun intended) and if a Qinghai location gets the TMT built, then so be it. China romps right now because when they want the bullet train to be built here, it just gets built. No soul-crushing years of political wrangling.
"The govt uses eminent domain all the time.... This is ONE instance, that I might actually support the use of it...."
No eminent domain is needed here. The TMT was supposed to be built in the one area where a legal agreement signed in 1960 permits them, snd has ben sited in accordance with all the numerous environmental and cultural stipulations that are part of the agreement. The protesters want to declare the agreement invalid.
The history of native rights in the US is highly speckled, but it has worked out well in the end. My nearest tribe, the Navajo, are aggressive Athabascans who invaded the region, conquering the agrarian Hopi, shortly before the era of white settlement, and have mined uranium on their lands ever since. What they did with it before the coming of Europeans was use the brilliantly colored oxides as pottery glazes. Today, they make a fortune selling uranium to the French. Oh, and the tribe's dispute with the Hopi was finally settled peacefully in the US courts, in 1974. That beats the warpath approach any time.
The telescope site is located in a small reserve that, according to an agreement signed in 1960, is the only place on the mountain where telescopes can be built. To get rights to this plot and to the access road leading up to it, the University of Hawaii had to agree to maintain the 11,000 acres around the reserve as a natural and cultural preserve. The protest movement wants to retroactively change the agreement on their own terms and for reasons they have conjured up out of the thin mountain air.
The TMT controversy could mark the same juncture in American history that the end of the Victorian age marked for the British. A nation that had led the world in science and technology reached its high water mark, and began the handover of its scientific patrimony to the next up-and-coming new country. Watch for the TMT to end up on the Qinghai Plateau of southern China, where a site at 5100 m (over 17,000 ft) has already been qualified for large telescopes.
Sorry, but we didn't realize that there was anything "colonialist" about science.
If Hawaii had always been independent like Fiji, the kanaka*, or commoners, would still be under control of the ali'i, the hereditary nobility, who enforced their rule with an intricate series of prohibitions on the commoners. All of Maunakea above the treeline was under exclusive control of the ali'i. No kanaka could go there, ever. Overall, the kanaka had fewer rights than Russian peasants in the time of the tsars.
So foreign astronomers come to the Big Island, and make a deal with the ali'i to build their telescopes. Some of the Kamehameha family were astronomical hobbyists, after all. I'm assuming that just as in our own history, the researchers would have to carefully avoid the altars and other sacred objects on the mountaintop, which is vast and gently sloped - Maunakea is more massive than the entire Rocky Mountains - and would be granted a concession on a small area near the summit.
Astronomy on this independent Hawaii would be just like astronomy there today, except that the common people, and whatever foreign supporters they could muster, would have no input into the process whatever.
* Please excuse my omission of the A-macron. The character set used here just swallows it.
It's the electronics trading district of downtown Tokyo. Imagine a crammed complex of skinny Asian buildings all grown together, served by a twisty maze of tiny alleys and rickety stairways where every possible kind of tech is on sale in an authentic Blade Runner atmosphere (I think Akihabara is where the idea came from). You can find anything from arcane hobby parts to household appliances there. I wouldn't be surprised if there are replicants on sale there now.
I can still remember being led around by older relatives in the "war surplus" stores as they were always called in the Fifties in big-city downtowns, agog at the piles of vacuum tubes, ammo boxes and arcane chunks of militaria that required cobbling up a 28V power supply to operate. Later these became discount electronic stores ("Look! Japanese made radios!").
One fork of this evolutionary chain became Radio Shack - real Radio Shack, festooned with ham gear, and electronic supermarkets like Fry's; the other begat the electronic flea market where hobbyists enthusiastically rummaged through stacks of used technojunk and walls of printed manuals. The last time I visited one of these was in the Nineties. It was in the rain in Tempe, Arizona, the last few weary radio hams nosing through it on Rascal scooters, sucking oxygen through masks like Darth Vader and bleary-eyed for the old days.
These are hardly petty criminals. They target businesses of all sizes, and have hit governments. If they have hit the federal government, then by definition national security is involved, and it's showtime for whatever special agents and forces eradicating them takes.
The Enigma reference is irrelevant because during WW II, we specifically didn't want the Axis to know that we had broken their code. Ransomware operators? We would want them to know that we can trace them and kill them wherever they are, and if we can break their encryption we want them to know that too.
We already know that local governments, including police and sheriff offices, have been nailed by ransomware and have paid up to get their data back. If this conjecture about the feds proves out, it would reinforce my hypothesis that NSA surveillance is a paper tiger. If NSA data collection was as effective as we fear it is, they would be able to trace the Bitcoin payments and have agents sent out to strangle the perps with their own intestines, no matter where they might be located.
Whatever we think of the NSA's domestic operations, everyone in here would love to see that happen at least once.
Capturing a small spread is the same thing, market-wise, as charging a percentage commission. The broker is charging for a convenience, rather than speculating on being able to sell out whole venues at a cushy markup. The Arizona ticket market is living proof that your "twirly-mustached speculators will buy up all the tickets and charge us a fortune" scenario just doesn't happen. In other states, ticket resale is called "scalping" to make it sound nefarious, creating legal cover to ban it. Like those medallion taxi systems, this is just a way of making a statutory monopoly sound like public service.
What we really wish for here is that we had the jurisdiction to apply this principle to airline tickets. If we simply made all those nonrefundable tickets transferable, airlines wouldn't have to judge tales of woe about medical problems, and sales could still be final. If you couldn't use a ticket for any reason, you could give to a relative or sell it on eBay.
It is well known to all liberal hipsters that the US is evil when it lets Middle Eastern Dictatorships stand and also when it pulls them down. Or just maybe, a critical-mass percentage of people in the region are just cult-crazed rabid killbots, and have been for as long as anyone can remember. Why else would women, after reading the news about how Daesh treats its females as slaves and party favors, rush over to join the movement?
But we're nerds, remember, and we're supposed to Think Different. Perhaps we should investigate the Middle Eastern microbial ecosystem for some species analogous to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Read closely the part about effects on humans)
Shouldn't this be a job for that omnipotent NSA everyone in here fears so much? If Hillary Clinton, not some Republican, admits that the private sector has to do this job, I think we're a lot safer from the great spy threat than we thought.
The whole problem is that the holy cities are under control of the tribe that sheltered and promoted Wahhabism, the cult that ruined Islam. Read up on it and weep.
Here in Arizona, reselling event tickets is perfectly legal. And resellers never consistently make money on speculative purchase and resale. In the long run brokers make their money on commissions.
When anyone, flesh or otherwise, buys up large numbers of event tickets in hopes of reselling at a profit, he is second-guessing the event operator. In the long run, this is a very risky way to make a living because sports and concert promoters know their business and have spent years getting good at judging what their markets will bear. If ticket resellers consistently made money on speculative purchase of tickets, rather than on resale fees and commissions, the event operators are just as consistently underpricing their events.
In the real world, this just doesn't happen. A speculator might make one or two killings, but eventually he always gets wiped out.
It was Snowden who actually revealed the problem: the incestuous relationship between several successive US administrations and Saudi Arabia, which is the country that weaponized Islam and keeps the death-cult interpretation of the faith funded:
"Having tried a fair bit more bananas that most people, I disagree. I would say Cavendish is just fine. Sure, there is diversity in banana fruit tastes, and IMO Cavendish is not as good as, say, a Pisang Awak, but I don't get where people call it bad. I've had worse varieties."
We're dealing with foodie hipster one-upmanship here. One of the rules is that a fruit only tastes good if you pay a fortune for it at Whole Paycheck.
"I'm just tired of hearing all the incredible applications for a material that nobody's figured out how to mass-produce economically yet."
Relax. Dentists are not going to use it anyway, because it would cannibalize their future business. Better to put in fillings that rot out and need to be redrilled every few years.
We actually have examples of sentient hives - humans have something like 10x the bacteria that they do cells. The bacteria are required to keep humans healthy, so...
The bacteria do a lot of work, but no thinking is involved. It's like having a whole Foxconn inside your body.
How are we doing on finding those dark matter filaments that supposedly lurk in our own solar system? Now that New Horizons has uploaded all its Pluto flyby JPGs and is sending the Raws, it could soon perform some experiment that would test this possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
TV networks have no idea what to make of streaming technology. Some of them get the idea that they can use the Internet to extend their TV audience to people on the Internet, but are so divided on how to go about it no delivery model has emerged that is consistent enough to be usable by a make-it-simple company like Apple.
Even the simplest case, over-the-air network recent episodes, is a rickety hash. Sometimes you can stream the latest several episodes of a given show. Sometimes you have to wait a week, and sometimes your favorite show is just not available for streaming at all. Sometimes you have to "verify your cable provider" for an over-the-air show! Streaming could have been the OTA networks' natural way of extending their working commercial-sponsored business model to the huge audience of people who are semi-regular TV watchers who occasionally miss an episode.
Cable networks could capture the cord-cutter market by offering their content to existing subscription services. Some do, each with its own idiosyncratic interface, while most operate with the comforting assumption taht most people will pay a separate subscription fee for each cable channel they stream. And what about streaming by those who still subscribe to cable? You have to hope that the skimpy pulldown in the "Verify Your Provider" list will eventually include your own cable company.
Small wonder that today's busy young people just shrug and get into the habit of torrenting everything. And once you have gotten used to that model and its more consistent interface, they won't be back.
A place of silent meditation, that doesn't draw trucks and tour buses up and down the mountainside every day.
There is a visitor center for the whole telescope complex at the 9000' level on the access road. That is as close as tourists can get to the site.
The real villains of this situation are not the Hawaiians, but a radical mainland organization called Deep Green Resistance. If you read Hawaiian news reports, you will see that a haole named Will Falk was all over the mountain, whipping up the protests. This is the organization's manifesto on the TMT, written by Falk himself:
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015...
As you see, Deep Green has a much larger agenda than just chasing the TMT out of Hawaii.
During the Nineties, the Greens tried an identical campaign here in Arizona, in an attempt to bring down the astronomy 'industry' in the state. Because we consist mainly of Republicans with guns, they were unsuccessful. I can still remember that one of their arguments at the time was "Send the new telescopes to Hawaii! They love astronomy there."
"What do you know anout what people are arguing?"
It's been a good news/bad news week for leftists. You're celebrating killing off the Thirty Meter Telescope, but now we're giving you GMO pigs to have a whole new set of nightmares about.
I agree that science trumps nationalism (no pun intended) and if a Qinghai location gets the TMT built, then so be it. China romps right now because when they want the bullet train to be built here, it just gets built. No soul-crushing years of political wrangling.
"The govt uses eminent domain all the time....
This is ONE instance, that I might actually support the use of it...."
No eminent domain is needed here. The TMT was supposed to be built in the one area where a legal agreement signed in 1960 permits them, snd has ben sited in accordance with all the numerous environmental and cultural stipulations that are part of the agreement. The protesters want to declare the agreement invalid.
The history of native rights in the US is highly speckled, but it has worked out well in the end. My nearest tribe, the Navajo, are aggressive Athabascans who invaded the region, conquering the agrarian Hopi, shortly before the era of white settlement, and have mined uranium on their lands ever since. What they did with it before the coming of Europeans was use the brilliantly colored oxides as pottery glazes. Today, they make a fortune selling uranium to the French. Oh, and the tribe's dispute with the Hopi was finally settled peacefully in the US courts, in 1974. That beats the warpath approach any time.
The telescope site is located in a small reserve that, according to an agreement signed in 1960, is the only place on the mountain where telescopes can be built. To get rights to this plot and to the access road leading up to it, the University of Hawaii had to agree to maintain the 11,000 acres around the reserve as a natural and cultural preserve. The protest movement wants to retroactively change the agreement on their own terms and for reasons they have conjured up out of the thin mountain air.
The TMT controversy could mark the same juncture in American history that the end of the Victorian age marked for the British. A nation that had led the world in science and technology reached its high water mark, and began the handover of its scientific patrimony to the next up-and-coming new country. Watch for the TMT to end up on the Qinghai Plateau of southern China, where a site at 5100 m (over 17,000 ft) has already been qualified for large telescopes.
Sorry, but we didn't realize that there was anything "colonialist" about science.
If Hawaii had always been independent like Fiji, the kanaka*, or commoners, would still be under control of the ali'i, the hereditary nobility, who enforced their rule with an intricate series of prohibitions on the commoners. All of Maunakea above the treeline was under exclusive control of the ali'i. No kanaka could go there, ever. Overall, the kanaka had fewer rights than Russian peasants in the time of the tsars.
So foreign astronomers come to the Big Island, and make a deal with the ali'i to build their telescopes. Some of the Kamehameha family were astronomical hobbyists, after all. I'm assuming that just as in our own history, the researchers would have to carefully avoid the altars and other sacred objects on the mountaintop, which is vast and gently sloped - Maunakea is more massive than the entire Rocky Mountains - and would be granted a concession on a small area near the summit.
Astronomy on this independent Hawaii would be just like astronomy there today, except that the common people, and whatever foreign supporters they could muster, would have no input into the process whatever.
* Please excuse my omission of the A-macron. The character set used here just swallows it.
Before you die, you have to go to Akihabara.
It's the electronics trading district of downtown Tokyo. Imagine a crammed complex of skinny Asian buildings all grown together, served by a twisty maze of tiny alleys and rickety stairways where every possible kind of tech is on sale in an authentic Blade Runner atmosphere (I think Akihabara is where the idea came from). You can find anything from arcane hobby parts to household appliances there. I wouldn't be surprised if there are replicants on sale there now.
I can still remember being led around by older relatives in the "war surplus" stores as they were always called in the Fifties in big-city downtowns, agog at the piles of vacuum tubes, ammo boxes and arcane chunks of militaria that required cobbling up a 28V power supply to operate. Later these became discount electronic stores ("Look! Japanese made radios!").
One fork of this evolutionary chain became Radio Shack - real Radio Shack, festooned with ham gear, and electronic supermarkets like Fry's; the other begat the electronic flea market where hobbyists enthusiastically rummaged through stacks of used technojunk and walls of printed manuals. The last time I visited one of these was in the Nineties. It was in the rain in Tempe, Arizona, the last few weary radio hams nosing through it on Rascal scooters, sucking oxygen through masks like Darth Vader and bleary-eyed for the old days.
These are hardly petty criminals. They target businesses of all sizes, and have hit governments. If they have hit the federal government, then by definition national security is involved, and it's showtime for whatever special agents and forces eradicating them takes.
The Enigma reference is irrelevant because during WW II, we specifically didn't want the Axis to know that we had broken their code. Ransomware operators? We would want them to know that we can trace them and kill them wherever they are, and if we can break their encryption we want them to know that too.
We already know that local governments, including police and sheriff offices, have been nailed by ransomware and have paid up to get their data back. If this conjecture about the feds proves out, it would reinforce my hypothesis that NSA surveillance is a paper tiger. If NSA data collection was as effective as we fear it is, they would be able to trace the Bitcoin payments and have agents sent out to strangle the perps with their own intestines, no matter where they might be located.
Whatever we think of the NSA's domestic operations, everyone in here would love to see that happen at least once.
Capturing a small spread is the same thing, market-wise, as charging a percentage commission. The broker is charging for a convenience, rather than speculating on being able to sell out whole venues at a cushy markup. The Arizona ticket market is living proof that your "twirly-mustached speculators will buy up all the tickets and charge us a fortune" scenario just doesn't happen. In other states, ticket resale is called "scalping" to make it sound nefarious, creating legal cover to ban it. Like those medallion taxi systems, this is just a way of making a statutory monopoly sound like public service.
What we really wish for here is that we had the jurisdiction to apply this principle to airline tickets. If we simply made all those nonrefundable tickets transferable, airlines wouldn't have to judge tales of woe about medical problems, and sales could still be final. If you couldn't use a ticket for any reason, you could give to a relative or sell it on eBay.
"propping up a regime that gasses its own people"
It is well known to all liberal hipsters that the US is evil when it lets Middle Eastern Dictatorships stand and also when it pulls them down. Or just maybe, a critical-mass percentage of people in the region are just cult-crazed rabid killbots, and have been for as long as anyone can remember. Why else would women, after reading the news about how Daesh treats its females as slaves and party favors, rush over to join the movement?
But we're nerds, remember, and we're supposed to Think Different. Perhaps we should investigate the Middle Eastern microbial ecosystem for some species analogous to this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Read closely the part about effects on humans)
Shouldn't this be a job for that omnipotent NSA everyone in here fears so much? If Hillary Clinton, not some Republican, admits that the private sector has to do this job, I think we're a lot safer from the great spy threat than we thought.
The whole problem is that the holy cities are under control of the tribe that sheltered and promoted Wahhabism, the cult that ruined Islam. Read up on it and weep.
Here in Arizona, reselling event tickets is perfectly legal. And resellers never consistently make money on speculative purchase and resale. In the long run brokers make their money on commissions.
When anyone, flesh or otherwise, buys up large numbers of event tickets in hopes of reselling at a profit, he is second-guessing the event operator. In the long run, this is a very risky way to make a living because sports and concert promoters know their business and have spent years getting good at judging what their markets will bear. If ticket resellers consistently made money on speculative purchase of tickets, rather than on resale fees and commissions, the event operators are just as consistently underpricing their events.
In the real world, this just doesn't happen. A speculator might make one or two killings, but eventually he always gets wiped out.
It was Snowden who actually revealed the problem: the incestuous relationship between several successive US administrations and Saudi Arabia, which is the country that weaponized Islam and keeps the death-cult interpretation of the faith funded:
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
The KSA is the real enemy in the region. Time to get rid of it.
"Having tried a fair bit more bananas that most people, I disagree. I would say Cavendish is just fine. Sure, there is diversity in banana fruit tastes, and IMO Cavendish is not as good as, say, a Pisang Awak, but I don't get where people call it bad. I've had worse varieties."
We're dealing with foodie hipster one-upmanship here. One of the rules is that a fruit only tastes good if you pay a fortune for it at Whole Paycheck.
Porsche is aware that electric cars can do performance as well as economy.
"I'm just tired of hearing all the incredible applications for a material that nobody's figured out how to mass-produce economically yet."
Relax. Dentists are not going to use it anyway, because it would cannibalize their future business. Better to put in fillings that rot out and need to be redrilled every few years.
We actually have examples of sentient hives - humans have something like 10x the bacteria that they do cells. The bacteria are required to keep humans healthy, so ...
The bacteria do a lot of work, but no thinking is involved. It's like having a whole Foxconn inside your body.
How are we doing on finding those dark matter filaments that supposedly lurk in our own solar system? Now that New Horizons has uploaded all its Pluto flyby JPGs and is sending the Raws, it could soon perform some experiment that would test this possibility.