CBS -- which apparently still determines programming primarily on Nielsen ratings -- decided to drop the show
Why are people surprised by this? CBS is a business people - it makes it's money not by producing quality, but by producing shows that people will watch and advertisers thus be induced to buy commercials during. If American TV is crap - it's not because of an evil plot by the networks to produce crap, it's because the American public laps it up in such vast quantities. (And there is not a doubt in my mind that had Jericho even middling ratings - those numbers they now mock would instead be Exhibit A in their campaign. People are like that)
Note: This is not to say Jericho wasn't crap - it was, and derivative crap at that.
A major American city is also still in shambles more than a year after an enormous natural disaster.
My fellow citizens, and all you others, I fear that this may be a grave sign of the failure of the American Experiment.
No, the grave sign of such failure is that produces people profoundly ignorant enough to believe that such massive and widespread damage can be repaired in time for the third commercial break.
A great majority of the contributors to this campaign are business owners/executives. We are mostly comprised of very intelligent people, such as yourselves, which was why I was originally thrilled to learn we had made our mark here.... until I started reading all of this bashing.
Rough translation: We, the fans of the show, convinced ourselves we were better than the average Joe Sixpack. Our delusions were sadly shattered on encountering the real world.
Quality TV is dead. Jericho was original,
Jericho was a direct ripoff of Alas, Babylon and dozens of other (much, much, worse than the classic Babylon) post apocalyptic books, movies, and TV shows. It wasn't original in plotline or characterization or any other useful metric.
Which is why I watched two espisodes and gave up. Reading Wikipedia's summary, I'm glad I did - as it is glaringly apparent the show went rapidly downhill. Not satisfied with badly mangling the post apocolypse genre, it went on to add soap opera themes, plagiarise 24 and then the X-Files.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't going to happen. Sure, PageRank was a great idea that changed the search engine game, but even an idea that revolutionary (in search engine terms) wouldn't be enough to topple Google. Search is a balance of having the right algorithms AND having the huge infrastructure needed to run the algorithms over most of the web.
Huge infrastructure? Only if you if you cache the whole web (as Google does). You start from a dozen or so machines (as proof of concept, and as Google did) and build outward from there.
I don't know about that. People are frequently floored when I tell them that I don't know who movie star X or pop singer Y is. Its possible for people to be disconnected from certain spheres of popular culture if they simply don't have any interest in them.
Bingo! I know folks who start talking about "Billy" or "Bobbie" or whoever (that I've never heard of) with great familiarity - and when I ask, it turns out to be a character on American Idol or some other 'reality' show. A genre which, with the exception of Deadliest Catch, I actively avoid.
Additionally, I can't recall Star Wars being often quoted outside of nerd culture, despite it having mass appeal.
And that's the truth - for the most part cultural fads come and go pretty quickly in the general public, even multi-year megablockbusters like the Star Wars franchise. Some, like Homer's "Do'h!" a few hang around for a long time - but they are the exceptions, not the rule. (As well as being reinforced because the show is still on the air - and Star Wars isn't.)
Nerd culture on the other hand seems to never let anything go.
Could this put more people in a dangerous position of dependency on a fragile infrastructure run by people without your best interests in mind?
You've never actually lived on a farm have you? Unless you want to live a lifestyle roughly that of a peasant in the dark ages - that farm is pretty dependent on fragile infrastructure as well. Gasoline, fertilizer, vetrinary services, doctors, containers to store the farm products in, the list is virtually endless and virtually none of it can be produced on the farm.
Yah, I know the myths of the ruggedly independent family farmer, and of the back to the land folks, and of the survivalists - but they are just that, myths.
And then you get IT vendors muscling into telco and trying to impose IT requirements there.
More accurately you have "IT vendors muscling into telco and trying to impose IT religion". Most IT changes seem (to me) to be chasing that mythical +1% Language of Productivity or Magic Boots of One Extra Flashy Buzzword.
So what dies this have to do with power of attorney?
If you read my message - what a Power of Attorney has to do with the situation is abundantly clear.
If I allow a visitor into my house, I do not give him/her power of attorney. Neither does this happen if I allow someone to use my network. I just through my router, "Sure, come and use my network".
I see... You aren't interested in thinking, or facts, just in making analogies where the two items involved have about as much in common as fish and bicycles.
In the cities, on the cutting edge, stuff drops out of use almost before it can be considered a mature product. But not every IT project is about the cutting edge. A lot of things, particularly in infrastructure and even more particularly in remote rural areas, were built to last because no one knew when they'd be able to afford a proper upgrade.
Even in the cities stuff was built to last - because until very recently upgrade cycles were measured in years, if not decades. Certainly not the annual or quarterly cycles so common today, even in infrastructure.
I own a Bell System familiarization manual from the early 80's - and about the only type of switching system not covered in it was the local manually operated local plugboard. The only type of switching system specifically mentioned as being phased out was the manually operated (actually semi automatic as the operator punched buttons rather than patched cables) switchboards for connecting to and cross connecting between long distance trunks. The tacit assumption (even for the remaining mechanical systems where were already obsolescent by then) was "this stuff is out there, and it's going to be for a while yet - so you'd better know about it".
I dislike Dell, and when people ask me why I say, "I find their tier two and three support to be unbearable, and I hate their proprietary hardware, and their tendency to skimp on things like montherboards." It makes people's eyes glaze over, and in their minds, they file it away under "Nerd crap that doesn't apply to me."
Of course they think it's nerd crap - because you talk down to them in a language they don't understand. Would it be so hard to say "their support sucks, parts are hard to get and expensive, and the parts are cheap crap to start with"?
That's exactly what I was thinking - if the author's mom wants prints, why not give them to her? Why force a gadget on her (which can break, batteries can run down, etc... etc...) that she doesn't want? Not to mention that prints have not only have no lock-in, she can pick here own frames, mattes, etc... to match her decor and tastes.
My mom (who gets both digital photography and computers) owned, briefly, a digital frame - and then trashed it after about a year. She has photos, old and new, all around the house - there was no way a single digital frame could replace all those, and the cost of well over a hundred digital frames (not to mention the maintenance) was simply out of the question. Nor is a slide show always a viable option.
When we were visiting in March, Mom had just finished a wonderful 'diorama'. On an end table were pictures of her dad (who died in 1987), pictures of her and her siblings growing up that featured them and Grandpa, and pictures of us kids with Grandpa. It was lit with his reading lamp - and the centerpiece was his Bible, opened to his favorite passage and with his reading glasses laid on top. A slide show wouldn't have near the impact as that little grouping of carefully selected frames and photographs. While we were visiting them, she was happily redoing her 'family' wall - a careful grouping of photographs of us kids[1] and her grandkids. (She needs to make room for pictures of the new grandbaby due in June.) I spent a wonderful afternoon helping her and reminiscing about when and where some of the photographs were taken. She doesn't want a slide show there - that would leave an empty wall. She just wants to have her photographs arranged and sized as she wants them. (And if the size or cropping doesn't suit her, Dad has a Mac, a high end scanner, several graphics and photoediting programs, and a high end printer - and Mom knows how to use 'em all.)
There's a time and place for geek cool - and a time and place for more traditional methods. The choice should be left to [the author's] Mom, not forced on her.
[1] Including one picture she just loves, which is also then one picture of me worse than any driver's license photo ever taken - my boot camp portrait. (Taken in the second week of boot camp when I was still shell shocked and waaay short on sleep.) If I could wave a magic wand and make just one picture of me disappear from human memory - that would be the one.
No, the word for that is practicality. There comes a point where a large enough percentage of a nation has access to doctors, education, and the means of creating wealth, that giving them access to more of those doesn't equate to an increased consumption of them.
That doesn't change the fact that a percentage exists that doesn't have acess to them.
In parts of Africa, Asia and South America, these resources can have a far greater impact than in any part of the USA. Sending 100 more doctors into the Appalachians or inner-city New York won't noticeably reduce sickness in either place. Sending the same doctors to Ethiopia would have a significant impact on the lives of a large number of the people there.
That you can believe black is white absolutely astonishes me. A person in inner-city New York or Appalachia who given acess to a doctor or a teacher won't have their lives significantly impacted? You live in a dream world utterly disconnected from reality.
Legally - it is not the owners representative, as it cannot be given Power of Attorney. It's inanimate, just like a doorknob. As I said, and you fail to understand, you confuse network permission with legal authority - the two are not the same.
Why didn't Intel work *with* OLPC to make a laptop to help educate people?
Why? Because the OLPC project (I.E. Negroponte) resisted any help other than handouts. He wasn't (and isn't) interested in cooperation. His political and philosophical goals were (and are) more important than anything else.
You're complaining how come Intel just made this laptop for the "warm and rosy" first-world countries, failing to see that A) first-world countries also need a classmate PC and B) poor country doesn't mean we run around naked in the dust and can't read/write.
This is especially important because Negroponte actively avoids having the OLPC project being active in places outside of Asia, Africa, and parts of South America.
All in all, I feel OLPC and Classmate PC will fill two different niches, and both are great products. Now, Negroponte much be hurt that he's not the only one making children PC, but in the long term he'll realize that the world is a large enough place for two products of this kind.
Negroponte is hurt because when Bulgaria and Rumania start buying Classmates, along with school systems in the American Appalachia and Rust Belt states - the political agenda underlying the project will be exposed in sharp relief.
[Rant]
It's always bothered me how many folks of a liberal bent (in America) will send money, doctors, and missionaries to Asia, Africa, South America, etc... As well as adopting children from those regions. Will they do so for the 'hood or for Appalachia? Many that I've talked with react with horror at the very prospect.
The submitter of TFA doesn't want to teach them to be careful - he wants to teach them to be field technicians. Field techs, by definition, have to frequently go where Joe User fears to tread - and your method teaches the techs to fear to tread there as well.
Now I work for a fortune 500 company and guess what we do with every box we get from Dell? Re-image it.
Not buying it. Companies that buy in any kind of bulk can get a custom setup from Dell (or any other big vendor) pretty easily. Heck, my wife's business just bought 20 Dells directly (the boss likes Dell for whatever reason), and with a single phone call all 20 machines were shipped sans crapware.
So either a) your company is screwing up pretty badly, or b) you re-image simply because it makes you look good (either to yourself or your bosses). Possibly both.
Why are credit card numbers so easy to find? Or put another way, why is credit card fraud so easy? Because it does not cost the credit card companies. When fraud is reported, the credit card company charges back to the merchants. As such, the credit card company is out relatively little money (it is the merchants who get screwed).
Well, duh. It's usually considered proper that the individual or organization that screws up pays the price - and the bulk of credit card fraud happens only because the merchant fails to live up to the terms of his contract and ensure the transaction is valid before submitting it. Why should the credit card company or processor pay for someone elses mistake?
4) Credit Card companies should have employees who Google for credit card numbers and de-activate any card whose number is found in the ' net.
Right - and here I am in a city distant from my home (maybe even overseas), and all the sudden I have no credit card. Or, I'm one of those people who charges everything to their card and pays it all in one lump sum at the end of the month - all of the sudden my charges start bouncing. (And I have to spend many hours refilling out forms to send the charges to my new card - after waiting four to six weeks for it and hoping my utilities don't get shut down or my prescriptions run out, etc... etc...)
I see a lot of Slashdotters, as is typical, advocating a simplistisic and brute force solution - automagically cancelling all cards whose numbers are found on the net. What they seem to forget is that those numbers don't exist in isolation - those cards belong to real flesh and blood people, and automagic cancellation can mean anything from a minor inconvience to serious problems. (Heck, I write checks so rarely - I just checked and found that even though I've lived in this house two years, I don't have any checks with my current adress on them!)
Maybe it's the airports you fly through, or maybe you give off some bad vibes - but I've never had a problem with the TSA screeners.
Even the time I was selected for the random full monte search, and they found the sheaf of maps with circles and arrows and approach routes etc... in my backpack. A quick (and polite) dicussion of geocaching, and I was on my way with no problems. It also helps that for years I've habitually travelled during off peak hours - nowadays that means I get to the airport when the lines are short and the screeners unharried.
Similarly, ideas are dime a dozen. Even *good* ideas are easy to find. Don't believe me? Just work on an area for a few months and you'll find yourself coming up with unique solutions and new ideas to solve existing problems that you (or people known to you) face.
It's interesting that you start by talking about good ideas - but later specify unique ideas. "Good" and "unique" are not synonyms.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are people surprised by this? CBS is a business people - it makes it's money not by producing quality, but by producing shows that people will watch and advertisers thus be induced to buy commercials during. If American TV is crap - it's not because of an evil plot by the networks to produce crap, it's because the American public laps it up in such vast quantities. (And there is not a doubt in my mind that had Jericho even middling ratings - those numbers they now mock would instead be Exhibit A in their campaign. People are like that)
Note: This is not to say Jericho wasn't crap - it was, and derivative crap at that.
No, the grave sign of such failure is that produces people profoundly ignorant enough to believe that such massive and widespread damage can be repaired in time for the third commercial break.
Rough translation: We, the fans of the show, convinced ourselves we were better than the average Joe Sixpack. Our delusions were sadly shattered on encountering the real world.
Jericho was a direct ripoff of Alas, Babylon and dozens of other (much, much, worse than the classic Babylon) post apocalyptic books, movies, and TV shows. It wasn't original in plotline or characterization or any other useful metric.
Which is why I watched two espisodes and gave up. Reading Wikipedia's summary, I'm glad I did - as it is glaringly apparent the show went rapidly downhill. Not satisfied with badly mangling the post apocolypse genre, it went on to add soap opera themes, plagiarise 24 and then the X-Files.
No, that's a geek/programmer fantasy on how a geek/programmer should be treated by his bosses. It only lacks a few belly dancers to become soft porn.
Huge infrastructure? Only if you if you cache the whole web (as Google does). You start from a dozen or so machines (as proof of concept, and as Google did) and build outward from there.
If only it were that simple.
Bingo! I know folks who start talking about "Billy" or "Bobbie" or whoever (that I've never heard of) with great familiarity - and when I ask, it turns out to be a character on American Idol or some other 'reality' show. A genre which, with the exception of Deadliest Catch, I actively avoid.
And that's the truth - for the most part cultural fads come and go pretty quickly in the general public, even multi-year megablockbusters like the Star Wars franchise. Some, like Homer's "Do'h!" a few hang around for a long time - but they are the exceptions, not the rule. (As well as being reinforced because the show is still on the air - and Star Wars isn't.)
Nerd culture on the other hand seems to never let anything go.
You've never actually lived on a farm have you? Unless you want to live a lifestyle roughly that of a peasant in the dark ages - that farm is pretty dependent on fragile infrastructure as well. Gasoline, fertilizer, vetrinary services, doctors, containers to store the farm products in, the list is virtually endless and virtually none of it can be produced on the farm.
Yah, I know the myths of the ruggedly independent family farmer, and of the back to the land folks, and of the survivalists - but they are just that, myths.
More accurately you have "IT vendors muscling into telco and trying to impose IT religion". Most IT changes seem (to me) to be chasing that mythical +1% Language of Productivity or Magic Boots of One Extra Flashy Buzzword.
If you read my message - what a Power of Attorney has to do with the situation is abundantly clear.
I see... You aren't interested in thinking, or facts, just in making analogies where the two items involved have about as much in common as fish and bicycles.
Even in the cities stuff was built to last - because until very recently upgrade cycles were measured in years, if not decades. Certainly not the annual or quarterly cycles so common today, even in infrastructure.
I own a Bell System familiarization manual from the early 80's - and about the only type of switching system not covered in it was the local manually operated local plugboard. The only type of switching system specifically mentioned as being phased out was the manually operated (actually semi automatic as the operator punched buttons rather than patched cables) switchboards for connecting to and cross connecting between long distance trunks. The tacit assumption (even for the remaining mechanical systems where were already obsolescent by then) was "this stuff is out there, and it's going to be for a while yet - so you'd better know about it".
Of course they think it's nerd crap - because you talk down to them in a language they don't understand. Would it be so hard to say "their support sucks, parts are hard to get and expensive, and the parts are cheap crap to start with"?
That's exactly what I was thinking - if the author's mom wants prints, why not give them to her? Why force a gadget on her (which can break, batteries can run down, etc... etc...) that she doesn't want? Not to mention that prints have not only have no lock-in, she can pick here own frames, mattes, etc... to match her decor and tastes.
My mom (who gets both digital photography and computers) owned, briefly, a digital frame - and then trashed it after about a year. She has photos, old and new, all around the house - there was no way a single digital frame could replace all those, and the cost of well over a hundred digital frames (not to mention the maintenance) was simply out of the question. Nor is a slide show always a viable option.
When we were visiting in March, Mom had just finished a wonderful 'diorama'. On an end table were pictures of her dad (who died in 1987), pictures of her and her siblings growing up that featured them and Grandpa, and pictures of us kids with Grandpa. It was lit with his reading lamp - and the centerpiece was his Bible, opened to his favorite passage and with his reading glasses laid on top. A slide show wouldn't have near the impact as that little grouping of carefully selected frames and photographs. While we were visiting them, she was happily redoing her 'family' wall - a careful grouping of photographs of us kids[1] and her grandkids. (She needs to make room for pictures of the new grandbaby due in June.) I spent a wonderful afternoon helping her and reminiscing about when and where some of the photographs were taken. She doesn't want a slide show there - that would leave an empty wall. She just wants to have her photographs arranged and sized as she wants them. (And if the size or cropping doesn't suit her, Dad has a Mac, a high end scanner, several graphics and photoediting programs, and a high end printer - and Mom knows how to use 'em all.)
There's a time and place for geek cool - and a time and place for more traditional methods. The choice should be left to [the author's] Mom, not forced on her.
[1] Including one picture she just loves, which is also then one picture of me worse than any driver's license photo ever taken - my boot camp portrait. (Taken in the second week of boot camp when I was still shell shocked and waaay short on sleep.) If I could wave a magic wand and make just one picture of me disappear from human memory - that would be the one.
Here in the real world - buying something from a company is a commercial transaction, the word cooperation doesn't enter into it at all.
That doesn't change the fact that a percentage exists that doesn't have acess to them.
That you can believe black is white absolutely astonishes me. A person in inner-city New York or Appalachia who given acess to a doctor or a teacher won't have their lives significantly impacted? You live in a dream world utterly disconnected from reality.
Legally - it is not the owners representative, as it cannot be given Power of Attorney. It's inanimate, just like a doorknob. As I said, and you fail to understand, you confuse network permission with legal authority - the two are not the same.
Why? Because the OLPC project (I.E. Negroponte) resisted any help other than handouts. He wasn't (and isn't) interested in cooperation. His political and philosophical goals were (and are) more important than anything else.
This is especially important because Negroponte actively avoids having the OLPC project being active in places outside of Asia, Africa, and parts of South America.
Negroponte is hurt because when Bulgaria and Rumania start buying Classmates, along with school systems in the American Appalachia and Rust Belt states - the political agenda underlying the project will be exposed in sharp relief.
[Rant]
It's always bothered me how many folks of a liberal bent (in America) will send money, doctors, and missionaries to Asia, Africa, South America, etc... As well as adopting children from those regions. Will they do so for the 'hood or for Appalachia? Many that I've talked with react with horror at the very prospect.
There's a word for that - racism.
[/rant]
The submitter of TFA doesn't want to teach them to be careful - he wants to teach them to be field technicians. Field techs, by definition, have to frequently go where Joe User fears to tread - and your method teaches the techs to fear to tread there as well.
Not buying it. Companies that buy in any kind of bulk can get a custom setup from Dell (or any other big vendor) pretty easily. Heck, my wife's business just bought 20 Dells directly (the boss likes Dell for whatever reason), and with a single phone call all 20 machines were shipped sans crapware.
So either a) your company is screwing up pretty badly, or b) you re-image simply because it makes you look good (either to yourself or your bosses). Possibly both.
Well, duh. It's usually considered proper that the individual or organization that screws up pays the price - and the bulk of credit card fraud happens only because the merchant fails to live up to the terms of his contract and ensure the transaction is valid before submitting it. Why should the credit card company or processor pay for someone elses mistake?
Right - and here I am in a city distant from my home (maybe even overseas), and all the sudden I have no credit card. Or, I'm one of those people who charges everything to their card and pays it all in one lump sum at the end of the month - all of the sudden my charges start bouncing. (And I have to spend many hours refilling out forms to send the charges to my new card - after waiting four to six weeks for it and hoping my utilities don't get shut down or my prescriptions run out, etc... etc...)
I see a lot of Slashdotters, as is typical, advocating a simplistisic and brute force solution - automagically cancelling all cards whose numbers are found on the net. What they seem to forget is that those numbers don't exist in isolation - those cards belong to real flesh and blood people, and automagic cancellation can mean anything from a minor inconvience to serious problems. (Heck, I write checks so rarely - I just checked and found that even though I've lived in this house two years, I don't have any checks with my current adress on them!)
Maybe it's the airports you fly through, or maybe you give off some bad vibes - but I've never had a problem with the TSA screeners.
Even the time I was selected for the random full monte search, and they found the sheaf of maps with circles and arrows and approach routes etc... in my backpack. A quick (and polite) dicussion of geocaching, and I was on my way with no problems. It also helps that for years I've habitually travelled during off peak hours - nowadays that means I get to the airport when the lines are short and the screeners unharried.
It's interesting that you start by talking about good ideas - but later specify unique ideas. "Good" and "unique" are not synonyms.
From your original post, "Washington Compost".
The rest of your post indicates equal lack of comprehension, both of the issues at hand, and of what I wrote.