Hmmm... can you tell me where on my iOS device I have granular control over permissions for individual apps? Because I've never found that. I've got it in my hand, and there is no granular control and the ability to enable/disable specific permissions. If I can, I want to know where thehell it is.
In my opinion, both Android an iOS suck for that.
Which is why my Nexus 7 tablet and my iPod touch both run in airplane mode most of the time.
I can't do IMAX... it makes me want to hurl. The vertigo almost kills me. I can't do 3D, it gives me a splitting headache which lasts for hours.
I can only imagine the projectile vomiting which would be triggered by 3D IMAX. Not something I want to experience.
Gravity was one of those movies which scared the bejeezus out of me and kept me at a level of stress at a pretty constant rate for the movie. But I'm also glad I could pause it.
It was an absolutely awesome movie, but it's hard to be that jacked up and tense for that long without a pause. There's very few movies which I feel physically fatigued after watching, but that was definitely one.
I've largely decided that my 55" TV is perfectly OK for my viewing needs. My seating is better, I can have a beer, and my wife can get me to pause it for bathroom breaks. I can have 5 people sitting in recliners watching a movie... I don't need much else.
Seriously? Anyone still masochist enough for that "authentic experience"?
There's a handful of movies I still want to see in the cinema... lately, mostly stuff put out by Marvel and other blockbusters.
But, increasingly, I simply don't go. I wait until it comes out on BluRay, watch it in my leather recliner, where I can pause, drink beer, and not have to deal with everyone else in the cinema.
I figure for the price of two people going to the cinema, buying the overpriced snacks, and all of the other stuff... I can buy several BluRays (more if they're on sale or not new releases), and then a bunch of people can watch it, and I can watch it again and again.
For many of us, paying to see a movie in the theater hasn't been cost effective in a decade. And having your own home theater setup isn't like it's that difficult these days. So it's hardly the domain of rich folks with huge houses.
So, yeah, I think it's been about 18-24 months since the last one I saw in the actual movie theater
Well, they're only going to ban you if you use the smart phone to actually record.
There's pretty much no way in hell they could try to stop anybody with a cell phone from entering a movie cinema.. pretty much everyone carries on these days.
Of course, I'm not sure what the value of crappy, head mounted recording it going to be, or how much it devalues the product.
I agree you shouldn't be recording the stuff in a movie theater, but a head mounted recording it going to have limited sound quality, is going to move around as the watcher does, and you'll probably hear them eating popcorn.
Do crappy recordings like this actually get watched and cut into DVD sales? I sure as heck wouldn't be interested in watching one of these, and I want my full surround sound in my home theater, not some dodgy stereo recording of the sounds inside the movie theater.
This sounds like it would be like watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, but without the good stuff.
I've never seen one of these recordings (I've never actually downloaded a movie, except for digital copies I've bought) -- but I can't imagine they're worth watching.
Sure, but that's the physical world. Just because you broke into one refrigerator, doesn't mean you can suddenly drink the beer from all the other refrigerators on the planet.
OK, we need all scientists working on this immediately.
Some form of generalized quantum entanglement so that I can have a fridge with unlimited beer.
Unless it's Budweiser, in which case you can keep it. Unless there's no other beer, in which case it'll do.;-)
If we can extend this principle so I can have an infinite supply of pizza, that would be awesome too.
You can gather metrics about your, um, performance.
And, as an added bonus, you can set it to give you an electrical jolt at random intervals... heighten your pleasure, and let you last longer since the jolt will distract you enough to bring you back from the brink.
And, of course, there will be an app so you can share your coital prowess with your friends. Unfortunately, it'll use whatever social media offering Microsoft has these days, so nobody will ever know.
Slightly more on topic... can anybody name a product in the last 10 years which Microsoft innovated? Not bought. Not copied. But a truly novel consumer product which you look at and think "now that's kind of cool".
I'm starting to think that one of the largest companies on the planet, which spends billions on research... doesn't ever actually produce anything they didn't buy or copy.
Which isn't what I'd call ROI on the Microsoft Research folks.
Just because most planets belong to a solar system doesn't mean that most solar systems don't have planets.
You're reading that wrong.
Even though there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy for planets to orbit, there are most likely around a quadrillion planets in our galaxy, total, with only a few trillion of them orbiting stars at most.
So, there are "around a quadrillion" planets, and only "a few trillion" of them orbit stars.
So, there's 10x, or 100x, or even 100x as many planets which, DO NOT belong to a solar system.
So, while many (if not most) stars could have planets, far more planets don't, in fact, actually have stars.
So, unless you meant to say "Just because most planets don't belong to a solar system", you've got it backwards. (And if you did, I'll apologize for the nit-picking.)
I will naively assume planets generally form around stars during stellar formation, and don't just spontaneously show up.
So, the homeless planets either spun out during formation... or... what, are subsequently ripped away by some other phenomenon? Possibly passing gravity? That about right?
So, if they're hard to see because they don't emit light... can they possibly be part of the whole dark matter thing? Or is that one different?
If there's quadrillions of planets, and trillions orbiting stars... there's 3 orders of magnitude more homeless planets than ones in orbits?
The mind truly boggles. Suddenly Space 1999 seems much more plausible to me (I mean the moon flying through space part, not the rest of it).
Sorry, but to anybody who isn't a believer in your damned god.. the bible is 100% written by humans who claim to have been spoken to directly by god.
Anybody who made such claims now would be investigated for schizophrenia, and a host of other mental illnesses. So why should we believe these people were any different?
Just because you believe god himself wrote that book, doesn't mean there's any truth to that, or proof of it.
The existence of the bible is not proof of god. Not even a little.
So, if god wants to tell us what is approved, why doesn't he get on his loudspeaker, and tell all of us what he's thinking instead of whispering in the ear of crazy people? Surely he's got the ability to remove any ambiguity and confusion?
Your collective delusion is your problem. Don't offer it as proof to the rest of us. Because we're not buying it.
But holding that opinion doesn't mean that any religious entity should have any legal standing to determine what is, and what isn't a valid marriage (or any other law).
A bunch of religious people getting together to decide it should be their right to curtail the rights of others is just horseshit.
My problem with religion is it seems to have some special exemption to be a bigoted douchebag, and have that be a protected status.
So religious people who want to be able to say "I won't serve you because you're gay", and have that be considered a defensible legal position... would also like to guarantee in law that someone can't say "we're not serving you because you're a Christian moron who says hateful things". It's the same hate and bigotry, but yours somehow has a special legal exemption.
At which point, I think the legal protections for your opinions should carry no more legal weight than who likes which football team more.
So, as long as religion feels they should have exemptions in civil society based on their religious beliefs, and that those beliefs somehow confer an obligation on the rest of us... I will treat your religion with the contempt it deserves.
It's the very vocal opinion of people who prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate, which somehow is supposed to have special standing in terms of the law.
Campaigning against the rights of other people which have absolutely no impact on you is moronic. It just makes you a bunch of idiots who think the world is required to listen to your bullshit.
If the Son of God has nothing to say about homosexuality, it probably doesn't matter as long as sexual relations is kept within a marriage.
Hmmm... Why must it be kept within a marriage? What did Jesus say on the topic of marriage? and Why should the rest of society give a shit what your religious opinion is about with whom and when we have sex?
You simply do not get a vote on the sex lives of people who aren't members of your religion (or aren't you for that matter)... and given the hypocrisy we see time and time again of religious people molesting children, cheating on their wives, or grabbing a little sausage in an airport bathroom... why should we give any credibility to what you think?
Apply your own damn morality to yourselves. And STFU about the rest of the world.
You're free to have your own religion. You're not free to tell the rest of the world how to live.
Now, how soon until we stop giving a shit about people's sexualities when there are more important things in the world.
I guess it depends on how long you're prepared to tolerate people campaigning against the rights of others, and accepting that one's religion is a valid excuse for that.
When people who are unaffected by someone else's sexuality stop having standing to say it should be outlawed, then society can stop caring. Until then, there's a long way to go.
That very loud and vocal segment of the population which uses their religion as a basis to say the rights of others should be curtailed, would be up in arms if the rest of society decided to limit their freedom of religion -- because they hypocritically see it as OK for them to do it, but not for someone to do it to them. Because somehow it's magically different.
And some of these same people would say "wow, a law outlawing blacks from marrying is absurd", while at the same time defending the position that it should be OK for religious groups to oppose the marriage of gays.
The merchant doesn't care about your data. The merchant just wants money.
No, see, that's where you're wrong.
The entire CurrenC system is designed to give merchants more access to your data. This is from TFA:
CurrentC also tracks information about a user's purchase history for merchants. CurrentC users can select what information they want to share with retailers and can opt out of marketing communications, according to the MCX website.
And if you really trust a merchant created system to respect your wishes and not track you, you're hopelessly naive.
The credit card tax is a strong inventive for merchants to turn their focus from selling things people want, to selling data about their customers.
Wait, what?
So which is it? They don't want my data? Or they want my data so they can sell it and make even more money?
And, don't forget the part where (in addition to everything you said), the system is also designed to give merchants access to more information about your purchases and buying history.
So, it's a badly written system, designed to tap directly into your account, with no liability on their behalf, coupled with an added amount of access to your information to violate your privacy.
There's really not a damned single thing about this which is in any way good for the consumer... I'm sure they'll try very hard to get people to use it (and in some cases might actually try to make it mandatory).
I agree, the entire premise of this system makes one go "WTF are you clowns thinking?" This is an insane amount of terrible ideas which have no net benefit to the consumer -- unless they create artificial benefits like their rewards program.
But losing the security of your bank account to people who are too greedy and incompetent to implement security is a terrible idea.
and develop a system that meets merchant needs while protecting the consumer
I don't believe those two things can be reconciled.
The merchants want all of your data, and want to be able to operate with zero liability.
The consumers want security and privacy.
The people developing CurrenC are pretty much at odds with what consumers actually need. Which means this system can never be fixed or trusted, because it's not designed for that.
It's designed to make them more money, and get them more analytics. They don't give a rats ass about the consumer.
They want to be like PayPal... act like a bank, with none of the liabilities of being a bank, and none of the responsibilities.
This is sort of like trusting the mob to be your financial advisors... there's pretty much no win for the consumers here.
This is the problem with a new system like this. Especially one designed to make more money for the retailers, and give them more access to consumer data.
They simply haven't been at this long enough to be trustworthy or competent at it.
And, historically, many of the vendors involved in the creation of this system have been fairly inept at implementing security, and fairly moronic about reporting it when it happens. Or understanding the severity of it when it happens.
So, sorry guys, I'll trust my bank -- because I know they're operating under at least some laws, and I'll trust VISA more than I'll trust you (because they've been at this for a while)... but I will never use this system if I have a choice.
This is a payment system which is designed to make them more money, and give them more information to consumer information at point of sale. Which means they've primarily focused on those things, and have proven themselves to have done a terrible job at security.
So, what's in it for us consumers? I'd say nothing at all which provides value to us, other than the shiny baubles and discounts they're offering in return for them getting higher profits, and a much more detailed look at how and where you spend your money -- which they don't currently have since the CC processors don't let them have it.
The people making this new system are interested in it for entirely different reasons. Which means everything they do is for their benefit, and not ours.
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Hmmm ... can you tell me where on my iOS device I have granular control over permissions for individual apps? Because I've never found that. I've got it in my hand, and there is no granular control and the ability to enable/disable specific permissions. If I can, I want to know where thehell it is.
In my opinion, both Android an iOS suck for that.
Which is why my Nexus 7 tablet and my iPod touch both run in airplane mode most of the time.
OSX doesn't allow it as far as I can tell ... I think in no small part because of a concession Apple made to the music labels.
I understand the point, just never found myself needing it ... in all honesty, I've never used it more than once or twice on my Android devices either.
What was the first version that didn't?
No, seriously ... my up-to-date Nexus 7 allows this.
So, either you know something I don't, or you're making an unfounded accusation.
Wait, what?
I have two Android devices, and an iOS device ... and I've only recently retired my iPad 1.
In what way is Android playing catch up with iOS? Are they features people actually use or even know about?
Because, I would say pound for pound, feature for feature, my Android devices do as much as my iOS devices.
I don't pick up my Android phone or tablet and think "boy, if it only had this feature that iOS has, it would be a complete device".
In fact, I'm not aware of a single feature I ever use or care about that iOS has which Android doesn't.
For that matter, I'd be hard pressed to tell you a feature that either has that the other doesn't that I've ever wished was there.
I can't do IMAX ... it makes me want to hurl. The vertigo almost kills me. I can't do 3D, it gives me a splitting headache which lasts for hours.
I can only imagine the projectile vomiting which would be triggered by 3D IMAX. Not something I want to experience.
Gravity was one of those movies which scared the bejeezus out of me and kept me at a level of stress at a pretty constant rate for the movie. But I'm also glad I could pause it.
It was an absolutely awesome movie, but it's hard to be that jacked up and tense for that long without a pause. There's very few movies which I feel physically fatigued after watching, but that was definitely one.
I've largely decided that my 55" TV is perfectly OK for my viewing needs. My seating is better, I can have a beer, and my wife can get me to pause it for bathroom breaks. I can have 5 people sitting in recliners watching a movie ... I don't need much else.
There's a handful of movies I still want to see in the cinema ... lately, mostly stuff put out by Marvel and other blockbusters.
But, increasingly, I simply don't go. I wait until it comes out on BluRay, watch it in my leather recliner, where I can pause, drink beer, and not have to deal with everyone else in the cinema.
I figure for the price of two people going to the cinema, buying the overpriced snacks, and all of the other stuff ... I can buy several BluRays (more if they're on sale or not new releases), and then a bunch of people can watch it, and I can watch it again and again.
For many of us, paying to see a movie in the theater hasn't been cost effective in a decade. And having your own home theater setup isn't like it's that difficult these days. So it's hardly the domain of rich folks with huge houses.
So, yeah, I think it's been about 18-24 months since the last one I saw in the actual movie theater
That was definitely my first reaction when I read the book ... then I found out it was real and that kind of blew my mind.
Well, they're only going to ban you if you use the smart phone to actually record.
There's pretty much no way in hell they could try to stop anybody with a cell phone from entering a movie cinema .. pretty much everyone carries on these days.
Of course, I'm not sure what the value of crappy, head mounted recording it going to be, or how much it devalues the product.
I agree you shouldn't be recording the stuff in a movie theater, but a head mounted recording it going to have limited sound quality, is going to move around as the watcher does, and you'll probably hear them eating popcorn.
Do crappy recordings like this actually get watched and cut into DVD sales? I sure as heck wouldn't be interested in watching one of these, and I want my full surround sound in my home theater, not some dodgy stereo recording of the sounds inside the movie theater.
This sounds like it would be like watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, but without the good stuff.
I've never seen one of these recordings (I've never actually downloaded a movie, except for digital copies I've bought) -- but I can't imagine they're worth watching.
Ahhhh .... Rule #34 strikes again.
Best ... rule ... evar!!!
OK, we need all scientists working on this immediately.
Some form of generalized quantum entanglement so that I can have a fridge with unlimited beer.
Unless it's Budweiser, in which case you can keep it. Unless there's no other beer, in which case it'll do. ;-)
If we can extend this principle so I can have an infinite supply of pizza, that would be awesome too.
Can I have that by, say, 4pm? Kthanksbye.
Was coming to say that.
Though, I suspect most of us only know about it due to reading the Cryptonomicon.
But, really, this gives stronger evidence for wearing tinfoil hats and living in a Faraday cage.
I'm also putting the finishing touches on my tinfoil codpiece ... maybe if it can't hear me it won't make me do stupid things. ;-)
Microsoft cock-ring.
You can gather metrics about your, um, performance.
And, as an added bonus, you can set it to give you an electrical jolt at random intervals ... heighten your pleasure, and let you last longer since the jolt will distract you enough to bring you back from the brink.
And, of course, there will be an app so you can share your coital prowess with your friends. Unfortunately, it'll use whatever social media offering Microsoft has these days, so nobody will ever know.
Slightly more on topic ... can anybody name a product in the last 10 years which Microsoft innovated? Not bought. Not copied. But a truly novel consumer product which you look at and think "now that's kind of cool".
I'm starting to think that one of the largest companies on the planet, which spends billions on research ... doesn't ever actually produce anything they didn't buy or copy.
Which isn't what I'd call ROI on the Microsoft Research folks.
You're reading that wrong.
So, there are "around a quadrillion" planets, and only "a few trillion" of them orbit stars.
So, there's 10x, or 100x, or even 100x as many planets which, DO NOT belong to a solar system.
So, while many (if not most) stars could have planets, far more planets don't, in fact, actually have stars.
So, unless you meant to say "Just because most planets don't belong to a solar system", you've got it backwards. (And if you did, I'll apologize for the nit-picking.)
I will naively assume planets generally form around stars during stellar formation, and don't just spontaneously show up.
So, the homeless planets either spun out during formation ... or ... what, are subsequently ripped away by some other phenomenon? Possibly passing gravity? That about right?
So, if they're hard to see because they don't emit light ... can they possibly be part of the whole dark matter thing? Or is that one different?
If there's quadrillions of planets, and trillions orbiting stars ... there's 3 orders of magnitude more homeless planets than ones in orbits?
The mind truly boggles. Suddenly Space 1999 seems much more plausible to me (I mean the moon flying through space part, not the rest of it).
Is anybody actually surprised by this?
This has always been about maximizing profits, and preventing a competitor from gaining access to your customers.
Because cable companies are ran by assholes.
Sorry, but to anybody who isn't a believer in your damned god .. the bible is 100% written by humans who claim to have been spoken to directly by god.
Anybody who made such claims now would be investigated for schizophrenia, and a host of other mental illnesses. So why should we believe these people were any different?
Just because you believe god himself wrote that book, doesn't mean there's any truth to that, or proof of it.
The existence of the bible is not proof of god. Not even a little.
So, if god wants to tell us what is approved, why doesn't he get on his loudspeaker, and tell all of us what he's thinking instead of whispering in the ear of crazy people? Surely he's got the ability to remove any ambiguity and confusion?
Your collective delusion is your problem. Don't offer it as proof to the rest of us. Because we're not buying it.
You can express any opinion you want.
But holding that opinion doesn't mean that any religious entity should have any legal standing to determine what is, and what isn't a valid marriage (or any other law).
A bunch of religious people getting together to decide it should be their right to curtail the rights of others is just horseshit.
My problem with religion is it seems to have some special exemption to be a bigoted douchebag, and have that be a protected status.
So religious people who want to be able to say "I won't serve you because you're gay", and have that be considered a defensible legal position ... would also like to guarantee in law that someone can't say "we're not serving you because you're a Christian moron who says hateful things". It's the same hate and bigotry, but yours somehow has a special legal exemption.
At which point, I think the legal protections for your opinions should carry no more legal weight than who likes which football team more.
So, as long as religion feels they should have exemptions in civil society based on their religious beliefs, and that those beliefs somehow confer an obligation on the rest of us ... I will treat your religion with the contempt it deserves.
It's the very vocal opinion of people who prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate, which somehow is supposed to have special standing in terms of the law.
Campaigning against the rights of other people which have absolutely no impact on you is moronic. It just makes you a bunch of idiots who think the world is required to listen to your bullshit.
Fuck that.
Hmmm ... Why must it be kept within a marriage? What did Jesus say on the topic of marriage? and Why should the rest of society give a shit what your religious opinion is about with whom and when we have sex?
You simply do not get a vote on the sex lives of people who aren't members of your religion (or aren't you for that matter) ... and given the hypocrisy we see time and time again of religious people molesting children, cheating on their wives, or grabbing a little sausage in an airport bathroom ... why should we give any credibility to what you think?
Apply your own damn morality to yourselves. And STFU about the rest of the world.
You're free to have your own religion. You're not free to tell the rest of the world how to live.
I guess it depends on how long you're prepared to tolerate people campaigning against the rights of others, and accepting that one's religion is a valid excuse for that.
When people who are unaffected by someone else's sexuality stop having standing to say it should be outlawed, then society can stop caring. Until then, there's a long way to go.
That very loud and vocal segment of the population which uses their religion as a basis to say the rights of others should be curtailed, would be up in arms if the rest of society decided to limit their freedom of religion -- because they hypocritically see it as OK for them to do it, but not for someone to do it to them. Because somehow it's magically different.
And some of these same people would say "wow, a law outlawing blacks from marrying is absurd", while at the same time defending the position that it should be OK for religious groups to oppose the marriage of gays.
They didn't get where they are by innovating.
They got there by lobbying Congress in the first place.
No, see, that's where you're wrong.
The entire CurrenC system is designed to give merchants more access to your data. This is from TFA:
And if you really trust a merchant created system to respect your wishes and not track you, you're hopelessly naive.
Wait, what?
So which is it? They don't want my data? Or they want my data so they can sell it and make even more money?
And, don't forget the part where (in addition to everything you said), the system is also designed to give merchants access to more information about your purchases and buying history.
So, it's a badly written system, designed to tap directly into your account, with no liability on their behalf, coupled with an added amount of access to your information to violate your privacy.
There's really not a damned single thing about this which is in any way good for the consumer ... I'm sure they'll try very hard to get people to use it (and in some cases might actually try to make it mandatory).
I agree, the entire premise of this system makes one go "WTF are you clowns thinking?" This is an insane amount of terrible ideas which have no net benefit to the consumer -- unless they create artificial benefits like their rewards program.
But losing the security of your bank account to people who are too greedy and incompetent to implement security is a terrible idea.
I don't believe those two things can be reconciled.
The merchants want all of your data, and want to be able to operate with zero liability.
The consumers want security and privacy.
The people developing CurrenC are pretty much at odds with what consumers actually need. Which means this system can never be fixed or trusted, because it's not designed for that.
It's designed to make them more money, and get them more analytics. They don't give a rats ass about the consumer.
They want to be like PayPal ... act like a bank, with none of the liabilities of being a bank, and none of the responsibilities.
This is sort of like trusting the mob to be your financial advisors ... there's pretty much no win for the consumers here.
This is the problem with a new system like this. Especially one designed to make more money for the retailers, and give them more access to consumer data.
They simply haven't been at this long enough to be trustworthy or competent at it.
And, historically, many of the vendors involved in the creation of this system have been fairly inept at implementing security, and fairly moronic about reporting it when it happens. Or understanding the severity of it when it happens.
So, sorry guys, I'll trust my bank -- because I know they're operating under at least some laws, and I'll trust VISA more than I'll trust you (because they've been at this for a while) ... but I will never use this system if I have a choice.
This is a payment system which is designed to make them more money, and give them more information to consumer information at point of sale. Which means they've primarily focused on those things, and have proven themselves to have done a terrible job at security.
So, what's in it for us consumers? I'd say nothing at all which provides value to us, other than the shiny baubles and discounts they're offering in return for them getting higher profits, and a much more detailed look at how and where you spend your money -- which they don't currently have since the CC processors don't let them have it.
The people making this new system are interested in it for entirely different reasons. Which means everything they do is for their benefit, and not ours.