AI is like nuclear physics, in the wrong hands, it's a powerful and dangerous amplifier. That's more worrisome to me than some sort of AI consciousness out to destroy mankind on its own initiative.
No systemd and it does all the things I want. In particular, it let's me run me-tv, which doesn't run well on ubuntu because of something to do with gui libraries. (Each side blames the other last I checked, which I admit was quite awhile ago.) Before Devuan, I had to run me-tv on Linux Mint, which is a very good distro (if you're comfortable with systemd, which I'm not.)
I use vlc a lot. But mplayer let's you skip ahead or backwards from the keyboard. The side arrows are short skips, the up and down arrows are bigger skips, and page up and page down are even bigger skips. When I'm searching for something, or skipping over commercials, that's really nice.
VLC is the best implementation overall though. Changing aspect ratio, reading subtitles, all those kinds of things work best in vlc.
Back in the 80s, the only semi-decent editor I could use on my atari 520-ST was Microemacs. My day job was working with Unix so I was familiar with vi (and even ed), and I'd tried emacs, though it usually brought the computers of those days to their knees.
I liked microemacs (or uemacs as I called it). And when computers became powerful enough to run emacs, I'd use emacs as though it were microemacs. There probably are better editors out there, but my fingers know the commands of those old guys and what's more, I like keeping my fingers on the keyboard when I work, not having to reach for the mouse.
With all the 'billions and billions' of galaxies out there (to use the late Carl Sagan's expression), I'm pretty damn sure there are aliens. But can they beat the speed of light? (which, according to some youtube videos is actually the speed of causality.) I doubt it, and if they were advanced enough to do that, I don't think they'd be much interested in our puny little planet. So, they are not a threat.
AI's have more chance of being a threat. So, I guess that's progress in the realistic fears department. But to tell you the truth, a future without AI doesn't look all that great to me. Do people want us to be piddling around like we are now 10K years from now? So AI is a threat and an opportunity. Could that mean it's a challenge?
There are various lists of greatest films, and usually "Citizen Kane" is at the top. Personally, I think it is not only not one of the greatest, I think it's downright bad. I find it pretentious, tedious, false, and with a gimmicky ending. So I have reason to take critics ratings with a mighty big grain of salt. But even Truffaut, who I consider one of the very good ones among film makers, paid a tribute to that movie. So maybe it's just me and Citizen Kane has a profundity that goes over my head.
I do like reading individual reviews by critics who are good writers and who have given a certain amount of thought to their opinions, like David Thomson for instance. He likes Citizen Kane, and that's not the only time we disagree. But he (and other critics who I sometimes agree with and sometimes don't) often points out things that I might have missed. Check out various critics, find out those who seem to have something to offer, and you can benefit from it. If you go to Rotten Tomatoes don't just look at the score, look at the comments.
I have to say though that I'm an old guy, and I don't know what the new critics are like generally. I used to look at reviews done by amateurs on IMDB, and some of them were pretty good, but it's like slashdot, you have to sift through them, and they don't have slashdot's rating system to help you filter out the dolts.
For General relativity anyway. It always bothered me when I was thinking about gravity that it was supposed to be 'acceleration' and acceleration always seemed to imply speeding something up, giving it energy. Then I remembered that a centrifuge has a gravity like force but it doesn't expend energy.
The other thing, browse youtube videos together with your son, see which ones seem to work for him, maybe with some explanation from you.
Carl Barks (aka "The Good Artist")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks
created Uncle Scrooge and both drew and wrote the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics back in the 50s and they were the BEST comix around. Whenever I take a glance at the modern 'action hero' comics, I find the stories pretentious, repetitive and rather stupid and uninformed, and the characters one dimensional, compared to the old Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories.
Uncle Scrooge with his money, Donald Duck with his sheer toughness, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie with their Junior Woodchucks' handbook could take on anybody. Oh, and then there was Gyro Gearloose...
You were using Debian? So switch to Devuan. I did and I really like it.
As for old fartness, my first exposure to unix was trying to port Unix to a Motorola 68K based VME bus system in 1982. Eventually my boss gave up on it and we got Charles River Data Systems M68K based Unix computers. Things never went well with the larger project this was part of, but I transferred to another division before anything really hit the fan.
I remember how cars would develop this mysterious malady where they would start, and a second later the engine would die. That was a symptom of either a bad fuel pump or, more likely, the condensor inside the distributor needed to be replaced. If this happened to a clueless about cars friend, you could look like a mechanical genius just by replacing a 60 cent part for them.
I suppose one could still use feeler guages to regap spark plugs. Does anybody still do that?
For some reason, one thing I remember was mechanical voltage regulators. Seems like I was always having to replace them.
Also I drove a couple of vehicles with column shifts ('three on the tree' remember that expression?) And, the linkage to the gear shift would go bad. Usually it was just the bushings that needed replacing.
Changing channels on a TV, for channels with no station in the area you'd just get 'snow' or white noise, on the screen; the equivalent for sound was called static. Trying to watch a show on a station with a weak signal would be fuzzy. Also, the picture would often 'roll' if some vacuum tube in the electronics was weak. If you were capable enough, you could pull the tubes out and test them at a testing machine down at Radio Shack. Otherwise you'd bring in the television repair man.
Also, when telephone modems or fax machines were first making a connection that static like sound of the protocol handshake when they first connected.
I saw the movie as a kid when it first came out. I remember as soon as Robbie 'spoke' I recognized the voice as Marvin Miller who played Michael Anthony, personal secretary to John Beresford Tipton, on a TV show of the time called "The Millionaire". I really wished they'd used a less familiar voice for Robbie. But I loved that movie anyway.
PS On the TV show you never saw John Beresford Tipton's face. He was a mysterious billionaire. But he was voiced by Paul Frees, who was the voice actor for many cartoon characters, everybody from Ludwig Von Drake to the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Well, some bugs are found not by typos but by doing exactly what the manual says. Something that should've been tested and wasn't.
How they're found may also depend on how you define 'bug'. To me, most bugs are found by testing, but if you consider testing to be part of the design process, and a bug is found only after the design process is completed, then, by definition, bugs are not found by deliberate testing.
Back in the 70s when there were various mini computer manufacturers each with their own architecture. I worked for one of those, and we tested our code. I don't think anybody did deliberate 'fuzzing' (though I do believe a concept kinda like that was talked about.) But some pretty hairy bugs were found by accident. People making typos when trying to enter legitimate commands, that kind of thing.
I've been in shops with tape backup back in the days when it was the cheapest, densest form of storage. Like everything else it has it's pros and cons. One big con that I remember is that it is not random access. You want a file at the end of the tape you have to spool all the way to the end of the tape to get to it. Another thing I remember is that they kept coming out with new technology tape drives and sometimes the new drives weren't compatible with the formats of the old tapes. (And tape drives were expensive).
Another thing about tape is that it is erasable. When CDs came out I though a ha, here is the ideal medium. You burn a CD, it's random access, and you can't record over it. (Depends on the kind of CD you have of course.) However, I guess the recordable CDs aren't considred long lasting enough to be good archive material. And maybe people feel the density of CDs and their successors the DVDs isn't all that good either.
I still think the ideal technology would be something like a CD/DVD that could last a long time even in relatively harsh conditions (stored in an attic that isn't air-conditioned all summer long), or a place with high humidity, or whatever, it would be random access and once written to, never erased. One problem also is, will there be equipment to read the damn thing 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line.
Well, just because someone doesn't want to start a language war doesn't mean they're not willing to start a language war if that's part of the price to be paid to have a discussion about the relative merits of different languages. I don't want to get flamed for being pedantic on this point, but I'm willing to be flamed and maybe lose precious karma points if that's what it takes to make my pedantic point.
I've read that Java was designed to be usable by 'mediocre' programmers. I take it the idea was you could hire people who weren't master programmers and get something working that didn't have a lot of subtle bugs like memory leaks that were going to come back and haunt you later. Also it was supposed to be very portable. I never used Java so I don't know how well it met those goals, but I can see how they would be desirable from a management point of view but not so much from a pure computer scientist's POV.
Haskell is a language where once you get your program to run at all it usually runs correctly. My very limited experience with it is that it requires a very mathematical sort of mind (so maybe I'm the 'mediocre programmer' when it comes to Haskell) and it's hard to know exactly what's happening under the hood so one could run in to performance issues.
One metric that I find appealing is, what language requires the least amount of lines of code. Bugs are often related to lines of code, also, if you're maintaining code, the fewer lines to look at the better. But I can see how a language designed just to be terse could be difficult. (APL anyone?)
The ideal language would probably have to find a balance between various requirements. Something where bugs could be caught easily, yet had a lot of power. It shouldn't be so complicated that few people ever master the entire language. (C++?) So it should be 'elegant' and 'expressive'. How does one measure elegance and expressiveness? And, once you've got this wonderful language, how do you promote it?
This has come up before and I recommended assembler. (And when I posted my recommendation before, I got some people posting their disagreement in followups. But their arguments were not enough to make me change my mind.)
I learned a few higher level languages before I got exposed to assembler, but it was only with assembler that some things about programming really made sense. Assembler de-mystifies computers.
It doesn't have to be a fancy machine. Use an emulator for a very basic machine and then add features. I learned it in a hardware class and the first version of our computer didn't have an index register. We had to use self-modifying code to process a list. Only then did an index register get added to the machine.
Also, it can be made into a kind of game, maybe including logic circuitry. When this came up in the past, some people posted about learning logic circuits from some children's game in the 1980s (I think that was the decade).
The way we see things is different from the way the producers see things. I reckon it's mostly an ego thing, but also there's that corporate mentality and insecurity where you don't want to be a scapegoat. The hackers also have egos, and, because they stole this, they want to think they've gotten something really big and important. In fact, the hackers may be the ones who are most blinded by ego.
An example of the disconnect that can exist between sellers and customers comes from the publishing world. According to the wikipedia, the author of the book thriller "Day Of The Jackal" had a hard time finding a publisher because the book was written about an assassination attempt on Charles DeGaulle and DeGaulle had already died of natural causes. So publishers thought readers wouldn't be interested in a story where they knew DeGaulle was going to survive so there wouldn't be any suspense. But the book was a best-seller. It may be that the producers of "Game Of Thrones" have an inflated sense of the importance of no spoilers. (Sometimes in whodunnits spoilers may spoil, and in movies like "The Crying Game", but is "Game Of Thrones" like that?)
I think spilling the beans will make little difference in viewership (might even increase it because it's publicity, and there's no such thing as bad publicity.) However, the suits might think it's going to make a difference. Then again, they might not. Or they might decide being successfully blackmailed is worse. Personally, I'll be surprised if they paid up, but I've been surprised before.
I get a fair number of stations in my area. I don't spend a lot of time watching TV but there have been some guilty pleasures. I discovered 'Community' by accident that way. Sometimes there's an old movie I want to see, and the quality will be better than on youtube or wherever. I watched "Time of their Lives" on Svengoolie for instance. (Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello was actually a pretty good actor it seems.)
Broadcast TV is just another thing that's out there where casual browsing turns up a nice tidbit now and then.
Y'know, it's been awhile since I tried searching for a me-tv website. I just did, with "me-tv linux" as keywords. I came up with a slew of sites that seemed to be relevant, but I didn't know which to recommend. I just download what Mint or Devuan has. The last time I checked, me-tv wasn't being maintained and looking for a volunteer. If it had been written in C, I might have considered taking on the job myself, but it's written in C++, originally by some cobber from down under.
I'm replying to my own post because I feel I should have explained more about using a USB stick, which is probably what a lot of people would do.
In my experience, the OS has to boot up and load the firmware before you even plug in the USB stick. This means, for example, that if I set up my computer to turn on in the middle of night (setting this up in the BIOS) just so it can record a late night movie, I have to use my pcHDTV card. Because I won't be there to plug in the USB stick after the thing has booted up. Also, having me-tv autostart won't work. If I plug in the usb stick after me-tv is running, me-tv won't see it. I have to kill me-tv and restart it.
All of my TV watching is OTA broadcast. I used to record analog with TV capture cards. I also used them to 'digitize' my old VHS tape recordings so I could get rid of the VHS tapes. (Digitizing preserved the recordings, and also allowed quicker access since I didn't have to fast forward to watch something recorded on the tail end of a 6 or 8 hour tape.)
When the USA switched to digital by mandate, I had to adjust. It took some doing and maybe I can offer some useful tips. A lot of stuff is European which uses a different system than the USA which uses ATSC. So, if you're European, or if you're searching the 'net and come across some European software like say kaffeine, beware.
MythTV gets a lot of attention. I never got it to work and it seems like overkill to me anyway. What I use is me-tv. That's an unfortunate name because if you google me-tv you get a lot of false hits.
Me-tv doesn't work well with ubuntu (something about gui libraries.) It also doesn't work very well with pclinuxos. But it works very well with Mint and Devuan! It's not really good for watching 'live'. But, you can start it recording and then watch the recording while it's being recorded with vlc or mplayer or something like that, and, depending on when you start watching or how far you've skipped ahead, you may be only seconds behind the live broadcast. Also with those players you can pause, go back, whatever, while it's continuing to record the program.
When you've installed me-tv and first start it up, you do a scan and it finds the local TV stations. Then edit the channels list it created. Also be sure to edit the preferences as the default settings can be pretty wrongheaded, like starting a recording 5 minutes in advance and continuing after you've specified it should stop. You can put it in your 'startup applications' with the invocation/usr/bin/me-tv -s -m. This way it will start up automatically in the background and quietly record programs you have specified. But, if you're using a USB stick that has custom firmware this might not work because the OS has to find and configure the USB before it starts me-tv. My pcHDTV hardware has no problem because it's hardware support is build into the kernel, but with my Hauppauge TV stick, I have to worry about timing.
Some stations will broadcast several programs at once and you can record several at a time if they use the same base carrier signal. If the station is broadcasting in full HDTV you get a nice high res picture. If they multiplex several shows, which happens a lot for local community and religious stations, you'll get a lower res picture. But there's a lot out there. If you like some of the PBS programs like 'Nova', it's nice to get the high resolution videos of nature. (Just so you won't think I'm too much of a culture vulture, I also watch 'Supernatural', and see it in all its 1280 by 1024 glory.)
If you use a hauppauge tv tuner stick you have to copy a small file to/lib/firmware to get it to work. For my particular hauppauge the file name is xc3028-v27.fw, but it probably varies dpending on whihc model you have. Besides hauppauge, I've used pcHDTV which works 'out of the box' on newer systems.
I hope this saves some of you some of the pain I went through getting all of this to work.
I actually got introduced to linux through slackware sold as a box of 50 floppies. I think I still have them lying around somewhere. Yeah, it was in the early 90s. I had worked in Unix environments since the 1980s, and had recently gotten a PC with Windows 3.1 (to replace my aging Atari 520 ST, moving up to modern stuff after a hiatus from the computer world.) And I was complaining about it to a colleague who showed me an ad in a computer magazine. It was the first I'd ever heard of linux. So, I ordered the floppies and one scary Saturday morning I started installing, following the directions. Late afternoon I was running linux, which was just like another flavor of Unix with all the old familiar shell commands and utilities, except this wasn't a VAX or Sun Workstation or something like that; this was on my home computer!
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AI is like nuclear physics, in the wrong hands, it's a powerful and dangerous amplifier. That's more worrisome to me than some sort of AI consciousness out to destroy mankind on its own initiative.
No systemd and it does all the things I want. In particular, it let's me run me-tv, which doesn't run well on ubuntu because of something to do with gui libraries. (Each side blames the other last I checked, which I admit was quite awhile ago.) Before Devuan, I had to run me-tv on Linux Mint, which is a very good distro (if you're comfortable with systemd, which I'm not.)
I use vlc a lot. But mplayer let's you skip ahead or backwards from the keyboard. The side arrows are short skips, the up and down arrows are bigger skips, and page up and page down are even bigger skips. When I'm searching for something, or skipping over commercials, that's really nice.
VLC is the best implementation overall though. Changing aspect ratio, reading subtitles, all those kinds of things work best in vlc.
Back in the 80s, the only semi-decent editor I could use on my atari 520-ST was Microemacs. My day job was working with Unix so I was familiar with vi (and even ed), and I'd tried emacs, though it usually brought the computers of those days to their knees.
I liked microemacs (or uemacs as I called it). And when computers became powerful enough to run emacs, I'd use emacs as though it were microemacs. There probably are better editors out there, but my fingers know the commands of those old guys and what's more, I like keeping my fingers on the keyboard when I work, not having to reach for the mouse.
With all the 'billions and billions' of galaxies out there (to use the late Carl Sagan's expression), I'm pretty damn sure there are aliens. But can they beat the speed of light? (which, according to some youtube videos is actually the speed of causality.) I doubt it, and if they were advanced enough to do that, I don't think they'd be much interested in our puny little planet. So, they are not a threat.
AI's have more chance of being a threat. So, I guess that's progress in the realistic fears department. But to tell you the truth, a future without AI doesn't look all that great to me. Do people want us to be piddling around like we are now 10K years from now? So AI is a threat and an opportunity. Could that mean it's a challenge?
There are various lists of greatest films, and usually "Citizen Kane" is at the top. Personally, I think it is not only not one of the greatest, I think it's downright bad. I find it pretentious, tedious, false, and with a gimmicky ending. So I have reason to take critics ratings with a mighty big grain of salt. But even Truffaut, who I consider one of the very good ones among film makers, paid a tribute to that movie. So maybe it's just me and Citizen Kane has a profundity that goes over my head.
I do like reading individual reviews by critics who are good writers and who have given a certain amount of thought to their opinions, like David Thomson for instance. He likes Citizen Kane, and that's not the only time we disagree. But he (and other critics who I sometimes agree with and sometimes don't) often points out things that I might have missed. Check out various critics, find out those who seem to have something to offer, and you can benefit from it. If you go to Rotten Tomatoes don't just look at the score, look at the comments.
I have to say though that I'm an old guy, and I don't know what the new critics are like generally. I used to look at reviews done by amateurs on IMDB, and some of them were pretty good, but it's like slashdot, you have to sift through them, and they don't have slashdot's rating system to help you filter out the dolts.
For General relativity anyway. It always bothered me when I was thinking about gravity that it was supposed to be 'acceleration' and acceleration always seemed to imply speeding something up, giving it energy. Then I remembered that a centrifuge has a gravity like force but it doesn't expend energy.
The other thing, browse youtube videos together with your son, see which ones seem to work for him, maybe with some explanation from you.
Carl Barks (aka "The Good Artist") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks created Uncle Scrooge and both drew and wrote the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics back in the 50s and they were the BEST comix around. Whenever I take a glance at the modern 'action hero' comics, I find the stories pretentious, repetitive and rather stupid and uninformed, and the characters one dimensional, compared to the old Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories. Uncle Scrooge with his money, Donald Duck with his sheer toughness, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie with their Junior Woodchucks' handbook could take on anybody. Oh, and then there was Gyro Gearloose...
You were using Debian? So switch to Devuan. I did and I really like it.
As for old fartness, my first exposure to unix was trying to port Unix to a Motorola 68K based VME bus system in 1982. Eventually my boss gave up on it and we got Charles River Data Systems M68K based Unix computers. Things never went well with the larger project this was part of, but I transferred to another division before anything really hit the fan.
I remember how cars would develop this mysterious malady where they would start, and a second later the engine would die. That was a symptom of either a bad fuel pump or, more likely, the condensor inside the distributor needed to be replaced. If this happened to a clueless about cars friend, you could look like a mechanical genius just by replacing a 60 cent part for them.
I suppose one could still use feeler guages to regap spark plugs. Does anybody still do that?
For some reason, one thing I remember was mechanical voltage regulators. Seems like I was always having to replace them.
Also I drove a couple of vehicles with column shifts ('three on the tree' remember that expression?) And, the linkage to the gear shift would go bad. Usually it was just the bushings that needed replacing.
Changing channels on a TV, for channels with no station in the area you'd just get 'snow' or white noise, on the screen; the equivalent for sound was called static. Trying to watch a show on a station with a weak signal would be fuzzy. Also, the picture would often 'roll' if some vacuum tube in the electronics was weak. If you were capable enough, you could pull the tubes out and test them at a testing machine down at Radio Shack. Otherwise you'd bring in the television repair man.
Also, when telephone modems or fax machines were first making a connection that static like sound of the protocol handshake when they first connected.
I saw the movie as a kid when it first came out. I remember as soon as Robbie 'spoke' I recognized the voice as Marvin Miller who played Michael Anthony, personal secretary to John Beresford Tipton, on a TV show of the time called "The Millionaire". I really wished they'd used a less familiar voice for Robbie. But I loved that movie anyway.
PS On the TV show you never saw John Beresford Tipton's face. He was a mysterious billionaire. But he was voiced by Paul Frees, who was the voice actor for many cartoon characters, everybody from Ludwig Von Drake to the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Well, some bugs are found not by typos but by doing exactly what the manual says. Something that should've been tested and wasn't.
How they're found may also depend on how you define 'bug'. To me, most bugs are found by testing, but if you consider testing to be part of the design process, and a bug is found only after the design process is completed, then, by definition, bugs are not found by deliberate testing.
Back in the 70s when there were various mini computer manufacturers each with their own architecture. I worked for one of those, and we tested our code. I don't think anybody did deliberate 'fuzzing' (though I do believe a concept kinda like that was talked about.) But some pretty hairy bugs were found by accident. People making typos when trying to enter legitimate commands, that kind of thing.
I've been in shops with tape backup back in the days when it was the cheapest, densest form of storage. Like everything else it has it's pros and cons. One big con that I remember is that it is not random access. You want a file at the end of the tape you have to spool all the way to the end of the tape to get to it. Another thing I remember is that they kept coming out with new technology tape drives and sometimes the new drives weren't compatible with the formats of the old tapes. (And tape drives were expensive).
Another thing about tape is that it is erasable. When CDs came out I though a ha, here is the ideal medium. You burn a CD, it's random access, and you can't record over it. (Depends on the kind of CD you have of course.) However, I guess the recordable CDs aren't considred long lasting enough to be good archive material. And maybe people feel the density of CDs and their successors the DVDs isn't all that good either.
I still think the ideal technology would be something like a CD/DVD that could last a long time even in relatively harsh conditions (stored in an attic that isn't air-conditioned all summer long), or a place with high humidity, or whatever, it would be random access and once written to, never erased. One problem also is, will there be equipment to read the damn thing 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line.
Well, just because someone doesn't want to start a language war doesn't mean they're not willing to start a language war if that's part of the price to be paid to have a discussion about the relative merits of different languages. I don't want to get flamed for being pedantic on this point, but I'm willing to be flamed and maybe lose precious karma points if that's what it takes to make my pedantic point.
I've read that Java was designed to be usable by 'mediocre' programmers. I take it the idea was you could hire people who weren't master programmers and get something working that didn't have a lot of subtle bugs like memory leaks that were going to come back and haunt you later. Also it was supposed to be very portable. I never used Java so I don't know how well it met those goals, but I can see how they would be desirable from a management point of view but not so much from a pure computer scientist's POV.
Haskell is a language where once you get your program to run at all it usually runs correctly. My very limited experience with it is that it requires a very mathematical sort of mind (so maybe I'm the 'mediocre programmer' when it comes to Haskell) and it's hard to know exactly what's happening under the hood so one could run in to performance issues.
One metric that I find appealing is, what language requires the least amount of lines of code. Bugs are often related to lines of code, also, if you're maintaining code, the fewer lines to look at the better. But I can see how a language designed just to be terse could be difficult. (APL anyone?)
The ideal language would probably have to find a balance between various requirements. Something where bugs could be caught easily, yet had a lot of power. It shouldn't be so complicated that few people ever master the entire language. (C++?) So it should be 'elegant' and 'expressive'. How does one measure elegance and expressiveness? And, once you've got this wonderful language, how do you promote it?
This has come up before and I recommended assembler. (And when I posted my recommendation before, I got some people posting their disagreement in followups. But their arguments were not enough to make me change my mind.)
I learned a few higher level languages before I got exposed to assembler, but it was only with assembler that some things about programming really made sense. Assembler de-mystifies computers.
It doesn't have to be a fancy machine. Use an emulator for a very basic machine and then add features. I learned it in a hardware class and the first version of our computer didn't have an index register. We had to use self-modifying code to process a list. Only then did an index register get added to the machine.
Also, it can be made into a kind of game, maybe including logic circuitry. When this came up in the past, some people posted about learning logic circuits from some children's game in the 1980s (I think that was the decade).
The way we see things is different from the way the producers see things. I reckon it's mostly an ego thing, but also there's that corporate mentality and insecurity where you don't want to be a scapegoat. The hackers also have egos, and, because they stole this, they want to think they've gotten something really big and important. In fact, the hackers may be the ones who are most blinded by ego.
An example of the disconnect that can exist between sellers and customers comes from the publishing world. According to the wikipedia, the author of the book thriller "Day Of The Jackal" had a hard time finding a publisher because the book was written about an assassination attempt on Charles DeGaulle and DeGaulle had already died of natural causes. So publishers thought readers wouldn't be interested in a story where they knew DeGaulle was going to survive so there wouldn't be any suspense. But the book was a best-seller. It may be that the producers of "Game Of Thrones" have an inflated sense of the importance of no spoilers. (Sometimes in whodunnits spoilers may spoil, and in movies like "The Crying Game", but is "Game Of Thrones" like that?)
I think spilling the beans will make little difference in viewership (might even increase it because it's publicity, and there's no such thing as bad publicity.) However, the suits might think it's going to make a difference. Then again, they might not. Or they might decide being successfully blackmailed is worse. Personally, I'll be surprised if they paid up, but I've been surprised before.
I get a fair number of stations in my area. I don't spend a lot of time watching TV but there have been some guilty pleasures. I discovered 'Community' by accident that way. Sometimes there's an old movie I want to see, and the quality will be better than on youtube or wherever. I watched "Time of their Lives" on Svengoolie for instance. (Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello was actually a pretty good actor it seems.)
Broadcast TV is just another thing that's out there where casual browsing turns up a nice tidbit now and then.
Y'know, it's been awhile since I tried searching for a me-tv website. I just did, with "me-tv linux" as keywords. I came up with a slew of sites that seemed to be relevant, but I didn't know which to recommend. I just download what Mint or Devuan has. The last time I checked, me-tv wasn't being maintained and looking for a volunteer. If it had been written in C, I might have considered taking on the job myself, but it's written in C++, originally by some cobber from down under.
I'm replying to my own post because I feel I should have explained more about using a USB stick, which is probably what a lot of people would do.
In my experience, the OS has to boot up and load the firmware before you even plug in the USB stick. This means, for example, that if I set up my computer to turn on in the middle of night (setting this up in the BIOS) just so it can record a late night movie, I have to use my pcHDTV card. Because I won't be there to plug in the USB stick after the thing has booted up. Also, having me-tv autostart won't work. If I plug in the usb stick after me-tv is running, me-tv won't see it. I have to kill me-tv and restart it.
All of my TV watching is OTA broadcast. I used to record analog with TV capture cards. I also used them to 'digitize' my old VHS tape recordings so I could get rid of the VHS tapes. (Digitizing preserved the recordings, and also allowed quicker access since I didn't have to fast forward to watch something recorded on the tail end of a 6 or 8 hour tape.)
When the USA switched to digital by mandate, I had to adjust. It took some doing and maybe I can offer some useful tips. A lot of stuff is European which uses a different system than the USA which uses ATSC. So, if you're European, or if you're searching the 'net and come across some European software like say kaffeine, beware.
MythTV gets a lot of attention. I never got it to work and it seems like overkill to me anyway. What I use is me-tv. That's an unfortunate name because if you google me-tv you get a lot of false hits.
Me-tv doesn't work well with ubuntu (something about gui libraries.) It also doesn't work very well with pclinuxos. But it works very well with Mint and Devuan! It's not really good for watching 'live'. But, you can start it recording and then watch the recording while it's being recorded with vlc or mplayer or something like that, and, depending on when you start watching or how far you've skipped ahead, you may be only seconds behind the live broadcast. Also with those players you can pause, go back, whatever, while it's continuing to record the program.
When you've installed me-tv and first start it up, you do a scan and it finds the local TV stations. Then edit the channels list it created. Also be sure to edit the preferences as the default settings can be pretty wrongheaded, like starting a recording 5 minutes in advance and continuing after you've specified it should stop. You can put it in your 'startup applications' with the invocation /usr/bin/me-tv -s -m. This way it will start up automatically in the background and quietly record programs you have specified. But, if you're using a USB stick that has custom firmware this might not work because the OS has to find and configure the USB before it starts me-tv. My pcHDTV hardware has no problem because it's hardware support is build into the kernel, but with my Hauppauge TV stick, I have to worry about timing.
Some stations will broadcast several programs at once and you can record several at a time if they use the same base carrier signal. If the station is broadcasting in full HDTV you get a nice high res picture. If they multiplex several shows, which happens a lot for local community and religious stations, you'll get a lower res picture. But there's a lot out there. If you like some of the PBS programs like 'Nova', it's nice to get the high resolution videos of nature. (Just so you won't think I'm too much of a culture vulture, I also watch 'Supernatural', and see it in all its 1280 by 1024 glory.)
If you use a hauppauge tv tuner stick you have to copy a small file to /lib/firmware to get it to work. For my particular hauppauge the file name is xc3028-v27.fw, but it probably varies dpending on whihc model you have. Besides hauppauge, I've used pcHDTV which works 'out of the box' on newer systems.
I hope this saves some of you some of the pain I went through getting all of this to work.
What's been happening with them?
I actually got introduced to linux through slackware sold as a box of 50 floppies. I think I still have them lying around somewhere. Yeah, it was in the early 90s. I had worked in Unix environments since the 1980s, and had recently gotten a PC with Windows 3.1 (to replace my aging Atari 520 ST, moving up to modern stuff after a hiatus from the computer world.) And I was complaining about it to a colleague who showed me an ad in a computer magazine. It was the first I'd ever heard of linux. So, I ordered the floppies and one scary Saturday morning I started installing, following the directions. Late afternoon I was running linux, which was just like another flavor of Unix with all the old familiar shell commands and utilities, except this wasn't a VAX or Sun Workstation or something like that; this was on my home computer!