I've already payed for the service, so when they release anything that looks remotely appealing, I watch it
Well, sort of. I don't know about you, but I've got Youtube as well. Also a decent staple of computer games I could be playing. So the cost is my time (or "opportunity costs", if you're a soulless Econ geek). Whatever pops up new on Netflix has to be a more appealing use of its runtime to me than leveling my MMO character a bit, or catching up on the last Critical Role campaign, or seeing what Fatman on Batman has to say about the upcoming genre releases I'm excited about (often at a length greater than the movie they are talking about!), etc.
But yes, I'm in a very different mindspace when I'm thinking about watching a Netflix release than was the critic who was told to go watch this Netflix movie, and is trapped in it by their job if they don't like it.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Critics have their uses. Like any tool, you just have to know how to use them.
The thing is if I pick a *random* critic and read their review, what I've got is a random person who was essentially forced by their job to watch this movie. Anyone who was forced to read books in school for writing projects knows this automatically starts you off a little ticked at the book. To make it worse, the odds of this being their favorite genre of movies, or even one they would have picked to see for fun, are fairly slim. The main thing they bring to the table over me just asking a random person at a bus stop, is their ability to write. The only way this is ever helpful to me is if I'm in the same boat; someone is dragging me to see this movie, and I wouldn't have picked it myself.
Taking the Rotten Tomatoes critical review number is the statistical equivalent of just averaging a bunch of those random cranky reviewers. Again, not at all helpful if this is a movie I WANT to see.
A better way to use critics is to read up on their review history, pick a couple whose judgment you trust, and (this part is REALLY important) whose differences in taste from yours you know well, and can thus adjust for. Only read their reviews. Ignore everyone else's.
But for a mass genre flick (eg: an action flick, a sci-fi flick, etc) like Bright, the best thing to do with Rotten Tomatoes is completely ignore that critic score, and look at the viewer score. That's the collective judgment of people who thought they might like that kind of movie, and VOLUNTARILLY watched it.
What did Bright get from them? 86%. That's a pretty good genre flick right there.
RT, for very good reason, splits ratings for paid critics and its userbase at large. For any genre movie (and Bright is all-in Fantasy Sci-Fi, with a splash buddy-cop action), if you are a fan of that genre you should never look at the critic's reviews.
So yeah, Richard Roper and the reviewer from Uproxx (who loved "Tully" and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic and the My Little Pony movie) didn't care for it, and neither did most of their colleagues. I don't really care.
The fans, the people who wanted to watch it in the first place without being forced, gave it an 86% positive rating. I'm one of those folks, so what they think is a much better guide. If I'm being dragged to a random movie I wouldn't normally chose, *then* perhaps the critics' reviews are more relevant.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read. You're suggesting people ought to vote on things not because of the merits of what they're voting on but out of vindictive spite. And you wonder why there is so much vitriol in politics. Your mindset is part of the problem.
...only surpassed by the naiveté of acting like the entire Republican caucus hasn't been doing exactly this already since 2008. If they're gonna be like this, perhaps they can use it for GOOD for once.
My kids, for some reason I can't quite figure out, flat out can't bring themselves to do homework. They'll always ace tests though. Something to do with their particular flavor of ADHD, I'm told. Most "solutions" to this problem involve extreme parental intervention, which aren't practical when you have more than one of them at once, and flat out doesn't work when the young person goes off to college in another state.
So what I really need are colleges that do the opposite - Test-only policies.
The application process deliberately does NOT inform the applicant that they're attempting to create a duplicate account.
So what you're saying is that the article fails due to the fact that it didn't occur to them that sysadmins could also deal with the security failures of a common user-unfriendly setup by making it even more user-unfriendly.
Loads. I hear about it from their friends on Twitter all the time. Never seen one get restore this fast though. Usually its weeks, or the user just gives up and creates a new account.
Arguably in this case, the account in question has in fact violated twitter's TOS repeatedly. Its been making death threats and bullying other twitter users even today after restoration. If it was anybody BUT the POTUS it would have been shut off long ago.
They have their own streaming software that runs on their Roku boxes and provide an interface to all the streams that the box is taking. Presumably they are looking to turn that into a service like Netflix.
I can see why you might not have noticed it. My wife likes to use it for her HGTV shows, but I never used it after the first day. I just install the streaming software for each service/channel I want on the main page, and surf to them from there.
I did. It's a reasonable assumption that a nuclear weapon would have saved Saddam and Iraq
But is it really? I don't think we have enough data to say that. The only certified nuclear states in existence are either US allies (France, Israel), or countries with a huge military. The US also hasn't invaded ANY country with a very powerful military in the last 50 years (for example, North Korea's military regularly hovers around a million men). Iraq at the time they were first invaded only had about 350,000 men in their army, 100,000 of those were recently called-up "reservists", and the US felt it had to ally with half the world to do the job. So it seems equally likely its the military and not the nukes doing the deterrence.
Its quite possible for any small nuclear state without a top-4 military, the US would simply identify their nukes, and take out their ability to deploy them as job one (normally, taking out air defenses are job one).
The entire point of expert systems is to distill the reasoning process of experts so that you don't have to have one of those available to you at all times.
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert
Honestly, having as much as 30% of the users being experts kind of sounds like a waste to me.
Yet the Mac survived despite similarly being a proprietary design, it wasn't until Windows 95 came out that the Mac became technically inferior -- MacOS 8 and Windows 3.1 were pretty comparable technically, but Windows 95 had real multitasking and while it crashed a lot, so did MacOS 8.
I'd "well-but" this, but I honestly have no clue how Apple managed to survive. They almost didn't, of course. At one point Microsoft actually stepped in and saved them. The theory was Microsoft was worried they'd lose their anti-trust suit with the US government if they didn't have the fig-leaf of competition from Apple to hide behind. So they'd probably be history like Atari and Commodore if they hadn't happened to be the last one standing.
Everything went to hell after Tramiel left and management is entirely to blame
I was a diehard. Bought an A1000 a month after release, and a A2000 eventually. I loved the platform. But this take, while common, is just flat-out wrong.
The Amiga was designed first and foremost to be the world's best gaming rig. Everything else came second. The problem was that the PC platform was (inadvertently) opened, and there was flat out no way the Amiga could compete any more. The engineers there were great, but at the end they were competing against an entire industry of graphic and sound engineers creating new PC hardware.
It had this great design with several graphics and sound coprocessors that was really innovative. But in the end, that design became a boat-anchor. The only people who could speed up your graphics hardware or improve your sound hardware were Commodore, and to do so you'd have to buy a whole new Amiga (at today's equivalent of $3-4k). Meanwhile there were hundreds of garage shops all over the world constantly fighting over who could develop the best consumer graphics or sound card for a PC ISA slot. In 3 years yesterday's great new one would be hopelessly low-end and slow. The Amiga's hardware got left in the dust, and there was nothing a single plucky engineering team, no matter how well or badly managed, could hope to do about it.
And of course the PC's modular design wasn't due to any great engineering insight or management vision. It was "modular" simply because a base PC was so useless, and more hungry garage startups reverse-engineered the base hardware and BIOS. No management genius at IBM caused that. Quite the opposite.
The only moral to the Amiga story is: Open always wins.
Sounds to me like you also had two Android tablets whose browser still works too, and possibly at least a third that still works, but may slowly start to develop problems. Considering that tablet has to be AT LEAST 4 YEARS OLD (Jellybean was the latest release from mid 2012 to October 2013), that isn't bad at all. Even your sainted Chromebook won't necessarily support OS updates much past that point.
I read a lot of SF and Fantasy, so I feel little shame in saying I've read no Gibson outside of Neuromancer.
It was OK I suppose. But I wasn't really fond of his protagonist. Dude wasn't sympathetic at all, and in the end I just did not like him. I think I would have enjoyed it more if he'd written it from the point of view of his female bodyguard. Also his universe was dystopian and ugly. I already have one ugly dystopia narrated by people I don't like, I don't need more when I go to read.
OTOH, if that is your kind of thing, I'd suggest picking up Charlie Human's Apocolypse Now Now. Human can at least write a bastard narrator that I still somehow want to follow.
Other examples: Inciting a riot, libel, calling in a fake bomb threat, advocating the violent overthrow of the government, criminal conspiracy, verbal assault, making terroristic threats, and fighting words.
So no, "Usenet ethos" or no, you don't get to cynically use words as weapons against other people and then hide behind "free expression".
And there's a moderation system here, theoretically designed to judge the quality of speech without actually restricting it
They subverted the/. moderation system just fine during the election.
As near as I can tell, they had hordes of new-ish user accounts that had just enough rep to randomly get access to the moderation system. The non-mod accounts posted pro-Putin (and incidentally Trump) propaganda (almost all from suspiciously high UIDs), and the mod accounts upvoted them and downvoted anybody saying anything else. The only way I knew our typical posters were talking about the Russians at all is from the upvoted posts from new users ridiculing the idea.
The moderation system here I think works pretty good, when not attacked by state-level actors.
I have a hard time believing that the Russian trolls would have found this site to be worth their efforts
You can "believe" what you want, but it was damn obvious at the time it was Russians. You could see that just by looking at the arguments that got modded up. 1st priority was suspiciously over-the-top ridicule of any mention of Russian involvement in the election (back when few people were even talking about that), followed by assertions that Putin was a reasonable guy and Ukrainians were Nazis, with a distant third being pro-Trump (usually specious, and sometimes using logic I've never heard from an American).
It was only later that it became known that there was an active campaign to do this all over the internet. If you think this should have been a low-priority target for them, I guess that should show you just how extensive the effort was. Either that, or you can go take their target priority list up with Putin.
However, anything but option 1 requires Congress to do something. And I really don't think the current Republican Congress is interested in adding some safe Democratic seats to Congress.
That's understating it. The only way PR is ever going to be allowed full statehood is if they find a way to add a republican state too (eg: split Texas in two), or the Dems managed to get 60 votes in the Senate to prevent filibusters.
The shenanigans that were pulled to deny Obama his last Supreme Court pick have nothing on the mayhem they'd be willing to generate to prevent a permanent extra 2 votes in the Senate.
Yes, money is an issue, but it's not like they have much choice about trying to raise it to rebuild.
True, but with generation via renewables (I assume that's part of the argument here), the costs tend to be heavily weighted towards the front-end, rather than paying for the fuel as you go. So presumably they'd have to pay more up-front to get their grid back up to the same production that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I've already payed for the service, so when they release anything that looks remotely appealing, I watch it
Well, sort of. I don't know about you, but I've got Youtube as well. Also a decent staple of computer games I could be playing. So the cost is my time (or "opportunity costs", if you're a soulless Econ geek). Whatever pops up new on Netflix has to be a more appealing use of its runtime to me than leveling my MMO character a bit, or catching up on the last Critical Role campaign, or seeing what Fatman on Batman has to say about the upcoming genre releases I'm excited about (often at a length greater than the movie they are talking about!), etc.
But yes, I'm in a very different mindspace when I'm thinking about watching a Netflix release than was the critic who was told to go watch this Netflix movie, and is trapped in it by their job if they don't like it.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Critics have their uses. Like any tool, you just have to know how to use them.
The thing is if I pick a *random* critic and read their review, what I've got is a random person who was essentially forced by their job to watch this movie. Anyone who was forced to read books in school for writing projects knows this automatically starts you off a little ticked at the book. To make it worse, the odds of this being their favorite genre of movies, or even one they would have picked to see for fun, are fairly slim. The main thing they bring to the table over me just asking a random person at a bus stop, is their ability to write. The only way this is ever helpful to me is if I'm in the same boat; someone is dragging me to see this movie, and I wouldn't have picked it myself.
Taking the Rotten Tomatoes critical review number is the statistical equivalent of just averaging a bunch of those random cranky reviewers. Again, not at all helpful if this is a movie I WANT to see.
A better way to use critics is to read up on their review history, pick a couple whose judgment you trust, and (this part is REALLY important) whose differences in taste from yours you know well, and can thus adjust for. Only read their reviews. Ignore everyone else's.
But for a mass genre flick (eg: an action flick, a sci-fi flick, etc) like Bright, the best thing to do with Rotten Tomatoes is completely ignore that critic score, and look at the viewer score. That's the collective judgment of people who thought they might like that kind of movie, and VOLUNTARILLY watched it.
What did Bright get from them? 86%. That's a pretty good genre flick right there.
RT, for very good reason, splits ratings for paid critics and its userbase at large. For any genre movie (and Bright is all-in Fantasy Sci-Fi, with a splash buddy-cop action), if you are a fan of that genre you should never look at the critic's reviews.
So yeah, Richard Roper and the reviewer from Uproxx (who loved "Tully" and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic and the My Little Pony movie) didn't care for it, and neither did most of their colleagues. I don't really care.
The fans, the people who wanted to watch it in the first place without being forced, gave it an 86% positive rating. I'm one of those folks, so what they think is a much better guide. If I'm being dragged to a random movie I wouldn't normally chose, *then* perhaps the critics' reviews are more relevant.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read. You're suggesting people ought to vote on things not because of the merits of what they're voting on but out of vindictive spite. And you wonder why there is so much vitriol in politics. Your mindset is part of the problem.
...only surpassed by the naiveté of acting like the entire Republican caucus hasn't been doing exactly this already since 2008. If they're gonna be like this, perhaps they can use it for GOOD for once.
My kids, for some reason I can't quite figure out, flat out can't bring themselves to do homework. They'll always ace tests though. Something to do with their particular flavor of ADHD, I'm told. Most "solutions" to this problem involve extreme parental intervention, which aren't practical when you have more than one of them at once, and flat out doesn't work when the young person goes off to college in another state.
So what I really need are colleges that do the opposite - Test-only policies.
The application process deliberately does NOT inform the applicant that they're attempting to create a duplicate account.
So what you're saying is that the article fails due to the fact that it didn't occur to them that sysadmins could also deal with the security failures of a common user-unfriendly setup by making it even more user-unfriendly.
Restored in 11 minutes no less. Anecdotally, it usually takes weeks. Try that trick if you aren't POTUS.
Particularly if your profile is full of name-calling and threats like his is. Good luck.
Loads. I hear about it from their friends on Twitter all the time. Never seen one get restore this fast though. Usually its weeks, or the user just gives up and creates a new account.
Arguably in this case, the account in question has in fact violated twitter's TOS repeatedly. Its been making death threats and bullying other twitter users even today after restoration. If it was anybody BUT the POTUS it would have been shut off long ago.
our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day
Was it the employee's last day before they deleted Trump's account?
It would be tough for it to drop.
This is why people get irate when you give advice as a "tip". That's totally inconsiderate ... unless you write it down.
They have their own streaming software that runs on their Roku boxes and provide an interface to all the streams that the box is taking. Presumably they are looking to turn that into a service like Netflix.
I can see why you might not have noticed it. My wife likes to use it for her HGTV shows, but I never used it after the first day. I just install the streaming software for each service/channel I want on the main page, and surf to them from there.
And the "Police Academy series" people keep talking about never happened at all.
I did. It's a reasonable assumption that a nuclear weapon would have saved Saddam and Iraq
But is it really? I don't think we have enough data to say that. The only certified nuclear states in existence are either US allies (France, Israel), or countries with a huge military. The US also hasn't invaded ANY country with a very powerful military in the last 50 years (for example, North Korea's military regularly hovers around a million men). Iraq at the time they were first invaded only had about 350,000 men in their army, 100,000 of those were recently called-up "reservists", and the US felt it had to ally with half the world to do the job. So it seems equally likely its the military and not the nukes doing the deterrence.
Its quite possible for any small nuclear state without a top-4 military, the US would simply identify their nukes, and take out their ability to deploy them as job one (normally, taking out air defenses are job one).
The entire point of expert systems is to distill the reasoning process of experts so that you don't have to have one of those available to you at all times.
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert
Honestly, having as much as 30% of the users being experts kind of sounds like a waste to me.
Yet the Mac survived despite similarly being a proprietary design, it wasn't until Windows 95 came out that the Mac became technically inferior -- MacOS 8 and Windows 3.1 were pretty comparable technically, but Windows 95 had real multitasking and while it crashed a lot, so did MacOS 8.
I'd "well-but" this, but I honestly have no clue how Apple managed to survive. They almost didn't, of course. At one point Microsoft actually stepped in and saved them. The theory was Microsoft was worried they'd lose their anti-trust suit with the US government if they didn't have the fig-leaf of competition from Apple to hide behind. So they'd probably be history like Atari and Commodore if they hadn't happened to be the last one standing.
Everything went to hell after Tramiel left and management is entirely to blame
I was a diehard. Bought an A1000 a month after release, and a A2000 eventually. I loved the platform. But this take, while common, is just flat-out wrong.
The Amiga was designed first and foremost to be the world's best gaming rig. Everything else came second. The problem was that the PC platform was (inadvertently) opened, and there was flat out no way the Amiga could compete any more. The engineers there were great, but at the end they were competing against an entire industry of graphic and sound engineers creating new PC hardware.
It had this great design with several graphics and sound coprocessors that was really innovative. But in the end, that design became a boat-anchor. The only people who could speed up your graphics hardware or improve your sound hardware were Commodore, and to do so you'd have to buy a whole new Amiga (at today's equivalent of $3-4k). Meanwhile there were hundreds of garage shops all over the world constantly fighting over who could develop the best consumer graphics or sound card for a PC ISA slot. In 3 years yesterday's great new one would be hopelessly low-end and slow. The Amiga's hardware got left in the dust, and there was nothing a single plucky engineering team, no matter how well or badly managed, could hope to do about it.
And of course the PC's modular design wasn't due to any great engineering insight or management vision. It was "modular" simply because a base PC was so useless, and more hungry garage startups reverse-engineered the base hardware and BIOS. No management genius at IBM caused that. Quite the opposite.
The only moral to the Amiga story is: Open always wins.
Well, the average IQ is 100, and you already know how wise average people are.
If there's one thing D&D taught me, its that Intelligence and Wisdom are two completely different things.
What you see today is what happens when a large amount of voters use Wisdom as a dump stat.
Sounds to me like you also had two Android tablets whose browser still works too, and possibly at least a third that still works, but may slowly start to develop problems. Considering that tablet has to be AT LEAST 4 YEARS OLD (Jellybean was the latest release from mid 2012 to October 2013), that isn't bad at all. Even your sainted Chromebook won't necessarily support OS updates much past that point.
I read a lot of SF and Fantasy, so I feel little shame in saying I've read no Gibson outside of Neuromancer.
It was OK I suppose. But I wasn't really fond of his protagonist. Dude wasn't sympathetic at all, and in the end I just did not like him. I think I would have enjoyed it more if he'd written it from the point of view of his female bodyguard. Also his universe was dystopian and ugly. I already have one ugly dystopia narrated by people I don't like, I don't need more when I go to read.
OTOH, if that is your kind of thing, I'd suggest picking up Charlie Human's Apocolypse Now Now. Human can at least write a bastard narrator that I still somehow want to follow.
Other examples: Inciting a riot, libel, calling in a fake bomb threat, advocating the violent overthrow of the government, criminal conspiracy, verbal assault, making terroristic threats, and fighting words.
So no, "Usenet ethos" or no, you don't get to cynically use words as weapons against other people and then hide behind "free expression".
And there's a moderation system here, theoretically designed to judge the quality of speech without actually restricting it
They subverted the /. moderation system just fine during the election.
As near as I can tell, they had hordes of new-ish user accounts that had just enough rep to randomly get access to the moderation system. The non-mod accounts posted pro-Putin (and incidentally Trump) propaganda (almost all from suspiciously high UIDs), and the mod accounts upvoted them and downvoted anybody saying anything else. The only way I knew our typical posters were talking about the Russians at all is from the upvoted posts from new users ridiculing the idea.
The moderation system here I think works pretty good, when not attacked by state-level actors.
I have a hard time believing that the Russian trolls would have found this site to be worth their efforts
You can "believe" what you want, but it was damn obvious at the time it was Russians. You could see that just by looking at the arguments that got modded up. 1st priority was suspiciously over-the-top ridicule of any mention of Russian involvement in the election (back when few people were even talking about that), followed by assertions that Putin was a reasonable guy and Ukrainians were Nazis, with a distant third being pro-Trump (usually specious, and sometimes using logic I've never heard from an American).
It was only later that it became known that there was an active campaign to do this all over the internet. If you think this should have been a low-priority target for them, I guess that should show you just how extensive the effort was. Either that, or you can go take their target priority list up with Putin.
However, anything but option 1 requires Congress to do something. And I really don't think the current Republican Congress is interested in adding some safe Democratic seats to Congress.
That's understating it. The only way PR is ever going to be allowed full statehood is if they find a way to add a republican state too (eg: split Texas in two), or the Dems managed to get 60 votes in the Senate to prevent filibusters.
The shenanigans that were pulled to deny Obama his last Supreme Court pick have nothing on the mayhem they'd be willing to generate to prevent a permanent extra 2 votes in the Senate.
Yes, money is an issue, but it's not like they have much choice about trying to raise it to rebuild.
True, but with generation via renewables (I assume that's part of the argument here), the costs tend to be heavily weighted towards the front-end, rather than paying for the fuel as you go. So presumably they'd have to pay more up-front to get their grid back up to the same production that way.