That's an excellent idea. Might also get rid of the "every time I see a foe post ANYthing, I gotta mod 'em down" types. I and others I've talked to have noticed spasms of 5 mod-downs at once, which tends to indicate a troll or foe following one about.
My own pet peeve: Being ancient of account and excellent of karma, my posts start life at +2. Every so often someone mods one down as "overrated". How can it be overrated if it's at the default??
Myself, I only mod up, never down. There are already enough morons who live for the chance to make a snappy mod-down. In fact, I've even been known to mod up one of my freaks (who happens to be an unmitigated linux bigot, but nonetheless occasionally has something worthwhile to say).
(Come to mention it, why isn't he here trashing the excellent concept of a nice installer for real people?:)
I know a guy who is a handyman and massage therapist by trade (his business card says "I Bring You Hands"), but on the side he teaches Dungeons & Dragons at a local university.
Side note: the D&D class often attracts "problem students" of jr.high age. They soon discover that to do well at D&D, they need to learn history, math (specifically statistics), and assorted other stuff they've been resisting in regular school. Some have gone from near-dropouts to A and B grades (with a concomitantly improve attitude), motivated by their desire to do well at D&D.
As several others have asked... how does one get in on such work? I've done line-editing, scene doctoring, and proofreading for small local pubs and private parties, but would like something a bit more regular.
That's a nice idea too. Don't some camcorders already detach from the part that holds a VHS tape, so you can use just the camera part itself with a minitape? Same concept, except substitute a HD for the minitape. Best of both worlds!
Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.
That would let you make cheap backups on the road or offload your video whenever you ran out of HD space (just pick up a few $4 minitapes anywhere), or copy video from an existing tape, etc.
Any of the knowledgeable folk in the DV/MPEG discussion above have technical objections or feasibility comments?
There is (or at least was) already a long distance service that is "free" provided you're willing to listen to a couple minutes of advertsing for every 20 minutes of LD use.
However, the thought of making anyone using a bulk autodialer pay a certain amount into my telephone account for each time they call has a certain appeal.
Lessee... per the above-mentioned LD service, assuming 3 cents a minute for wholesale LD, two minutes of ads are worth 60 cents (20 minutes worth of LD use). For recorded phone spam, since it DOES monopolise the line for the duration (you can't hang up, because it typically won't disconnect) lets up the ante to 50 cents per minute or any part thereof. Sound fair to you??
Hmm... signing up for telespam could become a right profitable way to run a phone line!! And you could keep a junk phone line whose sole mission in life is to collect money from telemarketers (shunt it to an answering machine with the ringer and sound turned off), while keeping your "normal" phone number spam-free by making sure it's on a master Do Not Call list (see my post above about that).
Damn, we're missing a helluva marketing opportunity here!;)
Just let a modem pick up the line... SCREECH*SCREECH*DOING*SCREEECH... Used to be a common method of getting rid of unwanted callers.
But in fact, it does zero good to hang up on, annoy, or (worst of all since it PEGS you as a prospect) argue with telemarketers. What DOES work is to say in a Properly Annoyed Voice: "I'm SUPPOSED to be on your Do Not Call list!! You better put me back on your do not call list, or I will report you to the FTC!" They about pee themselves backing away and apologizing, and you never hear from them again.
And if you do this a few times, ALL the calls go away -- because most telemarketers use a master DNC list. Newspapers are the best for getting yourself DNC'd by the whole world. After I told the Los Angeles Daily News to never call me again, within a few weeks I stopped getting ANY telemarketing calls, and 15 years later I'm STILL not getting any junk calls.
(Yes, this post repeats what I've said every time the subject comes up. Apparently Slashdot readers are slow learners.;)
What I wrote on the comments form; feel free to plagiarize:
**************** This is the worst of all possible amendments. Automated phone spam is already the most abusive, as it usually grabs the phone line and won't let go until it's done with its spiel. This wastes my time if I happen to answer the line, and wastes the limited space on my answering machine tape if it picks up. Plus in my experience, automated phone spam is the MOST likely to not have a valid way to get off the list. Oh, sure, it may give you an 800 number to call, but that's likely to reach some convoluted voicemail system that never gets you anywhere. And the concept of "prior contact" has already been stretched to mean "and everyone our company ever shares marketing information with". Not only that, but the upshot WILL be that telemarketers uniformly go to an automated model (much cheaper for them, much more annoying for us). PLEASE don't let this go through. KEEP "Do Not Call" a REAL prohibition against junk calls. ***********************
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
Ads are mostly not about immediate sales anyway, but rather about *brand recognition*. With a dedicated downloading client, it would be easy to designate a set of episodes as "Sponsored by BigCorpX", in a way that the user couldn't help seeing as they select the desired downloads. Cripes, just a textbox and a corp logo would do the job.
Rather than a player (which might not be MY player of choice anyway)... why not offer a nice clean search, preview, and downloading client, that uses a fixed percentage the bandwidth consumed by the content-download to deliver ads on the side. Sortof like the Opera browser concept. As I search the content provider's download catalog, they can target ads depending on what I happen to be searching for, AND based on my location (if the whole service is legit, no need to disguise what country you're in). And the idea of rating ads is excellent, not only for improving quality and effect, but also as a simple trick to get people to pay more attention to the ads (if you get to trash an ad you don't like, you may be more inclined to watch more of the ads, looking for ads to trash:)
Also, they might offer discounted DVDs for sale direct to downloaders. I know when I really like a series (or tune, or movie), I want the real thing for posterity, even if I already have a bootleg. It'd be handy as hell to be able to look back in my download list and pick out shows that I want DVD sets for.
[insert fantasy about getting broadband in my lifetime here]
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
Or for that matter -- rather than inserting ads into the material, the networks COULD just provide a nice clean (no spyware, no DRM) client that plays ads on the side while it lets you look for, perhaps preview, and then download the shows of your choice. That would probably wind up being about the same show-to-ad time ratio as meatspace TV. Yeah, local automation or scripts would likely bypass some of the ads, but no more so than fridge-runs or VCR/Tivo recordings. And if it's a well-mannered client and the ads are halfway decent quality, why spend energy avoiding 'em?
And so much the better if it hooks into BitTorrent -- that's a whole lotta bandwidth the networks wouldn't have to provide for their own product.
Yeah, there'd be ripped copies floating around that some folk would grab to avoid the evil ads, but why bother with that if you can get guaranteed top quality downloads on your first try??
Occurs to me that Eliza and her friends could also be useful for screwing with the signal-to-noise ratio -- maybe an AI could pick up parts of existing threads and produce matching chatter, no matter what the topic is. After all, if they're going to waste taxpayer dollars on such projects, the least we can do in return is waste their time!!
Yeah, ridiculous. Never let it be said that one government agency is capable of doing a job by itself at any level, if two or more agencies could get their paws on its budget!!
Next summer is probably good timing for me anyway. And... solar power and a cheap place to put 'em, eh?? I've got a wonderful idea. He can put a tower up on my place in exchange for internet service.:)
(I have 10 acres at the peak of the slight ridge that runs just south of Ave.D, and have good LoS to the west half of Lancaster, Quartz Hill, and the western AV. So not all that farfetched, assuming there's not some cranky zoning issue I don't know about.)
Oh! That's teeny-tiny. Could be mounted just about anywhere.
BTW I already heard back from James at tcnuts. He says the provider in Rosamond sucks (well, he was more polite than that:) but that he's looking into covering this area. So there may be hope for us yet!!:)
Pickups are classed as commercial vehicles in CA, therefore are are taxed by weight, same as 18-wheelers. This applies even to mini-trucks that weigh less than a standard passenger car. SUVs are legally passenger vehicles, therefore pay passenger rates (much lower despite being heavier than the average pickup).
I have a car and a pickup that are the same age and similar weight, but the truck gets taxed $110 more (and rising) as a "commercial" vehicle. The extra $110 started when these idiot voters passed a proposition (ca. 1985) to soak commercial vehicles, without realising the extent of its effects.
I don't know about Hummers specifically (tho IIRC, they do have passenger-class plates here) but SUVs in general are passenger vehicles in Calif., and pay the lower license fee.
Conversely, any pickup, *including mini-trucks*, is legally a "commercial vehicle" (ie. "truck") and pays the same weight fees as an 18-wheeler.
This is due to idiots passing a proposition that raised the vehicle tax on "trucks" without bothering to notice that includes pickups.
And that's why my 26 year old pickup gets dinged $146 in tax and lic. fees (which continues to rise every year, it's gone up $22 in the past 5 years), vs. $38 for a "passenger vehicle" of comparable age and weight.
Not quite. According to a tax breakdown that used to be posted at many service stations, here in California we ALSO pay state sales tax on gasoline. So the state does indeed have a motive to look the other way as the gas companies rob us blind -- the higher the price of gas, the more sales tax it brings in.
Even worse: knowing how California does things, this will be an ADDITIONAL tax, not an "instead of" tax.
And most of the new tax income will disappear down whatever toilet the old tax vanishes down already, and somehow the budget will be even more cramped next year, and gov't admins everywhere will become more top-heavy.
The problem with taxes of any sort is that they can always find ways to increase taxes when they run out of money, regardless of whether they used it properly or blew it on the gov't equivalent of comic books. Unlike the rest of us, who when we run out of money, have to [*gasp*] STOP SPENDING.
The only trees within a mile are my own (tho far too valuable to cut down!) but it's not exactly a forest (this IS the desert, after all!) I can see the western part of Rosamond from here (about 10 miles as the crow flies), and the wind farm west of Mojave is in plain sight too (but not Mojave itself -- hills in the way). So there's a good chance of being line-of-sight to *somewhere*... How big is the part they glom onto your house -- like a sat.TV dish, or smaller?
I've been whining at Verizon for 3 years without result; 3 months wait would hardly be noticed!! Thanks for the reference; I found tcnuts.com and will give 'em a holler. I need to do something about networking my mess and rigging a router and suchlike anyway, so it's not like I'd be ready to go tomorrow regardless.:)
I've got a "dry line" (unused physical phone line) here which I'm reliably informed can extend DSL's range to about 4 miles, but Verizon isn't terribly interested in doing that either. Hell, I'd settle for DSL at half-speed -- it'd still be tons better'n 26k!!
In my experience "can't get broadband" is NOT listed as an option. The only answers offered are "Too expensive" or "Don't need it." Out of the dozens of surveys I've taken on the subject, only ONCE was "Not available" one of the allowed responses.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an excellent idea. Might also get rid of the "every time I see a foe post ANYthing, I gotta mod 'em down" types. I and others I've talked to have noticed spasms of 5 mod-downs at once, which tends to indicate a troll or foe following one about.
:)
My own pet peeve: Being ancient of account and excellent of karma, my posts start life at +2. Every so often someone mods one down as "overrated". How can it be overrated if it's at the default??
Myself, I only mod up, never down. There are already enough morons who live for the chance to make a snappy mod-down. In fact, I've even been known to mod up one of my freaks (who happens to be an unmitigated linux bigot, but nonetheless occasionally has something worthwhile to say).
(Come to mention it, why isn't he here trashing the excellent concept of a nice installer for real people?
"A liar must have a good memory." -- Quintilian (35-79 AD)
On the other hand, is there a special significance to "Pier 13?"
Yes. It's like ROT-13, except instead of being merely damp and mildewed, Pier 13 is all wet.
I know a guy who is a handyman and massage therapist by trade (his business card says "I Bring You Hands"), but on the side he teaches Dungeons & Dragons at a local university.
Side note: the D&D class often attracts "problem students" of jr.high age. They soon discover that to do well at D&D, they need to learn history, math (specifically statistics), and assorted other stuff they've been resisting in regular school. Some have gone from near-dropouts to A and B grades (with a concomitantly improve attitude), motivated by their desire to do well at D&D.
As several others have asked... how does one get in on such work? I've done line-editing, scene doctoring, and proofreading for small local pubs and private parties, but would like something a bit more regular.
My 'therapy' is pulling weeds. Since I have 10 acres in the desert, I never run out of weeds... :/
That's a nice idea too. Don't some camcorders already detach from the part that holds a VHS tape, so you can use just the camera part itself with a minitape? Same concept, except substitute a HD for the minitape. Best of both worlds!
Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.
That would let you make cheap backups on the road or offload your video whenever you ran out of HD space (just pick up a few $4 minitapes anywhere), or copy video from an existing tape, etc.
Any of the knowledgeable folk in the DV/MPEG discussion above have technical objections or feasibility comments?
There is (or at least was) already a long distance service that is "free" provided you're willing to listen to a couple minutes of advertsing for every 20 minutes of LD use.
;)
However, the thought of making anyone using a bulk autodialer pay a certain amount into my telephone account for each time they call has a certain appeal.
Lessee... per the above-mentioned LD service, assuming 3 cents a minute for wholesale LD, two minutes of ads are worth 60 cents (20 minutes worth of LD use). For recorded phone spam, since it DOES monopolise the line for the duration (you can't hang up, because it typically won't disconnect) lets up the ante to 50 cents per minute or any part thereof. Sound fair to you??
Hmm... signing up for telespam could become a right profitable way to run a phone line!! And you could keep a junk phone line whose sole mission in life is to collect money from telemarketers (shunt it to an answering machine with the ringer and sound turned off), while keeping your "normal" phone number spam-free by making sure it's on a master Do Not Call list (see my post above about that).
Damn, we're missing a helluva marketing opportunity here!
Just let a modem pick up the line... SCREECH*SCREECH*DOING*SCREEECH... Used to be a common method of getting rid of unwanted callers.
;)
But in fact, it does zero good to hang up on, annoy, or (worst of all since it PEGS you as a prospect) argue with telemarketers. What DOES work is to say in a Properly Annoyed Voice: "I'm SUPPOSED to be on your Do Not Call list!! You better put me back on your do not call list, or I will report you to the FTC!" They about pee themselves backing away and apologizing, and you never hear from them again.
And if you do this a few times, ALL the calls go away -- because most telemarketers use a master DNC list. Newspapers are the best for getting yourself DNC'd by the whole world. After I told the Los Angeles Daily News to never call me again, within a few weeks I stopped getting ANY telemarketing calls, and 15 years later I'm STILL not getting any junk calls.
(Yes, this post repeats what I've said every time the subject comes up. Apparently Slashdot readers are slow learners.
What I wrote on the comments form; feel free to plagiarize:
****************
This is the worst of all possible amendments. Automated phone spam is already the most abusive, as it usually grabs the phone line and won't let go until it's done with its spiel. This wastes my time if I happen to answer the line, and wastes the limited space on my answering machine tape if it picks up. Plus in my experience, automated phone spam is the MOST likely to not have a valid way to get off the list. Oh, sure, it may give you an 800 number to call, but that's likely to reach some convoluted voicemail system that never gets you anywhere. And the concept of "prior contact" has already been stretched to mean "and everyone our company ever shares marketing information with". Not only that, but the upshot WILL be that telemarketers uniformly go to an automated model (much cheaper for them, much more annoying for us). PLEASE don't let this go through. KEEP "Do Not Call" a REAL prohibition against junk calls.
***********************
Ads are mostly not about immediate sales anyway, but rather about *brand recognition*. With a dedicated downloading client, it would be easy to designate a set of episodes as "Sponsored by BigCorpX", in a way that the user couldn't help seeing as they select the desired downloads. Cripes, just a textbox and a corp logo would do the job.
Rather than a player (which might not be MY player of choice anyway) ... why not offer a nice clean search, preview, and downloading client, that uses a fixed percentage the bandwidth consumed by the content-download to deliver ads on the side. Sortof like the Opera browser concept. As I search the content provider's download catalog, they can target ads depending on what I happen to be searching for, AND based on my location (if the whole service is legit, no need to disguise what country you're in). And the idea of rating ads is excellent, not only for improving quality and effect, but also as a simple trick to get people to pay more attention to the ads (if you get to trash an ad you don't like, you may be more inclined to watch more of the ads, looking for ads to trash :)
Also, they might offer discounted DVDs for sale direct to downloaders. I know when I really like a series (or tune, or movie), I want the real thing for posterity, even if I already have a bootleg. It'd be handy as hell to be able to look back in my download list and pick out shows that I want DVD sets for.
[insert fantasy about getting broadband in my lifetime here]
Or for that matter -- rather than inserting ads into the material, the networks COULD just provide a nice clean (no spyware, no DRM) client that plays ads on the side while it lets you look for, perhaps preview, and then download the shows of your choice. That would probably wind up being about the same show-to-ad time ratio as meatspace TV. Yeah, local automation or scripts would likely bypass some of the ads, but no more so than fridge-runs or VCR/Tivo recordings. And if it's a well-mannered client and the ads are halfway decent quality, why spend energy avoiding 'em?
And so much the better if it hooks into BitTorrent -- that's a whole lotta bandwidth the networks wouldn't have to provide for their own product.
Yeah, there'd be ripped copies floating around that some folk would grab to avoid the evil ads, but why bother with that if you can get guaranteed top quality downloads on your first try??
Occurs to me that Eliza and her friends could also be useful for screwing with the signal-to-noise ratio -- maybe an AI could pick up parts of existing threads and produce matching chatter, no matter what the topic is. After all, if they're going to waste taxpayer dollars on such projects, the least we can do in return is waste their time!!
Coolness! If it works out, everybody happy!!
Yeah, ridiculous. Never let it be said that one government agency is capable of doing a job by itself at any level, if two or more agencies could get their paws on its budget!!
Next summer is probably good timing for me anyway. And... solar power and a cheap place to put 'em, eh?? I've got a wonderful idea. He can put a tower up on my place in exchange for internet service. :)
(I have 10 acres at the peak of the slight ridge that runs just south of Ave.D, and have good LoS to the west half of Lancaster, Quartz Hill, and the western AV. So not all that farfetched, assuming there's not some cranky zoning issue I don't know about.)
Oh! That's teeny-tiny. Could be mounted just about anywhere.
:) but that he's looking into covering this area. So there may be hope for us yet!! :)
BTW I already heard back from James at tcnuts. He says the provider in Rosamond sucks (well, he was more polite than that
Pickups are classed as commercial vehicles in CA, therefore are are taxed by weight, same as 18-wheelers. This applies even to mini-trucks that weigh less than a standard passenger car. SUVs are legally passenger vehicles, therefore pay passenger rates (much lower despite being heavier than the average pickup).
I have a car and a pickup that are the same age and similar weight, but the truck gets taxed $110 more (and rising) as a "commercial" vehicle. The extra $110 started when these idiot voters passed a proposition (ca. 1985) to soak commercial vehicles, without realising the extent of its effects.
I don't know about Hummers specifically (tho IIRC, they do have passenger-class plates here) but SUVs in general are passenger vehicles in Calif., and pay the lower license fee.
Conversely, any pickup, *including mini-trucks*, is legally a "commercial vehicle" (ie. "truck") and pays the same weight fees as an 18-wheeler.
This is due to idiots passing a proposition that raised the vehicle tax on "trucks" without bothering to notice that includes pickups.
And that's why my 26 year old pickup gets dinged $146 in tax and lic. fees (which continues to rise every year, it's gone up $22 in the past 5 years), vs. $38 for a "passenger vehicle" of comparable age and weight.
Not quite. According to a tax breakdown that used to be posted at many service stations, here in California we ALSO pay state sales tax on gasoline. So the state does indeed have a motive to look the other way as the gas companies rob us blind -- the higher the price of gas, the more sales tax it brings in.
Even worse: knowing how California does things, this will be an ADDITIONAL tax, not an "instead of" tax.
And most of the new tax income will disappear down whatever toilet the old tax vanishes down already, and somehow the budget will be even more cramped next year, and gov't admins everywhere will become more top-heavy.
The problem with taxes of any sort is that they can always find ways to increase taxes when they run out of money, regardless of whether they used it properly or blew it on the gov't equivalent of comic books. Unlike the rest of us, who when we run out of money, have to [*gasp*] STOP SPENDING.
The only trees within a mile are my own (tho far too valuable to cut down!) but it's not exactly a forest (this IS the desert, after all!) I can see the western part of Rosamond from here (about 10 miles as the crow flies), and the wind farm west of Mojave is in plain sight too (but not Mojave itself -- hills in the way). So there's a good chance of being line-of-sight to *somewhere*... How big is the part they glom onto your house -- like a sat.TV dish, or smaller?
:)
I've been whining at Verizon for 3 years without result; 3 months wait would hardly be noticed!! Thanks for the reference; I found tcnuts.com and will give 'em a holler. I need to do something about networking my mess and rigging a router and suchlike anyway, so it's not like I'd be ready to go tomorrow regardless.
I've got a "dry line" (unused physical phone line) here which I'm reliably informed can extend DSL's range to about 4 miles, but Verizon isn't terribly interested in doing that either. Hell, I'd settle for DSL at half-speed -- it'd still be tons better'n 26k!!
In my experience "can't get broadband" is NOT listed as an option. The only answers offered are "Too expensive" or "Don't need it." Out of the dozens of surveys I've taken on the subject, only ONCE was "Not available" one of the allowed responses.