Well, technically you don't need their box. You need a box. There are a few different solutions on the market that use CableCARD but unfortunately (AFAIK) they either have you pay for another service to use them (Tivo), or use the now discontinued Windows Media Center. They have basically eliminated all competition in this area, but technically there are still options available.
The way this country is, I doubt you could get a simple majority saying people should be free to breathe oxygen. There would be some bickering about some groups shouldn't be allowed to breathe whereas others would take umbrage that some freeloaders do nothing and yet get to breathe the same air that they do and it just isn't fair because they work hard for their air.
The only way to fix this mess is term limits...and those ought to apply to supreme court judges as well who should be voted into office by the public. There are way too many religious extremists in the SCOTUS for decades ruining the US. Congress is toothless, the real decisions are made in the Supreme Court and people are not even allowed to vote. What kind of democracy is this?
The only idea worse than lifetime appointed judges is judges who are up for election. A good portion of states have electable judges which turns application of the law into political points.
This is why there are so many ads with, "as a judge I gave maximum sentence to thousands of drug offenders to keep them from molesting your kids. Vote for me to keep you free!" and "I only give maximum sentences and when possible go above and beyond maximum sentences because I am tough on crime."
The whole reason for lifetime appointments is so that shit like that can't happen in the supreme court of the land. It also means that they are more-or-less untouchable by politicians who want to have them replaced by someone more sympathetic to their views. For better or worse, they are free to practice the law instead of petty politics.
Show me even one system that is able to match human beings in creativity and resourcefulness. No, Deep Blue does not count: playing chess, or even go, is not the same as creating the LIGO experiment.
Do you realize how little of a requirement this is for the vast majority of jobs? Especially the low paid service and manufacturing jobs.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering just when the economy tanked and had to take a just-more-than minimum wage manufacturing job to pay the bills. The hardest part was just trying to focus on a mind-numbingly simple job. Hell, I was designing the machines to do these jobs on paper out of pure boredom. Which as luck would have it, once the economy turned around, I got a job literally designing those exact same machines (same company, same processes, everything).
We have been promised sex robots for years now. All this time, Google has been struggling to make self-driving cars.
That is not a matter of tech, it is a matter of cost vs return. Will we have sentient or semisentient androids / gynoids any time soon? No. However, that is not anywhere close to what is needed for a sexbot. The tech is there: A Real Doll with a few servo motors to facilitate pelvic, facial, and arm movements and a Siri-like intelligent agent with voice interface to provide some semblance of communication and audio feedback is really all that is needed for a practical anthropomorphic sexbot. The only reason this has yet to be adopted is: 1) nobody wants to spend a few thousand dollars on a sex toy and 2) the social stigma of using a sex toy. Outside of vibrators and dildos for women (and only women), sex toys (especially lifelike dolls) are only for sad pathetic losers.
That is, if you're near a large supply of readily accessible water. Even with scavanging the water vapor off the fuel cells, there will be losses. And it's likely to use a lot of water to start up. Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.
And solar power is probably unfeasible for places near the poles where they experience polar nights which can last for an entire month. That doesn't mean that solar power is a bad idea that needs to be abandoned. It is possible and essential to have many different forms of power generation each with various strengths and weaknesses.
The problem is that while most projectors and conference room TVs have VGA, the vast majority of laptops have dropped or are dropping the VGA port in favor smaller options. The trend for the last few years is all about making slimmer machines with as few ports as required. HDMI has been the preferred output for the last five years or so but now Apple is backing Thunderbolt, others are now backing USB C, HDMI Mini, and variants of Displayport.
Most people can get by with adapters, but everything but the oldest legacy equipment has at minimum HDMI compatibility. The conference rooms in my office were all updated about 5-7 years ago and all have HDMI. Even my college presentation halls and classrooms had HDMI (when few laptops had HDMI) and I graduated 6 over years ago.
Our life together is so precious together, We have grown - we have grown, Although our love is still special, Let's take our chance and fly away somewhere alone,
It's been so long since we took the time, No-one's to blame, I know time flies so quickly, But when I see you darling, It's like we both are falling in love again, It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Everyday we used to make it love, Why can't we be making love nice and easy, It's time to spread our wing's and fly, Don't let another day go by my love, It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Why don't we take off alone, Take a trip far, far away, We'll be together on our own again, Like we used to in the early days, Well, well, well darling,
It's been so long since we took the time, No-one's to blame, I know time flies so quickly, But when I see you darling, It's like we both are falling in love again, It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Everyday we used to make it love, Why can't we be making love nice and easy, It's time to spread our wing's and fly, Don't let another day go by my love, It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Our life together is so precious together, We have grown - we have grown, Although our love is still special, Let's take our chance and fly away somewhere alone.
Easy for you to say. Some of us like keeping our jobs, the occasional bonus or, god forbid, a raise. Also, when you do leave, don't expect a good reference. I know from personal experience that one of the first questions a company asks a reference is "how many hours a week did they typically work and did they do overtime when told?"
You don't say? This is a bargain basement PC with no expansion slots. There is no reason for her to upgrade when Windows 7 works fine for what it is used for: recipes, pictures, Facebook, and browser games.
In the case of my Grandma, her crappy windows 7 system uses a low end onboard video card that will never be ported to Windows 10. There is no PCIe slot to install a new card, either. The updater service knows this and alerts that Win 10 can't be installed because of it. However, it doesn't stop it from flashing the notification every few hours to upgrade.
In my case, I have a CableCard tuner that requires Media Center in order to record premium channels such as HBO. So until they bring WMC to Windows 10, no upgrade for me, either.
Hauppage. They have one of only a few cablecard tuners that actually allow the recording of encrypted channels, because apparently Media Center is the only software that has encryption allowed by the media cartels.
If you want to record HBO, Starz, etc. Media Center is the only game in town.
I don't think it works that way. I get paid a salary for a work week. That salary assumes I only work 40 hours a week, but because it is salary, It doesn't change If I work less than 40 (which I would just be strait-up fired) nor do I get extra money for working more than 40 (no overtime pay for salary workers). Here is how it works. I want to go home at 5, but the boss comes in at 4:50 and says "don't leave until this is done." I tell him "it will probably take another day or two." He says "well, better get working then". I then stay there working until 5 AM where in I go to McDonalds get breakfast and a few cups of coffee, make a quick stop at home to get a shower, change my clothes, and return to work to start another day, thus pulling 12 extra hours which I don't get paid for.
Now assume that this isn't just a one-off thing and happens frequently. You can see how people can work 60+ hours a week and not get paid for it. Not because they love their job but because it's expected. This is how it is, pretty much everywhere in America. The only major difference is usually that some places the boss will order dinner on the companies dime instead of me going hungry because I only brought lunch and I can't leave because my card only gives me access until 6 PM.
I live in a house built by my own hands on land I claimed after killing the Indians living here. I'm typing this on a telegraph because I'm not the kind of greedy bastard that has to have a newfangled computer. I'm only using the telegraph until I figure out how to make the internet work with an abacus. I keep my food in the root cellar instead of wasting money on one of those refrigerators and keep the house lit by candles made with fat rendered from the animals I raise. TV is shadow puppets on the wall and I ride a horse buggy into town.
YOU sound like the greediest asshole ever with all your modern conveniences! How dare you buy things??
Kettle, meet pot. (neither of which I own because those are such extravagances). First, look at you Mr Moneybags with your horse buggy. Us salt of the Earth types walk everywhere (barefoot, no less) not ride around like royalty! And Telegraphs and abaci?! I have a few remaining fingers and toes that I can use to count on without needing luxuries like abaci. As for communication, I typically just go on a long journey to find a person and babble incoherently to their face, because I don't have lavish things like education or language. The few times that I need to have some high speed messages, I use a magnet that was given to me to induce an electrical current on the telephone lines one hundred miles away from my alcove. I know what you are going to say, that a magnet is such opulence but at least I wasn't greedy enough to actually buy it. Someone chucked it at me while shouting something vulgar, so it's mine now!
So that today, instead of everybody moving up, at least in the US, there is a new society of haves (1%ers) and have nots (everybody else).
Wrong. We have a society of haves and "soon-to-have's*."
*For various definitions of "Soon" which may or may not exceed the expected lifetime of one or more generations and may be dependent on one or more of the following: hard work, extreme good fortune, unfair business practices, unethical behavior, bribery, choosing to be born of wealthy families of correct skin color in wealthy countries and the correct gender. Offer void where prohibited, see God for details.
One big reason renting is so popular is not being tied down to a single area. Maybe I can afford to settle down when I'm 70 but right now I need to stay flexible. Every 6 months to a year I need to evaluate my options to where the salary hotspots are go there. In the last 5 years, I have lived in Boston, Seattle, 'Frisco, Austin, Portland, Denver, and am soon moving to Manhattan. These are where the high-paying jobs are and I need to be there. Houses and family just make me less flexible thus less employable.
Money never sleeps and neither can I. This is the way of the new economy. The way of our grandparents starting with a company, staying 25-40 years and retiring are dead. Company loyalty is for the stupid. If you can't update your resume every year, you might as well just jump in front of a bus because you don't matter. The only measure of success these days is the number of figures in your paycheck and the number of prestigious jobs on your CV. A flashy car doesn't hurt either but lease, never ever buy.
In Developed countries, no. Companies like to bitch and moan that it is the profitable markets like we are doing most of the pirating, but that is just plain false. Claiming that it is the US and Europe is just ways to get stockholder and government sympathy. The piracy rates of developed countries is the lowest in the world [1].
The problem areas are the rest of the world where this stuff is openly sold on the streets and people just don't care. So when people bring up things like Steam Sales and cheap games they are right, stuff is too cheap for the majority of us to pirate, but elsewhere in the world, it is not.
The biggest problem with this, as well as this generation of game consoles that that GPU tech can't keep pace with display technology. We have consumer-priced sub-$1000 (some even $600) 4K displays and manufacturers are already looking toward 8K meanwhile most mid-level GPUs, much less what goes in to laptops and consoles, are only now getting powerful enough to really push out 1080 with smooth framerates and decent AA and other effects. As I understand it, the Rift is two 1080x1200 displays which is half of 4K resolution and it still needs a $400 card.
Until we can get commodity-level cards that can smoothly handle these resolutions, or a 720p VR solution, I can't see this being anything more than a toy for people with too much money. I would love to get one, but unless I can hook it up to a laptop or whathaveyou, I can't see getting one. The last thing I want for VR is to be tethered to a desk. Hell, maybe with this technology, maybe 3D movies and games can finally make a comeback.
Slashdot Mirror
We haven't had those kind of booths in a long time. Hell, even the 1978 Superman movie made that joke, forcing him use a revolving door to change.
Well, technically you don't need their box. You need a box. There are a few different solutions on the market that use CableCARD but unfortunately (AFAIK) they either have you pay for another service to use them (Tivo), or use the now discontinued Windows Media Center. They have basically eliminated all competition in this area, but technically there are still options available.
The way this country is, I doubt you could get a simple majority saying people should be free to breathe oxygen. There would be some bickering about some groups shouldn't be allowed to breathe whereas others would take umbrage that some freeloaders do nothing and yet get to breathe the same air that they do and it just isn't fair because they work hard for their air.
The only way to fix this mess is term limits...and those ought to apply to supreme court judges as well who should be voted into office by the public. There are way too many religious extremists in the SCOTUS for decades ruining the US. Congress is toothless, the real decisions are made in the Supreme Court and people are not even allowed to vote. What kind of democracy is this?
The only idea worse than lifetime appointed judges is judges who are up for election. A good portion of states have electable judges which turns application of the law into political points.
This is why there are so many ads with, "as a judge I gave maximum sentence to thousands of drug offenders to keep them from molesting your kids. Vote for me to keep you free!" and "I only give maximum sentences and when possible go above and beyond maximum sentences because I am tough on crime."
The whole reason for lifetime appointments is so that shit like that can't happen in the supreme court of the land. It also means that they are more-or-less untouchable by politicians who want to have them replaced by someone more sympathetic to their views. For better or worse, they are free to practice the law instead of petty politics.
Show me even one system that is able to match human beings in creativity and resourcefulness. No, Deep Blue does not count: playing chess, or even go, is not the same as creating the LIGO experiment.
Do you realize how little of a requirement this is for the vast majority of jobs? Especially the low paid service and manufacturing jobs.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering just when the economy tanked and had to take a just-more-than minimum wage manufacturing job to pay the bills. The hardest part was just trying to focus on a mind-numbingly simple job. Hell, I was designing the machines to do these jobs on paper out of pure boredom. Which as luck would have it, once the economy turned around, I got a job literally designing those exact same machines (same company, same processes, everything).
We have been promised sex robots for years now. All this time, Google has been struggling to make self-driving cars.
That is not a matter of tech, it is a matter of cost vs return. Will we have sentient or semisentient androids / gynoids any time soon? No. However, that is not anywhere close to what is needed for a sexbot. The tech is there: A Real Doll with a few servo motors to facilitate pelvic, facial, and arm movements and a Siri-like intelligent agent with voice interface to provide some semblance of communication and audio feedback is really all that is needed for a practical anthropomorphic sexbot. The only reason this has yet to be adopted is: 1) nobody wants to spend a few thousand dollars on a sex toy and 2) the social stigma of using a sex toy. Outside of vibrators and dildos for women (and only women), sex toys (especially lifelike dolls) are only for sad pathetic losers.
I keep seeing them on Kinja for like $10 - $20. Some of them even have built in flashlights and whatnot. Sounds much more useful than a pager IMO.
That is, if you're near a large supply of readily accessible water. Even with scavanging the water vapor off the fuel cells, there will be losses. And it's likely to use a lot of water to start up. Here in the desert, water is a BIG issue.
And solar power is probably unfeasible for places near the poles where they experience polar nights which can last for an entire month. That doesn't mean that solar power is a bad idea that needs to be abandoned. It is possible and essential to have many different forms of power generation each with various strengths and weaknesses.
Eagles with machine guns.
AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!
The problem is that while most projectors and conference room TVs have VGA, the vast majority of laptops have dropped or are dropping the VGA port in favor smaller options. The trend for the last few years is all about making slimmer machines with as few ports as required. HDMI has been the preferred output for the last five years or so but now Apple is backing Thunderbolt, others are now backing USB C, HDMI Mini, and variants of Displayport.
Most people can get by with adapters, but everything but the oldest legacy equipment has at minimum HDMI compatibility. The conference rooms in my office were all updated about 5-7 years ago and all have HDMI. Even my college presentation halls and classrooms had HDMI (when few laptops had HDMI) and I graduated 6 over years ago.
Our life together is so precious together,
We have grown - we have grown,
Although our love is still special,
Let's take our chance and fly away somewhere alone,
It's been so long since we took the time,
No-one's to blame,
I know time flies so quickly,
But when I see you darling,
It's like we both are falling in love again,
It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Everyday we used to make it love,
Why can't we be making love nice and easy,
It's time to spread our wing's and fly,
Don't let another day go by my love,
It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Why don't we take off alone,
Take a trip far, far away,
We'll be together on our own again,
Like we used to in the early days,
Well, well, well darling,
It's been so long since we took the time,
No-one's to blame,
I know time flies so quickly,
But when I see you darling,
It's like we both are falling in love again,
It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Everyday we used to make it love,
Why can't we be making love nice and easy,
It's time to spread our wing's and fly,
Don't let another day go by my love,
It'll be just like starting over - starting over,
Our life together is so precious together,
We have grown - we have grown,
Although our love is still special,
Let's take our chance and fly away somewhere alone.
OK, so lease an electric car. Do not buy an electric car. Gotcha.
Yeah, but just think of it, a 168 hour work week. People will no longer need to go home at night and can work 24/7! Think of all the profits!
Plus the syndicates will finally be free of that menace, Batman. There is no Batman if there is no night time.
Easy for you to say. Some of us like keeping our jobs, the occasional bonus or, god forbid, a raise. Also, when you do leave, don't expect a good reference. I know from personal experience that one of the first questions a company asks a reference is "how many hours a week did they typically work and did they do overtime when told?"
You don't say? This is a bargain basement PC with no expansion slots. There is no reason for her to upgrade when Windows 7 works fine for what it is used for: recipes, pictures, Facebook, and browser games.
In the case of my Grandma, her crappy windows 7 system uses a low end onboard video card that will never be ported to Windows 10. There is no PCIe slot to install a new card, either. The updater service knows this and alerts that Win 10 can't be installed because of it. However, it doesn't stop it from flashing the notification every few hours to upgrade.
In my case, I have a CableCard tuner that requires Media Center in order to record premium channels such as HBO. So until they bring WMC to Windows 10, no upgrade for me, either.
Hauppage. They have one of only a few cablecard tuners that actually allow the recording of encrypted channels, because apparently Media Center is the only software that has encryption allowed by the media cartels.
If you want to record HBO, Starz, etc. Media Center is the only game in town.
I don't think it works that way. I get paid a salary for a work week. That salary assumes I only work 40 hours a week, but because it is salary, It doesn't change If I work less than 40 (which I would just be strait-up fired) nor do I get extra money for working more than 40 (no overtime pay for salary workers). Here is how it works. I want to go home at 5, but the boss comes in at 4:50 and says "don't leave until this is done." I tell him "it will probably take another day or two." He says "well, better get working then". I then stay there working until 5 AM where in I go to McDonalds get breakfast and a few cups of coffee, make a quick stop at home to get a shower, change my clothes, and return to work to start another day, thus pulling 12 extra hours which I don't get paid for.
Now assume that this isn't just a one-off thing and happens frequently. You can see how people can work 60+ hours a week and not get paid for it. Not because they love their job but because it's expected. This is how it is, pretty much everywhere in America. The only major difference is usually that some places the boss will order dinner on the companies dime instead of me going hungry because I only brought lunch and I can't leave because my card only gives me access until 6 PM.
I live in a house built by my own hands on land I claimed after killing the Indians living here. I'm typing this on a telegraph because I'm not the kind of greedy bastard that has to have a newfangled computer. I'm only using the telegraph until I figure out how to make the internet work with an abacus. I keep my food in the root cellar instead of wasting money on one of those refrigerators and keep the house lit by candles made with fat rendered from the animals I raise. TV is shadow puppets on the wall and I ride a horse buggy into town.
YOU sound like the greediest asshole ever with all your modern conveniences! How dare you buy things??
Kettle, meet pot. (neither of which I own because those are such extravagances). First, look at you Mr Moneybags with your horse buggy. Us salt of the Earth types walk everywhere (barefoot, no less) not ride around like royalty! And Telegraphs and abaci?! I have a few remaining fingers and toes that I can use to count on without needing luxuries like abaci. As for communication, I typically just go on a long journey to find a person and babble incoherently to their face, because I don't have lavish things like education or language. The few times that I need to have some high speed messages, I use a magnet that was given to me to induce an electrical current on the telephone lines one hundred miles away from my alcove. I know what you are going to say, that a magnet is such opulence but at least I wasn't greedy enough to actually buy it. Someone chucked it at me while shouting something vulgar, so it's mine now!
So that today, instead of everybody moving up, at least in the US, there is a new society of haves (1%ers) and have nots (everybody else).
Wrong. We have a society of haves and "soon-to-have's*."
*For various definitions of "Soon" which may or may not exceed the expected lifetime of one or more generations and may be dependent on one or more of the following: hard work, extreme good fortune, unfair business practices, unethical behavior, bribery, choosing to be born of wealthy families of correct skin color in wealthy countries and the correct gender. Offer void where prohibited, see God for details.
One big reason renting is so popular is not being tied down to a single area. Maybe I can afford to settle down when I'm 70 but right now I need to stay flexible. Every 6 months to a year I need to evaluate my options to where the salary hotspots are go there. In the last 5 years, I have lived in Boston, Seattle, 'Frisco, Austin, Portland, Denver, and am soon moving to Manhattan. These are where the high-paying jobs are and I need to be there. Houses and family just make me less flexible thus less employable.
Money never sleeps and neither can I. This is the way of the new economy. The way of our grandparents starting with a company, staying 25-40 years and retiring are dead. Company loyalty is for the stupid. If you can't update your resume every year, you might as well just jump in front of a bus because you don't matter. The only measure of success these days is the number of figures in your paycheck and the number of prestigious jobs on your CV. A flashy car doesn't hurt either but lease, never ever buy.
In Developed countries, no. Companies like to bitch and moan that it is the profitable markets like we are doing most of the pirating, but that is just plain false. Claiming that it is the US and Europe is just ways to get stockholder and government sympathy. The piracy rates of developed countries is the lowest in the world [1].
The problem areas are the rest of the world where this stuff is openly sold on the streets and people just don't care. So when people bring up things like Steam Sales and cheap games they are right, stuff is too cheap for the majority of us to pirate, but elsewhere in the world, it is not.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/co... info/stats/Crime/Software-piracy-rate
1080x1200 per eye is too low of a resolution? What do you want, 16K per eye?
My thoughts as well. Personally, I would say go to about 300 characters while not having images or reply tags ("@user") counted against that limit.
That would give plenty of space to write out a full thought while still keeping it brief.
The biggest problem with this, as well as this generation of game consoles that that GPU tech can't keep pace with display technology. We have consumer-priced sub-$1000 (some even $600) 4K displays and manufacturers are already looking toward 8K meanwhile most mid-level GPUs, much less what goes in to laptops and consoles, are only now getting powerful enough to really push out 1080 with smooth framerates and decent AA and other effects. As I understand it, the Rift is two 1080x1200 displays which is half of 4K resolution and it still needs a $400 card.
Until we can get commodity-level cards that can smoothly handle these resolutions, or a 720p VR solution, I can't see this being anything more than a toy for people with too much money. I would love to get one, but unless I can hook it up to a laptop or whathaveyou, I can't see getting one. The last thing I want for VR is to be tethered to a desk. Hell, maybe with this technology, maybe 3D movies and games can finally make a comeback.
Look on the bright side, at least you don't have to worry about any damn Mind Worms. Vicious little bastards.