Amazon stopped selling Chromecast and other devices that don't "support" Amazon's streaming service, years ago.
Amazon probably got tired of getting them back from customers who expected it to come with a remote control and just friggen' work. The Chromecast is confusing to setup and use for non-geeks, and forget about actually getting customer service from Google.
It may be hard for the/. crowd to grasp, but there's still plenty of people out there who are totally baffled by the concept of products which require you to interact with them via your smartphone. As an example, most of the bad reviews on the $199 Yuneec Breeze drone at Walmart are due to people having problems with the smartphone-based control system.
Google is doing this because Amazon refuses to sell Google devices.
Funny, I can't buy an Android tablet at the Apple Store. Sprint won't sell me a Verizon phone. Safeway wouldn't sell me a DJI drone. Target doesn't sell industrial arc welders.
And for fucks sake, don't even get me started about the argument I got into with the manager when Home Depot refused to sell me a sandwich.
The left is generally in favor of them, especially for countries like Mexico and China who abuse their people and their land.
Yeah, just like how red light cameras are for making intersections safer. Not for raising government revenue, no sireee.
A factory in China could be paying their workers a decent living wage, and not screwing up the environment, yet their goods will still be subject to the tariff. Congratulations government asshats, you've just given them more incentive to cut corners to retain profitability!
If you're really just trying to make sure your foreign competitors are playing fair, you simply require that they meet the same environmental and labor standards as domestically manufactured goods, lest they be seized at the border. But that just wouldn't fly, because it doesn't give American companies an artificial advantage.
Although economists disagree by how much, the consensus view among economists and economic historians is that "The passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.
The problem with import tariffs is that they're a burden on the many, for the benefit of the few. I don't know about you, but my source of income will in no way increase due to more American workers building solar panels or washing machines, here in the USA. The only thing I'll notice is a higher price at the store on those items.
Since this is such a great idea, why doesn't the Trump administration just go ahead and tariff the fuck out of imported everything? I'm sure the MAGA crowd will absolutely love it when that South Korean-made TV they were eyeballing for the Superbowl costs twice as much (along with just about everything else at Walmart).
And we are supposed to believe that the owner of Fox News is the guardian of quality information presented in an unbiased format? Really?
During the election, I actually had no trouble finding Fox's coverage of the same stories Trump supporters refused to read because it came from the "biased liberal media". Of course, once I posted a link to Fox, they still wouldn't read it, because that's cognitive dissonance for you.
Heck, it wasn't even that hard to find an article on Breitbart where they're not exactly singing the praises of Trump's tax plan. But I'm sure those drinking the kool aid just see it as an acceptable casualty of making sure the country isn't ruined by those damned snowflake liberals, or something like that.
So, naturally, I picked a low end AMD desktop. Oh. my. god. Is it slow! or what!! Something called superfetch would keep thrashing the disk.
My desktop is a Skylake i7 running Windows 10. Since I only use it for transcoding video (Blu-Rays to H.265), I didn't bother wasting money on a SSD. Even trying to browse the web on it results in disk thrashing which grinds the machine to a halt. Windows is just no longer tolerable for general use without an SSD.
The root of this problem is that MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, The New York Times, and virtually all the mainstream media has lost all credibility in the eyes of conservatives
Bullshit. You can find exactly the same stories on Fox, and sometimes even Breitbart if you can stomach the spin (how they attempt to defend the repeal of Net Neutrality is absolutely painful to read). People simply choose not to read news they disagree with, regardless of the source.
"ObamaCare repeal would leave 32 million more without insurance" What liberal rag is this headline from? Fox.
Now that people are doing the exact same thing online, suddenly it's the end of democracy as we know it?
It's not the exact same thing, because Facebook isn't just passively consumed like a magazine or TV broadcast. It, by design, allows friends to actively put their stamp of approval (by "liking") on bullshit and fake news, and promote (by re-sharing) whatever idiotic groupthink happens to be going around. It absolutely does reinforce the belief in terrible ideas, just look at the anti-vaxxer movement.
Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night.
So, send in a robot or drone, and assess the situation with no risk to human life. Swatting will fall out of fashion very quickly if the prankster/troll risks jail, and all it accomplishes is law enforcement sending a flying camera to peek through the target's windows for a few minutes.
If I had to pick other coins that aren't just stupid gimmicks and have a real function
All altcoins have a function: to separate fools from their BTC. You can't travel back in time to buy Bitcoin when it was cheap, but you might be able to convince enough people that your shitcoin du jour is worth "investing" their Bitcoin in. Since some altcoins actually have gone up in value, the beat goes on...
and yet the actions of Google and Amazon are just as bad.
No, no, no. A thousand fucking times, no.
You still have a choice not to be a customer of Amazon, Google, or the lot of 'em. Apple will be pleased to sell you a phone. Bing or DuckDuckGo will happily take your search queries. I'd be here all night attempting to list every retailer which competes with Amazon.
In my neighborhood, there is one choice of wired broadband provider.
Net Neutrality is necessary because it means no matter how much Amazon, Facebook, or Google decide to wall up their gardens, some upstart can still register their own.com, and be given a fair share at taking them on. That is what we stand to lose. Someone could start a great new competitor to YouTube, but if my broadband provider doesn't come to favorable terms with them, here's South Park saying it better than I ever could.
If you're pirating all your content, then Plex or Kodi are reasonable solutions. If you have some legal or moral hesitation over pirating, they aren't very useful.
I see no moral issues with ripping copies of my own legally purchased content, and putting it on a NAS for my own personal use. A perfectly legitimate use for Kodi, IMHO.
Given the cost of a low-end Intel Compute Stick, I don't see why anyone buys these locked-down ad-laden closed-ecosystem sticks other than lack of sufficient knowledge to set one up with Plex or Kodi.
The Compute Stick sucks as a media streamer. It's constantly doing all the annoying shit Windows tends to do (incessant notifications, updating when you least want it to, etc.) when you just want to sit down and watch some TV. It still hasn't gotten the sleep/wake process perfect, and you're frequently futzing behind the TV having to restart the damn thing. Netflix's Windows 10 "Metro" (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now) app is an abomination, and runs slow as snot on anything remotely considered a budget CPU. Amazon Prime Video only works through the web browser, and that gets old quick.
That being said, in addition to the Fire Stick, I do have a PC connected to my living room TV. It's my media server for Kodi (which runs just fine on the Fire Stick).
...only going to get worse once the broadband providers get in on it.
What happened today? Google took their ball and went home, like a spoiled brat. So, sideload Kodi, and install the YouTube Add-on. Alternatively, (and less brain power required) skip the Starbucks habit for a few days and buy another streaming device. I can't imagine HDMI ports are a precious commodity, when a faux reproduction (it's emulator based) of a 26 year old gaming console is so popular, retailers can't keep it in stock.
In a post-net-neutrality tomorrow, it's only a matter of time before the broadband providers start taking sides in these content provider turf wars. You'll long for the days when the fix was quite so simple.
The real threat is that Bitcoin facilitates the circumvention of the established gate keepers of the financial system.
You can't change human nature with technology. Bitcoin is being used to perpetuate the same shit which lead to banking regulations back in ye olden days. Collectively, the mob of Bitcoin users is no less greedy than the people who make up the established financial system. The difference is, the established system has to play by the rule of law - Bitcoin presently, does not.
Much worse than cash. Cash has to be physically moved and as amounts increase, so does the impracticality. There are already plenty of laws around moving large amounts of cash around.
Yet if you want to actually use Bitcoin for something, you've gotta turn it back into cash. So, unless your recipient in Bumfuckistan can turn his Bitcoin millions into the local currency, it's totally useless to him.
Bitcoin is useful for moving large amounts of imaginary money around. If you actually want to move real money, you still run into exactly the same problems as before.
The dollar is no longer guaranteed by anything, not gold, nor silver, nor land, nor oil reserves, or anything else. Thus, we need to judge its value on other criteria, not real value. Things such as trust, or scarcity.
Its value is guaranteed by the legal requirement that it must be accepted to pay off previous debts.
When I agree to a finance contract to purchase a car, they're agreeing to accept my $280 per month for the duration of the loan, even if $280 no longer buys a burrito at Taco Bell. Funny thing is, this "trust" major financial institutions have in the dollar leads to another trait Bitcoin sorely lacks: stability.
Electricity consumption ensures that it cannot be created without cost, thereby preventing anyone from artificially increasing the supply.
No. Bitcoin's scarcity hinges on the fact that the bulk of the miners all agree on which version of the Bitcoin software is the "one true Bitcoin". Anyone can easily modify the software to spew out coins galore, or change a few parameters they didn't like - and people have (Bitcoin cash, anyone?). There's only one rule in the game of cryptocoins: mob rule.
Once again, bitcoin is in no way inferior other currencies, and you must look to other measures to determine its worth. The concept that bitcoin seems impossible to debase makes it considerably desirable.
No way inferior? Try buying anything with it without jumping through a bunch of hoops, and losing some of it due to transaction fees and value fluctuations. Maybe if you're trying to fund ransomware (or other illegal activities) with it, it's an easier way to transfer money than traditional means - but for legitimate purposes, it's still a far bigger hassle than just using cash, your debit/credit card, Western Union, or PayPal.
If you were to download a movie you had no intention of purchasing, you've deprived the copyright owner of absolutely nothing. They were never going to get a sale from you in the first place, and you have not deprived the copyright holder of their right to exclusive distribution (the copyright holder can still sell their IP, same as before).
However, since we're talking about BitTorrent, where anything you download is immediately shared with other users, you're facilitating copyright infringement by design (unless you're sharing files which can be legally shared, obviously).
If you snuck into Disneyland, they'd very likely charge you with trespassing - not theft of the admission fee. When you gain access to property, whether real or intellectual, without permission of the owner - you have broken a law, but it's not theft.
They were tired of broken government and chose to try to sabotage it rather than letting it sputter on in status quo secret failure. Trump was not elected because he was really expected to fix anything.
Some people believe the scripted rivalries in professional wrestling are real, too. If the Republicans truly believed Trump was going to sabotage anything, they would've have let him run with an (R) next to his name in the primaries. See: Ross Perot
If Trump wants his businesses to keep humming along, he'll play ball just like every politician before him. He has absolutely no incentive to upend any part of the system which has enabled him (and his family) to remain incredibly wealthy.
This will end up in cat/mouse, and the mouse will always get away.
Actually, no. The cat vs mouse analogy implies that while a cat is extremely adept at catching prey, mice are such prolific breeders that even a skilled predator can't exterminate them completely. While mice are oblivious to the fact their compatriots are being picked off, we humans aren't the same.
We can be bribed or threatened not to fuck with the cat. It generally works.
Slashdot Mirror
Quit today and you can have plenty of free time right now! The catch is, "free time" doesn't pay very well.
Amazon stopped selling Chromecast and other devices that don't "support" Amazon's streaming service, years ago.
Amazon probably got tired of getting them back from customers who expected it to come with a remote control and just friggen' work. The Chromecast is confusing to setup and use for non-geeks, and forget about actually getting customer service from Google.
It may be hard for the /. crowd to grasp, but there's still plenty of people out there who are totally baffled by the concept of products which require you to interact with them via your smartphone. As an example, most of the bad reviews on the $199 Yuneec Breeze drone at Walmart are due to people having problems with the smartphone-based control system.
Google is doing this because Amazon refuses to sell Google devices.
Funny, I can't buy an Android tablet at the Apple Store. Sprint won't sell me a Verizon phone. Safeway wouldn't sell me a DJI drone. Target doesn't sell industrial arc welders.
And for fucks sake, don't even get me started about the argument I got into with the manager when Home Depot refused to sell me a sandwich.
The left is generally in favor of them, especially for countries like Mexico and China who abuse their people and their land.
Yeah, just like how red light cameras are for making intersections safer. Not for raising government revenue, no sireee.
A factory in China could be paying their workers a decent living wage, and not screwing up the environment, yet their goods will still be subject to the tariff. Congratulations government asshats, you've just given them more incentive to cut corners to retain profitability!
If you're really just trying to make sure your foreign competitors are playing fair, you simply require that they meet the same environmental and labor standards as domestically manufactured goods, lest they be seized at the border. But that just wouldn't fly, because it doesn't give American companies an artificial advantage.
Although economists disagree by how much, the consensus view among economists and economic historians is that "The passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.
The problem with import tariffs is that they're a burden on the many, for the benefit of the few. I don't know about you, but my source of income will in no way increase due to more American workers building solar panels or washing machines, here in the USA. The only thing I'll notice is a higher price at the store on those items.
Since this is such a great idea, why doesn't the Trump administration just go ahead and tariff the fuck out of imported everything? I'm sure the MAGA crowd will absolutely love it when that South Korean-made TV they were eyeballing for the Superbowl costs twice as much (along with just about everything else at Walmart).
And we are supposed to believe that the owner of Fox News is the guardian of quality information presented in an unbiased format? Really?
During the election, I actually had no trouble finding Fox's coverage of the same stories Trump supporters refused to read because it came from the "biased liberal media". Of course, once I posted a link to Fox, they still wouldn't read it, because that's cognitive dissonance for you.
Heck, it wasn't even that hard to find an article on Breitbart where they're not exactly singing the praises of Trump's tax plan. But I'm sure those drinking the kool aid just see it as an acceptable casualty of making sure the country isn't ruined by those damned snowflake liberals, or something like that.
So, naturally, I picked a low end AMD desktop. Oh. my. god. Is it slow! or what!! Something called superfetch would keep thrashing the disk.
My desktop is a Skylake i7 running Windows 10. Since I only use it for transcoding video (Blu-Rays to H.265), I didn't bother wasting money on a SSD. Even trying to browse the web on it results in disk thrashing which grinds the machine to a halt. Windows is just no longer tolerable for general use without an SSD.
The root of this problem is that MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, The New York Times, and virtually all the mainstream media has lost all credibility in the eyes of conservatives
Bullshit. You can find exactly the same stories on Fox, and sometimes even Breitbart if you can stomach the spin (how they attempt to defend the repeal of Net Neutrality is absolutely painful to read). People simply choose not to read news they disagree with, regardless of the source.
"ObamaCare repeal would leave 32 million more without insurance" What liberal rag is this headline from? Fox.
Now that people are doing the exact same thing online, suddenly it's the end of democracy as we know it?
It's not the exact same thing, because Facebook isn't just passively consumed like a magazine or TV broadcast. It, by design, allows friends to actively put their stamp of approval (by "liking") on bullshit and fake news, and promote (by re-sharing) whatever idiotic groupthink happens to be going around. It absolutely does reinforce the belief in terrible ideas, just look at the anti-vaxxer movement.
Those teams are brought into the most volatile situations and must be on a hair trigger if they want to go home each night.
So, send in a robot or drone, and assess the situation with no risk to human life. Swatting will fall out of fashion very quickly if the prankster/troll risks jail, and all it accomplishes is law enforcement sending a flying camera to peek through the target's windows for a few minutes.
One says to the other "Does this dark matter make me look fat?"
If I had to pick other coins that aren't just stupid gimmicks and have a real function
All altcoins have a function: to separate fools from their BTC. You can't travel back in time to buy Bitcoin when it was cheap, but you might be able to convince enough people that your shitcoin du jour is worth "investing" their Bitcoin in. Since some altcoins actually have gone up in value, the beat goes on...
If you voted for a candidate solely because the other side made you feel butthurt, who's the real snowflake?
This country would be much better off if more people voted with their brain, rather than their ego.
Was expecting this to be the top comment, and then you didn't even link to the original.
The Internet is for Porn
and yet the actions of Google and Amazon are just as bad.
No, no, no. A thousand fucking times, no.
You still have a choice not to be a customer of Amazon, Google, or the lot of 'em. Apple will be pleased to sell you a phone. Bing or DuckDuckGo will happily take your search queries. I'd be here all night attempting to list every retailer which competes with Amazon.
In my neighborhood, there is one choice of wired broadband provider.
Net Neutrality is necessary because it means no matter how much Amazon, Facebook, or Google decide to wall up their gardens, some upstart can still register their own .com, and be given a fair share at taking them on. That is what we stand to lose. Someone could start a great new competitor to YouTube, but if my broadband provider doesn't come to favorable terms with them, here's South Park saying it better than I ever could.
Roku just about works with everything.
...except Kodi. Thanks for playing, but it's all the same walls - just a different garden.
If you're pirating all your content, then Plex or Kodi are reasonable solutions. If you have some legal or moral hesitation over pirating, they aren't very useful.
I see no moral issues with ripping copies of my own legally purchased content, and putting it on a NAS for my own personal use. A perfectly legitimate use for Kodi, IMHO.
Given the cost of a low-end Intel Compute Stick, I don't see why anyone buys these locked-down ad-laden closed-ecosystem sticks other than lack of sufficient knowledge to set one up with Plex or Kodi.
The Compute Stick sucks as a media streamer. It's constantly doing all the annoying shit Windows tends to do (incessant notifications, updating when you least want it to, etc.) when you just want to sit down and watch some TV. It still hasn't gotten the sleep/wake process perfect, and you're frequently futzing behind the TV having to restart the damn thing. Netflix's Windows 10 "Metro" (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now) app is an abomination, and runs slow as snot on anything remotely considered a budget CPU. Amazon Prime Video only works through the web browser, and that gets old quick.
That being said, in addition to the Fire Stick, I do have a PC connected to my living room TV. It's my media server for Kodi (which runs just fine on the Fire Stick).
Anti-consumer, anti-choice cr@p like this is
...only going to get worse once the broadband providers get in on it.
What happened today? Google took their ball and went home, like a spoiled brat. So, sideload Kodi, and install the YouTube Add-on. Alternatively, (and less brain power required) skip the Starbucks habit for a few days and buy another streaming device. I can't imagine HDMI ports are a precious commodity, when a faux reproduction (it's emulator based) of a 26 year old gaming console is so popular, retailers can't keep it in stock.
In a post-net-neutrality tomorrow, it's only a matter of time before the broadband providers start taking sides in these content provider turf wars. You'll long for the days when the fix was quite so simple.
The real threat is that Bitcoin facilitates the circumvention of the established gate keepers of the financial system.
You can't change human nature with technology. Bitcoin is being used to perpetuate the same shit which lead to banking regulations back in ye olden days. Collectively, the mob of Bitcoin users is no less greedy than the people who make up the established financial system. The difference is, the established system has to play by the rule of law - Bitcoin presently, does not.
Much worse than cash. Cash has to be physically moved and as amounts increase, so does the impracticality. There are already plenty of laws around moving large amounts of cash around.
Yet if you want to actually use Bitcoin for something, you've gotta turn it back into cash. So, unless your recipient in Bumfuckistan can turn his Bitcoin millions into the local currency, it's totally useless to him.
Bitcoin is useful for moving large amounts of imaginary money around. If you actually want to move real money, you still run into exactly the same problems as before.
The dollar is no longer guaranteed by anything, not gold, nor silver, nor land, nor oil reserves, or anything else. Thus, we need to judge its value on other criteria, not real value. Things such as trust, or scarcity.
Its value is guaranteed by the legal requirement that it must be accepted to pay off previous debts.
When I agree to a finance contract to purchase a car, they're agreeing to accept my $280 per month for the duration of the loan, even if $280 no longer buys a burrito at Taco Bell. Funny thing is, this "trust" major financial institutions have in the dollar leads to another trait Bitcoin sorely lacks: stability.
Electricity consumption ensures that it cannot be created without cost, thereby preventing anyone from artificially increasing the supply.
No. Bitcoin's scarcity hinges on the fact that the bulk of the miners all agree on which version of the Bitcoin software is the "one true Bitcoin". Anyone can easily modify the software to spew out coins galore, or change a few parameters they didn't like - and people have (Bitcoin cash, anyone?). There's only one rule in the game of cryptocoins: mob rule.
Once again, bitcoin is in no way inferior other currencies, and you must look to other measures to determine its worth. The concept that bitcoin seems impossible to debase makes it considerably desirable.
No way inferior? Try buying anything with it without jumping through a bunch of hoops, and losing some of it due to transaction fees and value fluctuations.
Maybe if you're trying to fund ransomware (or other illegal activities) with it, it's an easier way to transfer money than traditional means - but for legitimate purposes, it's still a far bigger hassle than just using cash, your debit/credit card, Western Union, or PayPal.
If you were to download a movie you had no intention of purchasing, you've deprived the copyright owner of absolutely nothing. They were never going to get a sale from you in the first place, and you have not deprived the copyright holder of their right to exclusive distribution (the copyright holder can still sell their IP, same as before).
However, since we're talking about BitTorrent, where anything you download is immediately shared with other users, you're facilitating copyright infringement by design (unless you're sharing files which can be legally shared, obviously).
If you snuck into Disneyland, they'd very likely charge you with trespassing - not theft of the admission fee. When you gain access to property, whether real or intellectual, without permission of the owner - you have broken a law, but it's not theft.
They were tired of broken government and chose to try to sabotage it rather than letting it sputter on in status quo secret failure. Trump was not elected because he was really expected to fix anything.
Some people believe the scripted rivalries in professional wrestling are real, too. If the Republicans truly believed Trump was going to sabotage anything, they would've have let him run with an (R) next to his name in the primaries. See: Ross Perot
If Trump wants his businesses to keep humming along, he'll play ball just like every politician before him. He has absolutely no incentive to upend any part of the system which has enabled him (and his family) to remain incredibly wealthy.
This will end up in cat/mouse, and the mouse will always get away.
Actually, no. The cat vs mouse analogy implies that while a cat is extremely adept at catching prey, mice are such prolific breeders that even a skilled predator can't exterminate them completely. While mice are oblivious to the fact their compatriots are being picked off, we humans aren't the same.
We can be bribed or threatened not to fuck with the cat. It generally works.