FYI, I have TiVo, and have had it since the Series 2, long before the DTV changeover happened. If I had no DVR anymore, I'd probably not watch TV anymore either, because it just doesn't fit into my schedule -- so I also watch what I want when I want, and I don't see more than a few dozen frames of commercials during any viewing (thank you 30-second skip and 8-second rewind).
..too stimulating to allow your brain to slow down and process whatever it wants to, but not stimulating enough that you're learning or improving at anything.
See, that's not what I use it for. I don't need to learn anything or 'improve' at anything during Downtime. I want my brain to be awake, but let it be taken somewhere else for a while, away from the news and the typical worries of the day. It's therapeutic. Laughing your ass off at a couple half-hours of Whose Line Is It Anyway is good for your emotional and physical health.
I'm not trying to tell anyone else how to live, either. I'm far from sedentary, I race bikes and spend anywhere from 7 to 15+ hours a week doing that all year 'round, and I read before going to sleep at night. I don't feel any guilt or remorse for an hour or so a day spent watching some show or other while I'm eating dinner.
I think a lot of people would come to the same conclusions if they tried ditching TV for a week or a month.
Oh, I dunno about that. "Vacation of the mind". Especially these days.
Don't buy things that can be leveraged this way, not ever.
Be sure to enjoy your class-action lawsuit, everyone.
Also, enjoy potentially going bankrupt, Sonos. That's the kharma you get for being pricks and forcefully invading people's privacy.
I think eventually the needle is going to swing back the other way, people are going to get sick and tired of shit like this, and there'll be a revolt, resulting in legislation prohibiting this sort of crap. Or at least I can hope.
if it can't do work of at least the quality of a skilled, experienced, and talented bricklayer, then it doesn't matter how fast it can do it.
Go talk to an actual bricklayer. He'll tell you that he could work a lot faster -- if no one cares what the quality of the work looks like. Almost anyone can hurry up and do something fast, but it'll likely be sloppy looking when they get done, and it might not even hold together properly.
Keep in mind that, the last time I checked, they still can't build a robot that can fold laundry correctly, and compared to a human (even a human child) it takes so much longer that it's not even worth bothering with. Everyone is believing way too much of the hype about so-called, inaccurately-termed 'AI' and 'robots taking everyones jobs'. Everyone building these things also bought into the hype, invested a shitload of money, and is now desperately trying to cash in before Guido comes to break their kneecaps for not paying back the loans.
LOL, no, that's bullshit. The problem is a properly skilled, talented, experienced worker makes his job look easy. Meanwhile the guys signing the checks, who don't know the first thing about doing the actual work and are only good at shuffling papers, drinking coffee, and telling other people how to do their jobs (regardless of being full of shit) actually believe that it's easy and anyone can do the work -- because the guys who are good at it make it look easy. You want quality work, you pay a quality wage to get it.
I think downtime is important to mental and emotional health, and to me 'downtime' means letting your brain rest. I like to read but I also like to be told a story. Television does that; you can just sit there and watch a story being played out for you. Do you also not believe in going to see a movie (or even watching a movie on your TV or computer), or going to live theatre?
There always seems to be one of you in a crowd that says things like this. What do you do for 'downtime' during a typical day, and 'in bed sleeping' and 'downtime' are two different things. Nobody is 'productive' 16 hours a day.
That looks like Cable Company Math, talking about the number of channels per dollar
It's more than a little bit of a stretch when so many of those 'channels' are absolute garbage that nobody has any interest in. When it comes right down to it, if there are 500 channels, there are 5, maybe 10 tops, that any given person actually watches with any regularity.
Last I heard here in the U.S. they're required to have a tuner built in, and it's been that way for a long time now, and as someone else said: If there's no tuner, then it's just a monitor, not a TV.
I remember when paying for cable, even if I was on unemployment, was a must; it was what kept me sane, and I couldn't imagine not having it.
But that was then, and this is now. I thought a good long time about it before giving Comcast the boot, and while there were two or three channels available only on cable I initially felt a sense of loss about, in the long run I don't really miss them enough to be bothered. There are a plethora of OTA broadcast stations where I and many others live, and I am here to tell you: You'll find you have more than enough to watch, and that's with only OTA broadcast television. Most of you are going to have Netflix or some other streaming service for some of what you watch -- and again, you'll have more than enough. So don't fret about dumping cable; really, it's not worth what you're paying for it. Just look at all the garbage channels on cable you have zero (or less than zero) interest in; you're paying for those, too, whether you want them or not. Also there's the Dirty Little Secret about cable: Recompression. You may be technically getting 1080 resolution, but pixels are only part of the story, they're recompressing the video to fit more channels in the available bandwidth, and you'll notice it when things on the screen are moving (blocky!). Never seen it on OTA television. My advice to you is that if you're even thinking about dumping cable, just do it. You'll be glad you did later.
Internet troll's new hobby: Baiting the UK's Crown Prosecution Service. Good luck trying to track some anonymous person down who is behind 7 proxies (or at least a VPN or Tor, or is using free WiFi from some random cafe or coffeeshop).
As you will surmise from your comment being modded up all the way, you are far from alone in thinking what you're thinking -- and we are also far from alone in the Real World on this subject, either. Based on anyone I've ever spoken to in the real, non-internet world, I don't see where anyone, young or old, will accept a so-called 'autonomous car' with no real controls for the human occupant. It's essentially being out of control of the thing your life depends on, and that's diametrically opposed to human nature. You either control the tool or it's not a tool. If you can't control it, it's a threat -- and a palpable, real one in this case; it screws up, someone dies. You step into an 'autonomous' car with no way to drive it yourself, you're giving up your choices -- and that's also counter to human nature. Imagine being strapped into a wheelchair, legs and arms zip-tied down so you can't get out of it, and you tell the complete stranger who is going to push you around where it is you want to go -- and then they put a ball-gag in your mouth so you can't speak anymore, and they may or may not take you where you wanted to go; how would that make you feel? Even on a rollercoaster, you know you're going to come back to where you started. If you knew ahead of time there was a palpable chance the rollercoaster would fail catastrophically and there was a 50/50 chance you'd be killed, would you get on it? If you got into a cab, and the driver stopped talking to you and wasn't taking you where you wanted to go, and you couldn't get the door open to jump out, how would you feel? Those are the closest analogies I've come up with for how a level-5 autonomous car would feel like. I really don't think anyone is going to actually accept such a thing.
Hear, hear.
The worst that should happen to these people is they should be required to return any goods they received, and maybe pay Lowes any money they made from selling the aforementioned merchandise. All Lowes is doing is being falsely righteously indignated because their system was borqed. Who they should go after (in civil court) should be the company that designed their software, for doing such a poor job.
No, I don't mean 'get them the basics', I mean the programming language BASIC. Not 'Visual BASIC' or anything even that fancy; I mean plain-old, plain-text interpreted BASIC, with GOTO, GOSUB/RETURN, IF/THEN/ELSE, FOR loops, INPUT, PRINT, and so on. Or has everyone totally forgotten it? Simple, easy to use, no structure required, interpreted so crashing machines is impossible (just don't tell them about PEEK and POKE, initially). If they show any aptitude or interest beyond interpreted BASIC, they'll go looking for it.
If you believe Microsoft without independent verification from an otherwise uninterested third-party who has no investment in the outcome, then you're a fool.
This is just more fake news from Microsoft. Most people don't care what search engine they use and probably have no idea how to change the default anyway, so they use whatever is there so long as they find what they want. If you snuck into their houses and changed it to Google they not only wouldn't care, they probably wouldn't even notice. In fact it would be hilarious if some black-hat (or white-hat for that matter) created malware that changed everyones default search engine to anything but Bing.
Friend, here's the deal: Politicians and 'law enforcement' types probably actually understand all this, because they likely have advisors who are well versed in the technology, but the politicians and cops don't care; they want the power to snoop into anything, anywhere, at any time, without any barriers of any kind preventing them from doing so, they don't care what us peasants have to say about it, and they'll burn the world to the ground to get it. Of course none of them will be subject to this, there'd be 'government-grade encryption' that's not compromised in any way, and that's what all their communications and devices will have. Same goes for the rich; they'll have real encryption, while us filthy peasants get the ersatz; they don't even care if people get their identities stolen right and left, or their bank accounts drained, either. That's what their Perfect World looks like; we, of course, have to stop them, in concert with the politicians who don't believe ruining encryption is a good idea for anyone. But it's going to continue to be an uphill battle the whole way. Power always seeks more power, and real encryption stands in the way of that. All their talk about 'national security' and 'terrorism' is just an excuse they're using as leverage to get what they want.
Now ask them a question how likely would it be that 1 out of 10,000 would get lost or misplaced and end up in the wrong hands?
Worse: Some 'law enforcement officer' decides that since he/she has the key already, there's no reason for them to not go snooping around, warrant or no warrant. In fact let's go snooping through every house on the block, just in case we find something actionable. You know, for the safety and security of everyone. If people have nothing to hide in their homes, they shouldn't have anything to fear from this, right? And since it's 'law enforcement' on 'official business', they should trust them implicitly, right? If they don't trust them, then they MUST have something to hide, therefore justifying the snooping. Anyone making a big fuss over it for no reason probably is a criminal and needs to be investigated further..
When you use government-printed money for illegal activities, you have a choice between physically handing over the money (which can't be tracked, but you can be observed doing it, and the bills can be marked somehow so they CAN be tracked), or using some other method of transferring it that CAN be tracked. Cyptocurrency can be transferred electronically, anonymously, and remotely, and untraceably. That's the difference, and that's why it's perfectly adapted for criminal activity.
And who in their right mind ever thought that was going to work? If that was 'the point' then maybe cryptocurrency was created for the sole purpose of funding illegal activities.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and others send out suicide bombers to blow up and kill as many people as they possibly can; are you now going to say "..well, Rick, that's just ONE person doing something violent, we can't blame the whole group for their actions!", are you?
I think you either know Jack Shit about neo-nazi and similar hate groups, or you're one of them and are astroturfing for them. Which is it? GET OFF THE FENCE.
That one little blemish on your chest? Doesn't look like much does it? But it's got a funny color and keeps getting a little bigger every month, so you go to the doctor. Who sends you for bloodwork and an MRI. Both of which show that you have CANCER, it's metasticized, and it's actually in advanced stages -- and you're going to DIE, SOON, and nothing can stop it.
That's what the asshole who ran his car into people and killed that girl is: The little blemish. But the rest of the neo-nazi assholes are the CANCER; he was just the symptom you actually noticed. Need to get rid of the cancer, if possible, before it KILLS THE COUNTRY.
Or are you a neo-nazi, or a sympathizer, astroturfing on Slashdot for them?
Why the actual FUCK would I NOT want to 'stigmatize' Neo-Nazis? They're assholes, plain and simple. Are you a neo-nazi? You're sure sounding like one, sticking up for them like this.
Slashdot Mirror
..too stimulating to allow your brain to slow down and process whatever it wants to, but not stimulating enough that you're learning or improving at anything.
See, that's not what I use it for. I don't need to learn anything or 'improve' at anything during Downtime. I want my brain to be awake, but let it be taken somewhere else for a while, away from the news and the typical worries of the day. It's therapeutic. Laughing your ass off at a couple half-hours of Whose Line Is It Anyway is good for your emotional and physical health.
I'm not trying to tell anyone else how to live, either. I'm far from sedentary, I race bikes and spend anywhere from 7 to 15+ hours a week doing that all year 'round, and I read before going to sleep at night. I don't feel any guilt or remorse for an hour or so a day spent watching some show or other while I'm eating dinner.
I think a lot of people would come to the same conclusions if they tried ditching TV for a week or a month.
Oh, I dunno about that. "Vacation of the mind". Especially these days.
Don't buy things that can be leveraged this way, not ever.
Be sure to enjoy your class-action lawsuit, everyone.
Also, enjoy potentially going bankrupt, Sonos. That's the kharma you get for being pricks and forcefully invading people's privacy.
I think eventually the needle is going to swing back the other way, people are going to get sick and tired of shit like this, and there'll be a revolt, resulting in legislation prohibiting this sort of crap. Or at least I can hope.
if it can't do work of at least the quality of a skilled, experienced, and talented bricklayer, then it doesn't matter how fast it can do it.
Go talk to an actual bricklayer. He'll tell you that he could work a lot faster -- if no one cares what the quality of the work looks like. Almost anyone can hurry up and do something fast, but it'll likely be sloppy looking when they get done, and it might not even hold together properly.
Keep in mind that, the last time I checked, they still can't build a robot that can fold laundry correctly, and compared to a human (even a human child) it takes so much longer that it's not even worth bothering with. Everyone is believing way too much of the hype about so-called, inaccurately-termed 'AI' and 'robots taking everyones jobs'. Everyone building these things also bought into the hype, invested a shitload of money, and is now desperately trying to cash in before Guido comes to break their kneecaps for not paying back the loans.
LOL, no, that's bullshit. The problem is a properly skilled, talented, experienced worker makes his job look easy. Meanwhile the guys signing the checks, who don't know the first thing about doing the actual work and are only good at shuffling papers, drinking coffee, and telling other people how to do their jobs (regardless of being full of shit) actually believe that it's easy and anyone can do the work -- because the guys who are good at it make it look easy. You want quality work, you pay a quality wage to get it.
I think downtime is important to mental and emotional health, and to me 'downtime' means letting your brain rest. I like to read but I also like to be told a story. Television does that; you can just sit there and watch a story being played out for you. Do you also not believe in going to see a movie (or even watching a movie on your TV or computer), or going to live theatre?
There always seems to be one of you in a crowd that says things like this. What do you do for 'downtime' during a typical day, and 'in bed sleeping' and 'downtime' are two different things. Nobody is 'productive' 16 hours a day.
That looks like Cable Company Math, talking about the number of channels per dollar
It's more than a little bit of a stretch when so many of those 'channels' are absolute garbage that nobody has any interest in. When it comes right down to it, if there are 500 channels, there are 5, maybe 10 tops, that any given person actually watches with any regularity.
Last I heard here in the U.S. they're required to have a tuner built in, and it's been that way for a long time now, and as someone else said: If there's no tuner, then it's just a monitor, not a TV.
I remember when paying for cable, even if I was on unemployment, was a must; it was what kept me sane, and I couldn't imagine not having it.
But that was then, and this is now. I thought a good long time about it before giving Comcast the boot, and while there were two or three channels available only on cable I initially felt a sense of loss about, in the long run I don't really miss them enough to be bothered. There are a plethora of OTA broadcast stations where I and many others live, and I am here to tell you: You'll find you have more than enough to watch, and that's with only OTA broadcast television. Most of you are going to have Netflix or some other streaming service for some of what you watch -- and again, you'll have more than enough. So don't fret about dumping cable; really, it's not worth what you're paying for it. Just look at all the garbage channels on cable you have zero (or less than zero) interest in; you're paying for those, too, whether you want them or not. Also there's the Dirty Little Secret about cable: Recompression. You may be technically getting 1080 resolution, but pixels are only part of the story, they're recompressing the video to fit more channels in the available bandwidth, and you'll notice it when things on the screen are moving (blocky!). Never seen it on OTA television. My advice to you is that if you're even thinking about dumping cable, just do it. You'll be glad you did later.
Internet troll's new hobby: Baiting the UK's Crown Prosecution Service. Good luck trying to track some anonymous person down who is behind 7 proxies (or at least a VPN or Tor, or is using free WiFi from some random cafe or coffeeshop).
You are far from alone, friend, remember that.
As you will surmise from your comment being modded up all the way, you are far from alone in thinking what you're thinking -- and we are also far from alone in the Real World on this subject, either. Based on anyone I've ever spoken to in the real, non-internet world, I don't see where anyone, young or old, will accept a so-called 'autonomous car' with no real controls for the human occupant. It's essentially being out of control of the thing your life depends on, and that's diametrically opposed to human nature. You either control the tool or it's not a tool. If you can't control it, it's a threat -- and a palpable, real one in this case; it screws up, someone dies. You step into an 'autonomous' car with no way to drive it yourself, you're giving up your choices -- and that's also counter to human nature. Imagine being strapped into a wheelchair, legs and arms zip-tied down so you can't get out of it, and you tell the complete stranger who is going to push you around where it is you want to go -- and then they put a ball-gag in your mouth so you can't speak anymore, and they may or may not take you where you wanted to go; how would that make you feel? Even on a rollercoaster, you know you're going to come back to where you started. If you knew ahead of time there was a palpable chance the rollercoaster would fail catastrophically and there was a 50/50 chance you'd be killed, would you get on it? If you got into a cab, and the driver stopped talking to you and wasn't taking you where you wanted to go, and you couldn't get the door open to jump out, how would you feel? Those are the closest analogies I've come up with for how a level-5 autonomous car would feel like. I really don't think anyone is going to actually accept such a thing.
Hear, hear.
The worst that should happen to these people is they should be required to return any goods they received, and maybe pay Lowes any money they made from selling the aforementioned merchandise. All Lowes is doing is being falsely righteously indignated because their system was borqed. Who they should go after (in civil court) should be the company that designed their software, for doing such a poor job.
No, I don't mean 'get them the basics', I mean the programming language BASIC. Not 'Visual BASIC' or anything even that fancy; I mean plain-old, plain-text interpreted BASIC, with GOTO, GOSUB/RETURN, IF/THEN/ELSE, FOR loops, INPUT, PRINT, and so on. Or has everyone totally forgotten it? Simple, easy to use, no structure required, interpreted so crashing machines is impossible (just don't tell them about PEEK and POKE, initially). If they show any aptitude or interest beyond interpreted BASIC, they'll go looking for it.
If you believe Microsoft without independent verification from an otherwise uninterested third-party who has no investment in the outcome, then you're a fool.
I'm using the term ironically. If it pisses off the Trump fuccbois because I'm using it wrong then that's bonus points.
This is just more fake news from Microsoft. Most people don't care what search engine they use and probably have no idea how to change the default anyway, so they use whatever is there so long as they find what they want. If you snuck into their houses and changed it to Google they not only wouldn't care, they probably wouldn't even notice. In fact it would be hilarious if some black-hat (or white-hat for that matter) created malware that changed everyones default search engine to anything but Bing.
Friend, here's the deal: Politicians and 'law enforcement' types probably actually understand all this, because they likely have advisors who are well versed in the technology, but the politicians and cops don't care; they want the power to snoop into anything, anywhere, at any time, without any barriers of any kind preventing them from doing so, they don't care what us peasants have to say about it, and they'll burn the world to the ground to get it. Of course none of them will be subject to this, there'd be 'government-grade encryption' that's not compromised in any way, and that's what all their communications and devices will have. Same goes for the rich; they'll have real encryption, while us filthy peasants get the ersatz; they don't even care if people get their identities stolen right and left, or their bank accounts drained, either. That's what their Perfect World looks like; we, of course, have to stop them, in concert with the politicians who don't believe ruining encryption is a good idea for anyone. But it's going to continue to be an uphill battle the whole way. Power always seeks more power, and real encryption stands in the way of that. All their talk about 'national security' and 'terrorism' is just an excuse they're using as leverage to get what they want.
Now ask them a question how likely would it be that 1 out of 10,000 would get lost or misplaced and end up in the wrong hands?
Worse: Some 'law enforcement officer' decides that since he/she has the key already, there's no reason for them to not go snooping around, warrant or no warrant. In fact let's go snooping through every house on the block, just in case we find something actionable. You know, for the safety and security of everyone. If people have nothing to hide in their homes, they shouldn't have anything to fear from this, right? And since it's 'law enforcement' on 'official business', they should trust them implicitly, right? If they don't trust them, then they MUST have something to hide, therefore justifying the snooping. Anyone making a big fuss over it for no reason probably is a criminal and needs to be investigated further..
Excuse me, citizen; PAPERS, PLEASE..
When you use government-printed money for illegal activities, you have a choice between physically handing over the money (which can't be tracked, but you can be observed doing it, and the bills can be marked somehow so they CAN be tracked), or using some other method of transferring it that CAN be tracked. Cyptocurrency can be transferred electronically, anonymously, and remotely, and untraceably. That's the difference, and that's why it's perfectly adapted for criminal activity.
And who in their right mind ever thought that was going to work? If that was 'the point' then maybe cryptocurrency was created for the sole purpose of funding illegal activities.
This, exactly. You're either for it or you're against it, there's no fence-sitting possible.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and others send out suicide bombers to blow up and kill as many people as they possibly can; are you now going to say "..well, Rick, that's just ONE person doing something violent, we can't blame the whole group for their actions!", are you?
I think you either know Jack Shit about neo-nazi and similar hate groups, or you're one of them and are astroturfing for them. Which is it? GET OFF THE FENCE.
That one little blemish on your chest? Doesn't look like much does it? But it's got a funny color and keeps getting a little bigger every month, so you go to the doctor. Who sends you for bloodwork and an MRI. Both of which show that you have CANCER, it's metasticized, and it's actually in advanced stages -- and you're going to DIE, SOON, and nothing can stop it.
That's what the asshole who ran his car into people and killed that girl is: The little blemish. But the rest of the neo-nazi assholes are the CANCER; he was just the symptom you actually noticed. Need to get rid of the cancer, if possible, before it KILLS THE COUNTRY.
Or are you a neo-nazi, or a sympathizer, astroturfing on Slashdot for them?
Why the actual FUCK would I NOT want to 'stigmatize' Neo-Nazis? They're assholes, plain and simple. Are you a neo-nazi? You're sure sounding like one, sticking up for them like this.