It has taken me 40 years on this planet to eventually figure out the fact that some people simply do not think in a reasonable fashion
One could argue, from the point of view of the **AA, that they are being reasonable. They view copyright as the most important thing in existence (their corporate existence depends on it, so they somewhat justified in this), so their job is to protect copyright at all costs. Hence forming industry groups like the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc... If we accept this view, then using the historically lopsided power of the legal system to intimidate people, and make a general example of them, makes sense. It is reasonable (i.e. there is a valid, if not sound, logical basis).
The Mafia's protection rackets were also quite reasonable by this same reasoning. Those who don't bow to intimidation should be public examples to keep others in line. Even if the person cost of burning down someone's shop (higher notoriety with authorities, risk of capture, etc...) is more than the default that lead to the action, it may be worth it since it will force others who were on the fence about defaulting to reconsider, thus ensuring future revenue.
Very reasonable.
The real question is whether it is ethical, moral, or even legal, and whether this is a practice we wish to allow as a society.
f he had went to Fox for the big $ (as Joss Whedon has so foolishly done, so often), it would have never made it past a few episodes of the first season.
To Mr. Whedon's credit, going for the big $ at Fox worked very well for him twice previously. Both Buffy and Angel made tons of money for everyone, so you can't fault him for trying the same thing with Firefly (if it works once, try it again, if it works again there is no harm in sticking with it). Dollhouse, on the other hand, was a dumb move.
Or because they don't care. $380 is much higher than my $19 a month for Netflix, and $0 a month for Hulu, and my $0 a month streaming TV from other sources via a re-purposed MacMini. The lack of ads on my setup, to be memeful, is priceless. Me and the lady friend discuss getting cable from time to time, since the DTV switch killed all of our local channels, but it is so low on the priority list as to be almost non-existent.
When I had cable all I did was watch Dirty Jobs, and the Food Network (mostly as background noise). Hardly worth $380 (or the nearly $60 they were charging me).
Recently I house-sat for my father, and tried to kill some time watching his Direct TV, I gave up very quicky. 300 hundred channels of nothing is pretty much a literal reality. I was happy they had infomercials for sex-toys though, but I doubt the transient amusement value of that is worth much.
I can see having Cable and Sat TV for sports fans. Or people who really care about Dancing With the Stars, or people who need to watch the latest version of sitcom x as soon as humanly possible (for whatever reason). But for people not in those groups, it is pretty much worthless.
Most geeks, back to the topic, don't care much about sports, and probably don't have lives that hinging on knowing what the latest development in whatever the big sitcom of the day is. Most geeks are probably tech savvy enough to obtain their television from other sources for cheap or free, which beats paying a cable bill. Therefore most geeks don't have cable/sat for VERY sensible reasons.
The only thing I really miss about cable is being able to be indoctrinated with liberal viewpoints ala MSNBC, and occasionally getting my 4 minutes of hate via Bill O'Reilly. Though I suppose both of them are available via podcast/streaming, so if I cared much they would still be available. I apparently don't.
Not to argue with you, obviously your choice works for you and my differing choices have nothing to do with that. But do you think the larger back catalog would change your rental habits?
I noticed that Netflix changed my viewing habits. The automated sending of movies is great, and the streaming content pretty much killed my cable subscription. For my family it is worth the $15/mo.
To each their own, but I doubt very much that you have "normal" habits.
I have probably watched the Godfather over 50 times in the last 30 years. I've watched the original Starwars Trilogy about once a year since I was 8. Etc... I don't think, though, that I've ever spent over 15.00 for a single movie though. $20 DVDs is a pretty new thing, and I completely refuse to play along with that. I usually wait for it to hit $10, or buy it used via Blockbuster or a used bookstore, or for it to be a loss-leader at some media store. Blue Ray fits on the same budget criteria, I refuse to buy it until it hits the sub-$10 level, I will not spend more money for Blue Ray than I will for DVD.
I also have stranger tastes, and older, than Red Box will allow. I like old movies. I very rarely watch a new release, since I fully expect them to suck.
What do you have against Netflix, out of curiosity?
If there are no rental shops, and only Red Box, and your religion bars Netflix, then you pretty much are out of luck, unless you want to only buy (or pirate) movies. You, in other words, are completely out of luck.
With Blockbuster and locally owned video rental stores gone, where will people rent older films?
Blockbuster started to really suck in the older movie department. Recently (in the last 3 years or so) all they carry is new releases, crappy copy-cat movies (like Transmorphers, or other direct low-budged copies of recent blockbusters), and movies that were big and popular under 10 years ago. Recently they even cut this back make a large Blu-Ray section, and NYT Bestseller books aisle (which pretty much screams "we are a company deeply in crisis, and completely out of ideas that make money). Browsing Blockbuster is now somewhat depressing. The only reason to go there is to buy pre-watched new release DVDs, though they even jacked up those prices recently.
The only brick and mortar places that have/had a decent selection of older, more obscure, movies are mom&pops, some Hollywood videos. When I lived in Flagstaff Hasting's was the greatest video place on this side of Netflix, they still have aisles of VHS tapes. I doubt they ever removed inventory accept when it wore out, which is a very nice feature for a video store.
Netflix probably wins in the older move category. They have ALMOST everything I've looked for. Outside of that, try your local library. Most libraries have a decent movie section now. Some of them even have more movies than books these days (which is fundamentally depressing).
I just wish it had true ad-blocking. Not seeing ads is nice, but nothing really beats actually getting rid of them completely (both for bandwidth and security).
Other than that, I agree, Chromium is pretty nice. I installed the unstable (dev) version as a test, and now I find myself rarely using Firefox. I even installed Chrome on my Windows box, and use it happily around 75% of the time, even if it is blissfully sending my history to Google (I really don't do anything that anyone would ever care about, but for more secure uses I stick to Firefox).
Firefox has gotten pretty bad, of late. It takes around 3 times as long to open, and gets sluggish much faster. For some reason Mozilla decided to gut all added Win7 functionality, while adding a bunch of completely moronic features (Personas, really? Was that worth ANY dev time?). Chrome/ium uses more RAM total, but RAM is cheap, and somehow it never feels as sluggish as Firefox.
Though, as I'm typing this I have two pop-ups telling me that Chrome stopped responding, while typing this through Chrome.
Fallout 3 was fun, even with the annoying DLC (DLC is annoying, but FO3's DLC was more so since half of them didn't really tie into the game), but it really didn't carry on with what made FO1 and 2 great. FO3 took out most of the humor, and somehow, even with a bigger world, it took out a lot of the "largeness" of the original two games. I'm not saying that FO3 was a crappy game, it just wasn't a great game.
In FO2 I wasted hours running around New Reno in a purple robe, killing prostitues with a close up SMG blast. Yes, it is creepy, but it illustrates how you could create your own mini-games, and play them for hours completely ignoring anything that the devs wanted you to do. FO3 was also EXTREMELY easy, yes there was some tough parts, but it was easier to get past. Within the first 4 hours of FO3 I managed to lure a patrol of folks wearing power armor, fully decked out with energy weapons, next to a car, I blew up the car, and had over powered armor for the rest of the game (well 75% of it, until I was supposed to get it legitimately). The biggest challenge was keeping my follower from blowing themselves up (which I suppose is close to par, since I remember giving Vic in FO2 a shotgun, and having him kill me repeatedly every fight).
I also vastly prefer the 3rd person hex style of the original fallout. Making something first person (or over the shoulder 2nd) doesn't make it better. I'm actually getting fairly sick of making everything an FPS. FPSs are rather claustrophobic, which hurts when something is supposed to be in a vast, detailed, world. I liked the feel of playing a table top RPG in the first two, and having to budget your AP. The VAT system was a nice try, but was pretty much nothing but a situationally useful gimmick.
Not to sound too negative, I did enjoy the game. It just wasn't as Fallout-esque as I hoped it would be.
No, setting up a false dichotomy does not mean it is true. Generally if a dichotomy claims that it is either all A or all B, it is false. This is not true in the realm of testable factuals, but is VERY true in human affairs and ideology.
In abortion we can see this. I might be able to accept the views of position A, but not support their conclusion, or, obviously, visa versa. Alternatively, I could reach the same active conclusion (abortion [should|should not] be permitted) as position A or B, but by a different approach.
You also make the mistake of thinking that there is an actual truth value involved in the abortion debate. I fail to see any single testable truth that would provide critical for proving either position to be an objective, indisputable, truth. Abortion (and most hot-button debates represented by an extreme A or not-A form) is purely a cultural, and sociological debate. Not being factual, there is no possibility of truth.
Another problem with the abortion debate is that the terms themselves are vague, and generally non-solvable. By what criteria do we judge whether something is alive, what is a soul and how do we measure its presence in a fetus, at what point can something be called human, or even alive. What are the ethics of terminating something that is very rudimentary (i.e. how is it wrong to kill a fetus, but not an animal when the latter is higher in development and function than the former). What exactly would be a functional threshold? Is there a value to potential humans, if said thing is barely human at the moment? etc...
These questions are key to the whole debate. And I don't see any of them as being very solvable in themselves.
Is it more interesting to compare the competing views of Keynes, Marx and Friedman or to just scrawl down the nice ineffectual "Democratic" opinions of Kevin Rudd ?
Being more interesting does nothing to influence the truth value. One could easily, in the case of your example, take the view that prescriptive economics are all bunk, and thus Keynes, Marx, and Friedman are all not worthy of debate owing to irrelevance.
I've noticed this too, but after having a conversation on the topic with most of them (barring the far extremes, i.e. the ultra-religious, and the "women are special goddess things" camps) it generally becomes clear that most people find the idea of abortion distasteful, and most people's views are somewhere in the middle, though all fall into one camp or another depending on how they weigh certain aspects of the issue. The aspects are generally the same.
It is a very fun topic to discuss once you get beyond the whole "twitch" reflex that people have developed. People seem to first provide a strong front for or against it, because they are so used to being attacked for their views (any view), then they move on to actual rational discussion once you show that your not attacking their opinions, but just exploring and discussing with no motive of changing their point of view.
This twitch reflex is very common on all hot-button issues. A current example is the immigration debate, with one side appearing almost racist, and the other appearing as pro-immigration (and political correctness) at any cost. If this twitch reflex was removed, useful debate would be ressurected and the world (America specifically, being that we seem to have a particular dearth of this talent at the moment) be a better place. But sadly attack politics is so normal, that I doubt it is possible to be truly open on your views.
If I stood up and said I am for or against (abortion | gun control | illegal immigration | war | taxes), there would be cavalcade of of comments throwing ad hominems and automatically classifying my statement to an extremist point of view, and thus not worth listening too.
Generally, if you are for abortion you are a godless person with no value on life, if you are against you are a religious extremist. If you are for gun control you are a commie bastard who wants a police state, if you are against you are some sort of right wing militia member, if you are against illegal immigration you are a racist (just like if you disagree with Israel ymiou are a Nazi anti-Semite), if you are for you are a anti-american follower of the cult of political correctness. If you are for our wars you are a war-mongering neo-con who believes that America should rule the world, if you are against you are a pacifistic commie. If you are against taxes you are a Libertarian lunatic-fringeman, and if you are for you want a nannie state and adhere to communist principles.
These ad hominems do nothing but silence debate, and squash the vast, silent, middle. Sadly they are very effective, and because of such almost ubiquitous. As a result our politics have become a vast sideshow of extremes. Even the "Fair and Balanced" idea is dripping with this idiocy, since it claims that all view are represented, but somehow completely excludes the middle, favoring only the two ideological extremes.
These extremes cancel each other out, and leave absolutely nothing, just random noise and chaos.
Now it's trendy to have an Ipod/phone/pad so that's what they have.
Is a mere iPod trendy again? I thought that they were basically ubiquitous, and thus couldn't have any hipster cred? I'm glad I'm accidentally hip again, at any rate. At some point in the mid 00's, I somehow became hip because my college had a iBook/iPod combo on sale for $700. I bought it because I had a back to back bad experience with Windows and Linux, so I figured spending some hard-earned grant money on something retardedly stupid to use was a good idea, since I should be focused on my papers and not on installing drivers. I also hung out at a coffee shop (bad room mates, plus cheap caffeine) with said laptop and ipod (much easier than lugging a full tower dual booting Windows and whatever flavor of Linux I liked at the time around).
I'm relieved to hear that ipods are hip again, though, since now when I sit at Starbucks with my old HP booting Ubuntu, I can equal out to be just normal.
I personally believe that people who avoid the appearance of pretension at any cost are just as pretentious as those they strive so hard not to be. Screaming "look at me, I'm different than you!" is pretentious if your using an iPad or not.
I don't quite understand the Starbucks hate meme, and I thank you for dispelling the silly "Coffee at Starbucks costs $6,000,000 a cup" meme, but... Starbucks coffee isn't very good. Some of their (in store) blends are okay (Pike's Place), but most of them are over roasted, and lack any subtly.
They over roast their coffee to promote uniformity between batches and locations, so the coffee at every location at any time tastes exactly the same. They are the McDonalds of coffee.
I really don't mind their coffee for a quick pick me up. But if I want gourmet coffee I'll brew it at home, or find a (now scarce) independent shop.
As an odd aside, me and the lady friend recently took a trip to the Washington state, and were floored that Seattle had less Starbucks than Phoenix. In our hometown Starbucks pretty much completely killed our local coffee ecosystem, even our nice local chain (The Coffee Plantation), which is a shame.
Also, Starbucks makes most of their money on drinks that could barely be considered coffee. And oddly enough, the locations in poor areas make more money off of "vaguely coffee flavored milkshakes", than those in more affluent areas.
And if you don't value it equally, then there has to exist a ranking system, where some are worth zero and some are priceless.
Nope, everyone is worth pretty much the exact same, just some people think they are better. In the long run how much more are you worth than some poor child in Africa? How big is your contribution to the world? What the hell have you done to be worth any more than any other person on this planet?
On a draconian level, if it came down to it, I would rather you died than some kid in sub-Saharan Africa. The kid has some chance of developing into something meaningful and useful to the rest of us, whereas you probably are long past your prime, and your attitude pretty much precludes you from ever doing anything important.
Yes, this comment verges on troll, but it somewhat has to.
All humans are equally valuable (read this as "very valuable" or "completely worthless", depending on mood). And no, not being thrown to your knees at every moment wracked with paroxysms of sorrow at the thought of tragic deaths elsewhere doesn't change this. You are correct, tragedy outside our small social sphere of perception is largely academic, and somewhat (internally) mythic. This doesn't mean anything, it verges on saying "things that happen that I do not know do not happen". Solipsism. No, I am not currently crying, but that does not mean I am not upset. They are not at close to me as a very small minority of people, and this don't have much psychological effect, but this has nothing to do with the worth of them. You must remember you have as much psychological footprint to them, as they do for you. 99.99999% of the world doesn't care one bit about you as an individual either. Moreso, in a long view, you are basically nothing, as if you never existed.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
Huh? Could you please explain where you got this data from? Am I missing some sign of the impending apocalypse, did the oceans turn into blood while I was sleeping?
Yes, things are looking a bit nasty right now. But I have some hope left for us. People are rather ingenious, and get even more so when there is a impending need. Yes, there are too many of us, but this is changing, the population seems to be evening out, and growth is slowing. the two most populous countries in the world are currently experiencing a quality of life boom, which will reduce their growth (as it always does). Africa is still probably doomed, but what else is new.
Personally, I don't actually know how to reply to the rest of your comment, since the rest is based on the completely unsupported conclusion quoted above. I don't see 1 in 2 Americans dying of genocide, or hunger any time soon, much less 3 in 4 people globally. On what are you basing this? The number of people we need to get rid of to get to pre-Boomer levels? Why would that population be optimal anymore? We've increased efficiency, and increased the effective carrying population of the Earth since then. We probably will increase it further in the foreseeable future. Actually, we could probably healthily maintain our current population indefinably if the West decided to stop over consuming resources a bit, and we decided to start switching to more costly alternatives for energy and food.
This probably will happen in its own way.
Sure, there may be a rocky road ahead, but I whole heartedly doubt it is leading over a cliff.
In a sense, you own your lunatic fringe. The odd sect of radical Muslims who are doing truly nasty things, and/or trying to force the tenets of their religion on the rest of us are a part of the larger sect of Muslims. Normal Muslims know that these lunatics reflect badly on them as a whole.
I think it is okay that making silly drawings might affect some normal Muslims (though I'm guessing most of them are smart enough to engage in self-censorship, and simply avoid viewing images that might offend their religious sensibilities). They should be a bit uncomfortable.
That said, the real problem isn't whether or whether not people should choose to engage in activities that might be offensive to certain groups of people, it is whether or whether not people should be barred from doing such. the former is a matter of personal taste and choice, the latter is coercive.
I thought the whole Facebook gesture to be rather silly, and tasteless (though in an amusing way), but otherwise completely forgettable. After Pakistan decided to block the page, as covered here, I decided to actually participate by submitting a quickie MSPaint doodle (Muhammad Potato Head). Why did I do this? Because I view it very important to ridicule people who take things to seriously, or try to control the actions of others.
The whole exercise is basically nothing more than a giant political cartoon. It exists to highlight absurdity. If it makes someone uncomfortable, it is because there is an element of truth.
If I make fun of certain sects of Christian nut-jobs, it isn't a big issue. But somehow making fun certain sects of Muslim lunatics is now. This is dangerous. Extremists should be wholly mocked, we only risk slipping into their world when we stop and consider their wishes, or are moved by their threats. We give them credibility, and we give them encouragement.
...but large sections of the world live under Islamic law that is unchanged since the middle ages.
Actually the Muslims were the progressives in the middle ages. Certain Muslim countries have regressed to about where Christian Europe was during the middle ages, though.
Yes, the US blocks sites it finds objectionable. They tend to be the kind that Americans would make death threats about.
Could you cite this? I don't recall the US blocking any sites on a national level. I'm not saying that they haven't, but I have seen no evidence for it.
You made it sound like QM was some sort of critical problem that science, as a whole, had to rectify in order to move on, or exist, or something equally drastic sounding. I was replying to this reading, if it was the wrong one I apologize.
I would say that the philosophy of science and theology are completely unrelated, except where both touch upon basic epistemology and logic. I haven't studied theology much, but have spent some time around the philosophy of science, and from my experience they have very little in common, their approaches are quite different. At least in a formal sense.
Theology (as much as it existed, which it pretty much didn't) and PoS are pretty much completely separate domains. I'm pretty sure theology has been mostly driven out of philosophy as a formal academic discipline.
A surface glance would show the topics, methods, and criteria of the philosophy of either would be significantly different than the other. Other than the fact that both hopes to discover foundational principles, and ontic truths, they have very little overlap.
No, the act of science isn't simple. And it is fraught with strange philosophical issues that most scientists mostly ignore, but it generally works. In a large picture view science is pretty damn good at fixing its problems, and working towards some decent picture of what exists. On shorter time-frames this can get very very sloppy, but one of the glories of science is that it is, by nature, self-correcting, and generally slowly (perhaps too slowly for comfort at times) works towards greater empirical understanding of the world.
As for quantum strangeness, as I hinted, this difficulty was pretty much worked out in record time. A couple people had issue with it, but they were a shrinking minority. Most scientists simply accept it now, since the alternative has pretty much been discredited.
I don't know why you got modded so far down the troll hole, btw.
of course it is. how do you think scientists got past the mind blowing inconsistencies quantum mechanics requires us to grasp.
What scientists? I didn't realize that geologists, biologists, and anthropologists (Oh my!) had to get past the whole quantum strangeness thing. If by scientists you mean a certain set of physicists, then there was some interesting and fun soul searching (See the Einstein Bohr debates).
The fact that their are pushing for carbon taxes or cap and trade shows me that something is wrong, yes.
Are you confusing climate scientists with politicians?
The climate scientists are saying "there is a serious problem and we must do something", and the politicians are replying "there is a perceived problem, we must do something to make us look like we're doing something, and that will line the pockets of our donors at the same time!".
The science folk find a problem, and it is up to us, the plebes, to decide what to do about it. Just because you hate a solution doesn't make the problem invalid. That was pretty much the point of TFA.
I know, your fancy iPhones will never replace just shouting really loud...
From my experience most iPhone users (and cell users in general) sill just shout really loud, now they are just do it with a silly thing stuck in their ear, and at no one in particular.
Name one published piece of fiction that you are having trouble finding on the internet. There are torrents for them as much as there are for obscure movies and music fi
Actually there are a ton of books I can't find online. There is a large subset of books I can't find on "valid" online bookstores, and an even larger (as in unbelievably massive) amount that I can't find on torrent/rapidshare-like sites.
I just bought a Nook, and one of the first things I did was try to hunt down my current "to-read" pile of books in a digital format, peferably for free (I bought the physical book, so I have no problem with pirating them). I found VERY few of the books I own and want to read. Rick Moody does not exist in piracy circles, nor does Italo Calvino, nor does around 75% of my pile of books, these two authors are not obscure, the more obscure, or less American ones fair worse (Steve Aylett never exited, apparently).
Ebooks suffer the same problem that DVDs did in the early days (and to a lesser extent still suffers from), that older material has not been copied over to the new format. There is a couple movies I love that have only turned into DVDs in the last year or so. Books are the same, and even worse because this is a new medium. Pretty much anything published more than 5 years ago, that is not wildly popular doesn't exist in an ebook format.
Torrents are worse. Torrents are great for very popular things, but generally suck for strange and obscure things. Torrents are super for up-and-coming new releases, but perform abysmally for older things that last their patina of trendiness. Torrents, by their very nature, are about trendiness, and not breadth of content. They really suck for books, unless you only want new New York Times Bestsellers, and series with broad geek appeal.
I also am a philosophy nut, and most of the books that aren't considered "classic" don't exist in an online format. I'm sure there would be some benefit in owning yet another copy of the complete works of Plato or Aristotle (which are free, and open), but an ebook can't compete with my old, ratty, self annotated, copies I used as an undergrad. For more modern books, your pretty much out of luck, and those that exist are a pain to read since you DO read technical book in a non-linear fashion. And most ebook readers are TERRIBLE at footnotes and endnotes. One of the last ones I read wouldn't allow me to page back to the page that contained the endnote, basically leaving me completely stranded at the end of the book, and needing to page 30-40 pages forward from the last chapter heading.
Yes, some ebooks are formatted better than that. But all real books are, by nature, formatted in the optimal way, there isn't a choice in it.
That said, I love my Nook for light reading, for those books where it can be used. But to claim that ebooks are perfect is rather naive. In the end the Nook will never replace my room full of books. And not just because I love the tactile feel of books, or have a strange Luddite tendency. Books, on the whole, are far better than their ebook equivalent.
they also said more than 90% preferred the e-reader for personal reading. Surely that's a stronger indicator of the effectiveness of e-readers than 80% saying they don't like it for school.
You misread. 90% said they "liked it" for personal reading, not prefered it over woodpulp books. As stated, I like (even love) my ebook reader, and enjoy reading on it, but I don't see it ever replacing my large physical library, for a variety of reasons, some of which I stated above.
BTW, search uspto.gov for patents listing "venter, j craig" as an inventor & then do the same for "collins, francis" (head of the public HGP). Guess who has more patents?
You have to be careful with searches like this. There is such a thing as a defensive patent, where the patenter patents an idea to keep other people from patenting it and closing it off. I don't think I've ever used the same word in a sentence as much as in that one. For the sake of brevity you can read it as "patenter patents patents with patents"
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It has taken me 40 years on this planet to eventually figure out the fact that some people simply do not think in a reasonable fashion
One could argue, from the point of view of the **AA, that they are being reasonable. They view copyright as the most important thing in existence (their corporate existence depends on it, so they somewhat justified in this), so their job is to protect copyright at all costs. Hence forming industry groups like the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc... If we accept this view, then using the historically lopsided power of the legal system to intimidate people, and make a general example of them, makes sense. It is reasonable (i.e. there is a valid, if not sound, logical basis).
The Mafia's protection rackets were also quite reasonable by this same reasoning. Those who don't bow to intimidation should be public examples to keep others in line. Even if the person cost of burning down someone's shop (higher notoriety with authorities, risk of capture, etc...) is more than the default that lead to the action, it may be worth it since it will force others who were on the fence about defaulting to reconsider, thus ensuring future revenue.
Very reasonable.
The real question is whether it is ethical, moral, or even legal, and whether this is a practice we wish to allow as a society.
f he had went to Fox for the big $ (as Joss Whedon has so foolishly done, so often), it would have never made it past a few episodes of the first season.
To Mr. Whedon's credit, going for the big $ at Fox worked very well for him twice previously. Both Buffy and Angel made tons of money for everyone, so you can't fault him for trying the same thing with Firefly (if it works once, try it again, if it works again there is no harm in sticking with it). Dollhouse, on the other hand, was a dumb move.
only because they are lazy.
Or because they don't care. $380 is much higher than my $19 a month for Netflix, and $0 a month for Hulu, and my $0 a month streaming TV from other sources via a re-purposed MacMini. The lack of ads on my setup, to be memeful, is priceless. Me and the lady friend discuss getting cable from time to time, since the DTV switch killed all of our local channels, but it is so low on the priority list as to be almost non-existent.
When I had cable all I did was watch Dirty Jobs, and the Food Network (mostly as background noise). Hardly worth $380 (or the nearly $60 they were charging me).
Recently I house-sat for my father, and tried to kill some time watching his Direct TV, I gave up very quicky. 300 hundred channels of nothing is pretty much a literal reality. I was happy they had infomercials for sex-toys though, but I doubt the transient amusement value of that is worth much.
I can see having Cable and Sat TV for sports fans. Or people who really care about Dancing With the Stars, or people who need to watch the latest version of sitcom x as soon as humanly possible (for whatever reason). But for people not in those groups, it is pretty much worthless.
Most geeks, back to the topic, don't care much about sports, and probably don't have lives that hinging on knowing what the latest development in whatever the big sitcom of the day is. Most geeks are probably tech savvy enough to obtain their television from other sources for cheap or free, which beats paying a cable bill. Therefore most geeks don't have cable/sat for VERY sensible reasons.
The only thing I really miss about cable is being able to be indoctrinated with liberal viewpoints ala MSNBC, and occasionally getting my 4 minutes of hate via Bill O'Reilly. Though I suppose both of them are available via podcast/streaming, so if I cared much they would still be available. I apparently don't.
Not to argue with you, obviously your choice works for you and my differing choices have nothing to do with that. But do you think the larger back catalog would change your rental habits?
I noticed that Netflix changed my viewing habits. The automated sending of movies is great, and the streaming content pretty much killed my cable subscription. For my family it is worth the $15/mo.
Obviously mileage varies.
To each their own, but I doubt very much that you have "normal" habits.
I have probably watched the Godfather over 50 times in the last 30 years. I've watched the original Starwars Trilogy about once a year since I was 8. Etc... I don't think, though, that I've ever spent over 15.00 for a single movie though. $20 DVDs is a pretty new thing, and I completely refuse to play along with that. I usually wait for it to hit $10, or buy it used via Blockbuster or a used bookstore, or for it to be a loss-leader at some media store. Blue Ray fits on the same budget criteria, I refuse to buy it until it hits the sub-$10 level, I will not spend more money for Blue Ray than I will for DVD.
I also have stranger tastes, and older, than Red Box will allow. I like old movies. I very rarely watch a new release, since I fully expect them to suck.
What do you have against Netflix, out of curiosity?
If there are no rental shops, and only Red Box, and your religion bars Netflix, then you pretty much are out of luck, unless you want to only buy (or pirate) movies. You, in other words, are completely out of luck.
With Blockbuster and locally owned video rental stores gone, where will people rent older films?
Blockbuster started to really suck in the older movie department. Recently (in the last 3 years or so) all they carry is new releases, crappy copy-cat movies (like Transmorphers, or other direct low-budged copies of recent blockbusters), and movies that were big and popular under 10 years ago. Recently they even cut this back make a large Blu-Ray section, and NYT Bestseller books aisle (which pretty much screams "we are a company deeply in crisis, and completely out of ideas that make money). Browsing Blockbuster is now somewhat depressing. The only reason to go there is to buy pre-watched new release DVDs, though they even jacked up those prices recently.
The only brick and mortar places that have/had a decent selection of older, more obscure, movies are mom&pops, some Hollywood videos. When I lived in Flagstaff Hasting's was the greatest video place on this side of Netflix, they still have aisles of VHS tapes. I doubt they ever removed inventory accept when it wore out, which is a very nice feature for a video store.
Netflix probably wins in the older move category. They have ALMOST everything I've looked for. Outside of that, try your local library. Most libraries have a decent movie section now. Some of them even have more movies than books these days (which is fundamentally depressing).
I just wish it had true ad-blocking. Not seeing ads is nice, but nothing really beats actually getting rid of them completely (both for bandwidth and security).
Other than that, I agree, Chromium is pretty nice. I installed the unstable (dev) version as a test, and now I find myself rarely using Firefox. I even installed Chrome on my Windows box, and use it happily around 75% of the time, even if it is blissfully sending my history to Google (I really don't do anything that anyone would ever care about, but for more secure uses I stick to Firefox).
Firefox has gotten pretty bad, of late. It takes around 3 times as long to open, and gets sluggish much faster. For some reason Mozilla decided to gut all added Win7 functionality, while adding a bunch of completely moronic features (Personas, really? Was that worth ANY dev time?). Chrome/ium uses more RAM total, but RAM is cheap, and somehow it never feels as sluggish as Firefox.
Though, as I'm typing this I have two pop-ups telling me that Chrome stopped responding, while typing this through Chrome.
After FO3 there is no going back.
Why not?
Fallout 3 was fun, even with the annoying DLC (DLC is annoying, but FO3's DLC was more so since half of them didn't really tie into the game), but it really didn't carry on with what made FO1 and 2 great. FO3 took out most of the humor, and somehow, even with a bigger world, it took out a lot of the "largeness" of the original two games. I'm not saying that FO3 was a crappy game, it just wasn't a great game.
In FO2 I wasted hours running around New Reno in a purple robe, killing prostitues with a close up SMG blast. Yes, it is creepy, but it illustrates how you could create your own mini-games, and play them for hours completely ignoring anything that the devs wanted you to do. FO3 was also EXTREMELY easy, yes there was some tough parts, but it was easier to get past. Within the first 4 hours of FO3 I managed to lure a patrol of folks wearing power armor, fully decked out with energy weapons, next to a car, I blew up the car, and had over powered armor for the rest of the game (well 75% of it, until I was supposed to get it legitimately). The biggest challenge was keeping my follower from blowing themselves up (which I suppose is close to par, since I remember giving Vic in FO2 a shotgun, and having him kill me repeatedly every fight).
I also vastly prefer the 3rd person hex style of the original fallout. Making something first person (or over the shoulder 2nd) doesn't make it better. I'm actually getting fairly sick of making everything an FPS. FPSs are rather claustrophobic, which hurts when something is supposed to be in a vast, detailed, world. I liked the feel of playing a table top RPG in the first two, and having to budget your AP. The VAT system was a nice try, but was pretty much nothing but a situationally useful gimmick.
Not to sound too negative, I did enjoy the game. It just wasn't as Fallout-esque as I hoped it would be.
No, setting up a false dichotomy does not mean it is true. Generally if a dichotomy claims that it is either all A or all B, it is false. This is not true in the realm of testable factuals, but is VERY true in human affairs and ideology.
In abortion we can see this. I might be able to accept the views of position A, but not support their conclusion, or, obviously, visa versa. Alternatively, I could reach the same active conclusion (abortion [should|should not] be permitted) as position A or B, but by a different approach.
You also make the mistake of thinking that there is an actual truth value involved in the abortion debate. I fail to see any single testable truth that would provide critical for proving either position to be an objective, indisputable, truth. Abortion (and most hot-button debates represented by an extreme A or not-A form) is purely a cultural, and sociological debate. Not being factual, there is no possibility of truth.
Another problem with the abortion debate is that the terms themselves are vague, and generally non-solvable. By what criteria do we judge whether something is alive, what is a soul and how do we measure its presence in a fetus, at what point can something be called human, or even alive. What are the ethics of terminating something that is very rudimentary (i.e. how is it wrong to kill a fetus, but not an animal when the latter is higher in development and function than the former). What exactly would be a functional threshold? Is there a value to potential humans, if said thing is barely human at the moment? etc...
These questions are key to the whole debate. And I don't see any of them as being very solvable in themselves.
Is it more interesting to compare the competing views of Keynes, Marx and Friedman or to just scrawl down the nice ineffectual "Democratic" opinions of Kevin Rudd ?
Being more interesting does nothing to influence the truth value. One could easily, in the case of your example, take the view that prescriptive economics are all bunk, and thus Keynes, Marx, and Friedman are all not worthy of debate owing to irrelevance.
I've noticed this too, but after having a conversation on the topic with most of them (barring the far extremes, i.e. the ultra-religious, and the "women are special goddess things" camps) it generally becomes clear that most people find the idea of abortion distasteful, and most people's views are somewhere in the middle, though all fall into one camp or another depending on how they weigh certain aspects of the issue. The aspects are generally the same.
It is a very fun topic to discuss once you get beyond the whole "twitch" reflex that people have developed. People seem to first provide a strong front for or against it, because they are so used to being attacked for their views (any view), then they move on to actual rational discussion once you show that your not attacking their opinions, but just exploring and discussing with no motive of changing their point of view.
This twitch reflex is very common on all hot-button issues. A current example is the immigration debate, with one side appearing almost racist, and the other appearing as pro-immigration (and political correctness) at any cost. If this twitch reflex was removed, useful debate would be ressurected and the world (America specifically, being that we seem to have a particular dearth of this talent at the moment) be a better place. But sadly attack politics is so normal, that I doubt it is possible to be truly open on your views.
If I stood up and said I am for or against (abortion | gun control | illegal immigration | war | taxes), there would be cavalcade of of comments throwing ad hominems and automatically classifying my statement to an extremist point of view, and thus not worth listening too.
Generally, if you are for abortion you are a godless person with no value on life, if you are against you are a religious extremist. If you are for gun control you are a commie bastard who wants a police state, if you are against you are some sort of right wing militia member, if you are against illegal immigration you are a racist (just like if you disagree with Israel ymiou are a Nazi anti-Semite), if you are for you are a anti-american follower of the cult of political correctness. If you are for our wars you are a war-mongering neo-con who believes that America should rule the world, if you are against you are a pacifistic commie. If you are against taxes you are a Libertarian lunatic-fringeman, and if you are for you want a nannie state and adhere to communist principles.
These ad hominems do nothing but silence debate, and squash the vast, silent, middle. Sadly they are very effective, and because of such almost ubiquitous. As a result our politics have become a vast sideshow of extremes. Even the "Fair and Balanced" idea is dripping with this idiocy, since it claims that all view are represented, but somehow completely excludes the middle, favoring only the two ideological extremes.
These extremes cancel each other out, and leave absolutely nothing, just random noise and chaos.
Now it's trendy to have an Ipod/phone/pad so that's what they have.
Is a mere iPod trendy again? I thought that they were basically ubiquitous, and thus couldn't have any hipster cred? I'm glad I'm accidentally hip again, at any rate. At some point in the mid 00's, I somehow became hip because my college had a iBook/iPod combo on sale for $700. I bought it because I had a back to back bad experience with Windows and Linux, so I figured spending some hard-earned grant money on something retardedly stupid to use was a good idea, since I should be focused on my papers and not on installing drivers. I also hung out at a coffee shop (bad room mates, plus cheap caffeine) with said laptop and ipod (much easier than lugging a full tower dual booting Windows and whatever flavor of Linux I liked at the time around).
I'm relieved to hear that ipods are hip again, though, since now when I sit at Starbucks with my old HP booting Ubuntu, I can equal out to be just normal.
I personally believe that people who avoid the appearance of pretension at any cost are just as pretentious as those they strive so hard not to be. Screaming "look at me, I'm different than you!" is pretentious if your using an iPad or not.
I don't quite understand the Starbucks hate meme, and I thank you for dispelling the silly "Coffee at Starbucks costs $6,000,000 a cup" meme, but... Starbucks coffee isn't very good. Some of their (in store) blends are okay (Pike's Place), but most of them are over roasted, and lack any subtly.
They over roast their coffee to promote uniformity between batches and locations, so the coffee at every location at any time tastes exactly the same. They are the McDonalds of coffee.
I really don't mind their coffee for a quick pick me up. But if I want gourmet coffee I'll brew it at home, or find a (now scarce) independent shop.
As an odd aside, me and the lady friend recently took a trip to the Washington state, and were floored that Seattle had less Starbucks than Phoenix. In our hometown Starbucks pretty much completely killed our local coffee ecosystem, even our nice local chain (The Coffee Plantation), which is a shame.
Also, Starbucks makes most of their money on drinks that could barely be considered coffee. And oddly enough, the locations in poor areas make more money off of "vaguely coffee flavored milkshakes", than those in more affluent areas.
And if you don't value it equally, then there has to exist a ranking system, where some are worth zero and some are priceless.
Nope, everyone is worth pretty much the exact same, just some people think they are better. In the long run how much more are you worth than some poor child in Africa? How big is your contribution to the world? What the hell have you done to be worth any more than any other person on this planet?
On a draconian level, if it came down to it, I would rather you died than some kid in sub-Saharan Africa. The kid has some chance of developing into something meaningful and useful to the rest of us, whereas you probably are long past your prime, and your attitude pretty much precludes you from ever doing anything important.
Yes, this comment verges on troll, but it somewhat has to.
All humans are equally valuable (read this as "very valuable" or "completely worthless", depending on mood). And no, not being thrown to your knees at every moment wracked with paroxysms of sorrow at the thought of tragic deaths elsewhere doesn't change this. You are correct, tragedy outside our small social sphere of perception is largely academic, and somewhat (internally) mythic. This doesn't mean anything, it verges on saying "things that happen that I do not know do not happen". Solipsism. No, I am not currently crying, but that does not mean I am not upset. They are not at close to me as a very small minority of people, and this don't have much psychological effect, but this has nothing to do with the worth of them. You must remember you have as much psychological footprint to them, as they do for you. 99.99999% of the world doesn't care one bit about you as an individual either. Moreso, in a long view, you are basically nothing, as if you never existed.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
Huh? Could you please explain where you got this data from? Am I missing some sign of the impending apocalypse, did the oceans turn into blood while I was sleeping?
Yes, things are looking a bit nasty right now. But I have some hope left for us. People are rather ingenious, and get even more so when there is a impending need. Yes, there are too many of us, but this is changing, the population seems to be evening out, and growth is slowing. the two most populous countries in the world are currently experiencing a quality of life boom, which will reduce their growth (as it always does). Africa is still probably doomed, but what else is new.
Personally, I don't actually know how to reply to the rest of your comment, since the rest is based on the completely unsupported conclusion quoted above. I don't see 1 in 2 Americans dying of genocide, or hunger any time soon, much less 3 in 4 people globally. On what are you basing this? The number of people we need to get rid of to get to pre-Boomer levels? Why would that population be optimal anymore? We've increased efficiency, and increased the effective carrying population of the Earth since then. We probably will increase it further in the foreseeable future. Actually, we could probably healthily maintain our current population indefinably if the West decided to stop over consuming resources a bit, and we decided to start switching to more costly alternatives for energy and food.
This probably will happen in its own way.
Sure, there may be a rocky road ahead, but I whole heartedly doubt it is leading over a cliff.
In a sense, you own your lunatic fringe. The odd sect of radical Muslims who are doing truly nasty things, and/or trying to force the tenets of their religion on the rest of us are a part of the larger sect of Muslims. Normal Muslims know that these lunatics reflect badly on them as a whole.
I think it is okay that making silly drawings might affect some normal Muslims (though I'm guessing most of them are smart enough to engage in self-censorship, and simply avoid viewing images that might offend their religious sensibilities). They should be a bit uncomfortable.
That said, the real problem isn't whether or whether not people should choose to engage in activities that might be offensive to certain groups of people, it is whether or whether not people should be barred from doing such. the former is a matter of personal taste and choice, the latter is coercive.
I thought the whole Facebook gesture to be rather silly, and tasteless (though in an amusing way), but otherwise completely forgettable. After Pakistan decided to block the page, as covered here, I decided to actually participate by submitting a quickie MSPaint doodle (Muhammad Potato Head). Why did I do this? Because I view it very important to ridicule people who take things to seriously, or try to control the actions of others.
The whole exercise is basically nothing more than a giant political cartoon. It exists to highlight absurdity. If it makes someone uncomfortable, it is because there is an element of truth.
If I make fun of certain sects of Christian nut-jobs, it isn't a big issue. But somehow making fun certain sects of Muslim lunatics is now. This is dangerous. Extremists should be wholly mocked, we only risk slipping into their world when we stop and consider their wishes, or are moved by their threats. We give them credibility, and we give them encouragement.
...but large sections of the world live under Islamic law that is unchanged since the middle ages.
Actually the Muslims were the progressives in the middle ages. Certain Muslim countries have regressed to about where Christian Europe was during the middle ages, though.
Yes, the US blocks sites it finds objectionable. They tend to be the kind that Americans would make death threats about.
Could you cite this? I don't recall the US blocking any sites on a national level. I'm not saying that they haven't, but I have seen no evidence for it.
You made it sound like QM was some sort of critical problem that science, as a whole, had to rectify in order to move on, or exist, or something equally drastic sounding. I was replying to this reading, if it was the wrong one I apologize.
I would say that the philosophy of science and theology are completely unrelated, except where both touch upon basic epistemology and logic. I haven't studied theology much, but have spent some time around the philosophy of science, and from my experience they have very little in common, their approaches are quite different. At least in a formal sense.
Theology (as much as it existed, which it pretty much didn't) and PoS are pretty much completely separate domains. I'm pretty sure theology has been mostly driven out of philosophy as a formal academic discipline.
A surface glance would show the topics, methods, and criteria of the philosophy of either would be significantly different than the other. Other than the fact that both hopes to discover foundational principles, and ontic truths, they have very little overlap.
No, the act of science isn't simple. And it is fraught with strange philosophical issues that most scientists mostly ignore, but it generally works. In a large picture view science is pretty damn good at fixing its problems, and working towards some decent picture of what exists. On shorter time-frames this can get very very sloppy, but one of the glories of science is that it is, by nature, self-correcting, and generally slowly (perhaps too slowly for comfort at times) works towards greater empirical understanding of the world.
As for quantum strangeness, as I hinted, this difficulty was pretty much worked out in record time. A couple people had issue with it, but they were a shrinking minority. Most scientists simply accept it now, since the alternative has pretty much been discredited.
I don't know why you got modded so far down the troll hole, btw.
Like a record, baby.
of course it is. how do you think scientists got past the mind blowing inconsistencies quantum mechanics requires us to grasp.
What scientists? I didn't realize that geologists, biologists, and anthropologists (Oh my!) had to get past the whole quantum strangeness thing. If by scientists you mean a certain set of physicists, then there was some interesting and fun soul searching (See the Einstein Bohr debates).
The fact that their are pushing for carbon taxes or cap and trade shows me that something is wrong, yes.
Are you confusing climate scientists with politicians?
The climate scientists are saying "there is a serious problem and we must do something", and the politicians are replying "there is a perceived problem, we must do something to make us look like we're doing something, and that will line the pockets of our donors at the same time!".
The science folk find a problem, and it is up to us, the plebes, to decide what to do about it. Just because you hate a solution doesn't make the problem invalid. That was pretty much the point of TFA.
I know, your fancy iPhones will never replace just shouting really loud...
From my experience most iPhone users (and cell users in general) sill just shout really loud, now they are just do it with a silly thing stuck in their ear, and at no one in particular.
Name one published piece of fiction that you are having trouble finding on the internet. There are torrents for them as much as there are for obscure movies and music fi
Actually there are a ton of books I can't find online. There is a large subset of books I can't find on "valid" online bookstores, and an even larger (as in unbelievably massive) amount that I can't find on torrent/rapidshare-like sites.
I just bought a Nook, and one of the first things I did was try to hunt down my current "to-read" pile of books in a digital format, peferably for free (I bought the physical book, so I have no problem with pirating them). I found VERY few of the books I own and want to read. Rick Moody does not exist in piracy circles, nor does Italo Calvino, nor does around 75% of my pile of books, these two authors are not obscure, the more obscure, or less American ones fair worse (Steve Aylett never exited, apparently).
Ebooks suffer the same problem that DVDs did in the early days (and to a lesser extent still suffers from), that older material has not been copied over to the new format. There is a couple movies I love that have only turned into DVDs in the last year or so. Books are the same, and even worse because this is a new medium. Pretty much anything published more than 5 years ago, that is not wildly popular doesn't exist in an ebook format.
Torrents are worse. Torrents are great for very popular things, but generally suck for strange and obscure things. Torrents are super for up-and-coming new releases, but perform abysmally for older things that last their patina of trendiness. Torrents, by their very nature, are about trendiness, and not breadth of content. They really suck for books, unless you only want new New York Times Bestsellers, and series with broad geek appeal.
I also am a philosophy nut, and most of the books that aren't considered "classic" don't exist in an online format. I'm sure there would be some benefit in owning yet another copy of the complete works of Plato or Aristotle (which are free, and open), but an ebook can't compete with my old, ratty, self annotated, copies I used as an undergrad. For more modern books, your pretty much out of luck, and those that exist are a pain to read since you DO read technical book in a non-linear fashion. And most ebook readers are TERRIBLE at footnotes and endnotes. One of the last ones I read wouldn't allow me to page back to the page that contained the endnote, basically leaving me completely stranded at the end of the book, and needing to page 30-40 pages forward from the last chapter heading.
Yes, some ebooks are formatted better than that. But all real books are, by nature, formatted in the optimal way, there isn't a choice in it.
That said, I love my Nook for light reading, for those books where it can be used. But to claim that ebooks are perfect is rather naive. In the end the Nook will never replace my room full of books. And not just because I love the tactile feel of books, or have a strange Luddite tendency. Books, on the whole, are far better than their ebook equivalent.
they also said more than 90% preferred the e-reader for personal reading. Surely that's a stronger indicator of the effectiveness of e-readers than 80% saying they don't like it for school.
You misread. 90% said they "liked it" for personal reading, not prefered it over woodpulp books. As stated, I like (even love) my ebook reader, and enjoy reading on it, but I don't see it ever replacing my large physical library, for a variety of reasons, some of which I stated above.
BTW, search uspto.gov for patents listing "venter, j craig" as an inventor & then do the same for "collins, francis" (head of the public HGP). Guess who has more patents?
You have to be careful with searches like this. There is such a thing as a defensive patent, where the patenter patents an idea to keep other people from patenting it and closing it off. I don't think I've ever used the same word in a sentence as much as in that one. For the sake of brevity you can read it as "patenter patents patents with patents"