So it occured to me "Hey, why don't I go through the season passes on my Tivo and see how much it would cost me to subscribe through iTunes?"
So here's a list of most of my current season passes. I didn't bother including shows where I'm recording re-runs since theoretically I could buy DVD box sets or something and just always have them around. Also bear in mind this is a 2-person household.
Heroes: $42.99 Lost: $34.99 Battlestar Galactica: $25.99 Supernatural: $34.99 Colbert Report/Daiy Show: $9.99/16 episodes of each show Stargate SG-1: $37.99 Stargate Atlantis: $37.99 Dresden Files: 19.99 Bones: $39.99 Monk: $29.99 Weeds: $19.90 Eureka: $23.88 Psych: $28.99 My Name Is Earl: $36.99 30 Days: $11.94 Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: $19.99 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $19.99 Venture Brothers: $19.99 Robot Chicken: $19.99 Frisky Dingo: $19.99
Some of our season passes are not available on iTunes. For some of these we could still get them over the air via basic cable, or just have to wait for DVDs to be released months/year down the road: Dexter House Simpsons Mail Call Slings And Arrows
So a quick attempt to add up the totals above came to a bit under $540 for a "season" of the shows we watch. (Although the Daily Show/Colbert Report numbers should probably add more to that. We don't always watch every episode but we do watch more than 16 per year.)
Given that I curently have a fairly premium package from DirecTV, that total is only about 6 months worth of DirecTV bills for me right now. So while almost $600 certainly seems like a lot of money, it's still possible that it could work out to be a better deal. Of course I could easily save $40-50/month by downgrading my DirecTV package (there's maybe one or two shows left I care about on premium channels at this point so I'm probably going to do that pretty soon regardless) but the cheapest DirecTV package is still $600/year.
It would take more work to really compare the numbers, as I would almost certainly still need to keep at least basic cable, and then work out what that costs + the $20/month or so monthly fee on the series 3 tivo for recording the things itunes doesn't have and also just random things like live news, sporting events, awards shows, etc. But, as much as part of me thinks it's ridiculous to pay $600 for tv shows piecemeal, I of course have to admit that depending on how much I reduce or eliminate a satellite/cable bill, it actually might still be a better deal.
Definitely something I will need to give further consideration too. I don't know if I would totally eliminate broadcast Tv in favor of downloading everything and paying for it piecemeal, but it doesn't seem to be as unaffordable a concept as I had thought initially.
Also, Bonobo group dynamics are pretty much entirely based on frequent casual sex, even with siblings/children/etc. Bonobos do not have any particular heightened risk of STDs, nor any real population problems related to their promiscuity.
STDs are just a type of infectious disease, and infectious diseases are more influenced by highly-concentrated population centers than by sexual contact.
Go actually look up what it takes to come here legally, and then try to tell us how "not hard at all" it is for a poor person to do so. Especially a poor Mexican.
It is in fact very difficult for a poor person to come here. It's relatively easy for a person with a good-paying job and a sponsor already lined up, just a lot of time and paperwork. But how easy do you think it is to get Farmer John to officially sponsor someone to come pick fruit for him for a few weeks? Is it likely that Joe's Diner is going to have an HR department to handle his H1-B visa needs for a new dishwasher? How many people hoping to pick fruit or wash dishes are likely to have a non-refundable $100 fee lying around and 6 months to wait after paying that to even hear back if they can apply?
Canada, on the other hand, really *is* easy to apply for a temporary work visa:
"Just getting a hearing [for a visa] at the US embassy is a feat," says Javiar Gomez, a Mexico City house painter who waited four months to hear whether or not he could get a tourist visa to visit his brother in Chicago last year. He didn't get the visa. "You have to pay [a nonrefundable $100 fee] before knowing if you will be accepted or not. Its infuriating," he says.
Temporary workers who want to go to Canada fill out one form. There's no charge. The same application to the US, according the US Embassy website requires, among other things:
"A copy of the I-129 petition and the original approved I-797 petition. "
"A BANAMEX receipt for the 1,150 pesos (adjusted according to exchange rate) application fee. There can be additional fees for individuals obtaining work visas."
"Supplementary application form if applicant is male between the ages of 16 and 45."
Any Mexican can apply for an immigrant visa to Canada. But the US rules say that only Mexicans who have family or a sponsoring employer can apply for the same visa.
So it's totally easy to come here from Mexico for temporary work, providing you have a fairly large amount of money, can wait months or years to start your job, and you already have a legal resident family member or employer ready to sponsor you. Other than that it's totally easy.
On the other hand, if we keep the status quo, they come here illegally, and employers get to employ them with little risk of penalty (we'll deport the immigrant if we catch them but we certainly won't shut down the business that employed them), then they get some government services in exchange for all the sales taxes they pay (yes, indeed, they *do* pay some taxes) and they keep a lot of our agricultural and cleaning service prices down.
And even if Wikipedia's error rate someday beats Britannica's, under its current model Wikipedia can never have the key property that Britannica has, which is that you can cite it as an authoritative source without sounding silly.
Why does this keep coming up. Why can this seemingly not sink in?
ENCYCLOPEDIAS ARE NOT AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES.
You already can't cite Brittanica if you're writing an academic paper at anything above maybe high school level. You can't cite Wikipedia either. They *already* have parity in that regard.
You can just search by address and find a lot of the public information about private residences online, including photos in most cases (in all cases in the small sample I've tried).
I wonder how common this is with other regional governments?
You're right the head Primatologist of the Field Museum of Chicago just can't seem to get any publicity, except for the globally-published news articles where he disputes the new species conclusion. Poor guy. If only the Field Museum wasn't such a poor fly-by-night operation.
It's only a single point of failure if your implementation is bad. Who says there's only one server on the other end of the thin client terminal?
For example, you might have a farm of servers running VMWare virtual desktops and Vmotion, designed to automatically shift to a new server if one goes down.
VMWare, of course, does a fair amount of evangelizing solutions like this. I've seen demos using thin client devices from Wyse.
Whoever thinks doctors don't badmouth their patients has never spent 5 minutes with doctors. I used to routinely hear doctors complaining about "GOMERs" (Get Out of My Emergency Room) or sharing amusing stories of how stupid their patients were, etc etc.
It doesn't seem any different to me in IT. I've been working in IT for over 10 years now and I have never worked for an IT department that would *ever* tolerate openly insulting customers to their faces, but even then you couldn't go to a staff meeting without hearing stories about the latest problem customer or chuckles about someone doing something stupid.
It was the same working in fast food, you're polite to the customers but later you make fun of them with the other employees. If you're in a service job dealing with people, you're going to deal with people who amuse or annoy you and you're going to let that steam off hopefully in a private setting.
I just don't see this "bad attitude" in *professional* IT services, ie people who are employed and paid to be IT staff. The only people I encounter who are sometimes prone to public humiliation are in the online communities. But they're usually not doing their *job* in that capacity. In their own free time they're celebrating their right to be a dick.
Certainly gives the news more interesting stories. Usually it's a minor story about a little scuffle on a plane with no injuries. If we can get people actually murdered on airplanes more often it will do great things for our culture of fear.
I would suggest considering the number of total hijackings that have ever occurred, and compare that to the number of times a drunk/crazy/mentally-ill passenger has become violent on a flight. I believe you'll find the latter occurs FAR more often than the former.
I'm not sure issuing firearms to every person on a plane is the best situation for when the latter happens.
Congress only meeting once every 10 years would certainly solidify the majority of government power in the president's hands. Why, he could invade a country, and not have to get congressional approval for nine whole years!
To compare with the Texas situation, is Texas not a place where the governor has fairly limited power? I think I'd be concerned for a place with a rarely-involved legislature but a strong powerful executive branch.
In other words, I don't think we should consider scaling back the power/involvement of the legislature without also thoroughly shackling the executive branch.
What are people doing to their iPods? We've had three iPods of different generations in this house for several years, and we've never had one "lock up" on us ever. Hell, I've dropped my mini on the concrete more times than I can count and still never had a problem.
I've got another friend who has had several problems with his iPods, though. I just don't know what people are doing to them to cause these problems.
Backdating options is a legitimate accounting practice? It's never been allowed at any of the places I worked, where more than once I had options issued shortly after a huge aberrant stock spike and thus my option price was set so high that it never became profitable. I would have *loved* to have had them backdated, but had understood it was illegal to do so.
Same goes for TV, and I'm guessing they were successful because TV today is a lot less violent than it was in the 80's.
I just have to know, who is your cable or satellite provider on your planet? Because on my planet I see shows like the CSIs, Prison Break, 24, Supernatural, Buffy/Angel, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica. (Not, of course, counting stuff like Deadwood, Rome, Sleeper Cell, etc etc on the premium channels)
These shows generally don't have the same bullets/hour ratio that shows like the ATeam or Miami Vice did back in the 80s, but they all feature far more violence.
Honestly, the more I see of this stuff, the more I wonder if it isn't time for a congress reform rather than any of the billion other little "reforms" that congress proposes. The original intent of the founding fathers was that regular people would run for office and represent the best interests of their constituents
Seriously, what makes you think this person does not *perfectly* represent the "regular people" of this country?
He has little to no concern for ethics or the law as long as he thinks he won't get caught. He's only concerned with his own problems. He's completely tech-ignorant. When he *does* get caught, he spouts a lot of bullshit to try and weasel out of it. Sounds a lot like 90% of the USAnians I run into on a daily basis.
UDP is not connectionless. It is "stateless" which is not the same thing
UDP *is* connectionless. It is, in fact, a "connectionless protocol", as per the terminology that aspiring network admins are forced to learn at some point. Look up "connectionless protocol" and see what it says about UDP!
Connection-oriented or connectionless, reliable or unreliable, these are the ways we describe our protocols.
Stateful/stateless are also sometimes used, but they're not the official terms and they *are* synonymous with connection-oriented/connectionless from a networking perspective.
Any fooferaw that NAT or other things try to come up with to keep track of UDP connections doesn't change the fact that the UDP protocol itself is, by definition, connectionless.
One thing that occurs to me is that, I"ve never worked at a company where developers did QA. QA was an entirely different department with an entirely different skillset, and almost nobody with a CS degree seemed to end up in QA. (Presumably they would be developers if they had the CS degree.)
I support a large R&D organization, so I see a lot of interaction problems that often boil down to group A throws a problem over the fence at group B, group B throws it back, group C asks what the hell is going on, etc.
I'm not sure how to work this into a CS program. Do people go to school to get QA degrees? If so I suppose you could integrate the two programs. But somehow training developers to work with non-developers in the Software Dev Cycle seems like an important skill in the Real World(tm).
Also unless they have finally updated it, which I fully admit they may have at this point, the Server version doesn't have the same flexibility with snapshots that workstation does, where you can have multiple snapshots.
Slashdot Mirror
So it occured to me "Hey, why don't I go through the season passes on my Tivo and see how much it would cost me to subscribe through iTunes?"
So here's a list of most of my current season passes. I didn't bother including shows where I'm recording re-runs since theoretically I could buy DVD box sets or something and just always have them around. Also bear in mind this is a 2-person household.
Heroes: $42.99
Lost: $34.99
Battlestar Galactica: $25.99
Supernatural: $34.99
Colbert Report/Daiy Show: $9.99/16 episodes of each show
Stargate SG-1: $37.99
Stargate Atlantis: $37.99
Dresden Files: 19.99
Bones: $39.99
Monk: $29.99
Weeds: $19.90
Eureka: $23.88
Psych: $28.99
My Name Is Earl: $36.99
30 Days: $11.94
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: $19.99
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $19.99
Venture Brothers: $19.99
Robot Chicken: $19.99
Frisky Dingo: $19.99
Some of our season passes are not available on iTunes. For some of these we could still get them over the air via basic cable, or just have to wait for DVDs to be released months/year down the road:
Dexter
House
Simpsons
Mail Call
Slings And Arrows
So a quick attempt to add up the totals above came to a bit under $540 for a "season" of the shows we watch. (Although the Daily Show/Colbert Report numbers should probably add more to that. We don't always watch every episode but we do watch more than 16 per year.)
Given that I curently have a fairly premium package from DirecTV, that total is only about 6 months worth of DirecTV bills for me right now. So while almost $600 certainly seems like a lot of money, it's still possible that it could work out to be a better deal. Of course I could easily save $40-50/month by downgrading my DirecTV package (there's maybe one or two shows left I care about on premium channels at this point so I'm probably going to do that pretty soon regardless) but the cheapest DirecTV package is still $600/year.
It would take more work to really compare the numbers, as I would almost certainly still need to keep at least basic cable, and then work out what that costs + the $20/month or so monthly fee on the series 3 tivo for recording the things itunes doesn't have and also just random things like live news, sporting events, awards shows, etc. But, as much as part of me thinks it's ridiculous to pay $600 for tv shows piecemeal, I of course have to admit that depending on how much I reduce or eliminate a satellite/cable bill, it actually might still be a better deal.
Definitely something I will need to give further consideration too. I don't know if I would totally eliminate broadcast Tv in favor of downloading everything and paying for it piecemeal, but it doesn't seem to be as unaffordable a concept as I had thought initially.
Also, Bonobo group dynamics are pretty much entirely based on frequent casual sex, even with siblings/children/etc. Bonobos do not have any particular heightened risk of STDs, nor any real population problems related to their promiscuity.
STDs are just a type of infectious disease, and infectious diseases are more influenced by highly-concentrated population centers than by sexual contact.
It is in fact very difficult for a poor person to come here. It's relatively easy for a person with a good-paying job and a sponsor already lined up, just a lot of time and paperwork. But how easy do you think it is to get Farmer John to officially sponsor someone to come pick fruit for him for a few weeks? Is it likely that Joe's Diner is going to have an HR department to handle his H1-B visa needs for a new dishwasher? How many people hoping to pick fruit or wash dishes are likely to have a non-refundable $100 fee lying around and 6 months to wait after paying that to even hear back if they can apply?
Canada, on the other hand, really *is* easy to apply for a temporary work visa:
So it's totally easy to come here from Mexico for temporary work, providing you have a fairly large amount of money, can wait months or years to start your job, and you already have a legal resident family member or employer ready to sponsor you. Other than that it's totally easy.
On the other hand, if we keep the status quo, they come here illegally, and employers get to employ them with little risk of penalty (we'll deport the immigrant if we catch them but we certainly won't shut down the business that employed them), then they get some government services in exchange for all the sales taxes they pay (yes, indeed, they *do* pay some taxes) and they keep a lot of our agricultural and cleaning service prices down.
You only have to look back to the 1920s for that. Flapper gals used to go to great lengths to minimize their breasts.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS ARE NOT AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES.
You already can't cite Brittanica if you're writing an academic paper at anything above maybe high school level. You can't cite Wikipedia either. They *already* have parity in that regard.
The Cook County Assessors office already photographs homes and makes the photographs available online.
t ml
http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ccao/startres.h
You can just search by address and find a lot of the public information about private residences online, including photos in most cases (in all cases in the small sample I've tried).
I wonder how common this is with other regional governments?
*Someone* always has full access to your email, unless you maintain your own email servers and exclusively use encryption in all your messages.
If not Google, then your ISP. Even if you host your own servers your ISP can capture all your mail traffic unless you encrypt it.
The Blizzard patcher shuts itself down when it's done, does it not? I don't recall ever having the option of leaving it running to continue seeding.
You're right the head Primatologist of the Field Museum of Chicago just can't seem to get any publicity, except for the globally-published news articles where he disputes the new species conclusion. Poor guy. If only the Field Museum wasn't such a poor fly-by-night operation.
It's only a single point of failure if your implementation is bad. Who says there's only one server on the other end of the thin client terminal?
For example, you might have a farm of servers running VMWare virtual desktops and Vmotion, designed to automatically shift to a new server if one goes down.
VMWare, of course, does a fair amount of evangelizing solutions like this. I've seen demos using thin client devices from Wyse.
Because history shows us that is exactly what happened back in the ancient history of 20 years ago when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect.
Whoever thinks doctors don't badmouth their patients has never spent 5 minutes with doctors. I used to routinely hear doctors complaining about "GOMERs" (Get Out of My Emergency Room) or sharing amusing stories of how stupid their patients were, etc etc.
It doesn't seem any different to me in IT. I've been working in IT for over 10 years now and I have never worked for an IT department that would *ever* tolerate openly insulting customers to their faces, but even then you couldn't go to a staff meeting without hearing stories about the latest problem customer or chuckles about someone doing something stupid.
It was the same working in fast food, you're polite to the customers but later you make fun of them with the other employees. If you're in a service job dealing with people, you're going to deal with people who amuse or annoy you and you're going to let that steam off hopefully in a private setting.
I just don't see this "bad attitude" in *professional* IT services, ie people who are employed and paid to be IT staff. The only people I encounter who are sometimes prone to public humiliation are in the online communities. But they're usually not doing their *job* in that capacity. In their own free time they're celebrating their right to be a dick.
Certainly gives the news more interesting stories. Usually it's a minor story about a little scuffle on a plane with no injuries. If we can get people actually murdered on airplanes more often it will do great things for our culture of fear.
I would suggest considering the number of total hijackings that have ever occurred, and compare that to the number of times a drunk/crazy/mentally-ill passenger has become violent on a flight. I believe you'll find the latter occurs FAR more often than the former.
I'm not sure issuing firearms to every person on a plane is the best situation for when the latter happens.
Congress only meeting once every 10 years would certainly solidify the majority of government power in the president's hands. Why, he could invade a country, and not have to get congressional approval for nine whole years!
To compare with the Texas situation, is Texas not a place where the governor has fairly limited power? I think I'd be concerned for a place with a rarely-involved legislature but a strong powerful executive branch.
In other words, I don't think we should consider scaling back the power/involvement of the legislature without also thoroughly shackling the executive branch.
What are people doing to their iPods? We've had three iPods of different generations in this house for several years, and we've never had one "lock up" on us ever. Hell, I've dropped my mini on the concrete more times than I can count and still never had a problem.
I've got another friend who has had several problems with his iPods, though. I just don't know what people are doing to them to cause these problems.
Aha, thanks for the explanation. That's a much better explanation than I ever got from the plan administrators for some reason.
Backdating options is a legitimate accounting practice? It's never been allowed at any of the places I worked, where more than once I had options issued shortly after a huge aberrant stock spike and thus my option price was set so high that it never became profitable. I would have *loved* to have had them backdated, but had understood it was illegal to do so.
I just have to know, who is your cable or satellite provider on your planet? Because on my planet I see shows like the CSIs, Prison Break, 24, Supernatural, Buffy/Angel, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica. (Not, of course, counting stuff like Deadwood, Rome, Sleeper Cell, etc etc on the premium channels)
These shows generally don't have the same bullets/hour ratio that shows like the ATeam or Miami Vice did back in the 80s, but they all feature far more violence.
Seriously, what makes you think this person does not *perfectly* represent the "regular people" of this country?
He has little to no concern for ethics or the law as long as he thinks he won't get caught. He's only concerned with his own problems. He's completely tech-ignorant. When he *does* get caught, he spouts a lot of bullshit to try and weasel out of it. Sounds a lot like 90% of the USAnians I run into on a daily basis.
UDP *is* connectionless. It is, in fact, a "connectionless protocol", as per the terminology that aspiring network admins are forced to learn at some point. Look up "connectionless protocol" and see what it says about UDP!
Connection-oriented or connectionless, reliable or unreliable, these are the ways we describe our protocols.
Stateful/stateless are also sometimes used, but they're not the official terms and they *are* synonymous with connection-oriented/connectionless from a networking perspective.
Any fooferaw that NAT or other things try to come up with to keep track of UDP connections doesn't change the fact that the UDP protocol itself is, by definition, connectionless.
Rats and mice can *decimate* island ecosystems. They can climb well enough to get into nests and love the taste of eggs.
No no, they were *cabalists*. Totally different.
One thing that occurs to me is that, I"ve never worked at a company where developers did QA. QA was an entirely different department with an entirely different skillset, and almost nobody with a CS degree seemed to end up in QA. (Presumably they would be developers if they had the CS degree.)
I support a large R&D organization, so I see a lot of interaction problems that often boil down to group A throws a problem over the fence at group B, group B throws it back, group C asks what the hell is going on, etc.
I'm not sure how to work this into a CS program. Do people go to school to get QA degrees? If so I suppose you could integrate the two programs. But somehow training developers to work with non-developers in the Software Dev Cycle seems like an important skill in the Real World(tm).
Also unless they have finally updated it, which I fully admit they may have at this point, the Server version doesn't have the same flexibility with snapshots that workstation does, where you can have multiple snapshots.