I've pretty much quit TV. I do watch South Park and most of the Fox cartoons on the Internet, but I don't actually turn a TV on to flip through the channels anymore. That being said I work with TV junkies and there's TV's all over the building I work in and most of my family are still a bunch of TV junkies so I'm not that far behind on what's happening on TV, rather I want to be or not. I've tried watching TV, I really have.
The last shows I've watched (not counting the ones mentioned above)
Dollhouse Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles Caprica Stargate Universe First Wave Battlestar Galactica Farscape Stargate
It seems to me Hulu itself is a descent company that wants to offer us a descent way to watch TV on our computers, but they have to suck and take it to get the content. Part of this bending over to secure rights to the content includes putting tons of detection into their site to make sure I'm not using a browser integrated into a set-top box to watch it on my TV instead of on a computer. Part of this sucking includes showing commercials - while initially significantly less numerous than a cable viewing have slowly increased in number even if you pay for the premium version. All the premium payment allows me is the back catalog of some shows and earlier viewing opportunity and the ability to watch the shows near the bottom of list to be seen with my BluRay player while the ones I really want to watch are of the "unsecured rights" variety that I still have to use a computer for.
I cut them slack for corporate intent. I take it back for failure to push back enough.
The best way to avoid this would be to allow me to build a MythTV box with my own QAM tuner cards in it. (or let me use an off the shelf Tivo or something)
Well, technically I'm allowed to do so and it wouldn't even cost all that much - but since the cable company encrypts just about anything that isn't PBS or the Home Shopping network it would be pretty pointless now wouldn't it?
Hulu pisses me off because even if you pay for + you still get increasingly more commercials (seriously, they started with just a couple of commercials per show, now they rival over the air amounts).
The thing that REALLY pisses me off about Hulu is the lack of agnosticism. You can only watch THIS show on a computer, you can't watch it on your TV with your BluRay player or on your phone - even if you paid for Plus. I had Plus for a month and told them to shove it.
Seriously, before I got Plus I was looking at BluRay players at a store, I wanted to check out their site on my phone to see if a player had added support for Plus or not. EVEN THE FAQ SECTION redirected me to an alert and denial. I wasn't allowed to look at the compatible device list because I was a filthy mobile phone user.
So let me get this straight: I can watch American Dad with my BluRay player. I can't watch a nearly 10 year old Spiderman Cartoon series that never really took off. I can watch Family guy with my phone. I can't watch an obscure Japanese import cartoon few people know about. I can't watch the Simpsons on my BluRay player?
Most shows I want to watch are not approved for "TV Viewing", they charge for that inconvenience and I still have to watch commercials. Screw them.
I may consider getting Hulu Plus again after I buy an HD TV and a media PC for it. (That's right, my BluRay player is hooked up to my SD 36" Diamatron CRT!)
The cable companies are basically advertising for all the services I mentioned by refusing to offer anything worth watching in Clear QAM and pretending HD costs more for them to get to the consumer.
Hint - it costs the cable company more to offer an SD and HD version of a channel than it does to just offer an HD version. By offering both they're actually cutting into the bandwidth available to make other channels better HD. Not to mention two versions gets really confusing for people who have to remember to go to the HD version of the channel instead of the SD in the lower number range.
Most cable companies offer the fucking Home Shopping Network in 1080p for free, will offer SciFi and Discover - channels that actually put a lot of thought and effort into picture quality - in SD with a basic package and if you actually pay for the HD option will upgrade it to 720p using no bandwidth left as an excuse. Maybe if you eliminate the SD channel and reallocate that bandwidth to this channel you can just offer HD as basic? Many cable companies have been outed for lowering bitrates or lying about HD channels resolutions. (this page is dedicated to keeping track of that in Dallas)
My parents pay about $200 a month for basic cable plus a package that gives them Boomerang and a few movie channels like Starz. They get about 3 Mbps up and down and home phone service. They really don't want the home phone service but the way the package triple plays in the US phone service is like an appendix. Mom's been complaining that when she first got this package it was about $120 a month and just keeps creeping up in price.
BTW - it's fiber. I used to think the company she's using was among the best in the US but their service is slowly degrading to the point I don't know how they get away with it. Last time I was there many websites were unavailable - just no route to host and this isn't uncommon anymore. I was having to use my mobile phone to look at websites because I couldn't use their fiber service - and it wasn't DNS, I confirmed this. This sucked almost as bad because Sprint's service - Edge, 3G and absolutely no WiMax sucks balls in Louisiana. Even if you get an excellent 3G signal the back haul makes it seem like you're using a 28.8.
I haven't personally had cable in almost a decade. I get some very basic analog cable with my Internet access but I don't use it. The guy who did the install asked if I wanted my TV hooked up and I said no. Three times. Finally about the forth time he asked I caved and said go ahead since it didn't cost and extra, my dad uses it to watch news when he visits.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's instead of - well Clear QAM was a major contributing factor but the comment started to get too long and lose focus.
BTW, the way the media companies are dealing with loss of viewers is the opposite of what they should do.
Look at an original Star Trek episode on Hulu, it runs about 54 minutes. Look at an original Battlestar Galactica Episode, it runs about 50 minutes, look at a modern SciFi show - it will run about 43 minutes.
I would argue an hour long reality show is 0 minutes of non-advertising content.
People are watching less TV partially because there's less TV to watch in an hour.
I won't buy Texas Instruments products to this day due to their old "802.11b +" cards that had a partial G draft implementation that would do 22Mbps - but only with Windows and absolutely refused to work with the open source community to support the cards.
Later I had major issues with their 1394 chip and Linux, plus a couple of other things that turned up with TI chips that flat wouldn't work with anything but Windows.
There aren't many companies of that size I can think of that have been less open source friendly. How can they contribute the the kernel while hating on Linux so much at the same time?
No, it's a carefully constructed trust setup that is exercised in such as way as to stay legal.
I'm an insider.
To top it off providers like Exxon Mobile in particular structure their sales in such a way as to limit individual stations to $0.10 a gallon. The same guy can own three stations miles apart, buy his gas off of the same truck and charge wildly different prices at each station. The gas off the truck will vary in price at each station so as to limit him to $0,10 a gallon, there is no incentive to raise or lower prices in that case. If I were that guy I would make the gas prices as low as I possibly could, even if it butted up against Exxon's bottom line and forced me into $0.09 a gallon profit just to drag everyone else's prices down.
I used to support gas stations, I've worked for multiple petroleum companies. Something every corporate owned or contracted store does is have the manager drive around and report everyone else's gas prices to the corporate HQ who then sets the prices at the location calling in. It's a way to form a trust without working directly with one another. Using this method no one significantly undercuts anyone and everyone's prices stay close.
If you don't believe me look up the phone number of any gas station you like, call them and ask for their gas prices, They won't tell you because they don't want to make the other managers job any easier, if they have to drive around and get prices then dammit so do you.
I'm not sure, but being a model builder is enough for "probable cause" in many places, so I'm sure the dealers like better. I mean I have to register to buy cold medicine around here, that scale should be something along the lines of shooting up flares.
It's bad enough that model builders have to worry about cops making a big deal about owning precision scales. Now they're worried about coke dealer splitting granules.
You really want some of the most dishonest people out there to make dishonesty impossible?
I'm 100% for the legality of off-shoring, I'm very much against policies at home making the idea more appealing than it needs to be. The more you ask the government to do (and it sounds like you want them to do a lot) the bigger they become and the greater our problems are.
Staffing agencies wouldn't even be necessary - most of the time - if the regulations that make them desirable would either go away or become less complicated.
I'm going to argue the legal system IS government. Yes it is a nightmare, and yes there are elements of our society that abuse the shit out of the legal system. Not just welfare queens turned lawsuit queens but the abusive sue your competitors out of business approach to things so many companies have. Since the justice system is government run and laws are the definition of government our legal nightmares are still government issues.
The pump and dump stock problem is very real, maybe we can start trying that with manufacturing companies as well.
You're using one of the most commonly used fallacies in existence to attempt to discredit a statement. Quit it. It gets old, usually it's an attack on grammar or spelling, but ignoring an accepted definition in order to twist another is in second place.
I know plenty who do less than 40, but I wouldn't exactly consider them the most productive members of society >40 is usually closer to 0 than 40 with most of these people.
You are right about government meddling having a lot to do with that. The administrative cost of an employee to a business owner beyond what an employee immediately sees in many businesses is due to regulations and requirements that prevents companies from hiring more people. In turn they simply demand more of the people they do have. This is part of the reason staffing firms are so popular, they put the burden of the employment paperwork and benefits on someone else and remove much of the legal liability that can be associated with firing someone. They simply tell the staffing firm they don't need this person anymore and the staffing firm is free to lay someone off with the justification their position is gone, even if they're replacing that person with someone else.
Our national debt is established with a "people are the government property" mindset. The US people are the collateral against the loans our debt is financed by. Quite literally our butts belong to China (and other countries) if we default. So glad my butts being sold to other countries to pay for tattoo removal in California.
You've got some great points there, especially with the Europe/Airbus reference.
I do disagree however with we can't do everything at once. We can. We have a lot of land mass, a lot of people, and no shortage of talented people or of people without a lot of talent but can and will work on an assembly line.
We can make doing business here more attractive without becoming isolationist and we can do it in a way that actually increases our own employment, lowers individual and corporate taxes while balancing the budget. It's going to take rethinking government roles and contract structure and some outright wars on corruption.
If the "real" chips were outsourced to China to begin with, then China kept producing the chips in the same factory by the same people, even after the original orders were fulfilled, are they really "counterfeit" or just "chips without the royalties"?
I don't know, USA Today seems to agree with me, as does Hilary Clinton and Obama. Here's another.
I'm not digging for it right now, but it seems articles have run here on Slashdot about help desk jobs moving to India partially because the government made it the most logical step.
The federal government of the United States should not blame China for this, it's called being Shanghaied for a reason, and it's not a new term.
The reason the market is ripe for these sorts of problems is the governments own fault. There used to be lots of chipmakers in the United States. It costs to much to do business in the United States. Businesses have gotten in bed with the government and bought their own representatives and more important industry regulators to control the market to benefit the biggest players. When the biggest players can no longer afford to do business here they pick up and leave the country but the regulations they paid for remain.
Mix that with an unfavorable tax economy, actual government incentives to send business overseas (still haven't figured that one out), and punishment via tax brackets for people who attempt to move up in class and of course the market is ripe for China to supply fake chips. We ran all the good businesses out of the country, just how many lobbyist DOES China have?
The US version of the Laid Off has changed over the years. Used to laid off meant you had a pretty good chance of getting recalled, be it a week later, a month later whatever. The definition has slowly changed to more or less permanent. I think the words "down sizing" were meant to fix the confusion but were a little late to the party.
I've been given a week furlough - essentially a lay off - for corporate purposes. Vacation time was seen as debt to the stock holders so they would force everyone in the entire corporation to take one occasionally to boost the stock prices. That company was so concerned about their stock value they screwed the customers on a regular basis and lost a lot of contracts over it. Pleasing stock holders cost tons of business and reputation.
It's the no shame "we're letting you go because we don't need you any more" version of losing your job. Happened to me more than once, but I am proud of myself. I started on a team of eight on a contract with over 500 people. Got down to a team of one on a contract of 240. When my team (of just me) was no longer needed they put me to work elsewhere and still didn't send me home until 11 months after my job disappeared and the contract had about 160 people left. I actually work with one of the guys who lasted three months longer than me at the space center now - but both then and now we worked in different roles, we just got to know each other due to physical proximity.
There's about a dozen words to describe being gotten rid of because you're a screw up that come to mind.
A British one I had to look up the other day - I guessed at what the meaning was and was mostly right without the historical context: Council House.
I guessed right at government housing, but it could have had other meanings as well. If you equated it to say "Governors Mansion" it could imply that a Council House is where a member of the council lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I've pretty much quit TV. I do watch South Park and most of the Fox cartoons on the Internet, but I don't actually turn a TV on to flip through the channels anymore. That being said I work with TV junkies and there's TV's all over the building I work in and most of my family are still a bunch of TV junkies so I'm not that far behind on what's happening on TV, rather I want to be or not. I've tried watching TV, I really have.
The last shows I've watched (not counting the ones mentioned above)
Dollhouse
Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles
Caprica
Stargate Universe
First Wave
Battlestar Galactica
Farscape
Stargate
Well, two ran their course.
I was talking about Witchblade, but sure.
I will not cut Hulu a bunch of slack.
It seems to me Hulu itself is a descent company that wants to offer us a descent way to watch TV on our computers, but they have to suck and take it to get the content. Part of this bending over to secure rights to the content includes putting tons of detection into their site to make sure I'm not using a browser integrated into a set-top box to watch it on my TV instead of on a computer. Part of this sucking includes showing commercials - while initially significantly less numerous than a cable viewing have slowly increased in number even if you pay for the premium version. All the premium payment allows me is the back catalog of some shows and earlier viewing opportunity and the ability to watch the shows near the bottom of list to be seen with my BluRay player while the ones I really want to watch are of the "unsecured rights" variety that I still have to use a computer for.
I cut them slack for corporate intent. I take it back for failure to push back enough.
2) YES
The best way to avoid this would be to allow me to build a MythTV box with my own QAM tuner cards in it. (or let me use an off the shelf Tivo or something)
Well, technically I'm allowed to do so and it wouldn't even cost all that much - but since the cable company encrypts just about anything that isn't PBS or the Home Shopping network it would be pretty pointless now wouldn't it?
Hulu pisses me off because even if you pay for + you still get increasingly more commercials (seriously, they started with just a couple of commercials per show, now they rival over the air amounts).
The thing that REALLY pisses me off about Hulu is the lack of agnosticism. You can only watch THIS show on a computer, you can't watch it on your TV with your BluRay player or on your phone - even if you paid for Plus. I had Plus for a month and told them to shove it.
Seriously, before I got Plus I was looking at BluRay players at a store, I wanted to check out their site on my phone to see if a player had added support for Plus or not. EVEN THE FAQ SECTION redirected me to an alert and denial. I wasn't allowed to look at the compatible device list because I was a filthy mobile phone user.
So let me get this straight:
I can watch American Dad with my BluRay player.
I can't watch a nearly 10 year old Spiderman Cartoon series that never really took off.
I can watch Family guy with my phone.
I can't watch an obscure Japanese import cartoon few people know about.
I can't watch the Simpsons on my BluRay player?
Most shows I want to watch are not approved for "TV Viewing", they charge for that inconvenience and I still have to watch commercials. Screw them.
I may consider getting Hulu Plus again after I buy an HD TV and a media PC for it. (That's right, my BluRay player is hooked up to my SD 36" Diamatron CRT!)
Absolutely.
The cable companies are basically advertising for all the services I mentioned by refusing to offer anything worth watching in Clear QAM and pretending HD costs more for them to get to the consumer.
Hint - it costs the cable company more to offer an SD and HD version of a channel than it does to just offer an HD version. By offering both they're actually cutting into the bandwidth available to make other channels better HD. Not to mention two versions gets really confusing for people who have to remember to go to the HD version of the channel instead of the SD in the lower number range.
Most cable companies offer the fucking Home Shopping Network in 1080p for free, will offer SciFi and Discover - channels that actually put a lot of thought and effort into picture quality - in SD with a basic package and if you actually pay for the HD option will upgrade it to 720p using no bandwidth left as an excuse. Maybe if you eliminate the SD channel and reallocate that bandwidth to this channel you can just offer HD as basic? Many cable companies have been outed for lowering bitrates or lying about HD channels resolutions. (this page is dedicated to keeping track of that in Dallas)
My parents pay about $200 a month for basic cable plus a package that gives them Boomerang and a few movie channels like Starz. They get about 3 Mbps up and down and home phone service. They really don't want the home phone service but the way the package triple plays in the US phone service is like an appendix. Mom's been complaining that when she first got this package it was about $120 a month and just keeps creeping up in price.
BTW - it's fiber. I used to think the company she's using was among the best in the US but their service is slowly degrading to the point I don't know how they get away with it. Last time I was there many websites were unavailable - just no route to host and this isn't uncommon anymore. I was having to use my mobile phone to look at websites because I couldn't use their fiber service - and it wasn't DNS, I confirmed this. This sucked almost as bad because Sprint's service - Edge, 3G and absolutely no WiMax sucks balls in Louisiana. Even if you get an excellent 3G signal the back haul makes it seem like you're using a 28.8.
I haven't personally had cable in almost a decade. I get some very basic analog cable with my Internet access but I don't use it. The guy who did the install asked if I wanted my TV hooked up and I said no. Three times. Finally about the forth time he asked I caved and said go ahead since it didn't cost and extra, my dad uses it to watch news when he visits.
I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's instead of - well Clear QAM was a major contributing factor but the comment started to get too long and lose focus.
BTW, the way the media companies are dealing with loss of viewers is the opposite of what they should do.
Look at an original Star Trek episode on Hulu, it runs about 54 minutes. Look at an original Battlestar Galactica Episode, it runs about 50 minutes, look at a modern SciFi show - it will run about 43 minutes.
I would argue an hour long reality show is 0 minutes of non-advertising content.
People are watching less TV partially because there's less TV to watch in an hour.
It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.
I won't buy Texas Instruments products to this day due to their old "802.11b +" cards that had a partial G draft implementation that would do 22Mbps - but only with Windows and absolutely refused to work with the open source community to support the cards.
Later I had major issues with their 1394 chip and Linux, plus a couple of other things that turned up with TI chips that flat wouldn't work with anything but Windows.
Then there was the whole rattling the saber over cracking their calculators open.
There aren't many companies of that size I can think of that have been less open source friendly. How can they contribute the the kernel while hating on Linux so much at the same time?
No, it's a carefully constructed trust setup that is exercised in such as way as to stay legal.
I'm an insider.
To top it off providers like Exxon Mobile in particular structure their sales in such a way as to limit individual stations to $0.10 a gallon. The same guy can own three stations miles apart, buy his gas off of the same truck and charge wildly different prices at each station. The gas off the truck will vary in price at each station so as to limit him to $0,10 a gallon, there is no incentive to raise or lower prices in that case. If I were that guy I would make the gas prices as low as I possibly could, even if it butted up against Exxon's bottom line and forced me into $0.09 a gallon profit just to drag everyone else's prices down.
Your gas station analogy sucks.
I used to support gas stations, I've worked for multiple petroleum companies. Something every corporate owned or contracted store does is have the manager drive around and report everyone else's gas prices to the corporate HQ who then sets the prices at the location calling in. It's a way to form a trust without working directly with one another. Using this method no one significantly undercuts anyone and everyone's prices stay close.
If you don't believe me look up the phone number of any gas station you like, call them and ask for their gas prices, They won't tell you because they don't want to make the other managers job any easier, if they have to drive around and get prices then dammit so do you.
I'm not sure, but being a model builder is enough for "probable cause" in many places, so I'm sure the dealers like better. I mean I have to register to buy cold medicine around here, that scale should be something along the lines of shooting up flares.
It's bad enough that model builders have to worry about cops making a big deal about owning precision scales. Now they're worried about coke dealer splitting granules.
You really want some of the most dishonest people out there to make dishonesty impossible?
I'm 100% for the legality of off-shoring, I'm very much against policies at home making the idea more appealing than it needs to be. The more you ask the government to do (and it sounds like you want them to do a lot) the bigger they become and the greater our problems are.
Staffing agencies wouldn't even be necessary - most of the time - if the regulations that make them desirable would either go away or become less complicated.
I'm going to argue the legal system IS government. Yes it is a nightmare, and yes there are elements of our society that abuse the shit out of the legal system. Not just welfare queens turned lawsuit queens but the abusive sue your competitors out of business approach to things so many companies have. Since the justice system is government run and laws are the definition of government our legal nightmares are still government issues.
The pump and dump stock problem is very real, maybe we can start trying that with manufacturing companies as well.
2. to put by trickery into an undesirable position
You're using one of the most commonly used fallacies in existence to attempt to discredit a statement. Quit it. It gets old, usually it's an attack on grammar or spelling, but ignoring an accepted definition in order to twist another is in second place.
I know plenty who do less than 40, but I wouldn't exactly consider them the most productive members of society >40 is usually closer to 0 than 40 with most of these people.
You are right about government meddling having a lot to do with that. The administrative cost of an employee to a business owner beyond what an employee immediately sees in many businesses is due to regulations and requirements that prevents companies from hiring more people. In turn they simply demand more of the people they do have. This is part of the reason staffing firms are so popular, they put the burden of the employment paperwork and benefits on someone else and remove much of the legal liability that can be associated with firing someone. They simply tell the staffing firm they don't need this person anymore and the staffing firm is free to lay someone off with the justification their position is gone, even if they're replacing that person with someone else.
Our national debt is established with a "people are the government property" mindset. The US people are the collateral against the loans our debt is financed by. Quite literally our butts belong to China (and other countries) if we default. So glad my butts being sold to other countries to pay for tattoo removal in California.
You've got some great points there, especially with the Europe/Airbus reference.
I do disagree however with we can't do everything at once. We can. We have a lot of land mass, a lot of people, and no shortage of talented people or of people without a lot of talent but can and will work on an assembly line.
We can make doing business here more attractive without becoming isolationist and we can do it in a way that actually increases our own employment, lowers individual and corporate taxes while balancing the budget. It's going to take rethinking government roles and contract structure and some outright wars on corruption.
There's another thing I question.
If the "real" chips were outsourced to China to begin with, then China kept producing the chips in the same factory by the same people, even after the original orders were fulfilled, are they really "counterfeit" or just "chips without the royalties"?
I don't know, USA Today seems to agree with me, as does Hilary Clinton and Obama. Here's another.
I'm not digging for it right now, but it seems articles have run here on Slashdot about help desk jobs moving to India partially because the government made it the most logical step.
The federal government of the United States should not blame China for this, it's called being Shanghaied for a reason, and it's not a new term.
The reason the market is ripe for these sorts of problems is the governments own fault. There used to be lots of chipmakers in the United States. It costs to much to do business in the United States. Businesses have gotten in bed with the government and bought their own representatives and more important industry regulators to control the market to benefit the biggest players. When the biggest players can no longer afford to do business here they pick up and leave the country but the regulations they paid for remain.
Mix that with an unfavorable tax economy, actual government incentives to send business overseas (still haven't figured that one out), and punishment via tax brackets for people who attempt to move up in class and of course the market is ripe for China to supply fake chips. We ran all the good businesses out of the country, just how many lobbyist DOES China have?
The US version of the Laid Off has changed over the years. Used to laid off meant you had a pretty good chance of getting recalled, be it a week later, a month later whatever. The definition has slowly changed to more or less permanent. I think the words "down sizing" were meant to fix the confusion but were a little late to the party.
I've been given a week furlough - essentially a lay off - for corporate purposes. Vacation time was seen as debt to the stock holders so they would force everyone in the entire corporation to take one occasionally to boost the stock prices. That company was so concerned about their stock value they screwed the customers on a regular basis and lost a lot of contracts over it. Pleasing stock holders cost tons of business and reputation.
Laid off.
It's the no shame "we're letting you go because we don't need you any more" version of losing your job. Happened to me more than once, but I am proud of myself. I started on a team of eight on a contract with over 500 people. Got down to a team of one on a contract of 240. When my team (of just me) was no longer needed they put me to work elsewhere and still didn't send me home until 11 months after my job disappeared and the contract had about 160 people left. I actually work with one of the guys who lasted three months longer than me at the space center now - but both then and now we worked in different roles, we just got to know each other due to physical proximity.
There's about a dozen words to describe being gotten rid of because you're a screw up that come to mind.
A British one I had to look up the other day - I guessed at what the meaning was and was mostly right without the historical context: Council House.
I guessed right at government housing, but it could have had other meanings as well. If you equated it to say "Governors Mansion" it could imply that a Council House is where a member of the council lives.