I've known people on gov't assistance. It's a few hundred dollars a month and you have to be making about half the poverty line to get it. If you're sister is on gov't assistance for real then there's something wrong with her. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean there really is something wrong, and she needs the help. You don't get enough from the gov't to live, you get enough so that if your family is giving you a lot of help you can just barely eat.
Is this an astro turfer or something? I'd like to believe noone is this much of a jerk in real life...
We've talked about this in various Slashdot threads. Yes, there is something supposedly wrong with her. My sister purports to have "agoraphobia". This means that she can't go shopping, can't hold down a job, can't drive. Open spaces purport to cause panic attacks. Moreover, she purports to have various medical conditions, including crippling arthritis and a heart condition, which prevent her from working. (This is not the only way she works the system -- more on that later.)
Yet, she has a recreational vehicle with which she takes camping trips, and a 4-wheeler with which she joyrides out in the desert in Nevada. But these are parked out of sight when her social worker visits her single-wide, at which time she uses a walker to get around. Oops, scratch that, she now has a motorized wheelchair acquired at government expense. When she's not under scrutiny, she doesn't need any of these things. (I know this from personal observation.) Yes, it's open fraud. But so far she has gotten away with it. (I pay my way, and she has stuff I could never afford... You know, just never mind.)
She owes money to basically everyone, has no intention to pay any of it back, and has developed coping skills to avoid same. Her house has been in default (or in and out of default; I don't follow it that closely) since at least the late nineties. She's been on the edge of repossession since at least the turn of the century, but somehow the house never quite gets repossessed.
Yes, I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that there is something wrong with her. What is wrong with her is that she has decided that there is no moral reason not to game the system. And by "the system" I mean several systems -- various types of government care, and the collective ineptitude of various companies in trying to get their money back from her. We haven't even talked about how she managed to acquire a foster child, and what a fiasco that's been.
A few years back she talked our elderly mother into putting her (my sister) on the lease for the family homestead, ("for tax purposes") and promptly took out a loan against her own mother's house. Not to pay off her charge cards, or anything practical, but to take a cruise and buy herself stuff. That started a legal battle that she eventually lost. After several complicated transactions and some expense the house is free of the debt and I'm the sole owner. (My mother still lives there, and I will call the local sheriff if her daughter ever shows up.) Since then, my sister calls me on random days at 3:00 AM to cuss me out. She knows that I'm on call and have to pick up the phone. Eventually she gets tired of me hanging up and I'm good for two or three more weeks. (I also have a drunken aunt that calls me in the middle of the night, but that's a different story.)
The point is, just because someone is on government assistance doesn't mean they deserve it. I'm sorry if that bursts everyone's bubble, but it's true. Sometimes, all it means is that they found a way in, and decided that getting a check from the government beats the hell out of actually working for a living.
...and I freely admit that my outlook is colored by my own experiences. But I have a hard time believing that my sister is unique.
...and if you think this type of fraud couldn't possibly happen, that there must be checks and balances in place to avoid this sort of
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
This doesn't take into account people like, for instance, my sister, who hasn't worked since the mid-nineties and is grimly determined to do whatever it takes to remain on government assistance for the remainder of her life. Justified by "I had bad things happen to me in my youth; society owes me a comfortable living in the manner and place of my choosing as a result."
The local Walmart was lacking in any backup method. They had at least 50 buggies packed full of food sitting around the registers and a lot of pissed off customers. Glad they got it back up, I don't look forward to that riot.
If I understand what you're saying, my personal observation is that public broadcasting tends to be true to its big government roots. They will very occasionally reveal government corruption, but usually only if the reveal benefits a certain side of the aisle. A government mouthpiece is just another tool to be used by whomever happens to control the purse strings.
Mind you, I haven't spent a lot of time on the PBS radio or TV stations lately. I used to, when they were the only outlets for British programming, putting up with the irritation for value received. But that's not necessary anymore, and neither, in my opinion, are they.
It's true that there is a movement to defund PBS in all its aspects. As a libertarian, I support that. Taxes should pay for certain kinds of infrastructure, but there are fundamental, practical and historical reasons why taxes should not pay for news.
Living in Japan once in a while someone from NTT knocks on my door asking that i give them money for receiving the signal they broadcast. my teachers told me about this scam however i tell them two true things
1. i dont have a TV. so im not paying for something i'm not receiving 2. if you don't want me to get the signal then don't broadcast it to me.
same should apply here. the TV stations broadcasted their signal in "cleartext"
America is an exception when it comes to public broadcast fees. You don't pay for public broadcasting, yet you pay and a lot for cable. Most civilised countries (almost all or all countries in Europe) have a tv license fee, that's used to finance the public broadcasting system. And I think the same applies in Japan.
Let's make sure we agree on the terminology. "public broadcast" to me means the PBS broadcasts (usually one TV channel and one radio channel per area) that are funded by voluntary donations and our tax money (which isn't voluntary). Commercial broadcast TV is funded by selling commercial air time to advertisers. The price for watching broadcast content is to have to put up with the commercials, which presumably affects what you buy, which is valuable to the advertisers.
Let me repeat this, so it's clear: In the US, commercial TV broadcast is funded by advertising time. (And, in part, by selling rebroadcasting rights to cable channels.) That's why it's been classically "free" off-air to viewers. It's a different model from other countries, where you get taxed for owning a TV. The only exception is the US government sponsored PBS channel, which is still "free" to receive but is funded in part by income tax.
It's not clear from TFA whether Aero is cutting out the commercials. If not, they're not affecting that part of the business model. Granted, you may be able to FF over the commercials, but we've been able to do that for decades using various time shifting techniques. (Which the broadcast stations also fought, and lost.)
The "threat" I see, besides TFA's mention of cable companies adopting the same technique and avoiding retransmission fees, is that providing the content on-demand causes the network to lose control of the timeslots and order in which the content is viewed, which, if you read the articles on show popularity amongst various demographics, is very important to the networks. They'll put a poorly performing show sandwiched between two winners to try to pump up the numbers, or put a clear winner in a less popular time slot, or against a winner on a different channel, to try to increase the numbers in that particular slot. I think that's the part of the business model that on-demand destroys.
Actual legal issues aside, it's convenient on-demand that's the real enemy. The networks have already lost the battle for older content (hulu, netflix, et al) but are determined to hang onto their business model for first-run content.
The problem, of course, is that their prime demographic doesn't watch TV that way. The 18-45 crowd expects to watch content on the device of their choosing at the time of their choosing, and that is directly contrary to the network business model. And the networks don't know how to evolve. The primary consumers of the broadcast TV business model, the "tv tray generation" (mostly baby boomers) are dying out. And the networks don't know what to do about that.
The world is changing. The way content is consumed is changing. The way content is *produced* is also changing, which is a different story out of scope of this article. The classic content producers and content distributors are struggling with what to do about this. I submit that this is a good thing.
If I recall correctly from the previous Dr. Who story on here, the episodes fall to the public domain 50 years after their production (so 2016-2019 for these episodes). So BBC is capitalizing on the last few years when they can make money off these. Yes, I'm disappointed too but not the least bit shocked.
Are they releasing the lost episodes verbatim, or is some remastering involved? And if they are remastered, does that constitute a new original copyrightable work?
According to the BBC facebook page, they are remastered. The trailer looks pretty good.
> this is just shuttleworth going on about how he is not stupid because apple is eventually going to do this... hell, he isn't totally stupid - but he is totally not getting what most of his users want.
Agree.
> +that you could use the same cpu for everything has been a pipe dream for.. heck, ever since neuromancer came out. or even before that. of course we'll have that once we magically have been in the realm that we don't want faster hardware for about a decade. we're about a decade away from that right now and probably a decade away from it next year.
Same CPU, or even same hardware, is not unbelievable. Most computers these days have more grunt than most people actually need. As computers continue to get faster, cheaper, smaller, a reasonable question might be, what the heck do I need all this processing power for? Combining functionality is a reasonable usage. Virtualization is also a reasonable usage, as with fast enough hardware, the average user wouldn't care if an instruction set or OS is being interpreted or running native.
So, I'm very ok with the concept of merging computer related functions. There used to be a time when the alpha geek was measured by how many devices he carries and/or owns. But that gets really old, really fast. My current feeling is, the fewer devices the better.
The problem is, the major commercial attempt to merge platforms thus far (you know what I mean, and it's not Ubuntu) absolutely SUCKS. It fails as a phone, it fails as a tablet, and it fails most especially as a PC interface. My concern is that current knowledge of implementation of the "merge" concept is to standardize on what the execs think a mobile-appropriate interface looks like, and then force users to use it on all platforms.
That really, REALLY doesn't work for me. At least, for any non-fictional interface I've seen so far.
To go back to Neuromancer, the reason the concept worked in that universe is that any extensive computer work was done by "jacking in", direct mind/computer interface. As such, there was only one interface -- the visualizations and manipulations provided directly to the mind by the console -- across a variety of computer systems of different types and purposes.
No such single collective interface exists in the real world, at least, yet. Attempts to graft a phone interface onto a PC, use a single GUI code base across all platforms, have been laughingly bad so far. There may very well be practical solutions, but we haven't seen them yet. Note that "we are going to force you to use this interface, and you will like it" is not a practical solution.
> Speaking to PC Pro to mark the upcoming launch of Ubuntu 13.10, Shuttleworth said that the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone — an attempt to bridge mobile and desktop computing devices — had set an example that others will follow.
Perhaps, especially the "failed" part.
Although Apple execs are probably contractually forbidden to mention Microsoft, there's been two failed attempts so far to bridge mobile and desktop computing devices. It's going to be interesting to see what Apple comes up with. The learning so far has been that the same interface tends not to work on mobile and desktop.
I have insurance through my employer. It's considered a cadillac plan and will no longer be offered next year, rather than paying the surcharge. When I was a private contractor I paid cash for medical as I needed it. I may have to go back to that.
To continue, nothing is perfect, but it could have been a lot better. There were many episode plots that could have been worked into story arcs, or at very least affected future stories in some fashion, but they didn't even try, until (I'm told) the very end of enterprise, after most got bored and stopped watching.
The TNG movies also tended to ignore each other (and with few exceptions weren't very good). So, to see into darkness depend on circumstances set into motion in the reboot was a very cool thing.
...but necessary, to some extent. I think part of the problem in the Berman era was the tendency to over explain -- techno babble one's self out of a spot. After awhile it's not writing anymore, it's just gibberish. You don't have to explain everything.
Another thing is to know in advance where you are going. Joss Whedon is very good at this. Tim Krieg is not. His series tend to have very good premise and then dissolve into chaos in the second season.
Trek in the Berman era didn't even try. With few exceptions episodes were the moral quandary of the week solved by the technobabble of the week, with no thought of what comes before or after or how this fits into canon. It was sloppier than usual writing, even for TV.
I was reading this in my car on the way to the payday loans place and I got so outraged that I drifted out of my lane and hit a parked gasoline tanker. So I figure I might as well park here and finish reading the thread. There's a lot of smoke but with the windows rolled up it isn't too bad.
Fascinating. Mod up. I'm aware of some of that stuff, (a part for which I wrote code is in the F16, or at least was in the late seventies) but I never connected it to warning our allies to keep their US-supplied planes grounded during certain offensives. Makes total sense.
...having worked for a company that did this type of stuff for the government, and seeing the process first hand, what I observe is that the certification is not necessary done by someone with a deep knowledge of security. It's done by a bored inspector with some training, checking off line items, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for business reasons, or sometimes because the inspector wants to make his flight back to Virginia. So, great, it passed. Until it gets pwned. Then starts the long process of plugging an individual hole, getting pwned again, plugging another hole, getting pwned again. You know, the usual Microsoft patch cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
You are my new favorite person.
I've known people on gov't assistance. It's a few hundred dollars a month and you have to be making about half the poverty line to get it. If you're sister is on gov't assistance for real then there's something wrong with her. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean there really is something wrong, and she needs the help. You don't get enough from the gov't to live, you get enough so that if your family is giving you a lot of help you can just barely eat.
Is this an astro turfer or something? I'd like to believe noone is this much of a jerk in real life...
We've talked about this in various Slashdot threads. Yes, there is something supposedly wrong with her. My sister purports to have "agoraphobia". This means that she can't go shopping, can't hold down a job, can't drive. Open spaces purport to cause panic attacks. Moreover, she purports to have various medical conditions, including crippling arthritis and a heart condition, which prevent her from working. (This is not the only way she works the system -- more on that later.)
Yet, she has a recreational vehicle with which she takes camping trips, and a 4-wheeler with which she joyrides out in the desert in Nevada. But these are parked out of sight when her social worker visits her single-wide, at which time she uses a walker to get around. Oops, scratch that, she now has a motorized wheelchair acquired at government expense. When she's not under scrutiny, she doesn't need any of these things. (I know this from personal observation.) Yes, it's open fraud. But so far she has gotten away with it. (I pay my way, and she has stuff I could never afford... You know, just never mind.)
She owes money to basically everyone, has no intention to pay any of it back, and has developed coping skills to avoid same. Her house has been in default (or in and out of default; I don't follow it that closely) since at least the late nineties. She's been on the edge of repossession since at least the turn of the century, but somehow the house never quite gets repossessed.
Yes, I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that there is something wrong with her. What is wrong with her is that she has decided that there is no moral reason not to game the system. And by "the system" I mean several systems -- various types of government care, and the collective ineptitude of various companies in trying to get their money back from her. We haven't even talked about how she managed to acquire a foster child, and what a fiasco that's been.
A few years back she talked our elderly mother into putting her (my sister) on the lease for the family homestead, ("for tax purposes") and promptly took out a loan against her own mother's house. Not to pay off her charge cards, or anything practical, but to take a cruise and buy herself stuff. That started a legal battle that she eventually lost. After several complicated transactions and some expense the house is free of the debt and I'm the sole owner. (My mother still lives there, and I will call the local sheriff if her daughter ever shows up.) Since then, my sister calls me on random days at 3:00 AM to cuss me out. She knows that I'm on call and have to pick up the phone. Eventually she gets tired of me hanging up and I'm good for two or three more weeks. (I also have a drunken aunt that calls me in the middle of the night, but that's a different story.)
The point is, just because someone is on government assistance doesn't mean they deserve it. I'm sorry if that bursts everyone's bubble, but it's true. Sometimes, all it means is that they found a way in, and decided that getting a check from the government beats the hell out of actually working for a living.
Government spending != wages, unless you're talking about government wages, which I don't believe we were.
There Are 3 Unemployed People Competing For Every Job Opening
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
This doesn't take into account people like, for instance, my sister, who hasn't worked since the mid-nineties and is grimly determined to do whatever it takes to remain on government assistance for the remainder of her life. Justified by "I had bad things happen to me in my youth; society owes me a comfortable living in the manner and place of my choosing as a result."
I'm pretty sure she's not the only one.
The local Walmart was lacking in any backup method. They had at least 50 buggies packed full of food sitting around the registers and a lot of pissed off customers. Glad they got it back up, I don't look forward to that riot.
Ye gods, the crowd could get ugly...
Too late.
I'm having difficulty parsing that.
If I understand what you're saying, my personal observation is that public broadcasting tends to be true to its big government roots. They will very occasionally reveal government corruption, but usually only if the reveal benefits a certain side of the aisle. A government mouthpiece is just another tool to be used by whomever happens to control the purse strings.
Mind you, I haven't spent a lot of time on the PBS radio or TV stations lately. I used to, when they were the only outlets for British programming, putting up with the irritation for value received. But that's not necessary anymore, and neither, in my opinion, are they.
It's true that there is a movement to defund PBS in all its aspects. As a libertarian, I support that. Taxes should pay for certain kinds of infrastructure, but there are fundamental, practical and historical reasons why taxes should not pay for news.
...watch better TV to ... no, wait....
Living in Japan once in a while someone from NTT knocks on my door asking that i give them money for receiving the signal they broadcast.
my teachers told me about this scam however i tell them two true things
1. i dont have a TV. so im not paying for something i'm not receiving
2. if you don't want me to get the signal then don't broadcast it to me.
same should apply here. the TV stations broadcasted their signal in "cleartext"
America is an exception when it comes to public broadcast fees. You don't pay for public broadcasting, yet you pay and a lot for cable. Most civilised countries (almost all or all countries in Europe) have a tv license fee, that's used to finance the public broadcasting system. And I think the same applies in Japan.
Let's make sure we agree on the terminology. "public broadcast" to me means the PBS broadcasts (usually one TV channel and one radio channel per area) that are funded by voluntary donations and our tax money (which isn't voluntary). Commercial broadcast TV is funded by selling commercial air time to advertisers. The price for watching broadcast content is to have to put up with the commercials, which presumably affects what you buy, which is valuable to the advertisers.
Let me repeat this, so it's clear: In the US, commercial TV broadcast is funded by advertising time. (And, in part, by selling rebroadcasting rights to cable channels.) That's why it's been classically "free" off-air to viewers. It's a different model from other countries, where you get taxed for owning a TV. The only exception is the US government sponsored PBS channel, which is still "free" to receive but is funded in part by income tax.
It's not clear from TFA whether Aero is cutting out the commercials. If not, they're not affecting that part of the business model. Granted, you may be able to FF over the commercials, but we've been able to do that for decades using various time shifting techniques. (Which the broadcast stations also fought, and lost.)
The "threat" I see, besides TFA's mention of cable companies adopting the same technique and avoiding retransmission fees, is that providing the content on-demand causes the network to lose control of the timeslots and order in which the content is viewed, which, if you read the articles on show popularity amongst various demographics, is very important to the networks. They'll put a poorly performing show sandwiched between two winners to try to pump up the numbers, or put a clear winner in a less popular time slot, or against a winner on a different channel, to try to increase the numbers in that particular slot. I think that's the part of the business model that on-demand destroys.
Actual legal issues aside, it's convenient on-demand that's the real enemy. The networks have already lost the battle for older content (hulu, netflix, et al) but are determined to hang onto their business model for first-run content.
The problem, of course, is that their prime demographic doesn't watch TV that way. The 18-45 crowd expects to watch content on the device of their choosing at the time of their choosing, and that is directly contrary to the network business model. And the networks don't know how to evolve. The primary consumers of the broadcast TV business model, the "tv tray generation" (mostly baby boomers) are dying out. And the networks don't know what to do about that.
The world is changing. The way content is consumed is changing. The way content is *produced* is also changing, which is a different story out of scope of this article. The classic content producers and content distributors are struggling with what to do about this. I submit that this is a good thing.
But at least The Doctor saved a few quid on his TARDIS insurance.
C'mon, that was funny!
If I recall correctly from the previous Dr. Who story on here, the episodes fall to the public domain 50 years after their production (so 2016-2019 for these episodes). So BBC is capitalizing on the last few years when they can make money off these. Yes, I'm disappointed too but not the least bit shocked.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/13/10/03/2232213/first-few-doctor-who-episodes-may-fall-to-public-domain-next-year?sdsrc=popbyskid
Are they releasing the lost episodes verbatim, or is some remastering involved? And if they are remastered, does that constitute a new original copyrightable work?
According to the BBC facebook page, they are remastered. The trailer looks pretty good.
> this is just shuttleworth going on about how he is not stupid because apple is eventually going to do this... hell, he isn't totally stupid - but he is totally not getting what most of his users want.
Agree.
> +that you could use the same cpu for everything has been a pipe dream for.. heck, ever since neuromancer came out. or even before that. of course we'll have that once we magically have been in the realm that we don't want faster hardware for about a decade. we're about a decade away from that right now and probably a decade away from it next year.
Same CPU, or even same hardware, is not unbelievable. Most computers these days have more grunt than most people actually need. As computers continue to get faster, cheaper, smaller, a reasonable question might be, what the heck do I need all this processing power for? Combining functionality is a reasonable usage. Virtualization is also a reasonable usage, as with fast enough hardware, the average user wouldn't care if an instruction set or OS is being interpreted or running native.
So, I'm very ok with the concept of merging computer related functions. There used to be a time when the alpha geek was measured by how many devices he carries and/or owns. But that gets really old, really fast. My current feeling is, the fewer devices the better.
The problem is, the major commercial attempt to merge platforms thus far (you know what I mean, and it's not Ubuntu) absolutely SUCKS. It fails as a phone, it fails as a tablet, and it fails most especially as a PC interface. My concern is that current knowledge of implementation of the "merge" concept is to standardize on what the execs think a mobile-appropriate interface looks like, and then force users to use it on all platforms.
That really, REALLY doesn't work for me. At least, for any non-fictional interface I've seen so far.
To go back to Neuromancer, the reason the concept worked in that universe is that any extensive computer work was done by "jacking in", direct mind/computer interface. As such, there was only one interface -- the visualizations and manipulations provided directly to the mind by the console -- across a variety of computer systems of different types and purposes.
No such single collective interface exists in the real world, at least, yet. Attempts to graft a phone interface onto a PC, use a single GUI code base across all platforms, have been laughingly bad so far. There may very well be practical solutions, but we haven't seen them yet. Note that "we are going to force you to use this interface, and you will like it" is not a practical solution.
> Speaking to PC Pro to mark the upcoming launch of Ubuntu 13.10, Shuttleworth said that the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone — an attempt to bridge mobile and desktop computing devices — had set an example that others will follow.
Perhaps, especially the "failed" part.
Although Apple execs are probably contractually forbidden to mention Microsoft, there's been two failed attempts so far to bridge mobile and desktop computing devices. It's going to be interesting to see what Apple comes up with. The learning so far has been that the same interface tends not to work on mobile and desktop.
> I worked as a consultant in a big consulting firm. The formula is simple: awesome sales team, lots of faceless and C-grade developers.
Yep, often overseas.
> Why, in a country with some of the best web development companies in the world, has this website, which is poor quality at best, cost so much?
My guess would be, because the government did not use them.
Alternate answer: Perhaps it was written in ADA?
I have insurance through my employer. It's considered a cadillac plan and will no longer be offered next year, rather than paying the surcharge. When I was a private contractor I paid cash for medical as I needed it. I may have to go back to that.
iPhone 4 user who likes iOS 7 here...
So downgrade to iOS 6 and quit whining. Nobody forced you to upgrade to iOS 7 in the first place.
Apparently, you can't.
To continue, nothing is perfect, but it could have been a lot better. There were many episode plots that could have been worked into story arcs, or at very least affected future stories in some fashion, but they didn't even try, until (I'm told) the very end of enterprise, after most got bored and stopped watching.
The TNG movies also tended to ignore each other (and with few exceptions weren't very good). So, to see into darkness depend on circumstances set into motion in the reboot was a very cool thing.
Another thing is to know in advance where you are going. Joss Whedon is very good at this. Tim Krieg is not. His series tend to have very good premise and then dissolve into chaos in the second season.
Trek in the Berman era didn't even try. With few exceptions episodes were the moral quandary of the week solved by the technobabble of the week, with no thought of what comes before or after or how this fits into canon. It was sloppier than usual writing, even for TV.
Oh, good point. Maybe old people make riskier decisions because they have less to lose.
I'm saying there's absolutely no truth to the rumor that old people make bad decisions. Gee, the smoke is getting really bad.
I was reading this in my car on the way to the payday loans place and I got so outraged that I drifted out of my lane and hit a parked gasoline tanker. So I figure I might as well park here and finish reading the thread. There's a lot of smoke but with the windows rolled up it isn't too bad.
Fascinating. Mod up. I'm aware of some of that stuff, (a part for which I wrote code is in the F16, or at least was in the late seventies) but I never connected it to warning our allies to keep their US-supplied planes grounded during certain offensives. Makes total sense.
Good point. You can (still) buy a decent bottle of single malt for $200.