(1) I can't tell you. They lost me in season 3, so I never saw the end. I heard it sucked, though. I heard words like "directionless", "implausible", "senseless", "a waste of time", "a huge let-down", all terms that just guarantee I run right out and not see it.
(2) I think most of the "fun" in Caprica was in waiting for something to happen. Oh, and looking at Alessandra in various skimpy evening wear -- that was nice.
Unfortunately, most of the interesting stuff (including, incidentally, most of the effects) was in the pilot, and I think we started to get restless after a dozen episodes of emoting. You just can't take a show off Oxygen, add a few sci-fi elements and expect it to be a hit sci-fi show. It doesn't work like that.
A better idea might be to improve the writing, pick up the pace, and make the show just a little less FRAKKING BORING. Then who knows, more people might watch it.
> "A better, more modern business model could have saved Caprica from cancellation."
Better writing and pacing might have saved it. The only business model that would have saved it in it's current form is federal subsidy. Or nudity. That might have helped.
> Windows Phone 7 has plenty of terrible design decisions, for example what does the YouTube app do? It is a shortcut to IE which goes to YouTube's mobile site which then loads in a Zune player. WTF?
I think it's an example of the Microsoft design process -- stringing together existing products, even if non-optimal, instead of writing new code.
Agreed, but I don't think the issue is so much a matter of an effective deterrent as it is avoiding losing the durn things or having them stolen while we do have them.
More to the point, they're willing for other people to pay taxes for a service that neither they nor most of the other people will ever use. Nobody is preventing you from donating your own money to whatever cause you please.
My apologies I should have been more clear. I am *not* talking about farmers, commercial or otherwise. Farmers are the exception that often gets overlooked (and screwed). A single dwelling on acreage with outbuildings and a $250,000 vehicle in the garage, that sounds like yer rich, right? Except a farmer is in a single dwelling on acreage and the quarter million dollar vehicle is the combine harvester he co-owns with three other farmers. I fully undrestand, and I'm not talking about them.
I'm referring to the guy who has acreage because it's cool to look out the back yard at an acre of lawn bordered by shade trees hiding the ATV trails. Who doesn't farm and doesn't own a tractor.
But you raise a couple of good points. Firstly, that it's easy to lose sight of the professions that require what others would think of as obnoxious displays of wealth (and who might actually be in hock up to their eyebrows just trying to get the next crop in).
Moreover, you really can buy a serviceable truck for less than a high end TV. The metrosexual in a downtown loft watching a Beovision resting on his Macassar ebony flooring probably thinks he's living simply because he walks the 2 1/2 blocks to work, taking time to stop off at the local coffee shop while he holds up the line ordering an outrageously complicated drink and insisting they check "in the back" for those breakfast wraps they're out of. (Sorry, pet peeve.) The same guy who sneers at you because your job requires a truck.
The younger you are, the more you tend to lean left. There is truth behind the saying "If you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart". I would expect an industry that leans young would tend to lean left.
But I also have to wonder how much of it is self-loathing. You sometimes find that amongst people who acquire sudden wealth and aren't sure they deserve it.
Another factor is the development of an elitist mindset amongst sudden wealth. It puzzled me for awhile how the head of a family of four living on five acres with six vehicles could utter the phrase "live simply so others can simply live", and appear to mean it. But I realize now that he mean for me to do this, not (God forbid) himself. Another acquaintance is a big fan of raising taxes to fund mass transit, but has never stepped on a bus or train herself, because of that thing about rubbing shoulders with stinky people.
Instead of working on handheld devices with resolution better than the eye can see, why not improve the current state of flat panel displays?
I'm still using an old 19 inch tube because it supports 1600X1200 and my work requires a display at least 1200 pixels tall. Try buying that in a flat panel. In 16X9, it works out to be about 2140 pixels wide. But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short. In this case, the HDTV standards have messed us up, because of the perception that 1080P is all anyone could ever need.
I'm not talking about showing video at a higher resolution, I just want to get some work done.
I have to agree. The best thing you can do for the environment is to make higher quality purchases and then keep them for as long as practical. The major contribution to waste is not the technology you buy, but how soon you dump it for something new.
I shop appliances and vehicles carefully, and then keep them until it's no longer practical to fix them. My friends, who lease vehicles, or buy a new vehicle every 3 years, think I'm crazy for not doing regular updates to get the latest technology or the best gas mileage (usually a difference of only a few miles per gallon, if you compare apples to apples). But I figure everything I throw away or trade in has to go somewhere, so it might as well stay with me until I'm through with it.
I think "boycott" is the wrong word. I think you really mean "not watch".
I mean, why watch TV that sucks? Why even watch mediocre TV? I find that with no constraints on when I watch or even when a show is produced, there is enough good tv I haven't seen yet in the past 30 years that I have no need to even glance at anything current that isn't absolutely exceptional. Which is a very short list.
In fact, life is too short even for good tv. I find myself concentrating on maybe five or six programs, watching one or at most two episodes a night, and when I run out of episodes I look at my list and decide what else I want to watch, if anything. Sometimes I go for days without watching anything. It's just TV, fer chrissake. It's not like you need it to breathe.
Concentrating on a show and watching one a night is also helpful in seeing the flow of the story arc. I find watching once a week I forget nuances of the previous show and miss out on some of the aspects of a story.
The biggest difference between our generation and our parent's and grandparent's generation is entertainment habits. Used to be, it was normal to come home from work, change into comfortable clothes, and settle on the couch for a night of tv. You'd watch whatever was on, (including commercials) changing between 3 or at most 4 channels every half hour (for sitcoms) or hour (for dramas) depending on taste, finish with the news, and then go to bed. Night after night after night. I know, it seems bizarre now.
Increasingly, the current generation won't sit still for that. There are more demands on our time, and TV is just one of many different things we regularly do for entertainment. We want to watch what we want to watch, when we want to watch it, for as long as we want.
The networks don't know what to do with that paradigm. They still think they can sandwich a crap show between two hits and make some money off it. They still don't realize that increasingly, the only folks who fall for that are old. And getting older. Somewhat disguising this epic fail is that they're only getting poll data from the people who are watching TV in real time, completely missing out on the fact that this is a smaller and smaller group of people.
I remember reading somewhere that the main issue with traditional news services is that (1) delivery is so costly, and (2) delivery is locked down by unions, which means there is not a good way of switching to a different medium or to a different business model.
It occurs to me that the system must collapse first. After that happens, some of the same players can pick up the pieces and put together a new business model that doesn't require the newspaper printing and vending network, or the huge overhead involved in providing a network news tv show.
What I'm saying is, I believe that the reporting side is a significant cost. I do not believe that the reporting side is the significant cost. And I suspect that news organizations will be able to get along just fine on a web-based business model if they first jettison their obsolete delivery systems. (Print and video.) I mean really, the only time I buy a paper is bird cage cleaning day. (We have four parrots.) The last time I watched network news was on September 11, 2001. And most of that was on the computer.
Psst. The cold war ended two years before Clinton's first term. Losing the launch codes is still rather a faux pas. Admitting same is still embarrassing and somewhat dangerous.
> But to be fair, that's the trouble with rules that state "if you lose this, you are in super big trouble." You get two choices: a. admit it and be fired, b. hope no one finds out. If you go with b and they do find out, you're fired, but at least it wasn't guaranteed.
Yes. And setting it up that way, it's a sure bet that something exactly like this will happen. How it *should* work, is "If you lose this, you will immediately follow that procedure. If you lose this and you *do not* follow that procedure, you're in super big trouble."
> And, from my experience, if you're stuck with the job of keeping track of something sensitive, and you ask, "so what's the procedure if something is lost?", the answer will be "don't lose it!"
Yes, that occurred to me also, but I was not going to accuse Clinton of losing the launch codes. There are all kinds of tawdry jokes one could make about that, but hell, he's out of office, he'll never be President again, and we're all still in one piece. Let it go.
But aids, especially military ones, tend to stick around between administrations, and I find that thought a little frightening.
I've been arrested. It turned out the arresting officer had misunderstood the law -- specifically the part that said "when carrying concealed". When I pointed this out, after much discussion amongst themselves, the law officers in question returned my property and let me go.
Parenthetically, this is the one and only time when being proficient at reading upside-down really saved my butt.
This is why I now carry a copy of the officer's guide to Oregon law with me. (Electronic version, on my smartphone.) Even in the best of times, laws are complex and rife with misunderstanding, both for the citizen and for the law enforcement officer.
Now, far be it from me to interrupt an energetic rant, but let's address this. I'm going to assume for the moment that you are not a moron, because clearly you've at least figured out how to login and post to Slashdot. So I'm going to assume that you are deliberately misunderstanding what we're talking about here in order to make what is at best a peripheral point.
I don't think anybody in this thread is suggesting that the teenage perp should play with words to get around the meaning of the judgement. The point was not even remotely that. Rather, the point is about unintended consequences when an authority makes a judgement on a technical matter when neither the authority nor the perp have any understanding of the technical issues. It is about the unintended consequences of such an action.
I'm going to assume you have somewhat of a technical background in the following illustration. If you don't understand, I have a simpler illustration involving cars and crosswalks.
There was an article recently about a government looking at making steganography a crime, because of the assumption that it was being used by terrorists to pass information between cells.
Let's assume they go through with that. Let's further assume (not a great leap) that the lawmakers have a poor understanding of technology and the law is poorly worded.
Backpacking across the continent, you have occasion to visit that country. ---- and are immediately arrested and given a long prison term for being a terrorist.
What was your actual crime? Carrying a camera that records EXIF data in the jpg images it creates.
"But wait", any reasonable person would say, "that's not what the legislation meant." And that's true. And I'm sure the lawmakers feel real bad about it. But that's what the law *says*, and you should have known about it. Even though you may not know any more about photography than "I push button and it make picture."
The issue is unintended consequences. Almost certainly, the judge in this case did not intend for the perp not to be able to log into classmates.com. The judge did not understand the full reach of his judgement, and almost certainly neither did the perp. This is not a matter of "boo hoo, the perp can't go anywhere online that requires credentials", it is a matter of government applying conditions that have much further reaching consequences than they intend, and us letting them get away with it. The issue is, someone in the prosecutor's office, or the FBI, or Homeland Security, looking at a law and saying to themselves, "Hey, taken literally, this clause in the 2011 telecommunication act makes it illegal to watch a cable channel". And then selectively enforcing out-of-band for political gain.
If the judge meant for the perp to stay off the computer, he should say so, and that would be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have more than 15 brain cells, why are you spending so much time in front of the boob tube? It kinda negates your argument.
(1) I can't tell you. They lost me in season 3, so I never saw the end. I heard it sucked, though. I heard words like "directionless", "implausible", "senseless", "a waste of time", "a huge let-down", all terms that just guarantee I run right out and not see it.
(2) I think most of the "fun" in Caprica was in waiting for something to happen. Oh, and looking at Alessandra in various skimpy evening wear -- that was nice.
Unfortunately, most of the interesting stuff (including, incidentally, most of the effects) was in the pilot, and I think we started to get restless after a dozen episodes of emoting. You just can't take a show off Oxygen, add a few sci-fi elements and expect it to be a hit sci-fi show. It doesn't work like that.
>Caprica... well, they could have gotten rid of the cylons, and left everything else in, and ran it on USA and nobody would have known or cared..
Hell, they could have gotten rid of the cylons, left everything else in, and ran it on LIFETIME and maybe it'd still be on the air. Or Oxygen.
A better idea might be to improve the writing, pick up the pace, and make the show just a little less FRAKKING BORING. Then who knows, more people might watch it.
I mean geeze, how COULD the plot go any slower?
> "A better, more modern business model could have saved Caprica from cancellation."
Better writing and pacing might have saved it. The only business model that would have saved it in it's current form is federal subsidy. Or nudity. That might have helped.
> Windows Phone 7 has plenty of terrible design decisions, for example what does the YouTube app do? It is a shortcut to IE which goes to YouTube's mobile site which then loads in a Zune player. WTF?
I think it's an example of the Microsoft design process -- stringing together existing products, even if non-optimal, instead of writing new code.
Agreed, but I don't think the issue is so much a matter of an effective deterrent as it is avoiding losing the durn things or having them stolen while we do have them.
Really? It's like that here too. I wonder if there's any city where light rail does not smell like a Greyhound bathroom?
More to the point, they're willing for other people to pay taxes for a service that neither they nor most of the other people will ever use. Nobody is preventing you from donating your own money to whatever cause you please.
My apologies I should have been more clear. I am *not* talking about farmers, commercial or otherwise. Farmers are the exception that often gets overlooked (and screwed). A single dwelling on acreage with outbuildings and a $250,000 vehicle in the garage, that sounds like yer rich, right? Except a farmer is in a single dwelling on acreage and the quarter million dollar vehicle is the combine harvester he co-owns with three other farmers. I fully undrestand, and I'm not talking about them.
I'm referring to the guy who has acreage because it's cool to look out the back yard at an acre of lawn bordered by shade trees hiding the ATV trails. Who doesn't farm and doesn't own a tractor.
But you raise a couple of good points. Firstly, that it's easy to lose sight of the professions that require what others would think of as obnoxious displays of wealth (and who might actually be in hock up to their eyebrows just trying to get the next crop in).
Moreover, you really can buy a serviceable truck for less than a high end TV. The metrosexual in a downtown loft watching a Beovision resting on his Macassar ebony flooring probably thinks he's living simply because he walks the 2 1/2 blocks to work, taking time to stop off at the local coffee shop while he holds up the line ordering an outrageously complicated drink and insisting they check "in the back" for those breakfast wraps they're out of. (Sorry, pet peeve.) The same guy who sneers at you because your job requires a truck.
Dogpile!
The younger you are, the more you tend to lean left. There is truth behind the saying "If you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart". I would expect an industry that leans young would tend to lean left.
But I also have to wonder how much of it is self-loathing. You sometimes find that amongst people who acquire sudden wealth and aren't sure they deserve it.
Another factor is the development of an elitist mindset amongst sudden wealth. It puzzled me for awhile how the head of a family of four living on five acres with six vehicles could utter the phrase "live simply so others can simply live", and appear to mean it. But I realize now that he mean for me to do this, not (God forbid) himself. Another acquaintance is a big fan of raising taxes to fund mass transit, but has never stepped on a bus or train herself, because of that thing about rubbing shoulders with stinky people.
I think it's way too early to predict Android taking over the world. But even if so, it could be worse. It could be Windows CE.
Instead of working on handheld devices with resolution better than the eye can see, why not improve the current state of flat panel displays?
I'm still using an old 19 inch tube because it supports 1600X1200 and my work requires a display at least 1200 pixels tall. Try buying that in a flat panel. In 16X9, it works out to be about 2140 pixels wide. But no matter what size flat panel you get these days, their maximum resolution is 1080P, 1920X1080, which is too damned short. In this case, the HDTV standards have messed us up, because of the perception that 1080P is all anyone could ever need.
I'm not talking about showing video at a higher resolution, I just want to get some work done.
I have to agree. The best thing you can do for the environment is to make higher quality purchases and then keep them for as long as practical. The major contribution to waste is not the technology you buy, but how soon you dump it for something new.
I shop appliances and vehicles carefully, and then keep them until it's no longer practical to fix them. My friends, who lease vehicles, or buy a new vehicle every 3 years, think I'm crazy for not doing regular updates to get the latest technology or the best gas mileage (usually a difference of only a few miles per gallon, if you compare apples to apples). But I figure everything I throw away or trade in has to go somewhere, so it might as well stay with me until I'm through with it.
Because competition is good.
I think "boycott" is the wrong word. I think you really mean "not watch".
I mean, why watch TV that sucks? Why even watch mediocre TV? I find that with no constraints on when I watch or even when a show is produced, there is enough good tv I haven't seen yet in the past 30 years that I have no need to even glance at anything current that isn't absolutely exceptional. Which is a very short list.
In fact, life is too short even for good tv. I find myself concentrating on maybe five or six programs, watching one or at most two episodes a night, and when I run out of episodes I look at my list and decide what else I want to watch, if anything. Sometimes I go for days without watching anything. It's just TV, fer chrissake. It's not like you need it to breathe.
Concentrating on a show and watching one a night is also helpful in seeing the flow of the story arc. I find watching once a week I forget nuances of the previous show and miss out on some of the aspects of a story.
The biggest difference between our generation and our parent's and grandparent's generation is entertainment habits. Used to be, it was normal to come home from work, change into comfortable clothes, and settle on the couch for a night of tv. You'd watch whatever was on, (including commercials) changing between 3 or at most 4 channels every half hour (for sitcoms) or hour (for dramas) depending on taste, finish with the news, and then go to bed. Night after night after night. I know, it seems bizarre now.
Increasingly, the current generation won't sit still for that. There are more demands on our time, and TV is just one of many different things we regularly do for entertainment. We want to watch what we want to watch, when we want to watch it, for as long as we want.
The networks don't know what to do with that paradigm. They still think they can sandwich a crap show between two hits and make some money off it. They still don't realize that increasingly, the only folks who fall for that are old. And getting older. Somewhat disguising this epic fail is that they're only getting poll data from the people who are watching TV in real time, completely missing out on the fact that this is a smaller and smaller group of people.
I remember reading somewhere that the main issue with traditional news services is that (1) delivery is so costly, and (2) delivery is locked down by unions, which means there is not a good way of switching to a different medium or to a different business model.
It occurs to me that the system must collapse first. After that happens, some of the same players can pick up the pieces and put together a new business model that doesn't require the newspaper printing and vending network, or the huge overhead involved in providing a network news tv show.
What I'm saying is, I believe that the reporting side is a significant cost. I do not believe that the reporting side is the significant cost. And I suspect that news organizations will be able to get along just fine on a web-based business model if they first jettison their obsolete delivery systems. (Print and video.) I mean really, the only time I buy a paper is bird cage cleaning day. (We have four parrots.) The last time I watched network news was on September 11, 2001. And most of that was on the computer.
Psst. The cold war ended two years before Clinton's first term. Losing the launch codes is still rather a faux pas. Admitting same is still embarrassing and somewhat dangerous.
> But to be fair, that's the trouble with rules that state "if you lose this, you are in super big trouble." You get two choices: a. admit it and be fired, b. hope no one finds out. If you go with b and they do find out, you're fired, but at least it wasn't guaranteed.
Yes. And setting it up that way, it's a sure bet that something exactly like this will happen. How it *should* work, is "If you lose this, you will immediately follow that procedure. If you lose this and you *do not* follow that procedure, you're in super big trouble."
> And, from my experience, if you're stuck with the job of keeping track of something sensitive, and you ask, "so what's the procedure if something is lost?", the answer will be "don't lose it!"
Agreed. This is a guaranteed fail.
To which I would add, please let us know how it turns out.
Yes, that occurred to me also, but I was not going to accuse Clinton of losing the launch codes. There are all kinds of tawdry jokes one could make about that, but hell, he's out of office, he'll never be President again, and we're all still in one piece. Let it go.
But aids, especially military ones, tend to stick around between administrations, and I find that thought a little frightening.
But... it *did* get out. Just now.
I've been arrested. It turned out the arresting officer had misunderstood the law -- specifically the part that said "when carrying concealed". When I pointed this out, after much discussion amongst themselves, the law officers in question returned my property and let me go.
Parenthetically, this is the one and only time when being proficient at reading upside-down really saved my butt.
This is why I now carry a copy of the officer's guide to Oregon law with me. (Electronic version, on my smartphone.) Even in the best of times, laws are complex and rife with misunderstanding, both for the citizen and for the law enforcement officer.
Now, far be it from me to interrupt an energetic rant, but let's address this. I'm going to assume for the moment that you are not a moron, because clearly you've at least figured out how to login and post to Slashdot. So I'm going to assume that you are deliberately misunderstanding what we're talking about here in order to make what is at best a peripheral point.
I don't think anybody in this thread is suggesting that the teenage perp should play with words to get around the meaning of the judgement. The point was not even remotely that. Rather, the point is about unintended consequences when an authority makes a judgement on a technical matter when neither the authority nor the perp have any understanding of the technical issues. It is about the unintended consequences of such an action.
I'm going to assume you have somewhat of a technical background in the following illustration. If you don't understand, I have a simpler illustration involving cars and crosswalks.
There was an article recently about a government looking at making steganography a crime, because of the assumption that it was being used by terrorists to pass information between cells.
Let's assume they go through with that. Let's further assume (not a great leap) that the lawmakers have a poor understanding of technology and the law is poorly worded.
Backpacking across the continent, you have occasion to visit that country. ---- and are immediately arrested and given a long prison term for being a terrorist.
What was your actual crime? Carrying a camera that records EXIF data in the jpg images it creates.
"But wait", any reasonable person would say, "that's not what the legislation meant." And that's true. And I'm sure the lawmakers feel real bad about it. But that's what the law *says*, and you should have known about it. Even though you may not know any more about photography than "I push button and it make picture."
The issue is unintended consequences. Almost certainly, the judge in this case did not intend for the perp not to be able to log into classmates.com. The judge did not understand the full reach of his judgement, and almost certainly neither did the perp. This is not a matter of "boo hoo, the perp can't go anywhere online that requires credentials", it is a matter of government applying conditions that have much further reaching consequences than they intend, and us letting them get away with it. The issue is, someone in the prosecutor's office, or the FBI, or Homeland Security, looking at a law and saying to themselves, "Hey, taken literally, this clause in the 2011 telecommunication act makes it illegal to watch a cable channel". And then selectively enforcing out-of-band for political gain.
If the judge meant for the perp to stay off the computer, he should say so, and that would be fine.