SOME people like sports. All I say is that those people who do should cover the 100% of the costs of what they watch, and not get need to get a subsidy from the rest of us.
I agree, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why that shouldn't be true for all content.
This is one of the reasons I no longer pay for cable. What I can't get off the antenna on the roof or streaming, I do without.
But just assuming I wanted to pay $100+ a month for TELEVISION, the thing that would grate on me more than anything else is to be paying for, subsidizing if you will, content in which I have not the slightest interest.
In cases like MSNBC, where real viewership has dropped to the point where it no longer justifies advertising dollars, and the only thing keeping the station (and others -- I'm unfairly picking on MSNBC) is the contracts that the cable providers are locked into. The thing is, sports are (so they tell me) POPULAR, people actually *want* to watch them, will pay extra for sports packages on cable and satellite, and can be furious when a game is blacked out in their area. This is the least likely content type to care about being subsidized by the cable industry. What am I missing here?
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.
But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.
This hadn't occurred to me before. I wonder if viruses are the reason those stupid bottle deposit machines are always out of order. I swear to Fudd, I've seen them reboot, usually just as I'm dumping in the last bag of soft drink cans, and they display the Windows 98 splash screen.
Agreed, but we are talking about content, not apps. Ram is dirt cheap these days -- the cost of ram in portable devices is largely artificial. There's no reason why a large amount of ram couldn't be provided at a reasonable price for apps, and still have a slot for content.
The reasons you want a slot for content are (a) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary by individual (some of us only put a few songs on there, some don't use it at all, and some think they should carry around the library of congress) (b) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary with time. (IE, when I realized how much more convenient my Bionic (for instance) was than my ipod touch, I just got a larger chip, transferred the music to the Bionic and retired the Touch.)
...and (c) most importantly, recent versions of Android have for inexplicable reasons disabled the "mass storage" option when connected to a computer via USB, and the only ways to get music on them now are buy it in the store, use some stupid-ass dedicated app to manage the music on the device, or yank the chip and put your content on the chip directly. Re-buying music you already own on CD is unacceptable, content management apps are a HUGE fail, and that leaves you with removable storage. Ergo, a phone without removable storage is not a valid choice, despite guaranteed OS updates. (Besides, I wasn't very happy at all with that "os update" that disabled USB mass storage. Jerks.)
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I've been predicting for awhile that HP will fall next, it just seems so obviously likely, but I continue to be wrong. At least, so far. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
I guess I can see that, for a few years ago. But most non-Apple smartphones use micro-SD these days, and a 64 Gbyte card is $23 on Amazon today. (Or $120 for similar capacity in an Apple product, of course.) The first thing I did when I got my replacement phone (the previous one not having survived a motorcycle accident) was replace the paltry 8 GB micro-SD with a 64 GB part. And then it took almost an hour to download all my music to it.
One annoyance -- one of our vehicles with an older radio supports stereo Bluetooth, which means I can just play music from my phone through the car stereo, and manipulate the phone through the stereo controls.
In contrast, the radio in my 2014 motorcycle, which supports thumb drives and other neat stuff, will play music from the phone but will not control what is being played. Annoying.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
Or, they may realize that the government service they are receiving is beneficial, and that might start them wondering about whether the Tea Party is confused.
Um, this is the California school system we're talking about...
That "Something you know"-part can be extracted quite easily. How much do you like having all your teeth, fingers & toes attached?
Well yes, I think I would like to keep all my appendages. (Cue OB XKCD, where a $7 crowbar is more effective than a $100M password cracking array.) I have thought about this, and I think it can be solved by having two accounts -- your "real" account, and a "hostage" account, which looks a lot like your "real" account (kinda like keeping two sets of books) and takes the same biometrics, but upon providing a slightly different "something you know", raises (silent) alarms everywhere it would be appropriate to do so.
I think I have about six songs in itunes that are in "protected AAC" format, as I stopped buying stuff in that format early on, as soon as I realized the limitations. I still have a (gen3) ipod in the truck but the sound system in the other car and in the motorcycle understand thumb drives, and once you have that why the heck would you use an ipod? Most phones these days will play music and have removable storage -- why would you carry an extra device?
Once you realize that only Apple products will play "protected AAC" files, why the heck would you buy content in that format?
I guess the point I'm making is that if you lost access to content you paid for because itunes no longer supports your OS, this might be a good time to at least re-evaluate how you purchase content. If you must use itunes, it'll rip CDs just fine, and used CDs are available, often for a pittance, at Amazon and other places.
I can't believe in 2015 we're still saying "just say no to DRM content". That question should have been settled a long time ago.
I intended that as tongue in cheek. As I said in a different thread, my (vaccinated) daughter was homeschooled through most of grade school, (due to a difference of opinion between her doctors, who diagnosed her as severely dyslexic, and her teachers, who diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin) and she later interviewed and got accepted into a somewhat exclusive high school.
Other members of my family (who happen to live in California -- I live in a different state) were very vocal in their disapproval of my decision to homeschool, saying that "everyone knows homeschooled kids don't have any social skills or any education and they're a burden on society". (Apparently there's a pamphlet I didn't get.) To which I say, anything can be done badly. The trick is to do it well.
Europe has also done a much more thorough job of banning Thimerosal (a preservative containing mercury) in vaccines, an area where the US is still behind. Just sayin'.
It can work, if done intelligently. My daughter was educated in a homeschool consortium for most of grade school, and then applied and was accepted into a private high school. A consortium works by having each parent teach the subject they're qualified to teach. I'm pretty good at math and have teaching experience, but that job (math teacher) was already taken, by a retired nuclear engineer who also had teaching experience, so I ended up being IT for the classrooms instead.
Side note, you might be surprised by the number of teacher's children who are homeschooled.
The issue in my case was, the doctors (many doctors over many expensive months of diagnosis) concluded that daughter was severely dyslexic and would never read past a 5th grade level. On the other hand, the school had diagnosed her as ADD and insisted I put her on Ritalin. We could not come to an agreement, and I decided (exercising the parental prerogative that so many people in this thread revile) to believe the doctors rather than the teachers, (I'm funny that way) and pulled her out of school.
As far as vaccines go, I don't have much to contribute except that daughter got all her childhood shots including the (new at the time) chicken pox vaccine (because it didn't exist when I was growing up, and i got chicken pox in my 20's, and it was really messy) and she got chicken pox anyway.
I did turn down the gardasil vaccine, after much research. Which I won't bore you with here. Either you're familiar with the controversy, or you can read up on it yourself. Feel free to call me an anti-vaxxer.
Others have pointed out that vaccines are madated by law in Europe much more strictly than (most places) in the US. That's true. It's also true that Europe was much quicker at banning Thimerosal (a preservative containing mercury) in vaccines, an area where the US is still behind.
This has the same problem as any exclusively biometric technique -- the user can be compelled to give up their "password" merely by being physically present. "Something you have" can be taken, even if it's your still-living (for now) carcass. "Something you have" should always be supplemented with "something you know".
The summary rightly brings up privacy concerns but I'd also be concerned about the security of the transmitted data. Like RFID, the information can easily be snooped, and would have to be appropriately encrypted to be useful as credentials.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
You've pointed out two things: (a) that technology really *does* trickle down. Technology that only the rich could afford does eventually become available to the poor, either through commodity pricing or the used market. (b) The single most expensive part of a hybrid (and potentially the most polluting to create and dispose) is the battery. Both good points.
Slashdot Mirror
Why make your kids cry? www.thepiratebay...
eztv. Fewer porn ads.
SOME people like sports. All I say is that those people who do should cover the 100% of the costs of what they watch, and not get need to get a subsidy from the rest of us.
I agree, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why that shouldn't be true for all content.
This is one of the reasons I no longer pay for cable. What I can't get off the antenna on the roof or streaming, I do without.
But just assuming I wanted to pay $100+ a month for TELEVISION, the thing that would grate on me more than anything else is to be paying for, subsidizing if you will, content in which I have not the slightest interest.
In cases like MSNBC, where real viewership has dropped to the point where it no longer justifies advertising dollars, and the only thing keeping the station (and others -- I'm unfairly picking on MSNBC) is the contracts that the cable providers are locked into. The thing is, sports are (so they tell me) POPULAR, people actually *want* to watch them, will pay extra for sports packages on cable and satellite, and can be furious when a game is blacked out in their area. This is the least likely content type to care about being subsidized by the cable industry. What am I missing here?
Every phone seems to have this same issue, but it is not the phones fault. It's the fault of what the owner installs on it. My wifes galaxy mega was great at first, but now that she has all these stupid games installed it is buggy and needs to be restarted regularly.
I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.
But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.
This hadn't occurred to me before. I wonder if viruses are the reason those stupid bottle deposit machines are always out of order. I swear to Fudd, I've seen them reboot, usually just as I'm dumping in the last bag of soft drink cans, and they display the Windows 98 splash screen.
That hadn't occurred to me before -- keep a Windows 95 box on the network as a canary, expecting it to crash if there is an intruder on the network.
Only problem might be too many false positives.
Agreed, but we are talking about content, not apps. Ram is dirt cheap these days -- the cost of ram in portable devices is largely artificial. There's no reason why a large amount of ram couldn't be provided at a reasonable price for apps, and still have a slot for content.
The reasons you want a slot for content are (a) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary by individual (some of us only put a few songs on there, some don't use it at all, and some think they should carry around the library of congress) (b) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary with time. (IE, when I realized how much more convenient my Bionic (for instance) was than my ipod touch, I just got a larger chip, transferred the music to the Bionic and retired the Touch.)
Really? You mean like the Nexus? The Galaxy S6?
Very specifically not like those two. Hence "most".
Meg, is that you?
One can hope.
> who do you think will fall next [?]
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I've been predicting for awhile that HP will fall next, it just seems so obviously likely, but I continue to be wrong. At least, so far. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.
I guess I can see that, for a few years ago. But most non-Apple smartphones use micro-SD these days, and a 64 Gbyte card is $23 on Amazon today. (Or $120 for similar capacity in an Apple product, of course.) The first thing I did when I got my replacement phone (the previous one not having survived a motorcycle accident) was replace the paltry 8 GB micro-SD with a 64 GB part. And then it took almost an hour to download all my music to it.
One annoyance -- one of our vehicles with an older radio supports stereo Bluetooth, which means I can just play music from my phone through the car stereo, and manipulate the phone through the stereo controls.
In contrast, the radio in my 2014 motorcycle, which supports thumb drives and other neat stuff, will play music from the phone but will not control what is being played. Annoying.
That's it. It's been awhile, but I think I got the gist right, even though the details were off.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
Or, they may realize that the government service they are receiving is beneficial, and that might start them wondering about whether the Tea Party is confused.
Um, this is the California school system we're talking about...
That "Something you know"-part can be extracted quite easily. How much do you like having all your teeth, fingers & toes attached?
Well yes, I think I would like to keep all my appendages. (Cue OB XKCD, where a $7 crowbar is more effective than a $100M password cracking array.) I have thought about this, and I think it can be solved by having two accounts -- your "real" account, and a "hostage" account, which looks a lot like your "real" account (kinda like keeping two sets of books) and takes the same biometrics, but upon providing a slightly different "something you know", raises (silent) alarms everywhere it would be appropriate to do so.
I think I have about six songs in itunes that are in "protected AAC" format, as I stopped buying stuff in that format early on, as soon as I realized the limitations. I still have a (gen3) ipod in the truck but the sound system in the other car and in the motorcycle understand thumb drives, and once you have that why the heck would you use an ipod? Most phones these days will play music and have removable storage -- why would you carry an extra device?
Once you realize that only Apple products will play "protected AAC" files, why the heck would you buy content in that format?
I guess the point I'm making is that if you lost access to content you paid for because itunes no longer supports your OS, this might be a good time to at least re-evaluate how you purchase content. If you must use itunes, it'll rip CDs just fine, and used CDs are available, often for a pittance, at Amazon and other places.
I can't believe in 2015 we're still saying "just say no to DRM content". That question should have been settled a long time ago.
I intended that as tongue in cheek. As I said in a different thread, my (vaccinated) daughter was homeschooled through most of grade school, (due to a difference of opinion between her doctors, who diagnosed her as severely dyslexic, and her teachers, who diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin) and she later interviewed and got accepted into a somewhat exclusive high school.
Other members of my family (who happen to live in California -- I live in a different state) were very vocal in their disapproval of my decision to homeschool, saying that "everyone knows homeschooled kids don't have any social skills or any education and they're a burden on society". (Apparently there's a pamphlet I didn't get.) To which I say, anything can be done badly. The trick is to do it well.
> You do know that thimerosal has been out of all vaccines used in the US and Canada since the early 1990's right? [emphasis mine]
Apparently not. If you have evidence to the contrary, here's your chance to update a wiki entry.
Europe has also done a much more thorough job of banning Thimerosal (a preservative containing mercury) in vaccines, an area where the US is still behind. Just sayin'.
It can work, if done intelligently. My daughter was educated in a homeschool consortium for most of grade school, and then applied and was accepted into a private high school. A consortium works by having each parent teach the subject they're qualified to teach. I'm pretty good at math and have teaching experience, but that job (math teacher) was already taken, by a retired nuclear engineer who also had teaching experience, so I ended up being IT for the classrooms instead.
Side note, you might be surprised by the number of teacher's children who are homeschooled.
The issue in my case was, the doctors (many doctors over many expensive months of diagnosis) concluded that daughter was severely dyslexic and would never read past a 5th grade level. On the other hand, the school had diagnosed her as ADD and insisted I put her on Ritalin. We could not come to an agreement, and I decided (exercising the parental prerogative that so many people in this thread revile) to believe the doctors rather than the teachers, (I'm funny that way) and pulled her out of school.
As far as vaccines go, I don't have much to contribute except that daughter got all her childhood shots including the (new at the time) chicken pox vaccine (because it didn't exist when I was growing up, and i got chicken pox in my 20's, and it was really messy) and she got chicken pox anyway.
I did turn down the gardasil vaccine, after much research. Which I won't bore you with here. Either you're familiar with the controversy, or you can read up on it yourself. Feel free to call me an anti-vaxxer.
Others have pointed out that vaccines are madated by law in Europe much more strictly than (most places) in the US. That's true. It's also true that Europe was much quicker at banning Thimerosal (a preservative containing mercury) in vaccines, an area where the US is still behind.
This has the same problem as any exclusively biometric technique -- the user can be compelled to give up their "password" merely by being physically present. "Something you have" can be taken, even if it's your still-living (for now) carcass. "Something you have" should always be supplemented with "something you know".
The summary rightly brings up privacy concerns but I'd also be concerned about the security of the transmitted data. Like RFID, the information can easily be snooped, and would have to be appropriately encrypted to be useful as credentials.
> Last Wednesday, the legislation stalled in the Senate Education Committee as lawmakers said they were concerned that too many students would be forced into home schooling.
Or even worse, that they found that they liked it. The problem with making something a condition of participating in a government institution is the risk that significant numbers will discover they do fine without it.
too late for Randy Pausch.
I would be willing to sacrifice Jar Jar on the altar of PG-13 to have that scene in AotC.
Well, Lucas has been known to go back and futz with his films, so I guess there's always a small chance.
You've pointed out two things: (a) that technology really *does* trickle down. Technology that only the rich could afford does eventually become available to the poor, either through commodity pricing or the used market. (b) The single most expensive part of a hybrid (and potentially the most polluting to create and dispose) is the battery. Both good points.