Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
If you live in Chicago, I highly recommend seeing Alien Queen at circuit nightclub. It's a mashup of Alien+Aliens set to the music of queen, with a Drag Queen as Ripley. If the thought of full-sized xenomorphs in excellent costumes dancing sexy piques your interest, you should check it out.
Having a successful Hollywood producer with a track record of successfully embarrassing big companies and governments as a supporter can't hurt.
Yes it can hurt. 100% of the right wing people I talk to dismiss anything Mr Moore has to say or any of his causes automatically. Of course these same people would dismiss any change in the social order or method of communication, such as a wiki in general, and whistleblowing in specific.
(Full disclosure: There is a laundry list of people I dismiss whenever I hear anything, _they_ say).
The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards and for most users, it's completely unnecessary. It screws up passwords, for one, and it is in a position that is way too easy to hit accidentally. Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained. Did nobody notice that the OLPC computer also ditched the CapsLock? Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.
Plenty of people have complained. Namely the people that design your electronics, especially your computer PCBs. Netnames are all caps. Holding down the shift button the entire time is ridiculous and really bad for repetitive stress. Luckily the people who know how to make your electronics, also know how to make keybinding macros.
Also, I have HUGE hands, and I can't recal a time I hit the CAPS lock key accidentally.
The bigger story is that they took away the FUNction keys.
She is unelectable, why the hell does the media pay so much attention to her? She has to be the most hated political figure in the US for the left/left leaning middle. The dumbest thing the republicans could possibly do is run her in 2012.
She is unelectable when applying logic and intelligence tests.
She is entirely electable when the majority of the "swing" (i.e. underinformed) voters are swayed by her particular brand of claptrap.
I for one, welcome her four years of entertainment, preceding the apocalypse.
Just because it's a prototype doesn't mean it should be constructed sloppily.
You bring up a great point. Humans are inherently superficial, and will judge the quality of the macro on the visual aesthetic of the micro. Although the way a prototype looks has nothing to do with it's actual function or feasibility, it has a lot to do with whether a project will gain momentum.
As you go up the food chain, there are people who spend less and less time making decisions, based on fewer and fewer data. Really what it boils down to is upper management thinking one of these two things: "Gee, if I show this to MY boss, he'll think I'm a bad decision maker" or "Wow, this will make my boss think that I'm capable and that my team produces results".
The same applies to academia, only in that things that are sexy or compelling to and end consumer, product, or application will get preferential treatment.
Dogs can pick up cues from humans and are extremely social animals.
Cats OTOH are just freeloading parasites. Occasionally they purr and rub against you to mark their territory.
I've never met a cat that could respond to its name, let alone do tasks as complex as dogs.
There's a reason you don't have "helper cats" for the blind.
Cats can open doors. They are extremely judicious about their affections, as opposed to loving anything with a ball. Sounds like it's obvious in the other direction.
Since I'm not in the middle of the ocean, I don't have to breathe whatever crap they're spewing out. So I don't really have a reason to care. Of course it might still make sense for the big port cities to put emissions limits on what ships they'll accept, and send the really nasty ones elsewhere...
You're not really aware of the properties of a gas, are you?
Why more people don't mention Rope when they're talking about their favorite Hitchcock movies, I don't understand. Great movie. And (on topic!) the whole movie is just something like 3(?) takes.
One continuous shot per reel. They usually stop when someone goes through a door and comes right back out after the reel change.
This perfectly illustrates why the nerd pedantry is lonely, angry, and ignored. People with lives understand "requires no external power supply" to mean "doesn't have to be plugged in." Instead of accepting this, a few people have decided to ignore the hard work of these people to bring revolutionary educational tools into the hands of poor rural children, and quibble about thermodynamics.
From the top and bottom of my heart, please fuck off. The adults are doing useful things. Leave them to it.
Although I wholeheartedly agree with you, I thought that posting on slashdot _was_ leaving them to it. You think anyone who actually gets stuff done reads this stuff? (ducks)
cue/. superiority complex... Seriously, rather than tag as !news or PEBKAC, how about some intelligent discussion about either educating the general public or another more intelligent solution?
Let's take educating the public off the table. Fools are the greatest user segment. I hate to say it, but Apple's walled garden sounds really good when it comes to my family and never having to clean their computers again.
It's funny that someone created a way to use the internet to reinforce actual human values of friendship, relationships, and community in a way that normal people can understand and use, and that a lot of nerds worth their salt reject it wholeheartedly.
You can joke about all the inane updates ("I ate soup today!") all you want. But computer averse / illiterate users take to facebook like a nerd to a dark basement.
It's nice to have better integration between Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, search, and standard Web content on the desktop. But what's really needed right now is better integration between the desktop social Web and the mobile social Web
Its designed how they and possibly some other people use the web. There are plenty of people out there who don't give two shits about Facetube and Twitbook integration.
This is a very niche market, I don't see too many people using Flock either. This is, dare I say it a browser for Arts students.
I hate to break it to you, but *you* are now the niche market. Engineers, Programmers, and IT are no longer the driving force of the internet. Young people with social lives are, and this is the sort of thing that they like and will be a money magnet. Someday soon, you will hear someone say "Oh, Firefox? I don't see too many people using that. Isn't that the browser for people with Aspergers?"
Isn't there already a browser that does this that no one uses? Why create another browser for no one to use?
No one uses it? In addition to their normal habit of dismissing niche software / hardware as DOA, Slashdot veterans are suffering from a phenomena where they dismiss and can't understand the third wave of internet users. The user group that is larger than we ever were. Prepare to be left in the dust by the mass's desire to use our precious internet for what we perceive to be inane and pointless.
The time for "supercomputers" is long past. This is just muscle-play that does not mean anything. The fetish of having a "supercomputer" seems to be a left-over from the times when computers were very slow and almost nobody had one. Or maybe politicians (and journalists) are still living in those times...
False. 1) Protien Folding Simulations (and any number of chemical / biological simulations). 2) Prestige attracts money and brainpower.
Stunt, yes. You could make several smaller "super computers" to have equivalent output. Worthless no.
I don't agree with this. I think it should be the owners responsibility to secure their network, but the possibility for legal ramifications exists.
So, if I have an electrical outlet outside of my house and I don't "secure it", should people be able to plug into my electricity with impunity? How about my garden hose? If I don't physically bar someone from parking in my driveway, that's OK? Is it OK to help yourself to my garden? How about siphoning the gas out of my car?
There's loads of things in the physical world that aren't necessarily secured, but that you don't have a reasonable expectation of being able to use.
I don't agree in any way that just because the wireless isn't 100% locked down that you should get a free pass to just use it. You know you're using a network that isn't yours -- just because you can connect to it doesn't mean you have carte blanch.
I hate to play devils advocate, but using your external electrical outlet analogy, you don't have electronic devices that automagically search for the nearest outlet and plug itself in. My wifi will automatically connect to unsecured access points.
Douchebaggery on my part aside, FREE WIFI FOR EVERYONE!
True, but this assumes that all of the channels show exclusive shows 24/7 that have to justify their existence by this single showing.
This ENTIRELY fails to be the case. First there's reruns. How large a fraction of say Discovery consists of shows that have been shown previously ? I'd guess 75%, that alone, quadruples the money available to produce a show.
Then there's the shows that are sold and bought and end up being shown on more than one channel. It's the norm rather than the exception that a show is shown on several channels, if successful, it could even easily get into hundreds of channels. (keep in mind that shows are -also- sold to foreign channels)
So, how much of a average channels schedule consists of first-runs? (i.e. content that has not been shown previously anywhere, neither on this channel, nor on another)
It varies wildly by channel, offcourse, but I don't think there's -any- channels who approach 100%, and many channels seem to be in the 10% or thereabout range.
$43.000 for an half-hour show, may or may not be enough. It's not enough for a high-profile show, but MOST of the self-produced programming on those 200 channels isn't high-profile shows.
Yes. But. If channels are not affiliates, they have to pay for shows. Re-runs cost money.
A new Prime time sitcom costs $1 Mil per episode. $100K for your average reality TV show. Maybe $50K for a well run talk show.
There are station costs. Property taxes. Labor at the studio. Also, channels that don't put out a lot of new content don't get paid as much from the cable companies.
I wasn't even including the cable company overhead of having a fleet of technicians, financing your set-top boxes, or having an army of incompetent customer service drones.
The bottom line is that when you add it all up, you could not pay for the cost of all the cable tv programming based on total income of cable bills minus the cable company expenses.
> To me, at this point, you are very unaware of how much a television show actually costs to produce.
No. You just don't understand the math and how many households that cost is distributed across.
Actually, no. I do understand math and the distributed cost.
300,000,000 Assume roughly everyone in America pays $50 for cable and taxes / bs are taken out already
$50
$15,000,000,000 Total Cable income
200 Total Channels
$75,000,000 Total dollar amount per channel
8760 Total Hours of programming (24*365)
$8,561.643836 Dollars per hour
$4,280.821918 Dollars per half hour
You cannot produce a 1/2 hour television show for $4300. Not one that mainstream America would watch, anyways. You can play around with the number of subscribers, the number of channels, and even re-use half of all your programming, and you would get enough money to have community college actors, bad lighting, bad sound, a single set, and terrible scripts.
To me, at this point, commercials are greed. We already pay subscription (cable or otherwise), and most movies/TV shows use product placement among other things to supplement the cost. What really gets me is that now movies have 10 minutes of commercials before them. Did I really just pay $10 to watch 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of movie trailers? It's odd that only a few years ago, the movie/theatre business made a nice profit without having these commercials, yet now they cannot live without them.
I hope in time commercial-less media is the norm.
To me, at this point, you are very unaware of how much a television show actually costs to produce. Your $50 cable bill doesn't even put a dent in it. And yes, it is greed. Welcome to the primary motivating factor of all human activity. Shall I also introduce you to Greed's friend, Fear?
I'm seriously waiting for this tablet hysteria to die down. In 2007/2008, it was netbooks and nowadays we barely hear a peep about them.
I'm seriously waiting for nerds to realize that they are no longer the arbiters of cool or the most influential in what technology is developed, marketed, and makes manufacturers boat loads of money.
You don't hear a peep about netbooks because they are ubiquitous. It's called NEWs.
A good UI need to be consistent and predictable. When software tries to second guess what I want, glares at MS Word, it tends to piss me off instead.
And no, I don't want a video to full screen when I lean back or audio to mute when I switch app or whatever they think of next.
Yes, but a *profitable* UI has bells and whistles. Canonical may be innovating on a free platform, but people are lazy and pay to be even lazier. Sure it's ethically grey to encourage the further downfall of society, but that's how people get rich, right?
Why blame anyone at all? What is wrong with a child swearing, other than that some adults prefer to believe a lie about children and innocence.
The world is a dynamic place full of unfathomable joy, and unrelenting shittiness. We should have a full vocabulary and worldview to express and conceptualize this.
I don't want results before I even finish formulating my search request. It's distracting and confusing: a burst of visual noise while I'm trying to focus on what I'm typing in the search box (which I may decide to change as I'm typing it).
Why do I want to read results of a search that doesn't even represent my complete inquiry?
This is why you will be replaced by someone much more interesting than yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
If deception isn't necessary for placebos to work, does this mean the homeopathic medicine advocates can admit it's bullshit now?
Wait!? Doesn't that mean that homeopathic bullshit works?
Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
If you live in Chicago, I highly recommend seeing Alien Queen at circuit nightclub. It's a mashup of Alien+Aliens set to the music of queen, with a Drag Queen as Ripley. If the thought of full-sized xenomorphs in excellent costumes dancing sexy piques your interest, you should check it out.
Having a successful Hollywood producer with a track record of successfully embarrassing big companies and governments as a supporter can't hurt.
Yes it can hurt. 100% of the right wing people I talk to dismiss anything Mr Moore has to say or any of his causes automatically. Of course these same people would dismiss any change in the social order or method of communication, such as a wiki in general, and whistleblowing in specific.
(Full disclosure: There is a laundry list of people I dismiss whenever I hear anything, _they_ say).
The Caps Lock key is an arcane relic of the ancient IBM keyboards and for most users, it's completely unnecessary. It screws up passwords, for one, and it is in a position that is way too easy to hit accidentally. Besides, there's been a movement to ditch it for ages now, and thus far nobody's complained. Did nobody notice that the OLPC computer also ditched the CapsLock? Besides, anyone who still wants to use all caps still has the shift button.
Plenty of people have complained. Namely the people that design your electronics, especially your computer PCBs. Netnames are all caps. Holding down the shift button the entire time is ridiculous and really bad for repetitive stress. Luckily the people who know how to make your electronics, also know how to make keybinding macros.
Also, I have HUGE hands, and I can't recal a time I hit the CAPS lock key accidentally.
The bigger story is that they took away the FUNction keys.
On the other hand, I think you're a dick.
Why?
It was mostly for a comedic counterpoint. Agreeing with you with eloquence and disagreeing with juvenile coarseness.
It was also partially for propagating human foible of focusing on the way things look, rather than the way they work.
If it caused you distress, then I truly am regretful and apologized. It was meant to be an exaggerated affront.
She is unelectable, why the hell does the media pay so much attention to her? She has to be the most hated political figure in the US for the left/left leaning middle. The dumbest thing the republicans could possibly do is run her in 2012.
She is unelectable when applying logic and intelligence tests.
She is entirely electable when the majority of the "swing" (i.e. underinformed) voters are swayed by her particular brand of claptrap.
I for one, welcome her four years of entertainment, preceding the apocalypse.
Just because it's a prototype doesn't mean it should be constructed sloppily.
You bring up a great point. Humans are inherently superficial, and will judge the quality of the macro on the visual aesthetic of the micro. Although the way a prototype looks has nothing to do with it's actual function or feasibility, it has a lot to do with whether a project will gain momentum.
As you go up the food chain, there are people who spend less and less time making decisions, based on fewer and fewer data. Really what it boils down to is upper management thinking one of these two things: "Gee, if I show this to MY boss, he'll think I'm a bad decision maker" or "Wow, this will make my boss think that I'm capable and that my team produces results".
The same applies to academia, only in that things that are sexy or compelling to and end consumer, product, or application will get preferential treatment.
On the other hand, I think you're a dick.
Dogs can pick up cues from humans and are extremely social animals.
Cats OTOH are just freeloading parasites. Occasionally they purr and rub against you to mark their territory.
I've never met a cat that could respond to its name, let alone do tasks as complex as dogs.
There's a reason you don't have "helper cats" for the blind.
Cats can open doors. They are extremely judicious about their affections, as opposed to loving anything with a ball. Sounds like it's obvious in the other direction.
Since I'm not in the middle of the ocean, I don't have to breathe whatever crap they're spewing out. So I don't really have a reason to care. Of course it might still make sense for the big port cities to put emissions limits on what ships they'll accept, and send the really nasty ones elsewhere...
You're not really aware of the properties of a gas, are you?
Why more people don't mention Rope when they're talking about their favorite Hitchcock movies, I don't understand. Great movie. And (on topic!) the whole movie is just something like 3(?) takes.
One continuous shot per reel. They usually stop when someone goes through a door and comes right back out after the reel change.
This perfectly illustrates why the nerd pedantry is lonely, angry, and ignored. People with lives understand "requires no external power supply" to mean "doesn't have to be plugged in." Instead of accepting this, a few people have decided to ignore the hard work of these people to bring revolutionary educational tools into the hands of poor rural children, and quibble about thermodynamics.
From the top and bottom of my heart, please fuck off. The adults are doing useful things. Leave them to it.
Although I wholeheartedly agree with you, I thought that posting on slashdot _was_ leaving them to it. You think anyone who actually gets stuff done reads this stuff? (ducks)
cue /. superiority complex... Seriously, rather than tag as !news or PEBKAC, how about some intelligent discussion about either educating the general public or another more intelligent solution?
Let's take educating the public off the table. Fools are the greatest user segment. I hate to say it, but Apple's walled garden sounds really good when it comes to my family and never having to clean their computers again.
... and nothing of value was lost.
(in either direction, IMO)
It's funny that someone created a way to use the internet to reinforce actual human values of friendship, relationships, and community in a way that normal people can understand and use, and that a lot of nerds worth their salt reject it wholeheartedly.
You can joke about all the inane updates ("I ate soup today!") all you want. But computer averse / illiterate users take to facebook like a nerd to a dark basement.
It's nice to have better integration between Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, search, and standard Web content on the desktop. But what's really needed right now is better integration between the desktop social Web and the mobile social Web
Its designed how they and possibly some other people use the web. There are plenty of people out there who don't give two shits about Facetube and Twitbook integration. This is a very niche market, I don't see too many people using Flock either. This is, dare I say it a browser for Arts students.
I hate to break it to you, but *you* are now the niche market. Engineers, Programmers, and IT are no longer the driving force of the internet. Young people with social lives are, and this is the sort of thing that they like and will be a money magnet. Someday soon, you will hear someone say "Oh, Firefox? I don't see too many people using that. Isn't that the browser for people with Aspergers?"
Isn't there already a browser that does this that no one uses? Why create another browser for no one to use?
No one uses it? In addition to their normal habit of dismissing niche software / hardware as DOA, Slashdot veterans are suffering from a phenomena where they dismiss and can't understand the third wave of internet users. The user group that is larger than we ever were. Prepare to be left in the dust by the mass's desire to use our precious internet for what we perceive to be inane and pointless.
The time for "supercomputers" is long past. This is just muscle-play that does not mean anything. The fetish of having a "supercomputer" seems to be a left-over from the times when computers were very slow and almost nobody had one. Or maybe politicians (and journalists) are still living in those times...
False. 1) Protien Folding Simulations (and any number of chemical / biological simulations). 2) Prestige attracts money and brainpower.
Stunt, yes. You could make several smaller "super computers" to have equivalent output. Worthless no.
Other use: WEIGHT LOSS!!!!!!!
Show your friends and family how bright you are!
(ducks)
So, if I have an electrical outlet outside of my house and I don't "secure it", should people be able to plug into my electricity with impunity? How about my garden hose? If I don't physically bar someone from parking in my driveway, that's OK? Is it OK to help yourself to my garden? How about siphoning the gas out of my car?
There's loads of things in the physical world that aren't necessarily secured, but that you don't have a reasonable expectation of being able to use.
I don't agree in any way that just because the wireless isn't 100% locked down that you should get a free pass to just use it. You know you're using a network that isn't yours -- just because you can connect to it doesn't mean you have carte blanch.
I hate to play devils advocate, but using your external electrical outlet analogy, you don't have electronic devices that automagically search for the nearest outlet and plug itself in. My wifi will automatically connect to unsecured access points.
Douchebaggery on my part aside, FREE WIFI FOR EVERYONE!
True, but this assumes that all of the channels show exclusive shows 24/7 that have to justify their existence by this single showing.
This ENTIRELY fails to be the case. First there's reruns. How large a fraction of say Discovery consists of shows that have been shown previously ? I'd guess 75%, that alone, quadruples the money available to produce a show.
Then there's the shows that are sold and bought and end up being shown on more than one channel. It's the norm rather than the exception that a show is shown on several channels, if successful, it could even easily get into hundreds of channels. (keep in mind that shows are -also- sold to foreign channels)
So, how much of a average channels schedule consists of first-runs? (i.e. content that has not been shown previously anywhere, neither on this channel, nor on another)
It varies wildly by channel, offcourse, but I don't think there's -any- channels who approach 100%, and many channels seem to be in the 10% or thereabout range.
$43.000 for an half-hour show, may or may not be enough. It's not enough for a high-profile show, but MOST of the self-produced programming on those 200 channels isn't high-profile shows.
Yes. But. If channels are not affiliates, they have to pay for shows. Re-runs cost money.
A new Prime time sitcom costs $1 Mil per episode. $100K for your average reality TV show. Maybe $50K for a well run talk show.
There are station costs. Property taxes. Labor at the studio. Also, channels that don't put out a lot of new content don't get paid as much from the cable companies.
I wasn't even including the cable company overhead of having a fleet of technicians, financing your set-top boxes, or having an army of incompetent customer service drones.
The bottom line is that when you add it all up, you could not pay for the cost of all the cable tv programming based on total income of cable bills minus the cable company expenses.
> To me, at this point, you are very unaware of how much a television show actually costs to produce.
No. You just don't understand the math and how many households that cost is distributed across.
Actually, no. I do understand math and the distributed cost.
300,000,000 Assume roughly everyone in America pays $50 for cable and taxes / bs are taken out already
$50
$15,000,000,000 Total Cable income
200 Total Channels
$75,000,000 Total dollar amount per channel
8760 Total Hours of programming (24*365)
$8,561.643836 Dollars per hour
$4,280.821918 Dollars per half hour
You cannot produce a 1/2 hour television show for $4300. Not one that mainstream America would watch, anyways. You can play around with the number of subscribers, the number of channels, and even re-use half of all your programming, and you would get enough money to have community college actors, bad lighting, bad sound, a single set, and terrible scripts.
To me, at this point, commercials are greed. We already pay subscription (cable or otherwise), and most movies/TV shows use product placement among other things to supplement the cost. What really gets me is that now movies have 10 minutes of commercials before them. Did I really just pay $10 to watch 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of movie trailers? It's odd that only a few years ago, the movie/theatre business made a nice profit without having these commercials, yet now they cannot live without them.
I hope in time commercial-less media is the norm.
To me, at this point, you are very unaware of how much a television show actually costs to produce. Your $50 cable bill doesn't even put a dent in it. And yes, it is greed. Welcome to the primary motivating factor of all human activity. Shall I also introduce you to Greed's friend, Fear?
I'm seriously waiting for this tablet hysteria to die down. In 2007/2008, it was netbooks and nowadays we barely hear a peep about them.
I'm seriously waiting for nerds to realize that they are no longer the arbiters of cool or the most influential in what technology is developed, marketed, and makes manufacturers boat loads of money.
You don't hear a peep about netbooks because they are ubiquitous. It's called NEWs.
A good UI need to be consistent and predictable. When software tries to second guess what I want, glares at MS Word, it tends to piss me off instead. And no, I don't want a video to full screen when I lean back or audio to mute when I switch app or whatever they think of next.
Yes, but a *profitable* UI has bells and whistles. Canonical may be innovating on a free platform, but people are lazy and pay to be even lazier. Sure it's ethically grey to encourage the further downfall of society, but that's how people get rich, right?
The world is a dynamic place full of unfathomable joy, and unrelenting shittiness. We should have a full vocabulary and worldview to express and conceptualize this.
I turned it off as soon as I figured out how.
I don't want results before I even finish formulating my search request. It's distracting and confusing: a burst of visual noise while I'm trying to focus on what I'm typing in the search box (which I may decide to change as I'm typing it).
Why do I want to read results of a search that doesn't even represent my complete inquiry?
This is why you will be replaced by someone much more interesting than yourself.