Never! Not as in, "I'll never give up cable", but rather as in "I never had cable at all, ever".
By the time I was on my own it was obvious that the original selling point of cable - lack of advertising - had already set sail for Valhalla. I just never gave into the extortion in the first place. Can you take a stab at how much money I've been able to divert to other things because of that choice 20 years ago?
There's a reason they chose to use the word "most" to describe their success: in order for their snooping to be successful they have to connect to the offending machine(s). Deny them that connection, and they have nothing. Deny them that connection, and anonymizing proxies are irrelevant.
Did you think and speak the same during the O.J. Simpson trial, I wonder, or did you jump right in there and play jurist like everyone else on the outside? If you did the latter it would make you something of a situational hypocrite now.
What Would Karl Marx Do? It's precisely bullshit like this that provoked Marx and others to try to imagine alternative economic systems based on objectivity rather than emotion and greed. The ONLY reason there's even an argument is because we tolerate people and businesses setting prices based on everything except the actual cost of manufacture. Maybe the debate should center on whether it's ethical to allow the same product to be sold at different prices in different locales? Big Pharma, I'm looking at YOU.
We gave away the keys to that farm a LONG time ago. How long have credit card, telecom, and pretty much every corporate service provider been allowed to have legal contracts - AKA service agreements or terms of service - that explicitly specify that they are allowed to change the terms of the contract without notice at any time?
That stipulation is completely contrary to common-sense contractual law and logic, yet they've been getting away with it for decades now. How is that?
... not forcing AT&T to sell us the telegraph and telephone wires and make them a contractor for the publicly owned network. Because of that mistake we can never have true network neutrality.
Responsible forestry companies like Domtar are the stewards of the world's forests and ensure that they maintain their biodiversity, Mr. Williams, a consumer products industry veteran who took over as CEO of Domtar early last year, told reporters after his speech.
Translation: Williams' comments are his personal campaign to distinguish himself in his new job and impress the bored and shareholders, so he can justify a bit fat bonus - or golden parachute. Williams isn't a paper industry veteran or a "Priest of the Pulp", he's just another ambitious twit who leaps from one unrelated CEO job to another, collecting big fat checks along the way. Much like those folks over the in financial industry, perhaps he just sits and downloads porn Torrents all day while he's accruing those bonuses?
Now that I've got this new face and you don't know what I look like any more, I'm gonna make you pay for what you did to my first one, Mister Cheney! I was kinda attached to it.
I'd like to have an auto-pivoting monitor: servo motor and gear in the back, and a driver that senses content and rotates the display when it's obvious it would maximize use of the display.
Guess what I did with my 1440x900 laptop? In Windows 7 I dragged the Task Bar over to the left side and made it about an inch and a half wide. I've got Mint Linux on it also, but haven't yet figured out how to do the equivalent with that. On my desktop system I have one of the 1920x1200 BenQ LCD displays that others have mentioned, but even that was a step down for me: I was running my last CRT at 1920x1440, so I lost 240 vertical pixels when I switched to LCD!
I wrote to the author of the original article and asked her if she knew how they resolved it. If I get a useful response I'll share it here for the unproductively curious.
Fuck this moronic pandering to people who want to do nothing with a computer but watch 1080p videos: I want my vertical resolution back. Stop stealing pixels from the top and bottom and tacking them onto the sides where I don't need them for document work.
Mark Russell was iconoclastic. All the best stand-up comedians are iconoclastic as well as insightful and educational (case in point: George Carlin). South Park, however, just like its creators' other animated vehicles, panders so completely to vulgarity and cheap shots that it ceases to be insightful or educational. It's not iconoclastic, it's just controversial. The point of South Park is not to stimulate anything except the flow of money into its creators' pockets.
I didn't need to see this or any particular episode. The whole point of South Park is to piss various people off. I choose not to watch it at all precisely because it sets a primary goal to be controversial and piss people off. They can claim their real goal is to stimulate thought or educate, but that's just the P.C. marketspeak. Most people don't watch educational programming. I don't respect what they're doing at all.
When one sets out to do something that is carefully calculated to progressively piss off everyone, it shouldn't come as a huge shock when the plan succeeds so well that a few pissees become violent.
While prices might be dropping, they're not falling to the point they would have in the absence of those gimmicks, ESPECIALLY at the low end. I've been paying very close attention to LCD TV prices (at the low end) for a year and a half; at just about precisely the points where there was an imminent and precipitous price drop, new "features" magically appeared on new models.
It's bubblegum feature creep, the same tactic Microsoft used for years to justify prices for Windows. In the case of LCD TVs, they're using extra "Hertz" and LED backlighting (never mind the misleading marketing leads some people to mistakenly believe that the display itself is actually LEDs) to keep the prices artificially high. It's these industries' version of the fast food industry's coke-and-fries tactic: upsell the product with low-cost features or add-ons that add almost nothing to cost but add a mountain to profits. In the case of magnetic-media disk drives, they're adding more cache and tweaking this or that, which ultimately changes the total cost of production very little but helps the manufacturers stave off the price drops that SHOULD occur due to savings from mass production. In the case of SSDs, I duuno what the specific feature creep is, but you can bet that is what's taking place.
This is what manufacturers do to keep the full benefits of mass production from actually "trickling down" to consumers.
There's no "major setback" here, because we never had network neutrality in the first place. It's been a mirage: people calling a pile of dog poo a "rose" and admiring the cut of the Emperor's new nonexistent clothes.
WHO STILL OWNS THE WIRES?
As long as the physical medium remains in private ownership, we will never have network neutrality, regardless how many laws Congress might pass and rules the FCC might make.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't trying to be anonymous. Dammit, stupid Thunderbird RSS feeds!
Never! Not as in, "I'll never give up cable", but rather as in "I never had cable at all, ever".
By the time I was on my own it was obvious that the original selling point of cable - lack of advertising - had already set sail for Valhalla. I just never gave into the extortion in the first place. Can you take a stab at how much money I've been able to divert to other things because of that choice 20 years ago?
There's a reason they chose to use the word "most" to describe their success: in order for their snooping to be successful they have to connect to the offending machine(s). Deny them that connection, and they have nothing. Deny them that connection, and anonymizing proxies are irrelevant.
Did you think and speak the same during the O.J. Simpson trial, I wonder, or did you jump right in there and play jurist like everyone else on the outside? If you did the latter it would make you something of a situational hypocrite now.
What Would Karl Marx Do? It's precisely bullshit like this that provoked Marx and others to try to imagine alternative economic systems based on objectivity rather than emotion and greed. The ONLY reason there's even an argument is because we tolerate people and businesses setting prices based on everything except the actual cost of manufacture. Maybe the debate should center on whether it's ethical to allow the same product to be sold at different prices in different locales? Big Pharma, I'm looking at YOU.
We gave away the keys to that farm a LONG time ago. How long have credit card, telecom, and pretty much every corporate service provider been allowed to have legal contracts - AKA service agreements or terms of service - that explicitly specify that they are allowed to change the terms of the contract without notice at any time?
That stipulation is completely contrary to common-sense contractual law and logic, yet they've been getting away with it for decades now. How is that?
... not forcing AT&T to sell us the telegraph and telephone wires and make them a contractor for the publicly owned network. Because of that mistake we can never have true network neutrality.
That was my first thought when I read the title... Rambo In A Box. With breather holes and an old liter Coke bottle to piss in, of course.
Wow, who knew it would prove to be so hard to type on a keyboard over the top of a closed laptop? *shrug*
... is this one:
Translation: Williams' comments are his personal campaign to distinguish himself in his new job and impress the bored and shareholders, so he can justify a bit fat bonus - or golden parachute. Williams isn't a paper industry veteran or a "Priest of the Pulp", he's just another ambitious twit who leaps from one unrelated CEO job to another, collecting big fat checks along the way. Much like those folks over the in financial industry, perhaps he just sits and downloads porn Torrents all day while he's accruing those bonuses?
Now that I've got this new face and you don't know what I look like any more, I'm gonna make you pay for what you did to my first one, Mister Cheney! I was kinda attached to it.
I have a BenQ, but it doesn't pivot.
I'd like to have an auto-pivoting monitor: servo motor and gear in the back, and a driver that senses content and rotates the display when it's obvious it would maximize use of the display.
I don't watch it NOW. I've seen episodes in the past, which is how I formed the conclusion.
Guess what I did with my 1440x900 laptop? In Windows 7 I dragged the Task Bar over to the left side and made it about an inch and a half wide. I've got Mint Linux on it also, but haven't yet figured out how to do the equivalent with that. On my desktop system I have one of the 1920x1200 BenQ LCD displays that others have mentioned, but even that was a step down for me: I was running my last CRT at 1920x1440, so I lost 240 vertical pixels when I switched to LCD!
I wrote to the author of the original article and asked her if she knew how they resolved it. If I get a useful response I'll share it here for the unproductively curious.
Fuck this moronic pandering to people who want to do nothing with a computer but watch 1080p videos: I want my vertical resolution back. Stop stealing pixels from the top and bottom and tacking them onto the sides where I don't need them for document work.
Mark Russell was iconoclastic. All the best stand-up comedians are iconoclastic as well as insightful and educational (case in point: George Carlin). South Park, however, just like its creators' other animated vehicles, panders so completely to vulgarity and cheap shots that it ceases to be insightful or educational. It's not iconoclastic, it's just controversial. The point of South Park is not to stimulate anything except the flow of money into its creators' pockets.
I didn't need to see this or any particular episode. The whole point of South Park is to piss various people off. I choose not to watch it at all precisely because it sets a primary goal to be controversial and piss people off. They can claim their real goal is to stimulate thought or educate, but that's just the P.C. marketspeak. Most people don't watch educational programming. I don't respect what they're doing at all.
When one sets out to do something that is carefully calculated to progressively piss off everyone, it shouldn't come as a huge shock when the plan succeeds so well that a few pissees become violent.
While prices might be dropping, they're not falling to the point they would have in the absence of those gimmicks, ESPECIALLY at the low end. I've been paying very close attention to LCD TV prices (at the low end) for a year and a half; at just about precisely the points where there was an imminent and precipitous price drop, new "features" magically appeared on new models.
It's bubblegum feature creep, the same tactic Microsoft used for years to justify prices for Windows. In the case of LCD TVs, they're using extra "Hertz" and LED backlighting (never mind the misleading marketing leads some people to mistakenly believe that the display itself is actually LEDs) to keep the prices artificially high. It's these industries' version of the fast food industry's coke-and-fries tactic: upsell the product with low-cost features or add-ons that add almost nothing to cost but add a mountain to profits. In the case of magnetic-media disk drives, they're adding more cache and tweaking this or that, which ultimately changes the total cost of production very little but helps the manufacturers stave off the price drops that SHOULD occur due to savings from mass production. In the case of SSDs, I duuno what the specific feature creep is, but you can bet that is what's taking place.
This is what manufacturers do to keep the full benefits of mass production from actually "trickling down" to consumers.
Something tells me that Wisconsin will be Jamie Oliver's next destination.
Knowledge For The Sake Of Itself
Born: Mists of time
Died: 2010
Rest In Peace
There's no "major setback" here, because we never had network neutrality in the first place. It's been a mirage: people calling a pile of dog poo a "rose" and admiring the cut of the Emperor's new nonexistent clothes.
WHO STILL OWNS THE WIRES?
As long as the physical medium remains in private ownership, we will never have network neutrality, regardless how many laws Congress might pass and rules the FCC might make.
Which came first, the egg as dumb as a pet rock, or the chainsmoking chicken?