So instead, we have hayseeds in the middle of the country making bad decisions for the bulk of the people who live in this country. Yeah, that's much better. That makes so much more sense.
And that's the argument for less federal power and more state rights.
That makes no sense at all. We're all people- even cops.
I don't think it's about hating cops, but it should be about the understanding that the job comes with responsibility and risk.
I wasn't happy when Challenger or Columbia exploded and astronauts died. I also fully supported the ensuing investigation and steps taken to rectify the mistakes that allowed it to happen in order to prevent further loss of life. But, if I sign up to be an astronaut, it's understood that there is a risk other people don't take, so I should expect many more astronauts to die as a result of space shuttle explosions than civilians. If either shuttle explosion had killed regular people in their residences, that would have been a much bigger problem.
Police officers are placed in situations where their life is put at risk, but that's the job they signed up for. That's the job they received training to handle well. The standard for whether it's justified to kill someone because you feel your life is in danger should therefore be greater for a police officer than for a civilian: police officers should be receiving training on how to diffuse situations regular people don't know how to handle. They should be willing to put their life in risk to protect others whether that expectation shouldn't be placed on the clerk of a store being robbed at gunpoint.
Within those constraints, if we can minimize the risk to police, that's great. If we can lower the number of officer deaths to zero, that's ideal. But a higher standard should be expected of police officers than civilians, as well as a greater tolerance of risk.
Disney decanonized the EU, but especially after seeing Force Awakens, I'd rather decanonize the new movies. It was bad enough I don't intend on watching VIII or IX
Rogue One was a solid addition though, so I'll continue giving the spinoffs a chance.
You make very well-thought points about the technical stuff, but I disagree with your conclusions. I don't think your pessimism is logical based on the points you've made.
Group of sheep on both sides of the road: not as safe, but probably safe. Lamb on one side, ewe on the other? Very dangerous - the lamb will invariably run to its mother as you approach. Where's the ewe-lamb-running algorithm?
Sure, but to be fair if I had to travel to your area and rent a car, not knowing anything about the behavior of sheep, as a human driver I would be pretty terrible compared to you in that situation. But I doubt you'd say I don't deserve to have a driver's license, because that's a pretty unusual circumstance. I also doubt that even in your area, when you were taking the driving written test, that they had a section on whether you understood the intricacies of sheep behavior.
That's not because your experiences aren't valuable in that situation: it's because there's a difference between a driver and an experienced driver. You get the basic rules of the road going, and statistically you're safe enough to be trusted to be on the road. Young drivers are statistically less safe than experienced ones though. And you will tend to gather experience that relates to the particular location you drive in. Case in point, I'm pretty good at anticipating behavior from drivers in my area, but I've driven in another country and the same cues didn't apply. Still, I didn't get into an accident, being less experienced increases your risk, but it can still be an increased yet acceptable risk.
Where am I going with this? Well, autonomous driving is like an inexperienced driver with a lot of raw talent. It has an advantage over every human driver, including you, in that it will **never** get distracted, or tired. It has a field of vision of 360 degrees at all times, instead of having to choose what it will look at now. It has sensors that can see through objects you can't, so when I'm trying to turn in an area where the parked cars obstruct my view of an incoming car? It doesn't have that problem, it sees the incoming car.
Will it make worse decisions than I would given all the same information? During unexpected hazardous conditions, and assuming I'm not driving after not getting much sleep last night because I had to do another all-nighter at work...probably so. But the fact it has more information than I do and invariable alertness means that even though it would get me into accidents I wouldn't get into if I were driving, it nevertheless will get into less accidents, because it will avoid many of those more common accidents that I would get into if I were driving.
Not only that, but the sheep avoidance algorithm? It's coming. We're talking about the early inexperienced autonomous vehicle, but it's not always going to remain that way. Every time there's an accident with an autonomous vehicles there are logs to be examined. Engineers will pour over them and try to figure out if there's anything that can be done to avoid that type of accident. The problems that occur most often are fixed first, but eventually the system will be good enough that anticipation of animal behavior will be significant. At which point an update gets pushed to your car, and it now knows to slow down and be ready to avoid that road-crossing lamb. Because, unlike humans, when *one* autonomous vehicle gains experience, *all* autonomous vehicles gain that experience. And that's reason to be pretty optimistic.
Yes, I remember the Microsoft of the 1990s. However, Microsoft has been Open Source friendly for a far longer time than the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics of the past. Anybody still freaking out about them is actually being counter-productivity, by not giving credit to companies who actually did become better.
People like you were the ones sounding the horn when Microsoft created the.Net framework over a decade ago as an open standard and were screaming that they didn't want Mono in Linux because they were just about to sue everyone for patent infringement. Microsoft responded by publishing a covenant not to sue, and that the patents would be used defensively opened. Then people like you screamed that this covenant was not legally binding, because they were ignorant of the concept of estoppel, I guess. Did any of your fears come to pass?
Yes, Microsoft just extended the Linux kernel. To operate with a Microsoft service, affecting absolutely nobody else. That adds no additional features other than improved performance in their cloud service. We're supposed to all be freaking out that they're planning on destroying Linux when they're doing something that makes using Linux better in their cloud environment so they can better compete with the same service on Amazon EC2? Please. We're supposed to be afraid of extensions to a GPLv2 project that is necessarily open source as a result of the kernel license? Are you insane, what exactly is the mechanism for "extinguish" here? It's not like they can lock up any of the cool stuff they added, if people think it's valuable, they can get what they like and merge it to the mainstream kernel, Microsoft can't stop them. This is no different than a variety of custom kernel options that ubuntu offers, which already included one that's specialized for virtual machines.
This isn't 1999, and Canonical isn't SCO. Microsoft has been acting like a trustworthy company for a very long time, and contributed a good deal to various open source projects. Get over the evils of the past and reward a company for making a fantastic turnaround. Yes, it's true, they didn't do it to be nice, but because they don't have the same monopoly position they used to: nevertheless, they could have died off, but instead maintained relevance in the industry by working well with others. That's a good thing.
Well, that's also putting the marginal cost of the subscriber at 0. There is some cost for infrastructure that increases with subscriber coun
I agree, but that number doesn't include things that decrease the cost. You mentioned that costs go up with shows they have to license, but you didn't mention they have to license less shows if they have enough content they own. Original shows like Daredevil are also getting blu-ray releases, and we're not counting the revenue from that, etc.
I think the point is that while that can make sense for 'starting up', at *some* point you have to point and say 'here's where revenue will exceed investment'.
Agreed.
The problem is the statement on its face doesn't imply that the investment will stop.
Not agreed. It just means you need a critical mass of subscribers to support the continued investment.
If their investment outstrips subscription revenue by 2.5 billion annually, well you need to be able to find 2.5 billion worth of new subscribers.
Netflix costs more than $1 / year per subscriber. At the minimum of $8/month, it means they would need an additional ~26 million subscribers, and they got 5 million in the past 3 months. That's without considering the people paying $10 for hd streaming and $12 for 4k streaming, or excluding future price increases once they think they have enough content to keep subscribers with said increase.
He's saying his cash flow will be negative because they will be investing in new products.
And that those products will lead to money in the long-term: "that's a lot of capital up front, and then you get a payout over many years"
However, new products are not an indicator for success. Sales is!
"During Netflix's quarterly earnings call, in which it noted it had added more than five million subscribers in the last three months..." Those are the sales, right?
Ideally the new subscribers are going to stay with netflix and keep paying them for a long time.
That's where you want to make that distinction? You can only be held accountable for what you say to the public in public on a public forum, as long as you say that you said it?
What do you mean by 'held accountable', here? This isn't a guy who broke any laws.
I do believe that if you say something to the public in a public forum, then it's fantastic that it is indeed a public forum, because people can argue against you. Like we're having a civilized discussion right now, while on opposing sides. If this discussion turned less than civilized, and you started calling me names (or vice-versa), then I get to ignore you, and stop reading and responding. I don't get to start trying to find out who you are in real life because I respect your privacy, and I respect the forum chosen is one where there is an expectation of anonymity.
This seems like it's inviting abuse, but anyone who's ever done anything on the internet already knows that.
Without such forums where people can expect to retain some form of anonymity, there are a lot of important things that would never be said because people fear the consequences to their normal life. A lot of that is absolutely useless trolling, and like you said abuse of this right. A lot of it is not. This nation was literally shaped by writings from people who chose to, for various reasons, publish anonymously (such as with the Federalist Papers). Am I saying this trolling moron is the next James Madison? Of course not. What I am saying is that I will take the potential for abuse in order to gain the benefits.
How do you feel about anonymous donations to SuperPACs then? What about anonymous bomb threats?
Like they cross the line from speech to illegal actions? SuperPACs are required to name report their donors and bomb threats (as well as any other type of threat) and threats of violence have already been ruled by the supreme court as falling outside the first amendment. These are several accepted limits to free speech in the United States. You've named a few. Others are slander and libel laws, as well as fraud, and harassment. I don't think any of those things should be legal, and I'm not sure why you're assuming that I would.
CNN made the claim that this gif was inciting violence against journalists, that doesn't seem so different.
Yeah, and that's something else which they should know better. The hyperbole needs to stop. If the gif had replaced the wrestler with a particular CNN journalist, I'd see that point of view. With the CNN logo, any reasonable person would interpret that as a normal violence-based analogy. If we were going to play a game of one-on-one basketball and I told you, "I'm going to kick your ass," I'd expect you to be smart enough to not take that as a threat of violence, right? I think it's pretty clear it was merely meant as a humorous "Trump is winning against CNN."
The disturbing part about Trump posting the gif, the thing we really should be talking about, is that he sees the media as an adversarial relationship. Like he needs to beat them at their game instead of just fucking stop lying to the press while pretending they're the ones lying. The fact that he thinks he needs to be in a credibility war with CNN was the news story. The fact CNN decided to be fake victims and take it upon themselves to turn an internet troll into a respectable citizen has caused them to legitimately lose some of that credibility. They need to be smart enough to be put ethics over ratings if they want to be able to claim the moral high ground here.
Following up an obvious lead and calling the guy who made the meme in the first place was a small part of the story, not really important but a nice little thing to flesh it out. And since Trump is involved, being thorough is expected and generally necessary.
Again, I think this is our main point of disagreement here. It's not that I disagr
You're suggesting that it would have been more responsible for them to critique the president without doing any background investigation into what it is that he was saying? "Today the president has continued being awful. Where does he get this stuff anyway? Who knows? Not us. Let's not find out."
How is the guy who created the meme relevant? It is relevant where the President found the meme before retweeting it, because it gives you an insight on where the President gets his information. It would be relevant to find the guy if he had a direct connection to the President, because it tells you who has the ear of the President. But beyond that, it gives you no information.
If you're going to go down your path, you might as well be arguing that it's not responsible for them to critique this guy until they find out which teacher he had had for art in second grade, who maybe influenced his style of adding logos on tops of heads in videos. How can they possibly give you the facts on him unless they interview his parents, his teachers, his friends?
At some point, going another layer deep doesn't gain you anything relevant. The site where Trump got the video is where the relevancy stops. Anything beyond that absolutely is tabloid behavior, capitalizing on something that went viral for ratings without concern to the public interest.
Maybe read the actual source article [cnn.com], it's pretty tame.
I did read the source article, long before I started posting. And I was surprised to find out it was much worse than people have been saying. if you think the following text shouldn't get the everyone involved to at least be reprimanded, than you and I have very different opinions on journalism ethics:
CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Responsible news organization don't get to threaten people. The facts are either in the public interest or they are not. And a private citizen who doesn't want to be identified should never be identified, period. It shouldn't even be a question. He's either a public figure and his identity is important information for the public, or he's a private citizen whose identity should be protected unless he agrees to go on record.
A news organization absolutely doesn't get to use one's fears to change their behavior. Should Fox publish a list of names of everyone who goes to Trump protests? It should be easy to find that information, and the protest itself IS news to be reported on. The question is, what do you get by tracking down names?
Think about what you're saying here though. You're saying that what the President of the United States says to the public is not only not worth reporting on, but that it lessens a news organization for doing so.
I think if you read my post again, you'll see that I said precisely the opposite.
What I said is that what the President of the United States says to the public is very much reporting on. What some Reddit troll who never had direct contact with the President does is not. And that by going after the Reddit troll, CNN managed to take the spotlight away from the Trump's behavior, distracting us from what really does matter with their own bad behavior.
What CNN did actually do: they tracked down an internet poster, and then called him for a statement. They could have just published his name without calling him first, but that's irresponsible journalism.
I'm not sure what was leading up to that was "responsible journalism" either. I mean, tracking down an internet poster of a meme? That's tabloid-level shit.
I get Trump posted the meme, and that's news. But the news is that Trump posted the meme, who the fuck cares who made it? And if it's relevant that whoever made it is a racist anti-Semite because Trump follows those types of people, the news would be that Trump is following racist anti-Semites. The dude himself isn't a public figure, he's some guy trolling on Reddit. How would you like it if Fox News tracked down the source of some anti-Trump meme that a prominent Democrat retweeted, discovered the same guy also posted some "antifa" stuff that encouraged violence, then agreed to refrain from revealing his identity only if he agrees never to do it again?
I'm not defending Trump here. Posting shitty memes should be below the dignity of his office. Every time I think he can't sink any lower, he somehow manages, on a daily basis at that. But thanks to CNN, instead of having a real discussion about this, now we have to admit the Trump followers talking about bad behavior from the mainstream media actually have a point, in this one instance. This was below the dignity of a respectable news organization.
They could have ignored his request not to be identified, which... I guess they should have done, as heartless as it may be. They're getting a lot of shit for their compassion right now.
You're ignoring their option to simply respect his request without conditions. How exactly does revealing his identity serve the public interest?
Again, that's assuming there even was a story which was worth tracking the guy down for in the first place, and I don't think there was.
Here's my view: If you sell a product, you should fix any bugs or non-performance issues that relate to claims made when you sold it. Application, OS, driver, etc.
If I sell you a product, I don't have to fix anything. I have to give you what you paid for, which is the product in the state that it was when you bought it. Our relationship is then over.
If, in addition to the product, I entered into an agreement where you get bug fixes and updates, then yes, you are entitled to those updates. The duration of time for which you're entitled to those updates is specified in that agreement. It could be forever, but that would be very stupid on my part as a developer.
If, in addition to the update agreement, we have a support services agreement in which I've agreed to write custom fixes to the software to make sure it works for your use case, then, for as long as you pay me for that particular contract, I'm obliged to write fixes for any bugs you find. Those are generally expensive, for obvious reasons. Still worth it for many companies.
Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
Well, I tried Mint when the Unity thing happened, but the whole, "google needs to pay us or we'll remove it from the list of default search engines in our version of Firefox" thing bothered me on a philosophical level (I know I could and I did manually add it, but they were trying to charge money to stop them from removing a feature instead of charging money to add a feature, and that rubs me the wrong way) and I immediately returned to Ubuntu. Not GUbuntu, but not unity either. You can always just apt-get gnome, which I did, after trying KDE4 and thinking it was even worse.
At the time Gnome3 was much worse than it is now, but now it can be customizable to the point that I prefer it to Gnome2 and the alternatives that try to emulate Gnome2. And if you don't agree, you could always apt-get MATE.
People freak out over Unity and whatever else, but those are just default options. Install whatever window manager you want.
I suppose there are times when that's true. For instance, limiting the work-week to 40 hours, and after that time-and-a-half. You may prefer a 50 hour week or a 30 hour week.
It can be way more fundamental than that. Sometimes it can be even be an ethical disagreement over some issue.
But, long story short, I view that loss of freedom as similar to the loss of freedom living in a society. You miss out on some autonomy, but in return you get a range of benefits that should more than compensate you. And a voice (via elections) in what those benefits are. While occasionally you'll be screwed some, it's hard to imagine how a system could work that didn't do that to anyone, ever.
I'm fairly pragmatic about that, and I agree with you that sometimes you trade some fundamental rights by living in a society. But the system of that society is pretty important. The United States is currently polling as 70% Christian. If we straight off voted via an election to make that the official religion of the country and started enforcing certain beliefs over the remaining 30%, that would be a bad system of government. Instead we have a system that says that no matter what the majority of people believe in, individually everybody has the right to believe or not believe in whatever they wish, and that right is not to be infringed upon. Protecting individual freedoms from a tyranny of the majority is something I believe in.
It may be "unfair", but it is definitely the results of a free negotiation between two parties. Now, if you want to discuss limiting their freedom to enter into contracts with each other, that's fine. I don't think that freedom is absolute. But as most people professing your beliefs are fairly libertarian in outlook, I'd like to impose on you to explain why it's okay in this case. Especially since the right you think it is imposing on is your right to enter into a contract with one of those parties under your preferred conditions.
You've sort of got me pegged, but libertarians come in a spectrum. Sometimes when you just see the most vocal among us, you can get the wrong idea. For example, I'm a libertarian who is very much in favor of strong anti-trust laws. I come to this belief because even though I believe the free market is the way to achieve the best results, I also believe monopolies are a failure mode. In fact, the general distrust of the ability of government to take on duties that I believe are best handled by private enterprise is because the government is a monopoly, so having any one company be the monopoly isn't any better. In this case, I see the union as the monopoly, if you're not allowed to work without being a member.
I believe the original intent was to try to damage unions by allowing free riders, and also make it harder to have a de facto union shop.
Your confusing concepts. The only freedom you lose is the freedom to get a worse deal. Technically you are less free in that dimension, but its hard for me to imagine its a valuable freedom. Especially when compared to the freedom you get from having more money.
That's not true. What if the group is negotiating for something I don't agree with? Most people in the union can think something is a better deal, but I can personally think that's not true.
In a union shop, they do. One of the benefits they negotiate for is the right to work at that company
That particular right prevents anyone else from competing with them on negotiations, which in my opinion gives them an unfair amount of power.
they're not allowed to have split-benefits like that - thank (mostly republican) lawmakers.
Well, I'm certainly against any laws that would prevent them from doing that. To me that's equivalent of removing my freedom to negotiate my own deals, except in this case it's removing their freedom from negotiating their own deals.
I don't think that's true, but if it were, that would be enough for me to side against collectivism.
I'm not here to say unions haven't gotten us great things like child labor laws, 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, etc. This is fantastic. That said, if the cost for those great things are that I lose my choice to bargain for myself and HAVE to join an union, I'd rather not have those things.
Luckily, I think collectivism does work when it's not mandatory. Not being mandatory is, in fact, a great check on the corruption of unions just as much as unions are a check on the corruption of employers. When conditions are really bad, more people join the union, causing the employers to make concessions. When the unions make unreasonable demands, people leave the unions because they'd rather have a paying job. The equilibrium point of union membership gives you the fairest situation. In fact, ideally you'd be able to join competing unions that make different demands that better match what YOU want to bargain for.
I once went without sleep for 5 days, and while the 5th day was wasted, the 3rd and 4th were amazing for getting work done, particularly writing. I wrote a semester's worth of work on landscape architecture during that 5 day stretch, and having re-read a lot of it (15 years later) recently, it's a) not bad, and b) not something I could do now on a good day.
Uh...I once went 76 hours without sleep while finishing up my senior project in college. Toward the end of that period, I was in the computer lab writing, I looked at the clock, I wrote a sentence, I looked at the clock again and 20 minutes had passed. That's when I decided I wouldn't be productive anymore without going to sleep, so I walked to my dorm to take a few hours.
I later found out my roommate had seen me in the computer lab during that period, went in to say hello, but I was completely unresponsive, with my hands on the keyboard and staring at the screen. He figured I was too busy and annoyed to respond back, thought I was being weird for not at least saying that I was too busy to talk, but left anyway. I have no recollection of that, I assume he showed up during that missing 20 minutes. Turns out you start micro-sleeping when you're that sleep deprived. So you're telling me you were amazingly productive on the 3rd and 4th day? I mean, there's a point in sleep deprivation where you move past being tired and get an euphoria going that actually focuses you, but that's within the first 24 hours. After that, it just seemed to get progressively worse with me, until eventually there wasn't any productivity to be wrung out.
Don't forget that the original Star Trek was cancelled. I'd say the number of great shows that were cancelled far outweighs the number that eventually survived for their full "natural" duration.
I'm a Star Trek fan, as you can tell by my username. I also do like the Original Series, and can point to several legitimately good episodes in it. A good show it was not, at least not consistently. For every good episode there were many more that I only enjoy today in the same way I enjoy MST3K movies. And even for the Trekkies who believe TOS was a great TV show, you'll find none that thought the third season was any good. The season that gave us "Spock's Brain" deserved to be cancelled.
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So instead, we have hayseeds in the middle of the country making bad decisions for the bulk of the people who live in this country. Yeah, that's much better. That makes so much more sense.
And that's the argument for less federal power and more state rights.
I give you the cosmic microwave background.
That makes no sense at all. We're all people- even cops.
I don't think it's about hating cops, but it should be about the understanding that the job comes with responsibility and risk.
I wasn't happy when Challenger or Columbia exploded and astronauts died. I also fully supported the ensuing investigation and steps taken to rectify the mistakes that allowed it to happen in order to prevent further loss of life. But, if I sign up to be an astronaut, it's understood that there is a risk other people don't take, so I should expect many more astronauts to die as a result of space shuttle explosions than civilians. If either shuttle explosion had killed regular people in their residences, that would have been a much bigger problem.
Police officers are placed in situations where their life is put at risk, but that's the job they signed up for. That's the job they received training to handle well. The standard for whether it's justified to kill someone because you feel your life is in danger should therefore be greater for a police officer than for a civilian: police officers should be receiving training on how to diffuse situations regular people don't know how to handle. They should be willing to put their life in risk to protect others whether that expectation shouldn't be placed on the clerk of a store being robbed at gunpoint.
Within those constraints, if we can minimize the risk to police, that's great. If we can lower the number of officer deaths to zero, that's ideal. But a higher standard should be expected of police officers than civilians, as well as a greater tolerance of risk.
That's precisely what I do.
Disney decanonized the EU, but especially after seeing Force Awakens, I'd rather decanonize the new movies. It was bad enough I don't intend on watching VIII or IX
Rogue One was a solid addition though, so I'll continue giving the spinoffs a chance.
That makes it desirable, now what makes it good?
Because there's only one definition of 'good' that makes sense to me, and that is achieving what I desire.
Tesla also uses radar. That's an active sensor, so it's gotta consume a bit more than that.
Other car companies use lidar as well.
You make very well-thought points about the technical stuff, but I disagree with your conclusions. I don't think your pessimism is logical based on the points you've made.
Group of sheep on both sides of the road: not as safe, but probably safe. Lamb on one side, ewe on the other? Very dangerous - the lamb will invariably run to its mother as you approach. Where's the ewe-lamb-running algorithm?
Sure, but to be fair if I had to travel to your area and rent a car, not knowing anything about the behavior of sheep, as a human driver I would be pretty terrible compared to you in that situation. But I doubt you'd say I don't deserve to have a driver's license, because that's a pretty unusual circumstance. I also doubt that even in your area, when you were taking the driving written test, that they had a section on whether you understood the intricacies of sheep behavior.
That's not because your experiences aren't valuable in that situation: it's because there's a difference between a driver and an experienced driver. You get the basic rules of the road going, and statistically you're safe enough to be trusted to be on the road. Young drivers are statistically less safe than experienced ones though. And you will tend to gather experience that relates to the particular location you drive in. Case in point, I'm pretty good at anticipating behavior from drivers in my area, but I've driven in another country and the same cues didn't apply. Still, I didn't get into an accident, being less experienced increases your risk, but it can still be an increased yet acceptable risk.
Where am I going with this? Well, autonomous driving is like an inexperienced driver with a lot of raw talent. It has an advantage over every human driver, including you, in that it will **never** get distracted, or tired. It has a field of vision of 360 degrees at all times, instead of having to choose what it will look at now. It has sensors that can see through objects you can't, so when I'm trying to turn in an area where the parked cars obstruct my view of an incoming car? It doesn't have that problem, it sees the incoming car.
Will it make worse decisions than I would given all the same information? During unexpected hazardous conditions, and assuming I'm not driving after not getting much sleep last night because I had to do another all-nighter at work...probably so. But the fact it has more information than I do and invariable alertness means that even though it would get me into accidents I wouldn't get into if I were driving, it nevertheless will get into less accidents, because it will avoid many of those more common accidents that I would get into if I were driving.
Not only that, but the sheep avoidance algorithm? It's coming. We're talking about the early inexperienced autonomous vehicle, but it's not always going to remain that way. Every time there's an accident with an autonomous vehicles there are logs to be examined. Engineers will pour over them and try to figure out if there's anything that can be done to avoid that type of accident. The problems that occur most often are fixed first, but eventually the system will be good enough that anticipation of animal behavior will be significant. At which point an update gets pushed to your car, and it now knows to slow down and be ready to avoid that road-crossing lamb. Because, unlike humans, when *one* autonomous vehicle gains experience, *all* autonomous vehicles gain that experience. And that's reason to be pretty optimistic.
We're already at "spew conspiracy theories."
Yes, I remember the Microsoft of the 1990s. However, Microsoft has been Open Source friendly for a far longer time than the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics of the past. Anybody still freaking out about them is actually being counter-productivity, by not giving credit to companies who actually did become better.
People like you were the ones sounding the horn when Microsoft created the .Net framework over a decade ago as an open standard and were screaming that they didn't want Mono in Linux because they were just about to sue everyone for patent infringement. Microsoft responded by publishing a covenant not to sue, and that the patents would be used defensively opened. Then people like you screamed that this covenant was not legally binding, because they were ignorant of the concept of estoppel, I guess. Did any of your fears come to pass?
Yes, Microsoft just extended the Linux kernel. To operate with a Microsoft service, affecting absolutely nobody else. That adds no additional features other than improved performance in their cloud service. We're supposed to all be freaking out that they're planning on destroying Linux when they're doing something that makes using Linux better in their cloud environment so they can better compete with the same service on Amazon EC2? Please. We're supposed to be afraid of extensions to a GPLv2 project that is necessarily open source as a result of the kernel license? Are you insane, what exactly is the mechanism for "extinguish" here? It's not like they can lock up any of the cool stuff they added, if people think it's valuable, they can get what they like and merge it to the mainstream kernel, Microsoft can't stop them. This is no different than a variety of custom kernel options that ubuntu offers, which already included one that's specialized for virtual machines.
This isn't 1999, and Canonical isn't SCO. Microsoft has been acting like a trustworthy company for a very long time, and contributed a good deal to various open source projects. Get over the evils of the past and reward a company for making a fantastic turnaround. Yes, it's true, they didn't do it to be nice, but because they don't have the same monopoly position they used to: nevertheless, they could have died off, but instead maintained relevance in the industry by working well with others. That's a good thing.
You have a fair point, you're right about the Marvel series, my bad.
Still, the stuff they do actually produce and own can become additional sources of income.
Well, that's also putting the marginal cost of the subscriber at 0. There is some cost for infrastructure that increases with subscriber coun
I agree, but that number doesn't include things that decrease the cost. You mentioned that costs go up with shows they have to license, but you didn't mention they have to license less shows if they have enough content they own. Original shows like Daredevil are also getting blu-ray releases, and we're not counting the revenue from that, etc.
I think the point is that while that can make sense for 'starting up', at *some* point you have to point and say 'here's where revenue will exceed investment'.
Agreed.
The problem is the statement on its face doesn't imply that the investment will stop.
Not agreed. It just means you need a critical mass of subscribers to support the continued investment.
If their investment outstrips subscription revenue by 2.5 billion annually, well you need to be able to find 2.5 billion worth of new subscribers.
Netflix costs more than $1 / year per subscriber. At the minimum of $8/month, it means they would need an additional ~26 million subscribers, and they got 5 million in the past 3 months. That's without considering the people paying $10 for hd streaming and $12 for 4k streaming, or excluding future price increases once they think they have enough content to keep subscribers with said increase.
That statement makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense.
He's saying his cash flow will be negative because they will be investing in new products.
And that those products will lead to money in the long-term: "that's a lot of capital up front, and then you get a payout over many years"
However, new products are not an indicator for success. Sales is!
"During Netflix's quarterly earnings call, in which it noted it had added more than five million subscribers in the last three months..." Those are the sales, right? Ideally the new subscribers are going to stay with netflix and keep paying them for a long time.
That's where you want to make that distinction? You can only be held accountable for what you say to the public in public on a public forum, as long as you say that you said it?
What do you mean by 'held accountable', here? This isn't a guy who broke any laws.
I do believe that if you say something to the public in a public forum, then it's fantastic that it is indeed a public forum, because people can argue against you. Like we're having a civilized discussion right now, while on opposing sides. If this discussion turned less than civilized, and you started calling me names (or vice-versa), then I get to ignore you, and stop reading and responding. I don't get to start trying to find out who you are in real life because I respect your privacy, and I respect the forum chosen is one where there is an expectation of anonymity.
This seems like it's inviting abuse, but anyone who's ever done anything on the internet already knows that.
Without such forums where people can expect to retain some form of anonymity, there are a lot of important things that would never be said because people fear the consequences to their normal life. A lot of that is absolutely useless trolling, and like you said abuse of this right. A lot of it is not. This nation was literally shaped by writings from people who chose to, for various reasons, publish anonymously (such as with the Federalist Papers). Am I saying this trolling moron is the next James Madison? Of course not. What I am saying is that I will take the potential for abuse in order to gain the benefits.
How do you feel about anonymous donations to SuperPACs then? What about anonymous bomb threats?
Like they cross the line from speech to illegal actions? SuperPACs are required to name report their donors and bomb threats (as well as any other type of threat) and threats of violence have already been ruled by the supreme court as falling outside the first amendment. These are several accepted limits to free speech in the United States. You've named a few. Others are slander and libel laws, as well as fraud, and harassment. I don't think any of those things should be legal, and I'm not sure why you're assuming that I would.
CNN made the claim that this gif was inciting violence against journalists, that doesn't seem so different.
Yeah, and that's something else which they should know better. The hyperbole needs to stop. If the gif had replaced the wrestler with a particular CNN journalist, I'd see that point of view. With the CNN logo, any reasonable person would interpret that as a normal violence-based analogy. If we were going to play a game of one-on-one basketball and I told you, "I'm going to kick your ass," I'd expect you to be smart enough to not take that as a threat of violence, right? I think it's pretty clear it was merely meant as a humorous "Trump is winning against CNN."
The disturbing part about Trump posting the gif, the thing we really should be talking about, is that he sees the media as an adversarial relationship. Like he needs to beat them at their game instead of just fucking stop lying to the press while pretending they're the ones lying. The fact that he thinks he needs to be in a credibility war with CNN was the news story. The fact CNN decided to be fake victims and take it upon themselves to turn an internet troll into a respectable citizen has caused them to legitimately lose some of that credibility. They need to be smart enough to be put ethics over ratings if they want to be able to claim the moral high ground here.
Following up an obvious lead and calling the guy who made the meme in the first place was a small part of the story, not really important but a nice little thing to flesh it out. And since Trump is involved, being thorough is expected and generally necessary.
Again, I think this is our main point of disagreement here. It's not that I disagr
You're suggesting that it would have been more responsible for them to critique the president without doing any background investigation into what it is that he was saying? "Today the president has continued being awful. Where does he get this stuff anyway? Who knows? Not us. Let's not find out."
How is the guy who created the meme relevant? It is relevant where the President found the meme before retweeting it, because it gives you an insight on where the President gets his information. It would be relevant to find the guy if he had a direct connection to the President, because it tells you who has the ear of the President. But beyond that, it gives you no information.
If you're going to go down your path, you might as well be arguing that it's not responsible for them to critique this guy until they find out which teacher he had had for art in second grade, who maybe influenced his style of adding logos on tops of heads in videos. How can they possibly give you the facts on him unless they interview his parents, his teachers, his friends?
At some point, going another layer deep doesn't gain you anything relevant. The site where Trump got the video is where the relevancy stops. Anything beyond that absolutely is tabloid behavior, capitalizing on something that went viral for ratings without concern to the public interest.
Maybe read the actual source article [cnn.com], it's pretty tame.
I did read the source article, long before I started posting. And I was surprised to find out it was much worse than people have been saying. if you think the following text shouldn't get the everyone involved to at least be reprimanded, than you and I have very different opinions on journalism ethics:
CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Responsible news organization don't get to threaten people. The facts are either in the public interest or they are not. And a private citizen who doesn't want to be identified should never be identified, period. It shouldn't even be a question. He's either a public figure and his identity is important information for the public, or he's a private citizen whose identity should be protected unless he agrees to go on record.
A news organization absolutely doesn't get to use one's fears to change their behavior. Should Fox publish a list of names of everyone who goes to Trump protests? It should be easy to find that information, and the protest itself IS news to be reported on. The question is, what do you get by tracking down names?
Think about what you're saying here though. You're saying that what the President of the United States says to the public is not only not worth reporting on, but that it lessens a news organization for doing so.
I think if you read my post again, you'll see that I said precisely the opposite.
What I said is that what the President of the United States says to the public is very much reporting on. What some Reddit troll who never had direct contact with the President does is not. And that by going after the Reddit troll, CNN managed to take the spotlight away from the Trump's behavior, distracting us from what really does matter with their own bad behavior.
What CNN did actually do: they tracked down an internet poster, and then called him for a statement. They could have just published his name without calling him first, but that's irresponsible journalism.
I'm not sure what was leading up to that was "responsible journalism" either. I mean, tracking down an internet poster of a meme? That's tabloid-level shit.
I get Trump posted the meme, and that's news. But the news is that Trump posted the meme, who the fuck cares who made it? And if it's relevant that whoever made it is a racist anti-Semite because Trump follows those types of people, the news would be that Trump is following racist anti-Semites. The dude himself isn't a public figure, he's some guy trolling on Reddit. How would you like it if Fox News tracked down the source of some anti-Trump meme that a prominent Democrat retweeted, discovered the same guy also posted some "antifa" stuff that encouraged violence, then agreed to refrain from revealing his identity only if he agrees never to do it again?
I'm not defending Trump here. Posting shitty memes should be below the dignity of his office. Every time I think he can't sink any lower, he somehow manages, on a daily basis at that. But thanks to CNN, instead of having a real discussion about this, now we have to admit the Trump followers talking about bad behavior from the mainstream media actually have a point, in this one instance. This was below the dignity of a respectable news organization.
They could have ignored his request not to be identified, which... I guess they should have done, as heartless as it may be. They're getting a lot of shit for their compassion right now.
You're ignoring their option to simply respect his request without conditions. How exactly does revealing his identity serve the public interest?
Again, that's assuming there even was a story which was worth tracking the guy down for in the first place, and I don't think there was.
Here's my view: If you sell a product, you should fix any bugs or non-performance issues that relate to claims made when you sold it. Application, OS, driver, etc.
If I sell you a product, I don't have to fix anything. I have to give you what you paid for, which is the product in the state that it was when you bought it. Our relationship is then over.
If, in addition to the product, I entered into an agreement where you get bug fixes and updates, then yes, you are entitled to those updates. The duration of time for which you're entitled to those updates is specified in that agreement. It could be forever, but that would be very stupid on my part as a developer.
If, in addition to the update agreement, we have a support services agreement in which I've agreed to write custom fixes to the software to make sure it works for your use case, then, for as long as you pay me for that particular contract, I'm obliged to write fixes for any bugs you find. Those are generally expensive, for obvious reasons. Still worth it for many companies.
Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
Well, I tried Mint when the Unity thing happened, but the whole, "google needs to pay us or we'll remove it from the list of default search engines in our version of Firefox" thing bothered me on a philosophical level (I know I could and I did manually add it, but they were trying to charge money to stop them from removing a feature instead of charging money to add a feature, and that rubs me the wrong way) and I immediately returned to Ubuntu. Not GUbuntu, but not unity either. You can always just apt-get gnome, which I did, after trying KDE4 and thinking it was even worse.
At the time Gnome3 was much worse than it is now, but now it can be customizable to the point that I prefer it to Gnome2 and the alternatives that try to emulate Gnome2. And if you don't agree, you could always apt-get MATE.
People freak out over Unity and whatever else, but those are just default options. Install whatever window manager you want.
I suppose there are times when that's true. For instance, limiting the work-week to 40 hours, and after that time-and-a-half. You may prefer a 50 hour week or a 30 hour week.
It can be way more fundamental than that. Sometimes it can be even be an ethical disagreement over some issue.
But, long story short, I view that loss of freedom as similar to the loss of freedom living in a society. You miss out on some autonomy, but in return you get a range of benefits that should more than compensate you. And a voice (via elections) in what those benefits are. While occasionally you'll be screwed some, it's hard to imagine how a system could work that didn't do that to anyone, ever.
I'm fairly pragmatic about that, and I agree with you that sometimes you trade some fundamental rights by living in a society. But the system of that society is pretty important. The United States is currently polling as 70% Christian. If we straight off voted via an election to make that the official religion of the country and started enforcing certain beliefs over the remaining 30%, that would be a bad system of government. Instead we have a system that says that no matter what the majority of people believe in, individually everybody has the right to believe or not believe in whatever they wish, and that right is not to be infringed upon. Protecting individual freedoms from a tyranny of the majority is something I believe in.
It may be "unfair", but it is definitely the results of a free negotiation between two parties. Now, if you want to discuss limiting their freedom to enter into contracts with each other, that's fine. I don't think that freedom is absolute. But as most people professing your beliefs are fairly libertarian in outlook, I'd like to impose on you to explain why it's okay in this case. Especially since the right you think it is imposing on is your right to enter into a contract with one of those parties under your preferred conditions.
You've sort of got me pegged, but libertarians come in a spectrum. Sometimes when you just see the most vocal among us, you can get the wrong idea. For example, I'm a libertarian who is very much in favor of strong anti-trust laws. I come to this belief because even though I believe the free market is the way to achieve the best results, I also believe monopolies are a failure mode. In fact, the general distrust of the ability of government to take on duties that I believe are best handled by private enterprise is because the government is a monopoly, so having any one company be the monopoly isn't any better. In this case, I see the union as the monopoly, if you're not allowed to work without being a member.
I believe the original intent was to try to damage unions by allowing free riders, and also make it harder to have a de facto union shop.
I agree, and like I said, I'm against such laws.
Your confusing concepts. The only freedom you lose is the freedom to get a worse deal. Technically you are less free in that dimension, but its hard for me to imagine its a valuable freedom. Especially when compared to the freedom you get from having more money.
That's not true. What if the group is negotiating for something I don't agree with? Most people in the union can think something is a better deal, but I can personally think that's not true.
In a union shop, they do. One of the benefits they negotiate for is the right to work at that company
That particular right prevents anyone else from competing with them on negotiations, which in my opinion gives them an unfair amount of power.
they're not allowed to have split-benefits like that - thank (mostly republican) lawmakers.
Well, I'm certainly against any laws that would prevent them from doing that. To me that's equivalent of removing my freedom to negotiate my own deals, except in this case it's removing their freedom from negotiating their own deals.
Quit Dunning-Kruger'ing all over the place. You really think you can do a better job negotiating for yourself than a group that
No, I don't. But I'd rather get a worst deal than lose my freedom.
However, the situation being discussed is when you collect your union-negotiated benefits and wages, and then decline to pay the union dues.
Unions should negotiate union-only benefits. So if you leave the union, you lose whatever benefits they negotiated for. Problem solved.
Collectivism only works when it's mandatory
I don't think that's true, but if it were, that would be enough for me to side against collectivism.
I'm not here to say unions haven't gotten us great things like child labor laws, 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, etc. This is fantastic. That said, if the cost for those great things are that I lose my choice to bargain for myself and HAVE to join an union, I'd rather not have those things.
Luckily, I think collectivism does work when it's not mandatory. Not being mandatory is, in fact, a great check on the corruption of unions just as much as unions are a check on the corruption of employers. When conditions are really bad, more people join the union, causing the employers to make concessions. When the unions make unreasonable demands, people leave the unions because they'd rather have a paying job. The equilibrium point of union membership gives you the fairest situation. In fact, ideally you'd be able to join competing unions that make different demands that better match what YOU want to bargain for.
I once went without sleep for 5 days, and while the 5th day was wasted, the 3rd and 4th were amazing for getting work done, particularly writing. I wrote a semester's worth of work on landscape architecture during that 5 day stretch, and having re-read a lot of it (15 years later) recently, it's a) not bad, and b) not something I could do now on a good day.
Uh...I once went 76 hours without sleep while finishing up my senior project in college. Toward the end of that period, I was in the computer lab writing, I looked at the clock, I wrote a sentence, I looked at the clock again and 20 minutes had passed. That's when I decided I wouldn't be productive anymore without going to sleep, so I walked to my dorm to take a few hours.
I later found out my roommate had seen me in the computer lab during that period, went in to say hello, but I was completely unresponsive, with my hands on the keyboard and staring at the screen. He figured I was too busy and annoyed to respond back, thought I was being weird for not at least saying that I was too busy to talk, but left anyway. I have no recollection of that, I assume he showed up during that missing 20 minutes. Turns out you start micro-sleeping when you're that sleep deprived. So you're telling me you were amazingly productive on the 3rd and 4th day? I mean, there's a point in sleep deprivation where you move past being tired and get an euphoria going that actually focuses you, but that's within the first 24 hours. After that, it just seemed to get progressively worse with me, until eventually there wasn't any productivity to be wrung out.
I have, and it is indeed absolutely awesome.
Don't forget that the original Star Trek was cancelled. I'd say the number of great shows that were cancelled far outweighs the number that eventually survived for their full "natural" duration.
I'm a Star Trek fan, as you can tell by my username. I also do like the Original Series, and can point to several legitimately good episodes in it. A good show it was not, at least not consistently. For every good episode there were many more that I only enjoy today in the same way I enjoy MST3K movies. And even for the Trekkies who believe TOS was a great TV show, you'll find none that thought the third season was any good. The season that gave us "Spock's Brain" deserved to be cancelled.