Hell yeah. It's OK to send 18 year old barely-not-children-anymore to the hell hole Middle East with a pretty decent chance of dying - and usually for something shitty like a roadside bomb on top of it - not even in direct combat defending something - just in hopes that if they survive their education will be paid for - yet it's not ethical for someone to go to freaking Mars voluntarily if they want?
To quote you - Fuck. That. Hard.
Our priorities here are beyond fucked - but you only have to look at the war budget vs the NASA budget to know that. I'm sure someone has the statistics, but I'm pretty sure that what we spend on NASA in a year is equivalent to what - hours, days in war funding for the Middle East?
I agree. Hell, you can just slap a stick-on mirror over a broken one, in a pinch. I was driving cross-country once and needed to do just that - it got me through that trip until I was able to replace it. If the camera/connector/cable/display goes wonky it would have been a much more time consuming, expensive, and bitchly process, even just to figure out what stopped working.
There is also something to be said about feeling disconnected - no pun intended - that you get in video but you don't get in mirrors. You are looking at a direct reflection of reality with your own eyes as opposed to a digital image - it may not be measurable in metrics but your eyes are still seeing the reflection (insert "objects are closer than they appear" message, LOL) versus a digital eye that you then interpret. I just think disconnecting ourselves further from what is outside of our cars is probably not the best idea.
All that said, unless I'm in bumper to bumper street traffic, I don't really use side mirrors much to begin with (yet by all accounts I think I am a pretty decent driver - I was in one accident when I was 16 (20 years ago) and I've driven well over 700K miles since then - I have no "points on my license" etc., and I'm usually complemented - I think it comes from the combo of my mom racing cars and my dad being a police officer, LOL). Some driving instructors will tell you to use the mirrors, but old school ones tell you to actually turn your head when you can (especially on the highway when nothing is straight in front of you). It's just a second (less time than if you futz with some control) and then you actually see with your own eyes. It may not work for everyone, but it's worked for me - and removing myself twice from that by not only not using the mirrors, but a video camera, just seems silly for me, at least.
Hey, at least it's better than digging-our-heels-in-screw-the-users-we-know-better Apple. I applaud them for making this change, it may actually get me to reinstall Windows 8. I don't have a touch screen on my desk, and I don't want one (who wants to constantly be reaching up instead of tiny mouse flicks), but at least Microsoft has the balls to admit they were wrong and are undoing it. Unlike Apple, which fucks up your interface, everything about how you use their OS (iOS7 = I'll never purchase another Apple phone again) and tells you to like it or to fuck off, no you can't choose the background of your notepad because we know better than you what you should like.
When I think back to 20 years ago when Microsoft was the big bad and Apple was the almost "holistic" alternative, it's amazing how a few extremely successful products can change the perception of a company. Steve Jobs died a lonely but very very rich asshole who folks struggled to say a kind word about beyond his "design expertise" (did you hear one person say anything actually NICE about him? I actually sought out articles about his death looking and I couldn't find a single one) and here is DR. Evil himself Bill gates running around the globe giving away billions of dollars and actually improving the quality of life for people all over the planet, not just giving a gee-cool-slickly designed device or two to middle-to-upperclass folks who have the luxury of being able to afford a smartphone and it's service so we can feed our endless consumption appetite.
Who ever knew Microsoft would end up being the "good" sibling.
If you mean "inevitable wave of the future", as in "3-D movies in the home is the inevitable wave of the future" or "nuclear power is the inevitable wave of the future"...well, all I can say is, good luck with that, LOL.
That's also the conceit Star Trek uses, although the entire ship doesn't spin, just a plate within it. Like many space travel issues, we know how to do it, or at least have a reasonable idea of how it can be done, but it's difficult because even if we had the funding, the only ways in which things are possible would have the side effect of turning us into mush/killing us in the process. It's force fields that are the ingredient we really need to make a lot of this stuff work around our fragile human bodies.
It's how it is with so many things. Grains of truth may be there, but those who protest the loudest always have to go too far and come off with ridiculous crap like this so people like you and I just end up being disillusioned to the entire movement. It's like the "Woman in the Refridgerator" comic book stuff - sure, could women be better represented in comics? Of course. But when every little thing is brought forth and used as de facto evidence of something, it just makes you shake your head and walk away (for example, you cannot complain that too many female villains are too pretty and then complain when the "ugly" one is evil).
The folks that perpetrate this type of rhetoric think they are serving the greater good (think: Al Gore) but in the end they make even open minded people turn off totally because they think they have to overstate and inflate things to get our attention. According to Al Gore's statements a decade or so ago we are only what, five or six years from Manhattan being under the ocean? Please.
It has reached these religious levels where you cannot even have a rational discussion about it. It's also hypocritical - not to beat on Al Gore again, but how many private plane flights has that guy taken? I don't see him using a bicycle to get everywhere and he's probably one of the folks that drives an electric car and doesn't realize the environmental impact of the limited-lifespan batteries in them are no better for the overall environment than burning fossil fuels (the pounds of nickel in the batteries is devastating, dangerous, and rare to mine, usually by child labor).
Right there with you. Wasting such resources on on computations explicitly designed to tax equipment for what amounts to a hardware pissing contest, burning actual finite resources to do so (metals, coal for electricity, etc.).
As to the posting, it was only a matter of time before disruptive forces like this began to pop up. One way or another, in order for BitCoin to become what it wants to become (a legitimate currency) it's has to succumb to the very thing it was trying not to be (at the mercy of "big business"/corporatiszation and government regulated like the new IRS rules regarding it).
Yes, I read it - as painful as it was since it was written so poorly and scattered to begin with - and I'm a Blu-ray lover, thank you.:)
Other folks have addressed some of his other fallacies in terms of "allowing", rights issues, etc. - as I said, I didn't want to take the time to write a complex post refuting what he said because he said so many idiotic things and made so many baseless assumptions it would have taken a post as long as his to correct it all.
For example, he is totally ignorant of the fact that in many cases, they don't have the legal rights to stream everything they can put on DVD/Blu-ray to begin with - it's a legal issue, depending on when the film was made in particular, as to what kind of contract was signed. Sure, in 2014 if you sign a film contract they include every right under the sun, uninvented technologies, perpetual use, etc. - but it's only been a few decades since folks had "home video/media" as standard in contracts, let alone digital rights. The law is increasingly saying that digital rights are not included, so unless a studio owns something outright and produced the film in-house (not always as common as you think, just because a studio has rights to distribute a film doesn't mean they own it - like the Star Wars situation before Disney bought up Lucasfilm), they may well not be able to.
And that's just one - there are several other complete misunderstandings about the system to pick from in the "article".
I was challenging one of his false base assumptions that we would actually all want that to happen, specifically that "Surely the streaming option is more convenient for almost everybody," while ignoring the fact that "convenient" is not always "most desirable" - which was the point of the microwave analogy. Sure, you can cook just about anything more quickly in a microwave, and it sure is convenient to throw something on a plate, shove it in the device, and pull it out a minute later - eating it off of the same plate you cooked it on.
But as most folks will tell you, rarely is microwaved food actually the preferred way to cook food because of it's taste, texture, consistency, heat distribution, and how quickly it cools off. That's why a microwave is very much like streaming - it's there, sometimes you just feel like being super-lazy/something easy, or have limited options - it works. But it's not the way most people would choose to cook their food primarily and certainly isn't the best quality.
That depends on who you know and where you live. And what you mean by "dying", and if you are talking about DVD specifically or physical disc media (DVD and Blu-ray).
If you mean DVD vs. Blu-ray, it's been a slow death and shows no signs of ending anytime in the immediate future. Blu-ray sales are up, particularly for new releases, but DVD is still well entrenched and the choice of middle-American consumers.
If you mean physical media period, I can see how many in the/. community may think that, but it's now how it is with the general public. DVD sales are actually not in free-fall. DVD sales dropped 8% in 2013, even though Blu-ray was up. That's a drop - but there are countless other factors, from the quality of films released that year, etc. It is shrinking, but again - it's still the lion share of the home media viewing market.
Most of the growth, though, was in streaming - not ownership. The amount of folks purchasing digital content (vs. renting or streaming it) went up about 5% - which isn't anything near what streaming went up (30+%). So not everyone is "switching" over - some (an increasing amount) just aren't "purchasing" at all, at the moment. Streaming is cheap as dirt, comparatively (you can pay for a month of Netflix and Hulu for the price of purchasing one new release DVD or Blu-ray).
Thing is, once Internet caps arrive in the US (which we know is only a matter of time) streaming will loose steam, instantly (semi-pun intended). Then will be more of a test of if people really want to move over to purchasing digital media, much of which lives behind walled gardens, or if they still like grabbing a DVD or two when they are at Wal-mart doing their shopping.
Yeah, I knew there would be offended folks right away when I clicked on comments - and look, it was the first one. Great reply, though.
Don't apologize for the "rant" - you actually explained it perfectly. It's exactly what Molyneux was trying to express - you cannot take away the downs without also affecting the "ups".
For some people, like those that cannot function properly in life because of the "lows", it's worth it or is beneficial even in some cases to limit the "ups" as well. For others, who may feel that dynamic emotions are an important part of life, it may not be worth it.
I think there is also the "over-diagnosed" factor which is what makes some people so dismissive of it in general that other folks get highly defensive over it - just like ADHD, etc. There really is nothing offensive or inaccurate about his comment. Of course there are people who have these things, and severe enough that medication is beneficial. There also comes a point when so many people are being medicated for something that it's hard to argue that we may be not properly judging what is "balanced" when it turns out almost as many folks are diagnosed as "unbalanced" as we deem "balanced" - as in, when we start medicating for the "norm" versus the "exceptional".
But that's another topic, really - the point is, the guy made an analogy and it filled the point of an analogy - it gave me an instantly clear understanding of exactly what idea he was trying to express.
Apple's single digit percentage take of the laptop market isn't an indicator of anything.
The reason Apple devices don't come with drives anymore, period, is that they would need to be Blu-ray players at this point, and Apple refuses to put them in Mac's because they don't want to be in bed with Sony, coupled their incessant need to make a device as thin as possible (because most of us walk around with our laptop all day, apparently, or folks like you that must have some sort of medical disorder that a few extra ounces makes something "too heavy").
DVDs still sell incredibly well, it's one reason Blu-ray has taken so long to take hold.
It's all well and good if you basically use your computer as an Internet machine, and want to live off of WiFi, but discs are portable and put the user in control, not the walled garden and it's decision to allow you access to what you "own" or not (it's already happened that "rights issues" have come up and people have lost access to digital content they "owned"). Not to mention, you aren't married to a single service forever.
As to the "sensible" pricing - yup, you can buy a film for $5 at Wal-mart on DVD and then Apple wants $15-20 if you buy it on iTunes. Gee, wonder why that is. Oh yeah, you probably might want to start with the fact that Apple thinks they deserve 30% off the top of work someone else has done just for hosting a file.
Music is different, it is inherently consumed "on the go" - in vehicles, headphones as people go about their day, etc. It makes somewhat more sense in that case (at least now that Apple has dropped DRM on it). But films are a far different beast, and what applies to music does not automatically apply there, despite the best efforts of Apple to make you want to dump your cash into the walled garden so they have you by the balls.
This is the single stupidest, most presumptuous, idiotic thing I have ever read on/. that wasn't in the comments section - and it still vies for the top spot, even including them.
I started to write a complex response, but then realized that it would be asinine to give this drivel that much of my time when I can sum it up very easily:
Asking this idiotic question and not realizing the dozens of factors from quality (1080p streaming does not = 1080p Blu-ray, unless you are watching all your content on a tiny laptop screen), to the fact this AYCE streaming-world is mostly unique to the US and won't be sustainable here once Internet caps are in place for most folks (which anyone who follows such things knows is coming), and everything in between, is akin to someone posting an article saying, "Why doesn't everyone just cook with a microwave since it's the simplest, most convenient way to cook food?"
Though, it should have been obvious the writer was a tool from the first sentence - if you are idiotic enough to buy a laptop from Best Buy of all places, you don't have much sense to begin with.
Intended or not, it is what it has become. Take a reality check here.
Money Markets are an off-shoot of legit currency. But I don't need to care about the money market when I go to the store to buy groceries with my dollars.
With BitCoin, the entire thing is dependent upon them, because without them, the BitCoin is worthless. Why do the (very few) businesses that accept them accept them? As a marketing ploy, and because they can exchange them for legit currency to pay their bills, buy wares to sell in their stores, etc.
Without exchanges, BitCoins can do nothing and are nothing. The "every other currency" fallacy is just that. You are talking about academic theory, not reality. The dollar would still work if money markets didn't exist. If BitCoin exchanges didn't exist, no one would purchase the virtual rights to a virtual coin to begin with.
Actually, I didn't add it in the first place, intentionally, LOL. I was using a tablet which auto-corrected some p's to b's. And the version of/. that shows up on tablets doesn't have preview. My apologies.
Oh, I forgot to mention the other "talking point" in my post - the "it's just like every other currency" fallacy. It's like you guys think if you say that enough times it somehow becomes true.
Forget about the academics behind currency and look at the reality. The dollar, for instance, is beyond "faith" at this point in practical use. I don't have to have faith that every store in the United States will take my legal currency and give me goods in exchange for it. They just do. And the chances of that suddenly not being true are extremely remote.
BitBelievers are so wrapped up in theory that they cannot see the practical realities of BitCoin - it is not a "currency". Although I found it rather crass, a really good example was made by another poster. Why can't he make his shit a "currency" - it's in limited supply, it's unique to him, no one else can make his shit, and someday, his supply of shit will be depleted and no longer available. That makes it a valuable currency, right? The only thing missing is the digital component - he'd have to actually ship it around. Other than that, it fits the definition of what folks say makes BitCoin a currency to a T.
The fact that you "believe" in it is why people are beginning to equate it as a cult-based money-making scheme. It takes a religion-like belief. The tired "it's just like every other currency" talking point is just that - a talking point, which folks believe if you say enough somehow becomes truth. It's not. Sure, at it's base level, conceptually, all currency is based on faith, yadda, yadda, but since I can take my dollars and walk into any store in the country and purchase their products without question, I don't need to have "faith" - it's reality.
And as another reply someone made pointed out, you missed my Apple comparison - a stock owned in Apple is a portion of ownership of the company, which produces items which people desire/buy. So even if you cannot resell your share, you still own something. With BitCoin, you don't "own" anything but a virtual number. It's like an augmented reality MMO currency. (Though at least MMO currency can buy you gameplay fun.)
Well, in spite of a few "overrated" and "troll" ratings, my post is still strongly sitting there with a +5, so yeah, a few people seem to care what I am saying.
And I do apologize that it turned bold, typing on a tablet sometimes it changes the p tags to b tags.
Regardless, now that we have that out of the way, Anonymous Coward, you didn't read properly so it's probably good you didn't use your actual account to post.
A blind, deaf, armless, monkey toddler would have "timed it right" if they weren't so enthralled with the BitCult. I said, the second MtGox fell, if I didn't lose BitCoin with them totally, I would have pulled out because it clearly was the first domino to fall, not an isolated incident. It doesn't take a "special snowflake" to see what was happening.
The only thing that has propped it up so far is that the BitBelievers keep dumping in more of their legit currency into BitCoin as folks are fleeing, thinking they are getting in on some fire sale. No one new is coming into BitCoin at this point, and once those folks who are so into the BitCult run out of real currency to keep dumping in, it's just a matter of time before the entire bottom falls out.
I freely admitted that sure, I wish I'd bought a bunch when it was $20, but to think I'm venting "rage" by pointing out how delusional folks are who think it's going to continue, that folks who now pay $700 for one will ever make any profit on it, is laughable. I'm not raging, I'm simply gobsmacked that there are still folks who are so enamored with BitCoin they simply cannot see reality. There is a reason you see folks repeatedly referring to it as a cult now, because the folks who are still BitBelievers exhibit all the signs that one is a member of one.
Precisely. The BitBelievers cannot actually defend (and in most cases I am finding, don't actually understand it enough to be able to do so), so they mire down in semantics trying to talk about everything but the facts of the matter.
Just the fact that a pro-BitCoin site has that question up as a FAQ is pretty telling on its own, written with slick marketing tricks, to boot.
I guess we need to start being ultra-specific for the BitBelievers. It is a Ponzi-like scheme.
Broken down to its fundamentals, ignored in that FAQ question, a Ponzi scheme is generally understood to be a money making venture that is wholly dependent on new folks coming into the scheme in order to continue to fund the upper levels. If folks stop buying into the bottom, then things dry out all the way back up the chain until it fails.
That is precisely how BitCoin operates. It's just a new twist on it because it masquerades as a currency. Instead of trying to convince you that you are buying into something, it is quite up front about the fact that it's based on nothing. If folks stop bringing in legal currency to the BitCoin system by using it to purchase BitCoins, BitCoins become worthless. While the BitBelievers insist that it can be spent quite readily, it's a joke and everyone knows it - one can spend a dollar at literally millions of places, you can spend BitCoin directly at what, a few hundred? Maybe a thousand? The BitBelievers will then tell you about BitCoin ATMs, which, again, ignores the fact that when you use a BitCoin ATM, you are using it to pull legal tender out in order to be spent. It's worthless if one cannot turn it into legal tender (one way or another).
That's what makes it a Ponzi-like scheme, because if no one continued to exchange legal tender for BitCoin for people who have BitCoin, they have no intrinsic value on their own. It's based on nothingness.
That's why that FAQ is so disingenuous - if people stopped trading Apple stock tomorrow, Apple stock is still worth money because people still buy Apple products. You would be stuck with the stock itself but you would collect dividends based on the performance of the company and the percentage of profit you get as a stockholder. BitCoin's only product is itself, and is wholly dependent on the willingness of people to give someone legal tender for the right to own a virtual property. Since BitCoin doesn't produce income aside from more people buying into the scheme, they can wrap it up any way you like, but it's still based on nothingness.
Just look at the curt, pithy replies from BitBelievers - they know this train has gone off the rails, so that's really all they can say. With MtGox they proclaimed that it was just a poorly run business, and their talking points (I swear they must distribute them like Fox News does) were "it hadn't been the go to exchange for quite some time". Now that another one has fallen into insolvency, and another domino has hit the table, it's already becoming harder to defend, hence the growth of childish retorts because it's getting increasingly difficult to deny that the motion behind the fall of MtGox wasn't the start of the domino chain falling, but an isolated incident.
Now it's clear that MtGox may have been the first to go because indeed it was run poorly, but that it didn't fall solely because of how poorly it was run as the BitBelievers would like to think.
I'll be very curious how history looks at this very strange episode - in some ways, it's quite predictable that something like this would happen as it's happened over and over throughout human history (if prostitution is the oldest profession, parting a fool from their money must run a close second), but on the other hand things like this usually target the weak, the old, the infirm, those who are easy prey. In this case, a lot of very educated, erudite folks were taken in - I guess that will just go to show that the lure of a quick buck is more deeply imb
Twitter is a great source of breaking information, in a nearly endless number of ways.
Yeah, if you use it to follow folks that use it as a "microblog" to tell you what they had for lunch, just like FB, I can see your point. But if you subscribe to the right feeds, you can get some amazing content - and opportunities.
I've tweeted back and forth with several of my favorite celebrities (while it may seem silly, to this gay boy exchanging tweets with Cher at 2am one late night awhile back made my year). Another time I was traveling somewhere and because I had subbed to a few local feeds I found out about - and was selected as one of the winners of - a local contest which got me in the back door of a theme park at midnight to be in the first group to ride a brand new headliner attraction over and over all night at a private party (best damn brownie sundae I ever had at the desert bar, too, LOL).
Sure, those are not so typical (and admittedly vapid) examples, but you get the idea - the mobile friendly nature, the immediacy, and the ability to follow feeds without having to "friend" people is really great for timely information for everything from silly things like the above to people trying to stay in contact in a literal war zone.
Just like I've leveraged FB in more ways than I can ever count for opportunities or finding (or giving) help on various projects from old friends I haven't seen in person in a decade or more, and simply to keep in touch with folks I'd never see again otherwise (I love that when I travel I can just go to FB, see who I know there, and can connect with folks in practically any city I visit, either socially or just for advice), Twitter is really great if you learn how to use it well.
I come from a small town, and one of the things you learn growing up in one is who to go for and why - if I needed my car fixed, or help locating a research article, or who to ask about the best new restaurants in the area - it's really sweet when you can be a part of a local network like that because it makes life so much easier - and more enjoyable. That's what Twitter - and FB - do, they just expand them on a global scale.
It's all in learning how to make it work to the best advantage - if all you do is follow asshats who make a tweet every time they take a shit, sure, it's garbage - but there is so much more there for the taking, and sharing, if you go at it from a different mindset.
Exactly. And what info are people emailing that is so goddamn sensitive anyway? I've been on the Internet for twenty years, and even though I was a teenager when I began I always made the assumption that anything you type on a PC that is connected to the Internet is liable to be snooped on. So, since then, I simply have a rule not to put anything into an email or anything else that I wish to remain private. It's just common sense.
And nearly every one of the folks posting their outrage over this would be first in line to shove the pill down a criminal's throat of their wife/girlfriend/mother were violated and/or murdered. It's so easy to cry more for criminals when it's an abstract theoretical.
Idealism is noble and all, but sometimes in general when I read/. comments these days I feel like folks are missing that "ideal" is mostly an imaginative concept. Combined with the slippery slope fallacy, a spoonful of pseudo-anarchy idolatry, and a dollop of moral relativity, it would seem that we are in the face of impending doom with every little tiny ripple in the vast ocean of life.
This guy is a complete, disgusting, repulsive, degenerate, piece of garbage that deserves what he is getting right now. And I'm sure he is getting it quite regularly, quite possibly for the first time in his life.
Is how it happened ideal? No. Is it the beginning of the end of Western Civilization? No. Is it just? You bet your ass it is.
What you have here is an idiot prosecutor, who didn't know enough not to admit what he didn't know. Is the law often ignorant of technology? Yes, particularly this time, but the world self-corrected in this case (it tends to do that) and still stuck this little bastard in jail. Would it have been more ideal if he had been held accountable for the countless other things he likely deserves to be punished for (a lot of which we don't have laws for yet but should be punishable)? Of course. But it didn't go down that way, it went down this way. The end result is the same - he's some bad man's bitch right now, and getting a nice taste of the bitter he has put countless others through. He's lucky that thus far this has been the worst repercussion of his actions.
Civilization will continue to march on, this guy is getting what he deserves. Sometimes, the means don't matter nearly as much as the end result - regardless of the idealistic thinking that everything needs to happen "the right" way. And though AT&T also should be taken to task for not locking the door properly, he knew what he was doing when he was entering, and all this moral relativist bullshit I see in a lot of these posts (not yours in particular) is just that - bullshit. He's no white hat, he's no whistle-blower - he's a creep who was likely trying to "legitimize" himself as more than the grade-school "haxor" he is (which is why he chose the venue he did and did not take any steps to conceal his identity). He got burned. And the world is a better place with him locked up in a jail cell. That's what matters, and no slippery slope has begun.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yeah. It's OK to send 18 year old barely-not-children-anymore to the hell hole Middle East with a pretty decent chance of dying - and usually for something shitty like a roadside bomb on top of it - not even in direct combat defending something - just in hopes that if they survive their education will be paid for - yet it's not ethical for someone to go to freaking Mars voluntarily if they want?
To quote you - Fuck. That. Hard.
Our priorities here are beyond fucked - but you only have to look at the war budget vs the NASA budget to know that. I'm sure someone has the statistics, but I'm pretty sure that what we spend on NASA in a year is equivalent to what - hours, days in war funding for the Middle East?
I agree. Hell, you can just slap a stick-on mirror over a broken one, in a pinch. I was driving cross-country once and needed to do just that - it got me through that trip until I was able to replace it. If the camera/connector/cable/display goes wonky it would have been a much more time consuming, expensive, and bitchly process, even just to figure out what stopped working.
There is also something to be said about feeling disconnected - no pun intended - that you get in video but you don't get in mirrors. You are looking at a direct reflection of reality with your own eyes as opposed to a digital image - it may not be measurable in metrics but your eyes are still seeing the reflection (insert "objects are closer than they appear" message, LOL) versus a digital eye that you then interpret. I just think disconnecting ourselves further from what is outside of our cars is probably not the best idea.
All that said, unless I'm in bumper to bumper street traffic, I don't really use side mirrors much to begin with (yet by all accounts I think I am a pretty decent driver - I was in one accident when I was 16 (20 years ago) and I've driven well over 700K miles since then - I have no "points on my license" etc., and I'm usually complemented - I think it comes from the combo of my mom racing cars and my dad being a police officer, LOL). Some driving instructors will tell you to use the mirrors, but old school ones tell you to actually turn your head when you can (especially on the highway when nothing is straight in front of you). It's just a second (less time than if you futz with some control) and then you actually see with your own eyes. It may not work for everyone, but it's worked for me - and removing myself twice from that by not only not using the mirrors, but a video camera, just seems silly for me, at least.
Hey, at least it's better than digging-our-heels-in-screw-the-users-we-know-better Apple. I applaud them for making this change, it may actually get me to reinstall Windows 8. I don't have a touch screen on my desk, and I don't want one (who wants to constantly be reaching up instead of tiny mouse flicks), but at least Microsoft has the balls to admit they were wrong and are undoing it. Unlike Apple, which fucks up your interface, everything about how you use their OS (iOS7 = I'll never purchase another Apple phone again) and tells you to like it or to fuck off, no you can't choose the background of your notepad because we know better than you what you should like.
When I think back to 20 years ago when Microsoft was the big bad and Apple was the almost "holistic" alternative, it's amazing how a few extremely successful products can change the perception of a company. Steve Jobs died a lonely but very very rich asshole who folks struggled to say a kind word about beyond his "design expertise" (did you hear one person say anything actually NICE about him? I actually sought out articles about his death looking and I couldn't find a single one) and here is DR. Evil himself Bill gates running around the globe giving away billions of dollars and actually improving the quality of life for people all over the planet, not just giving a gee-cool-slickly designed device or two to middle-to-upperclass folks who have the luxury of being able to afford a smartphone and it's service so we can feed our endless consumption appetite.
Who ever knew Microsoft would end up being the "good" sibling.
If you mean "inevitable wave of the future", as in "3-D movies in the home is the inevitable wave of the future" or "nuclear power is the inevitable wave of the future"...well, all I can say is, good luck with that, LOL.
That's also the conceit Star Trek uses, although the entire ship doesn't spin, just a plate within it. Like many space travel issues, we know how to do it, or at least have a reasonable idea of how it can be done, but it's difficult because even if we had the funding, the only ways in which things are possible would have the side effect of turning us into mush/killing us in the process. It's force fields that are the ingredient we really need to make a lot of this stuff work around our fragile human bodies.
It's how it is with so many things. Grains of truth may be there, but those who protest the loudest always have to go too far and come off with ridiculous crap like this so people like you and I just end up being disillusioned to the entire movement. It's like the "Woman in the Refridgerator" comic book stuff - sure, could women be better represented in comics? Of course. But when every little thing is brought forth and used as de facto evidence of something, it just makes you shake your head and walk away (for example, you cannot complain that too many female villains are too pretty and then complain when the "ugly" one is evil).
The folks that perpetrate this type of rhetoric think they are serving the greater good (think: Al Gore) but in the end they make even open minded people turn off totally because they think they have to overstate and inflate things to get our attention. According to Al Gore's statements a decade or so ago we are only what, five or six years from Manhattan being under the ocean? Please.
It has reached these religious levels where you cannot even have a rational discussion about it. It's also hypocritical - not to beat on Al Gore again, but how many private plane flights has that guy taken? I don't see him using a bicycle to get everywhere and he's probably one of the folks that drives an electric car and doesn't realize the environmental impact of the limited-lifespan batteries in them are no better for the overall environment than burning fossil fuels (the pounds of nickel in the batteries is devastating, dangerous, and rare to mine, usually by child labor).
Right there with you. Wasting such resources on on computations explicitly designed to tax equipment for what amounts to a hardware pissing contest, burning actual finite resources to do so (metals, coal for electricity, etc.).
As to the posting, it was only a matter of time before disruptive forces like this began to pop up. One way or another, in order for BitCoin to become what it wants to become (a legitimate currency) it's has to succumb to the very thing it was trying not to be (at the mercy of "big business"/corporatiszation and government regulated like the new IRS rules regarding it).
Yup, my cherry has been popped.
If this is a regular occourance, I have to ask though - who's he blowing?
(And, I really am curious - I'd love to have my brain farts suddenly warrant a ./ front page article, I'm up to go down.)
Yes, I read it - as painful as it was since it was written so poorly and scattered to begin with - and I'm a Blu-ray lover, thank you. :)
Other folks have addressed some of his other fallacies in terms of "allowing", rights issues, etc. - as I said, I didn't want to take the time to write a complex post refuting what he said because he said so many idiotic things and made so many baseless assumptions it would have taken a post as long as his to correct it all.
For example, he is totally ignorant of the fact that in many cases, they don't have the legal rights to stream everything they can put on DVD/Blu-ray to begin with - it's a legal issue, depending on when the film was made in particular, as to what kind of contract was signed. Sure, in 2014 if you sign a film contract they include every right under the sun, uninvented technologies, perpetual use, etc. - but it's only been a few decades since folks had "home video/media" as standard in contracts, let alone digital rights. The law is increasingly saying that digital rights are not included, so unless a studio owns something outright and produced the film in-house (not always as common as you think, just because a studio has rights to distribute a film doesn't mean they own it - like the Star Wars situation before Disney bought up Lucasfilm), they may well not be able to.
And that's just one - there are several other complete misunderstandings about the system to pick from in the "article".
I was challenging one of his false base assumptions that we would actually all want that to happen, specifically that "Surely the streaming option is more convenient for almost everybody," while ignoring the fact that "convenient" is not always "most desirable" - which was the point of the microwave analogy. Sure, you can cook just about anything more quickly in a microwave, and it sure is convenient to throw something on a plate, shove it in the device, and pull it out a minute later - eating it off of the same plate you cooked it on.
But as most folks will tell you, rarely is microwaved food actually the preferred way to cook food because of it's taste, texture, consistency, heat distribution, and how quickly it cools off. That's why a microwave is very much like streaming - it's there, sometimes you just feel like being super-lazy/something easy, or have limited options - it works. But it's not the way most people would choose to cook their food primarily and certainly isn't the best quality.
That depends on who you know and where you live. And what you mean by "dying", and if you are talking about DVD specifically or physical disc media (DVD and Blu-ray).
If you mean DVD vs. Blu-ray, it's been a slow death and shows no signs of ending anytime in the immediate future. Blu-ray sales are up, particularly for new releases, but DVD is still well entrenched and the choice of middle-American consumers.
If you mean physical media period, I can see how many in the /. community may think that, but it's now how it is with the general public. DVD sales are actually not in free-fall. DVD sales dropped 8% in 2013, even though Blu-ray was up. That's a drop - but there are countless other factors, from the quality of films released that year, etc. It is shrinking, but again - it's still the lion share of the home media viewing market.
Most of the growth, though, was in streaming - not ownership. The amount of folks purchasing digital content (vs. renting or streaming it) went up about 5% - which isn't anything near what streaming went up (30+%). So not everyone is "switching" over - some (an increasing amount) just aren't "purchasing" at all, at the moment. Streaming is cheap as dirt, comparatively (you can pay for a month of Netflix and Hulu for the price of purchasing one new release DVD or Blu-ray).
Thing is, once Internet caps arrive in the US (which we know is only a matter of time) streaming will loose steam, instantly (semi-pun intended). Then will be more of a test of if people really want to move over to purchasing digital media, much of which lives behind walled gardens, or if they still like grabbing a DVD or two when they are at Wal-mart doing their shopping.
Yeah, I knew there would be offended folks right away when I clicked on comments - and look, it was the first one. Great reply, though.
Don't apologize for the "rant" - you actually explained it perfectly. It's exactly what Molyneux was trying to express - you cannot take away the downs without also affecting the "ups".
For some people, like those that cannot function properly in life because of the "lows", it's worth it or is beneficial even in some cases to limit the "ups" as well. For others, who may feel that dynamic emotions are an important part of life, it may not be worth it.
I think there is also the "over-diagnosed" factor which is what makes some people so dismissive of it in general that other folks get highly defensive over it - just like ADHD, etc. There really is nothing offensive or inaccurate about his comment. Of course there are people who have these things, and severe enough that medication is beneficial. There also comes a point when so many people are being medicated for something that it's hard to argue that we may be not properly judging what is "balanced" when it turns out almost as many folks are diagnosed as "unbalanced" as we deem "balanced" - as in, when we start medicating for the "norm" versus the "exceptional".
But that's another topic, really - the point is, the guy made an analogy and it filled the point of an analogy - it gave me an instantly clear understanding of exactly what idea he was trying to express.
Apple's single digit percentage take of the laptop market isn't an indicator of anything.
The reason Apple devices don't come with drives anymore, period, is that they would need to be Blu-ray players at this point, and Apple refuses to put them in Mac's because they don't want to be in bed with Sony, coupled their incessant need to make a device as thin as possible (because most of us walk around with our laptop all day, apparently, or folks like you that must have some sort of medical disorder that a few extra ounces makes something "too heavy").
DVDs still sell incredibly well, it's one reason Blu-ray has taken so long to take hold.
It's all well and good if you basically use your computer as an Internet machine, and want to live off of WiFi, but discs are portable and put the user in control, not the walled garden and it's decision to allow you access to what you "own" or not (it's already happened that "rights issues" have come up and people have lost access to digital content they "owned"). Not to mention, you aren't married to a single service forever.
As to the "sensible" pricing - yup, you can buy a film for $5 at Wal-mart on DVD and then Apple wants $15-20 if you buy it on iTunes. Gee, wonder why that is. Oh yeah, you probably might want to start with the fact that Apple thinks they deserve 30% off the top of work someone else has done just for hosting a file.
Music is different, it is inherently consumed "on the go" - in vehicles, headphones as people go about their day, etc. It makes somewhat more sense in that case (at least now that Apple has dropped DRM on it). But films are a far different beast, and what applies to music does not automatically apply there, despite the best efforts of Apple to make you want to dump your cash into the walled garden so they have you by the balls.
This is the single stupidest, most presumptuous, idiotic thing I have ever read on /. that wasn't in the comments section - and it still vies for the top spot, even including them.
I started to write a complex response, but then realized that it would be asinine to give this drivel that much of my time when I can sum it up very easily:
Asking this idiotic question and not realizing the dozens of factors from quality (1080p streaming does not = 1080p Blu-ray, unless you are watching all your content on a tiny laptop screen), to the fact this AYCE streaming-world is mostly unique to the US and won't be sustainable here once Internet caps are in place for most folks (which anyone who follows such things knows is coming), and everything in between, is akin to someone posting an article saying, "Why doesn't everyone just cook with a microwave since it's the simplest, most convenient way to cook food?"
Though, it should have been obvious the writer was a tool from the first sentence - if you are idiotic enough to buy a laptop from Best Buy of all places, you don't have much sense to begin with.
Intended or not, it is what it has become. Take a reality check here.
Money Markets are an off-shoot of legit currency. But I don't need to care about the money market when I go to the store to buy groceries with my dollars.
With BitCoin, the entire thing is dependent upon them, because without them, the BitCoin is worthless. Why do the (very few) businesses that accept them accept them? As a marketing ploy, and because they can exchange them for legit currency to pay their bills, buy wares to sell in their stores, etc.
Without exchanges, BitCoins can do nothing and are nothing. The "every other currency" fallacy is just that. You are talking about academic theory, not reality. The dollar would still work if money markets didn't exist. If BitCoin exchanges didn't exist, no one would purchase the virtual rights to a virtual coin to begin with.
Actually, I didn't add it in the first place, intentionally, LOL. I was using a tablet which auto-corrected some p's to b's. And the version of /. that shows up on tablets doesn't have preview. My apologies.
Oh, I forgot to mention the other "talking point" in my post - the "it's just like every other currency" fallacy. It's like you guys think if you say that enough times it somehow becomes true.
Forget about the academics behind currency and look at the reality. The dollar, for instance, is beyond "faith" at this point in practical use. I don't have to have faith that every store in the United States will take my legal currency and give me goods in exchange for it. They just do. And the chances of that suddenly not being true are extremely remote.
BitBelievers are so wrapped up in theory that they cannot see the practical realities of BitCoin - it is not a "currency". Although I found it rather crass, a really good example was made by another poster. Why can't he make his shit a "currency" - it's in limited supply, it's unique to him, no one else can make his shit, and someday, his supply of shit will be depleted and no longer available. That makes it a valuable currency, right? The only thing missing is the digital component - he'd have to actually ship it around. Other than that, it fits the definition of what folks say makes BitCoin a currency to a T.
The fact that you "believe" in it is why people are beginning to equate it as a cult-based money-making scheme. It takes a religion-like belief. The tired "it's just like every other currency" talking point is just that - a talking point, which folks believe if you say enough somehow becomes truth. It's not. Sure, at it's base level, conceptually, all currency is based on faith, yadda, yadda, but since I can take my dollars and walk into any store in the country and purchase their products without question, I don't need to have "faith" - it's reality.
And as another reply someone made pointed out, you missed my Apple comparison - a stock owned in Apple is a portion of ownership of the company, which produces items which people desire/buy. So even if you cannot resell your share, you still own something. With BitCoin, you don't "own" anything but a virtual number. It's like an augmented reality MMO currency. (Though at least MMO currency can buy you gameplay fun.)
Well, in spite of a few "overrated" and "troll" ratings, my post is still strongly sitting there with a +5, so yeah, a few people seem to care what I am saying.
And I do apologize that it turned bold, typing on a tablet sometimes it changes the p tags to b tags.
Regardless, now that we have that out of the way, Anonymous Coward, you didn't read properly so it's probably good you didn't use your actual account to post.
A blind, deaf, armless, monkey toddler would have "timed it right" if they weren't so enthralled with the BitCult. I said, the second MtGox fell, if I didn't lose BitCoin with them totally, I would have pulled out because it clearly was the first domino to fall, not an isolated incident. It doesn't take a "special snowflake" to see what was happening.
The only thing that has propped it up so far is that the BitBelievers keep dumping in more of their legit currency into BitCoin as folks are fleeing, thinking they are getting in on some fire sale. No one new is coming into BitCoin at this point, and once those folks who are so into the BitCult run out of real currency to keep dumping in, it's just a matter of time before the entire bottom falls out.
I freely admitted that sure, I wish I'd bought a bunch when it was $20, but to think I'm venting "rage" by pointing out how delusional folks are who think it's going to continue, that folks who now pay $700 for one will ever make any profit on it, is laughable. I'm not raging, I'm simply gobsmacked that there are still folks who are so enamored with BitCoin they simply cannot see reality. There is a reason you see folks repeatedly referring to it as a cult now, because the folks who are still BitBelievers exhibit all the signs that one is a member of one.
Precisely. The BitBelievers cannot actually defend (and in most cases I am finding, don't actually understand it enough to be able to do so), so they mire down in semantics trying to talk about everything but the facts of the matter.
Just the fact that a pro-BitCoin site has that question up as a FAQ is pretty telling on its own, written with slick marketing tricks, to boot.
I guess we need to start being ultra-specific for the BitBelievers. It is a Ponzi-like scheme. Broken down to its fundamentals, ignored in that FAQ question, a Ponzi scheme is generally understood to be a money making venture that is wholly dependent on new folks coming into the scheme in order to continue to fund the upper levels. If folks stop buying into the bottom, then things dry out all the way back up the chain until it fails.
That is precisely how BitCoin operates. It's just a new twist on it because it masquerades as a currency. Instead of trying to convince you that you are buying into something, it is quite up front about the fact that it's based on nothing. If folks stop bringing in legal currency to the BitCoin system by using it to purchase BitCoins, BitCoins become worthless. While the BitBelievers insist that it can be spent quite readily, it's a joke and everyone knows it - one can spend a dollar at literally millions of places, you can spend BitCoin directly at what, a few hundred? Maybe a thousand? The BitBelievers will then tell you about BitCoin ATMs, which, again, ignores the fact that when you use a BitCoin ATM, you are using it to pull legal tender out in order to be spent. It's worthless if one cannot turn it into legal tender (one way or another).
That's what makes it a Ponzi-like scheme, because if no one continued to exchange legal tender for BitCoin for people who have BitCoin, they have no intrinsic value on their own. It's based on nothingness. That's why that FAQ is so disingenuous - if people stopped trading Apple stock tomorrow, Apple stock is still worth money because people still buy Apple products. You would be stuck with the stock itself but you would collect dividends based on the performance of the company and the percentage of profit you get as a stockholder. BitCoin's only product is itself, and is wholly dependent on the willingness of people to give someone legal tender for the right to own a virtual property. Since BitCoin doesn't produce income aside from more people buying into the scheme, they can wrap it up any way you like, but it's still based on nothingness.
Just look at the curt, pithy replies from BitBelievers - they know this train has gone off the rails, so that's really all they can say. With MtGox they proclaimed that it was just a poorly run business, and their talking points (I swear they must distribute them like Fox News does) were "it hadn't been the go to exchange for quite some time". Now that another one has fallen into insolvency, and another domino has hit the table, it's already becoming harder to defend, hence the growth of childish retorts because it's getting increasingly difficult to deny that the motion behind the fall of MtGox wasn't the start of the domino chain falling, but an isolated incident.
Now it's clear that MtGox may have been the first to go because indeed it was run poorly, but that it didn't fall solely because of how poorly it was run as the BitBelievers would like to think.
I'll be very curious how history looks at this very strange episode - in some ways, it's quite predictable that something like this would happen as it's happened over and over throughout human history (if prostitution is the oldest profession, parting a fool from their money must run a close second), but on the other hand things like this usually target the weak, the old, the infirm, those who are easy prey. In this case, a lot of very educated, erudite folks were taken in - I guess that will just go to show that the lure of a quick buck is more deeply imb
Just like anything, it's all in how you use it.
Twitter is a great source of breaking information, in a nearly endless number of ways.
Yeah, if you use it to follow folks that use it as a "microblog" to tell you what they had for lunch, just like FB, I can see your point. But if you subscribe to the right feeds, you can get some amazing content - and opportunities. I've tweeted back and forth with several of my favorite celebrities (while it may seem silly, to this gay boy exchanging tweets with Cher at 2am one late night awhile back made my year). Another time I was traveling somewhere and because I had subbed to a few local feeds I found out about - and was selected as one of the winners of - a local contest which got me in the back door of a theme park at midnight to be in the first group to ride a brand new headliner attraction over and over all night at a private party (best damn brownie sundae I ever had at the desert bar, too, LOL).
Sure, those are not so typical (and admittedly vapid) examples, but you get the idea - the mobile friendly nature, the immediacy, and the ability to follow feeds without having to "friend" people is really great for timely information for everything from silly things like the above to people trying to stay in contact in a literal war zone.
Just like I've leveraged FB in more ways than I can ever count for opportunities or finding (or giving) help on various projects from old friends I haven't seen in person in a decade or more, and simply to keep in touch with folks I'd never see again otherwise (I love that when I travel I can just go to FB, see who I know there, and can connect with folks in practically any city I visit, either socially or just for advice), Twitter is really great if you learn how to use it well. I come from a small town, and one of the things you learn growing up in one is who to go for and why - if I needed my car fixed, or help locating a research article, or who to ask about the best new restaurants in the area - it's really sweet when you can be a part of a local network like that because it makes life so much easier - and more enjoyable. That's what Twitter - and FB - do, they just expand them on a global scale.
It's all in learning how to make it work to the best advantage - if all you do is follow asshats who make a tweet every time they take a shit, sure, it's garbage - but there is so much more there for the taking, and sharing, if you go at it from a different mindset.
Exactly. And what info are people emailing that is so goddamn sensitive anyway? I've been on the Internet for twenty years, and even though I was a teenager when I began I always made the assumption that anything you type on a PC that is connected to the Internet is liable to be snooped on. So, since then, I simply have a rule not to put anything into an email or anything else that I wish to remain private. It's just common sense.
And nearly every one of the folks posting their outrage over this would be first in line to shove the pill down a criminal's throat of their wife/girlfriend/mother were violated and/or murdered. It's so easy to cry more for criminals when it's an abstract theoretical.
Idealism is noble and all, but sometimes in general when I read /. comments these days I feel like folks are missing that "ideal" is mostly an imaginative concept. Combined with the slippery slope fallacy, a spoonful of pseudo-anarchy idolatry, and a dollop of moral relativity, it would seem that we are in the face of impending doom with every little tiny ripple in the vast ocean of life.
This guy is a complete, disgusting, repulsive, degenerate, piece of garbage that deserves what he is getting right now. And I'm sure he is getting it quite regularly, quite possibly for the first time in his life.
Is how it happened ideal? No. Is it the beginning of the end of Western Civilization? No. Is it just? You bet your ass it is.
What you have here is an idiot prosecutor, who didn't know enough not to admit what he didn't know. Is the law often ignorant of technology? Yes, particularly this time, but the world self-corrected in this case (it tends to do that) and still stuck this little bastard in jail. Would it have been more ideal if he had been held accountable for the countless other things he likely deserves to be punished for (a lot of which we don't have laws for yet but should be punishable)? Of course. But it didn't go down that way, it went down this way. The end result is the same - he's some bad man's bitch right now, and getting a nice taste of the bitter he has put countless others through. He's lucky that thus far this has been the worst repercussion of his actions.
Civilization will continue to march on, this guy is getting what he deserves. Sometimes, the means don't matter nearly as much as the end result - regardless of the idealistic thinking that everything needs to happen "the right" way. And though AT&T also should be taken to task for not locking the door properly, he knew what he was doing when he was entering, and all this moral relativist bullshit I see in a lot of these posts (not yours in particular) is just that - bullshit. He's no white hat, he's no whistle-blower - he's a creep who was likely trying to "legitimize" himself as more than the grade-school "haxor" he is (which is why he chose the venue he did and did not take any steps to conceal his identity). He got burned. And the world is a better place with him locked up in a jail cell. That's what matters, and no slippery slope has begun.
"Classic works for me, remove the 'beta' stuff from the url."
Be careful, or you'll be tossed in jail for hacking /.
I guess I don't understand why he didn't just tell the guy to fuck off and then ignore him.