>Want to stop piracy? Then make all content available everywhere. Don't make me sign up for Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO Now, Hulu, and a half dozen streaming providers just to watch the content I want to see.
I have previously predicted that the current streaming providers will become the new studios, and regional services will offer single points of access and billing to customers, becoming the new cable companies.
I believe there will be a market for companies that set up shop doing nothing more than having a local cache of the most popular items and pass-through streaming of the less-requested ones, as well as providing centralized billing and technical support.
It will require Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu, and a half dozen other streaming providers to give up on attempting to monopolize the world's eyeballs and instead accept that they will be competing with each other... but ultimately I think it'll happen.
If a student shouts down pretty much ANYONE speaking on campus, they should be kicked out for the term or permanently, depending on how tolerant the institution is feeling.
The point of such places is to expose you to ideas, not to make sure you only hear things you agree with. Kids who don't understand that are already too far behind in their education to help... if they ever figure it out, they can continue their education elsewhere.
They index and rank what is available. If you want something to be indexed and ranked... make it available. I've no sympathy at all for someone who wants simultaneously have and eat their cake.
The market will find a balance between monetization and reader base. I suspect it will involve giving away a complete summary and limiting subscribers to those interested in in-depth analysis.
If they did it here (Canada), I'd love it because the money would go back into Canadian Blood Services, and help fund blood drives, collection, and storage.
Hell, if they gave a percentage back to young donors to encourage regular donation, and another percentage to artificial blood research, that'd be awesome too.
Lining a for-profit blood business owner's pockets though? Not so nice.
It could be a family vacation photo. I have one, for instance, that goes on display on my desk from time to time... because it was a great vacation and I like to remember it.
People who think everything is sexual / perverted are the ones with the problem.
There are a number of 'arcades' around here in Southern Ontario, Canada. They're not a hole-in-the-wall commercial space in a mall anymore, though... they're big, big spaces, usually with a bar and restaurant.
Bigger screens, linked cabinets for PvP, etc. Now you use a house card to pay instead of quarters. And they still have those stupid play-for-tickets games.
While 9/11 was a well-coordinated and spectacular attack... I'm just a normal non-fanatic, non-obsessed guy who can come up with a dozen better ways off to terrorize a population just off the top of my head, none of which involve me dying while implementing them, though I suppose after the first or second go they'd carry a small risk of capture and incarceration.
When you think about it from that perspective, it's extraordinarily pathetic just how little they've achieved. Despite all the cloak-and-dagger, they generally get found and stopped. Despite their best efforts, most of the bodies are in the Middle East, not the USA. Despite their stated aims, the best possible outcome for them is failure, because if they started to do sufficiently well, every nation that supports them would get carpet bombed into dust, and every vaguely scary Muslim would be executed by their fearful neighbours. (Look at WWII for examples of how easily a population turns brutally racist when sufficiently motivated - it wasn't just the Germans)
I'm not terribly concerned. The Americans will continue to comically over-react and continue with their security theatre, the rest of the world (assuming they don't live somewhere the Americans decide to bomb in retribution) will be a little more careful and otherwise just keep on living.
Some women bleed like a stuck pig, or have exceptionally long or painful periods. Hormonal birth control basically takes over and gives them more statistically 'normal' symptoms. When you're dealing with those issues, the pregnancy prevention really is a side effect.
On the other hand, some women take them without skipping a week in order to completely suppress their cycle. I'm not sure if there's any long term issues with that, but assuming there aren't I've never understood why any and every woman wouldn't go with that option while on the pill.
The HHGttG game came with pocket lint, a microscopic space fleet, and a pair of Joo-Janto 2000 Peril-Sensitive sunglasses. I don't remember the pamphlet, but I wouldn't have read it anyway; hints and clues are cheating.
I still have brain cells dedicated to 'frotz me', 'aimfiz Belboz' and remembering grue repellent.
The Infocom games were generally quite good, but somebody needs to go back in time and bitch slap the devs for having logic in the game like 'with no hints that it's even a thing until step 500, you must perfectly perform a sequence of actions in the first 30 moves or the game cannot be completed'.
It has been my experience that any significant bias is already known and an accepted part of the culture, not some well-intentioned effort unknowingly failing to be fair.
And the review processes are usually HR bullshit. And the people pushing them use bad logic and misleading stats to push an agenda.
What you really need is to have a company not run by assholes... or given how rare that is, at least a company whose particular brand of assholes aren't sexist.
>how are you going to accurately get the numbers for job type, productivity, experience and skill level ?
Traditionally... by ignoring productivity and experience, and using seniority as a stand-in for skill level.
In other words, there is no practical way to do it since you need to individually perform a detailed historical analysis of each person's output, including adjusting for where others have helped or hindered. It'd be faster just to do the work over again.
> a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Easy peasy. Adjust the amount based on legal status. X if you're a dependent, Y if you're not. Two people living together (regardless of marital status) would be more efficient, encouraging people to cohabitate... which is good from the perspective of government service delivery. Doesn't matter if you have kids, or if you like people with the same kind of sex organs as your own.
Children get an amount sufficient to care for them, but not enough to be a profit center. Now I'm going to go all 'Orwell' on you. What if you got money as an adult, but kids resulted in a special benefits card that could only be spent on things for kids? Clothing, toys, age-appropriate books, etc. Limit the ways in which people could use kids for the monthly payout.
Now, in regions where the population is shrinking despite resources available to support it, you could add a bonus to the regular payment of parents of dependent children to make it easier on people to have children, but that would be done separately from the standard adult UBI and the dependent amount.
Where things actually start to get complicated is when it comes to the things that will remain scarce in a the shiny future 'post-scarcity' economy. Land, water, food, and energy. You are very definitely going to need a cost-of-living adjustment to allow people to afford living in denser areas where you need them to support economic activity.
>So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare.
Basic medical treatment - that which ultimately saves the state money in the majority of cases - needs to be universally available in a UBI economy. Let the rich buy better medical care, but don't let anyone go without the essentials. Everyone gets their shots, everyone gets their teeth cared for, broken bones get set, you even get glasses if you need them. Obliterate all other medical assistance programs. After all, we're talking about UBI because we've become so productive there isn't enough work to go around! We're already admitting that every human in our society deserves a share of its wealth... why artificially segregate health care from that share?
Same goes for education, though I'd say formal post-secondary education should be funded based on ability - let the dumb-but-rich buy their way through and fund access for the smart-but-poor.
Music died because radios were replaced by MP3 players and there's less exposure to new things now... you have to sell 'more of the same' because people like what's in their personal collection and want more of it. But movies? Kids used to be poor. These days, they have enough money (and they're freer with it) to be a great target demographic.
As they get older and they get experience they wise up, and then they age out. So what? There's another batch of tweens just itching to watch the latest crap you're churning out A bit older, and you don't have to be that much more inventive to hold on to them a few more years. What you make today can be exploited for nostalgia in 15 years... but in 20 it can be remade because the original audience has been completely replaced and the majority of your new audience won't even know they're consuming rehashed media.
I still don't get how some properties get 'rebooted' before anyone's forgotten the previous iteration - though in the case of the Hulk I'm glad because they got it so wrong the first time.
> and.. have classes where they can bring in outsiders to experiment with the products or troubleshoot what they need to do.
My wife takes hobby classes for craft making of various kinds from time to time. If there was an electronics shop around here with Pi kits and classes on how to build things with them... I'd be signing up.
I mean, I could figure it out on my own (I have a Pi and have done a few things with it) but given the lack of time I can afford to spend on it, having an instructor-led project to ensure I don't waste time on the basics, something with a set schedule outside my house... that'd be awesome.
For an attack in progress, I'd say it's more like you're being mugged and the attacker has managed to grab your wallet by the time you start fighting back.
You have a right to self-defence in the physical world, usually with a limit of 'reasonable force' (Texas excluded). To extend that to the digital world, if your system is attacked you should have the right to damage the attacking system to the point it can no longer continue its assault... and you should be able to take back your data if you can do so.
And of course, if you attack the wrong entity, you should be liable - just as you would if you were fighting a mugger and somehow knocked out an uninvolved bystander.
The danger of plenty of IT jobs - if you're competent and have time to do more than just 'put out fires' (i.e., apply quick and sloppy fixes instead of taking the time to fix the fundamental issues) - eventually you can eliminate most of your own job just by setting things up correctly.
If you're lucky that means they recognize you're good at improving system efficiencies and move you on to something else. If you're not lucky, it means they're happy sitting in 'maintenance' mode, they shrink the team, and somebody is out of work.
I tell them to email our automated ticketing system. It creates a ticket with the correct user information and doesn't require our help desk staff to waste any time interpreting what the user's trying to say... the user just types out what they will and can attach a screen shot.
Then the system does a keyword search and 99% of the time it will appropriately assign the ticket to the correct class of support personnel.
Then the help desk folks can ALSO spend more time on Slashdot.
Good ones are... but I've been in IT for a couple of decades and been involved in a lot of meetings over that time at several different companies... and I can think of ONE meeting that was highly productive and I would consider 'good', and a handful of others that were moderately 'OK'.
The rest were a waste of time where managers were playing around at 'communicating' and failing miserably. Usually, a well-written email would have done the job in a fraction of the time, and on the remainder of the occasions a smaller meeting group would have been more appropriate instead of having the majority of us sitting there unable to contribute to something outside our area.
1) The help desk won't tell the user they don't know how to do their job (and usually the user is so bad at describing the issue they probably haven't had a chance to figure out it's a PEBKAC issue) so they dispatch desktop support.
2) Desktop support doesn't understand what's happening and doesn't communicate well with the user to get the details required to figure it out, so they blame network (security/policy/site connectivity/whatever).
3) The network tech stops what they're doing to prove it's a desktop issue so they can push the job back down the chain.
4) The desktop guys figure out the user is improperly trained - sometimes they're just clueless, sometimes there's a change and their department didn't do the training... or even a simple notification.
That describes 80% of the tickets I am aware of in our organization. Sometimes it bounces back and forth between steps 2 and 3 a couple of times, to the user's frustration and the discredit of the IT department. The important thing is that I am neither tier 1 support nor a network guy, so I can mostly sit to the side and look down disdainfully at the whole farce without actually having to do something about it.
I agree in principle that having our lawmakers forced to live more like 'the common rabble' would be a good thing.
However, when one person's time (or lack thereof) could cause them to read a little less of the legislation they already do a terrible job of reviewing, you start to see the problems that a car and driver might be reducing.
Maybe we should have 'government housing' - where they are forced to take up residence near their place of work. A decent home would be a job perk, and they could walk or bike to the office. It could be operated like a condo community - the individual houses wouldn't need to be particularly large, because there would be common facilities for various activities, and they wouldn't need a home office given the real thing would be a short walk away.
I went to the trouble of installing a high-gain antenna in my attic... but streaming is so easy I can't actually recall the last time I used the antenna.
The local stations either have a free streaming option or they aren't showing anything I care about (usually the latter). The Internet lets me see more or less whatever I want from anywhere in the world within an hour of first broadcast (of course, that's not with Netflix).
Slashdot Mirror
>Want to stop piracy? Then make all content available everywhere. Don't make me sign up for Netflix, Amazon Video, HBO Now, Hulu, and a half dozen streaming providers just to watch the content I want to see.
I have previously predicted that the current streaming providers will become the new studios, and regional services will offer single points of access and billing to customers, becoming the new cable companies.
I believe there will be a market for companies that set up shop doing nothing more than having a local cache of the most popular items and pass-through streaming of the less-requested ones, as well as providing centralized billing and technical support.
It will require Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu, and a half dozen other streaming providers to give up on attempting to monopolize the world's eyeballs and instead accept that they will be competing with each other... but ultimately I think it'll happen.
Your way means the loudest, least civilized control information flow. How can that possibly backfire?
If a student shouts down pretty much ANYONE speaking on campus, they should be kicked out for the term or permanently, depending on how tolerant the institution is feeling.
The point of such places is to expose you to ideas, not to make sure you only hear things you agree with. Kids who don't understand that are already too far behind in their education to help... if they ever figure it out, they can continue their education elsewhere.
>Google should tell them to GTFO. Maybe even delist paywalls entirely.
Flagging the result as 'paywalled' and allowing a new filter to remove paywalled sites from your results would probably be a better solution.
They index and rank what is available. If you want something to be indexed and ranked... make it available. I've no sympathy at all for someone who wants simultaneously have and eat their cake.
The market will find a balance between monetization and reader base. I suspect it will involve giving away a complete summary and limiting subscribers to those interested in in-depth analysis.
If they did it here (Canada), I'd love it because the money would go back into Canadian Blood Services, and help fund blood drives, collection, and storage.
Hell, if they gave a percentage back to young donors to encourage regular donation, and another percentage to artificial blood research, that'd be awesome too.
Lining a for-profit blood business owner's pockets though? Not so nice.
It could be a family vacation photo. I have one, for instance, that goes on display on my desk from time to time... because it was a great vacation and I like to remember it.
People who think everything is sexual / perverted are the ones with the problem.
There are a number of 'arcades' around here in Southern Ontario, Canada. They're not a hole-in-the-wall commercial space in a mall anymore, though... they're big, big spaces, usually with a bar and restaurant.
Bigger screens, linked cabinets for PvP, etc. Now you use a house card to pay instead of quarters. And they still have those stupid play-for-tickets games.
While 9/11 was a well-coordinated and spectacular attack... I'm just a normal non-fanatic, non-obsessed guy who can come up with a dozen better ways off to terrorize a population just off the top of my head, none of which involve me dying while implementing them, though I suppose after the first or second go they'd carry a small risk of capture and incarceration.
When you think about it from that perspective, it's extraordinarily pathetic just how little they've achieved. Despite all the cloak-and-dagger, they generally get found and stopped. Despite their best efforts, most of the bodies are in the Middle East, not the USA. Despite their stated aims, the best possible outcome for them is failure, because if they started to do sufficiently well, every nation that supports them would get carpet bombed into dust, and every vaguely scary Muslim would be executed by their fearful neighbours. (Look at WWII for examples of how easily a population turns brutally racist when sufficiently motivated - it wasn't just the Germans)
I'm not terribly concerned. The Americans will continue to comically over-react and continue with their security theatre, the rest of the world (assuming they don't live somewhere the Americans decide to bomb in retribution) will be a little more careful and otherwise just keep on living.
Some women bleed like a stuck pig, or have exceptionally long or painful periods. Hormonal birth control basically takes over and gives them more statistically 'normal' symptoms. When you're dealing with those issues, the pregnancy prevention really is a side effect.
On the other hand, some women take them without skipping a week in order to completely suppress their cycle. I'm not sure if there's any long term issues with that, but assuming there aren't I've never understood why any and every woman wouldn't go with that option while on the pill.
The HHGttG game came with pocket lint, a microscopic space fleet, and a pair of Joo-Janto 2000 Peril-Sensitive sunglasses. I don't remember the pamphlet, but I wouldn't have read it anyway; hints and clues are cheating.
Regardless, bad logic, bad gameplay.
I still have brain cells dedicated to 'frotz me', 'aimfiz Belboz' and remembering grue repellent.
The Infocom games were generally quite good, but somebody needs to go back in time and bitch slap the devs for having logic in the game like 'with no hints that it's even a thing until step 500, you must perfectly perform a sequence of actions in the first 30 moves or the game cannot be completed'.
It has been my experience that any significant bias is already known and an accepted part of the culture, not some well-intentioned effort unknowingly failing to be fair.
And the review processes are usually HR bullshit. And the people pushing them use bad logic and misleading stats to push an agenda.
What you really need is to have a company not run by assholes... or given how rare that is, at least a company whose particular brand of assholes aren't sexist.
>how are you going to accurately get the numbers for job type, productivity, experience and skill level ?
Traditionally... by ignoring productivity and experience, and using seniority as a stand-in for skill level.
In other words, there is no practical way to do it since you need to individually perform a detailed historical analysis of each person's output, including adjusting for where others have helped or hindered. It'd be faster just to do the work over again.
> a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Easy peasy. Adjust the amount based on legal status. X if you're a dependent, Y if you're not. Two people living together (regardless of marital status) would be more efficient, encouraging people to cohabitate... which is good from the perspective of government service delivery. Doesn't matter if you have kids, or if you like people with the same kind of sex organs as your own.
Children get an amount sufficient to care for them, but not enough to be a profit center. Now I'm going to go all 'Orwell' on you. What if you got money as an adult, but kids resulted in a special benefits card that could only be spent on things for kids? Clothing, toys, age-appropriate books, etc. Limit the ways in which people could use kids for the monthly payout.
Now, in regions where the population is shrinking despite resources available to support it, you could add a bonus to the regular payment of parents of dependent children to make it easier on people to have children, but that would be done separately from the standard adult UBI and the dependent amount.
Where things actually start to get complicated is when it comes to the things that will remain scarce in a the shiny future 'post-scarcity' economy. Land, water, food, and energy. You are very definitely going to need a cost-of-living adjustment to allow people to afford living in denser areas where you need them to support economic activity.
>So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare.
Basic medical treatment - that which ultimately saves the state money in the majority of cases - needs to be universally available in a UBI economy. Let the rich buy better medical care, but don't let anyone go without the essentials. Everyone gets their shots, everyone gets their teeth cared for, broken bones get set, you even get glasses if you need them. Obliterate all other medical assistance programs. After all, we're talking about UBI because we've become so productive there isn't enough work to go around! We're already admitting that every human in our society deserves a share of its wealth... why artificially segregate health care from that share?
Same goes for education, though I'd say formal post-secondary education should be funded based on ability - let the dumb-but-rich buy their way through and fund access for the smart-but-poor.
Music died because radios were replaced by MP3 players and there's less exposure to new things now... you have to sell 'more of the same' because people like what's in their personal collection and want more of it. But movies? Kids used to be poor. These days, they have enough money (and they're freer with it) to be a great target demographic.
As they get older and they get experience they wise up, and then they age out. So what? There's another batch of tweens just itching to watch the latest crap you're churning out A bit older, and you don't have to be that much more inventive to hold on to them a few more years. What you make today can be exploited for nostalgia in 15 years... but in 20 it can be remade because the original audience has been completely replaced and the majority of your new audience won't even know they're consuming rehashed media.
I still don't get how some properties get 'rebooted' before anyone's forgotten the previous iteration - though in the case of the Hulk I'm glad because they got it so wrong the first time.
That's the time of the official announcement of the mission, not the launch or arrival.
They'll time the arrival for night to mitigate heating issues, obviously.
> and.. have classes where they can bring in outsiders to experiment with the products or troubleshoot what they need to do.
My wife takes hobby classes for craft making of various kinds from time to time. If there was an electronics shop around here with Pi kits and classes on how to build things with them... I'd be signing up.
I mean, I could figure it out on my own (I have a Pi and have done a few things with it) but given the lack of time I can afford to spend on it, having an instructor-led project to ensure I don't waste time on the basics, something with a set schedule outside my house... that'd be awesome.
For an attack in progress, I'd say it's more like you're being mugged and the attacker has managed to grab your wallet by the time you start fighting back.
You have a right to self-defence in the physical world, usually with a limit of 'reasonable force' (Texas excluded). To extend that to the digital world, if your system is attacked you should have the right to damage the attacking system to the point it can no longer continue its assault... and you should be able to take back your data if you can do so.
And of course, if you attack the wrong entity, you should be liable - just as you would if you were fighting a mugger and somehow knocked out an uninvolved bystander.
The danger of plenty of IT jobs - if you're competent and have time to do more than just 'put out fires' (i.e., apply quick and sloppy fixes instead of taking the time to fix the fundamental issues) - eventually you can eliminate most of your own job just by setting things up correctly.
If you're lucky that means they recognize you're good at improving system efficiencies and move you on to something else. If you're not lucky, it means they're happy sitting in 'maintenance' mode, they shrink the team, and somebody is out of work.
>I tell people to call the help desk phone line
I tell them to email our automated ticketing system. It creates a ticket with the correct user information and doesn't require our help desk staff to waste any time interpreting what the user's trying to say... the user just types out what they will and can attach a screen shot.
Then the system does a keyword search and 99% of the time it will appropriately assign the ticket to the correct class of support personnel.
Then the help desk folks can ALSO spend more time on Slashdot.
>Staff meetings are not work?
Good ones are... but I've been in IT for a couple of decades and been involved in a lot of meetings over that time at several different companies... and I can think of ONE meeting that was highly productive and I would consider 'good', and a handful of others that were moderately 'OK'.
The rest were a waste of time where managers were playing around at 'communicating' and failing miserably. Usually, a well-written email would have done the job in a fraction of the time, and on the remainder of the occasions a smaller meeting group would have been more appropriate instead of having the majority of us sitting there unable to contribute to something outside our area.
1) The help desk won't tell the user they don't know how to do their job (and usually the user is so bad at describing the issue they probably haven't had a chance to figure out it's a PEBKAC issue) so they dispatch desktop support.
2) Desktop support doesn't understand what's happening and doesn't communicate well with the user to get the details required to figure it out, so they blame network (security/policy/site connectivity/whatever).
3) The network tech stops what they're doing to prove it's a desktop issue so they can push the job back down the chain.
4) The desktop guys figure out the user is improperly trained - sometimes they're just clueless, sometimes there's a change and their department didn't do the training... or even a simple notification.
That describes 80% of the tickets I am aware of in our organization. Sometimes it bounces back and forth between steps 2 and 3 a couple of times, to the user's frustration and the discredit of the IT department. The important thing is that I am neither tier 1 support nor a network guy, so I can mostly sit to the side and look down disdainfully at the whole farce without actually having to do something about it.
I agree in principle that having our lawmakers forced to live more like 'the common rabble' would be a good thing.
However, when one person's time (or lack thereof) could cause them to read a little less of the legislation they already do a terrible job of reviewing, you start to see the problems that a car and driver might be reducing.
Maybe we should have 'government housing' - where they are forced to take up residence near their place of work. A decent home would be a job perk, and they could walk or bike to the office. It could be operated like a condo community - the individual houses wouldn't need to be particularly large, because there would be common facilities for various activities, and they wouldn't need a home office given the real thing would be a short walk away.
I went to the trouble of installing a high-gain antenna in my attic... but streaming is so easy I can't actually recall the last time I used the antenna.
The local stations either have a free streaming option or they aren't showing anything I care about (usually the latter). The Internet lets me see more or less whatever I want from anywhere in the world within an hour of first broadcast (of course, that's not with Netflix).