"Having someone walk around asking for orders takes more time away from making orders, cleaning the equipment, grinding the coffee, etc."
But coffee shops already have people walking around a coffee shop anyway, so they might as well have them try to extract more money from customers (and more importantly, poke the deadbeats).
They do? Granted I don't go to them very often, but I've yet to see a coffee shop that had someone walking around regularly.
I doubt it's all that different from Nandos - a chicken restaurant chain that's virtually non-existent in the US but very popular in the UK, where you order you meal at the counter but staff come around asking if you want dessert/coffee when you've finished.
Starbucks is completely different from this. You order at the counter, they call your name when your order is ready and then you either sit at a table and enjoy your coffee or you leave.
While the model works ok for the business meetings, it fails dismally for the loner with a laptop. Getting rid of WiFi is one way of solving the loner with a laptop problem, but it's difficult to see how it's the most profitable way of solving the problem and it doesn't solve the loner with a book problem or the pensioner with nowhere else to go problem.
Because the loner with a book isn't going to sit in the coffee shop for hours at a time taking up that valuable table space. If he's reading a book for more than 15-30 minutes, he/she will be more likely to just pick up and take it home. The pensioner (I assume you mean a retired person) doesn't need to hang out all day surfing the net either. If they can find nothing better to do than to hang out on Facebook or whatever else for hours at a time, they have bigger problems. They can go home and read a book just like the loner with a book.
If you think it's insane to have fast food restaurants that exist solely to serve coffee, and that's it, a lot of us agree with you, especially as someone decided we needed them everywhere. But, they exist, you stand in line and get extremely overpriced coffee, and leave.
The market, at the time, thought we needed them everywhere. Go to a Starbucks, it's busy, go to the one on the next block. There was a time when Starbucks couldn't get them built fast enough to keep up with the demand. Kind of like the.com era when everyone was starting a business to sell something online. Except this time the crash wasn't as big.
Although, although they have no table service, for some reason some of them apparently think you should tip them.
Um, no. When I go up to the counter and order there and carry stuff away, you don't get a damn tip. I tip people who wait on me.
Um, no. The tip jar is there for people who want to leave the barista a tip. If they thought you should tip, there would be a line on the receipt for writing it in. The tip jar at a coffee shop is no different from the tip jar on a piano at a lounge. That guy doesn't wait on you either, but you're free to tip him. Same goes for the coffee place. They put the jar there, I'm sure, initially because some people want to tip. If you don't want to, then don't. That's why it's called a tip or "gratuity", because you don't have to do it if you don't want.
Are you ok with bars? The exist largely on the same concept. You go in, stand in line (they don't all have waitresses), and order an overpriced drink. Someone decided to apply that to coffee and you're all up in arms.
Or you could just get up and keep an eye on it while ordering another coffee. I have yet to go to a coffee shop that was so big that you couldn't see every table and booth from the counter. Are you so fat and quiet that you can't yell or run after someone if they try to snatch your laptop?
My god, the level of entitlement around here is sickening.
Maybe even some kind of forced government pool. I personally want there to be a huge investment in games and other entertainment and I think if people understood the whole process they'd agree.
Here we go again trying to get the government involved. Why do people on Slashdot always see the need for the government to get involved in everything these days?!
I think the reality is that there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't give a shit about game (PC, console) development. To them, and I know some of them, they would rather see it all go away. To them, it's a huge waste of time. I may enjoy it and you may enjoy it, but they don't enjoy it at all. A game like Day of Defeat, which I can spend hours playing at a time, they see as simply a waste of several hours a day.
Some of these same people work with very high tech development projects and would rather just go outside and play frisbee or something else in their free time. The idea of playing a game on the computer that they just spent hours doing productive development work on sickens them.
This is exactly why having a "forced government pool" is a stupid idea. We don't need the government involved. What we need are people that consider pirating a game to be "no big deal" to stop doing it. You even said yourself that you know someone that makes six figures and still pirates because buying the game is "stupid". That person is in fact ruining the industry for the rest of us. He gets entertainment value out of all those games, but isn't funding the necessary R&D to bring new games to market. He probably pirates all of his movies too.
Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.
Doubling your revenue doesn't necessarily mean doubling your earnings. In some cases, the licensor of an underlying work (such as music, characters, a setting, etc.) wants a fixed royalty in dollars per copy, not as a percentage.
Valve didn't seem to complain when this happened. In fact, they had a huge press release on it after the fact. That doesn't sound like a company that didn't like what they saw.
In your example the towing company partners with AAA (so AAA directs customers to them) and the towing company guarantees quick service.
It's as if AAA partnered with the towing company to get normal service for their customers, and in return the towing company would agree to show up late for everyone else.
Uh, no, it's exactly as he stated. AAA partners with a towing company to get faster response to their customers. Everyone that doesn't have AAA is effectively delayed.
Having Google partner with Verizon to make sure video gets through quicker doesn't automatically mean Verizon is going to slow everyone else down. It just means that Verizon is going to prioritize Google's video packets. Why is this a problem? If you want your packets prioritized, pay Verizon to prioritize them.
At work, our phone lines run over VOIP. The phone company prioritizes VOIP traffic. They do that because it's their business to make sure the voice call gets through. If it means delaying YouTube or some other download, so be it.
Switching your phone number to another network is a pain in the ass.
What? Switching a phone number to another network is easy as pie. People do it all the time. Porting your number is a standard part of the procedure for getting a new subscription. At least in the EU. Here, phone companies are required to support it, and it's a good thing too.
The only way customers are bound to networks is through their contracts, and phone companies pull some weird shit to keep existing customers in.
I'm currently writing software for mobile phone contracts. It's ridiculous how many different kinds of discounts existing customers can get for renewing their contract. (Of course the discounts are optional. You don't get them automatically, but only when you're planning to leave. Don't forget to renew your contract every time it ends, or you'll be missing out on tons of discounts!)
Switching numbers on wireless phones use to be impossible in the States. The wireless providers weren't required by law to allow people to port their numbers, so they didn't do it. If you wanted to keep your number, you effectively had to keep your wireless provider. That all changed a few years ago when the government extended phone number porting laws to the wireless providers. It had been like that for years on land lines.
I'd say it's impossible. Google is too big to ignore. Frankly, if something like that happened you'd see congressional involvement.
Ha! Just like the "congressional involvment" we saw when Facebook set the privacy controls to default open? So a letter from a congressman is "congressional involvment"? Ha! In that case, Facebook actually made privacy controls easier to understand and use, but that letter from Schumer had nothing to do with it. The market (read as the users) through a fit and Facebook responded. So the market worked.
I actually support Google for this. This is the market talking. Keep the government out of it. If I want faster access to some site, I damn well should be able to pay for it. Oh, that's right, I already can by paying for a faster connection.
FYI, 10 years ago everyone said Microsoft was to big to ignore. No one's saying that anymore. Google isn't to big to ignore and it's why they have to be on their toes. If they get lazy and don't continue to improve their stuff, they will die out and be replaced by someone else. It won't happen overnight (FireFox and Chrome didn't gain their marketshare overnight), but it will happen.
I don't want politicians getting involved in much of anything unless fraud is involved somewhere (and we already have laws for that). They screw up enough things as it is. See AT&T circa 1914, Social Security, Medicare, the Post Office, and many more examples where "the government" got involved and made a mess.
Wouldn't it be easy enough to build a simple device that you could put the glasses on (so two eyes) and have that go to a single "pipe" that goes right into the camera lens? Sure, the camera will still record a flat 2D image, but it seems like fighting piracy would be pretty difficult with 3D.
I don't like people. I don't like dealing with the crowds, the cell phones, the kids, etc.
I know the feeling;)
There are theaters around now that have policies prohibiting cell phones and children in the theater. You can also pick your seat. I know in So Cal, there's one in Hollywood, the Arclight, and one in Orange County (can't remember the name of it right now, but it's at the Garden Walk in Anaheim). If you like to go to movies and don't like all those things, check out one of those theaters. You get the movie experience without the bullshit.
Jar Jar wasn't a triumph. He was almost unilaterally hated in the franchise with actual 'hate jar jar' fan sites dedicated to the topic. I wouldn't hold him up as an good example.
Wrong. Just because lots of people hated him doesn't mean he wasn't successful.
If you rate success based on the amount of money a movie makes, then you'd be right. If, however, success is rated not only on how much a movie makes but also it's staying power, you'd be dead wrong. Ask the kids that saw Episode 1 how they feel about it today (they're 17-20 years old today) and you will universally hear "OMG, I can't believe I ever liked that crap!"
No matter how well Jar Jar did to draw in the 10 and under crowd, his character, and the prequels with him, are now universally hated.
So the prequels made a lot of money, but they have no staying power. Those same kids are still enjoying the original trilogy along with their parents.
"A special effect without a story isn't much of anything" - George Lucas, circa 1980. I got the quote partially wrong, but the general idea is there and he did say something to that effect on a making of video.
This is why the United States is failing as a nation. No one seems to want to respect the choices that other people want to make. You all want the Nanny State to make the choices for you.
The problem with it being opt-in is that it also makes it lazy.
And in a free society, you have the right to be lazy/ignorant/stupid/insert whatever here. Until the United States becomes a dictatorship or a Communist government, it needs to be opt-in.
Once again, the Slashdotters show their own hypocrisy. You probably think email subscriptions should be opt-in instead of opt-out, but when it comes to organ donations, that needs to be opt-out because, in your words, opt-in makes it lazy.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a very good thing. Any time one can get remuneration to the actual content creators instead of the middle-men is a good idea in my book. Now, maybe the prices will drop a little on these things. And in the future, maybe the movie industry can move this way too (yeah, I know, wishful thinking).
Except in the case of the movie, who created the content? Is it the writer, the director, producer(s), or actors? Scripts change all the time and are even changed during filming, so who would get the payments? And you can't forget the cameraman and microphone operators.
Stop making excuses for the technological ineptitude of the masses of asses.
It's not an excuse. It's a fact: people don't understand this stuff. I agree with you about this. I don't think Google did anything wrong; instead of suing Google, the states should spend their money on educating people about how to secure their home networks. DUH!
Bullshit! This stuff gets easier and easier to do every day. It's not that they don't understand it, it's that they just don't care. The language of the setup screens can't get any easier to understand.
I've just about had it with people saying "Do your magic" when all I'm doing is setting up a shortcut on their desktop, not to mention turning on security for a WAP. If they had to do it themselves, they'd understand it just fine. But when they have "a computer guy" there, they decide to be stupid and just have "the computer guy" do it.
If someone can fix their toilet and redo their kitchen sink, they can secure their wireless. But since it's a computer, it must be a complex and difficult thing to do, right? Bullshit!
Your local government did that, and only because things were setup so that the federal government had no regulatory control over local cable companies.
Requiring an open infrastructure can only be enforced at the federal level. Either way, it's not going to happen unless government is involved.
Requiring an open infrastructure was established in 1996 with the TeleComm act of 1996. That required local companies to lease their lines to competitors. Why our Congress thinks laws like that need to be revisited just because it's been a little over 10 years is beyond me.
I have far more choices now for Internet access than I did back then. I can choose between the phone company (AT&T), cable (Time Warner), satellite (Dish and DirecTV), mobile phone (Tmobile, AT&T, Verizon, Spring, MetroPCS) for any of my Internet needs. If I need always on connectivity, I can get business accounts from all of those places.
I wonder what the old phone system would be like if it hadn't had common carrier net neutrality status, or roads, or railroads, or airplanes.
You do realize that the old phone system was a government granted monopoly because they (the government) felt it was a waste to have multiple companies running lines in parallel, right? Competition was alive and well until the government handed AT&T a monopoly and said "It's all yours"
In fact, I wonder about so-called business-friendly conservatives who think it's perfectly hunky dory to have racism in publicly accessible businesses. Can they even imagine a world where every single place you went, every single thing you did, was subject to a zillion different whims? Oh, no, don't shop there, the owner hates left handed people, red headed people, people taller than him....
You do realize that there are places like this that exist, despite laws to "protect us". And the business friendly conservatives don't think it's ok to have racism in the workplace, they're just not about to tell someone else who they can and can't hate. What they know is that those places would go out of business very fast because no one would want to work there and no one would do business with them. Or maybe you just think that if some of those laws were repealed, suddenly businesses would stop hiring black people. Yeah, I'm sure that's what would happen.
The whole point of all these laws, from anti-racism to net neutrality, is to level the playing ground.
Uh, no. The whole point of these laws is so the morons in congress can make it look like they're doing something. Slavery had been effectively abolished in this country by 1807 until the southern Democrats started repealing the laws that banned it. We're still fighting racism to this day, but I never hear a Republican call somebody a racist, it's always the Democrats. It was even a Republican president fighting southern Democrats that ended slavery, so you can stop with the "pro business" bullshit.
These so-called business-friendly nincompoops can't think past the end of their noses, that fragmenting life like that would send the economy back to the stone ages.
Aside from the basic fairness of it all, of course. But from the pragmatic point of view, they are short sighted beyond belief.
Bah. The rights wingers want big business to control big government, and the left wing wants big government to control big business. Neither of them has any faith in individual power.
The "right wingers" want nothing of the sort. What we want is for the government to get the hell out of the way and stop taxing and regulating business to the point that makes it impossible to even run a business unless you're a huge corporation. We want the federal government to be as small as possible. We want businesses to be able to do what they do best: make products that people want to buy and employee people to make those products. The problem now is that it's getting harder and harder for small businesses to compete with the big boys due to the increasing government regulations (which the big companies want because then they can run the small business competition out of business with the mountains of paperwork that's required to comply with all the regulation).
Without net neutrality, there's nothing stopping a site like Amazon from paying Comcast to slow traffic to any other retail site. Similarly, there's be great disincentive for network owners to allow access to bandwidth-hogging sites, so YouTube, Hulu, and most other video sites would never have been created, let alone new ones allowed to thrive.
Sure there is, it's called negative user feedback. Amazon would backpedal so fast your head would spin. Look at what happened when Blizzard tried to make all their users use their real name on their forums. They reversed course the next day due to the overwhelming negative response.
Unlike the current administration, businesses realize that if they piss off their customers, their customers will go elsewhere. The competition between Comcast and whoever else may be scant in some areas, but it does exist.
Net neutrality means that access remains free (as in freedom). Lack of it is a massive gift to network providers at the expense of free information. When the government abuses their power, then it's time to get your panties in a bunch. This bill abuses nothing, and grants no powers that the government doesn't already have.
Net neutrality means nothing of the sort. Net neutrality tells the providers that they can't charge for tiered access, something they already do. So your $40 per month cable bill will instantly go to over $100. If they have to give the same quality of service to everyone, you can bet your ass that they're going to make sure you pay for it. This bill removes the freedom we all enjoy right now. I'll take throttled traffic over a tripled bill any day of the week.
We are a Republic so we don't have the masses deciding "what's good for everyone". It is a representative Republic. What's good for one State might not be good for another.
My God, the FCC attempts a blatant power grab and the Slashdot crowd thinks it's great. The President does a blatant power grab with warrantless wiretapping and suddenly facism is upon us. It's the same damn thing you idiots! Wake the fuck up!
You mean when they threatened Comcast with action after Comcast's users cried foul and Comcast backed off before the FCC even did anything? Yeah, that was real effective.
The ruling you cited has to do with illegal search and seizure i.e. protection from the government. Google is not the government and as long as they don't give it to the government, they've done nothing wrong. As someone else pointed out, this is no different then someone wardriving through a neighbor collecting the information. The information is already in public.
This would be like saying that the cop illegally searched your car or house when he could clearly see the dead body through the window. That's not illegal search and seizure, that's enforcing the law.
Therein lies the problem. The average consumer does not think of wireless networking as "broadcast" information. They still consider it private. This is partially a lack of understand of the technology, and partially because it does not occur to most people that anyone else might try to snoop.
The hell they don't. I can't tell you the number of people that I have had to tell to "get your own" because they were trying to use their neighbors wireless access because they're to cheap to get their own Internet. This is exactly why I lock my down. They don't care that it's not their service. It's "free" and they want to use it.
I've even talked to people that don't want to bother locking it down because they think their Windows passwords will keep them secure. The guy was running XP with shares available to "Everyone". To bad I can't go back and show him that.
Which doesn't matter to much anyway. Besides the Laffer curve, there's another curve that's really just a straight line. That "curve" shows that no matter how high you raise taxes, the government keeps taking in the same amount of money. And it's for one very obvious reason: when you raise taxes, people that have money that they don't want taxed find ways of making it so it's not taxed. They either put it in non dividend yield stocks or they send it offshore or they buy bonds (which I don't think are taxed). Either way, they end up holding on to their money while everyone else is kept out of the upper brackets because they keep getting taxed so much that they can't break into those brackets.
The only time the government takes in more revenue is when they cut taxes. Business start hiring, which leads to more people paying taxes, which leads to higher tax revenue. Why this is still not understood is completely beyond me.
The government doesn't deserve any of it anyway! The government only needs enough revenue to secure the borders and run the military. Cut all the other social spending and entitlements (and yes I'm talking about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) and the government won't need half of what it's taking in right now.
Simply making it legal would break the drug smugglers. If it's legal, why in the hell would you buy it from a drug smuggler? There'd be no point!
Complexity? Give me a break. An old friend of mine once grew a plant in his closet at home with a blue light. Unfortunately, he never got to try out the quality since he left the light on one night. His mom saw the glow from his room and checked it out. Lucky for him, his dad just made him throw out the plant (his mom wanted him out of the house).
The point is, it doesn't take much to grow a pot plant.
Slashdot Mirror
"Having someone walk around asking for orders takes more time away from making orders, cleaning the equipment, grinding the coffee, etc."
But coffee shops already have people walking around a coffee shop anyway, so they might as well have them try to extract more money from customers (and more importantly, poke the deadbeats).
They do? Granted I don't go to them very often, but I've yet to see a coffee shop that had someone walking around regularly.
I doubt it's all that different from Nandos - a chicken restaurant chain that's virtually non-existent in the US but very popular in the UK, where you order you meal at the counter but staff come around asking if you want dessert/coffee when you've finished.
Starbucks is completely different from this. You order at the counter, they call your name when your order is ready and then you either sit at a table and enjoy your coffee or you leave.
While the model works ok for the business meetings, it fails dismally for the loner with a laptop. Getting rid of WiFi is one way of solving the loner with a laptop problem, but it's difficult to see how it's the most profitable way of solving the problem and it doesn't solve the loner with a book problem or the pensioner with nowhere else to go problem.
Because the loner with a book isn't going to sit in the coffee shop for hours at a time taking up that valuable table space. If he's reading a book for more than 15-30 minutes, he/she will be more likely to just pick up and take it home. The pensioner (I assume you mean a retired person) doesn't need to hang out all day surfing the net either. If they can find nothing better to do than to hang out on Facebook or whatever else for hours at a time, they have bigger problems. They can go home and read a book just like the loner with a book.
If you think it's insane to have fast food restaurants that exist solely to serve coffee, and that's it, a lot of us agree with you, especially as someone decided we needed them everywhere. But, they exist, you stand in line and get extremely overpriced coffee, and leave.
The market, at the time, thought we needed them everywhere. Go to a Starbucks, it's busy, go to the one on the next block. There was a time when Starbucks couldn't get them built fast enough to keep up with the demand. Kind of like the .com era when everyone was starting a business to sell something online. Except this time the crash wasn't as big.
Although, although they have no table service, for some reason some of them apparently think you should tip them.
Um, no. When I go up to the counter and order there and carry stuff away, you don't get a damn tip. I tip people who wait on me.
Um, no. The tip jar is there for people who want to leave the barista a tip. If they thought you should tip, there would be a line on the receipt for writing it in. The tip jar at a coffee shop is no different from the tip jar on a piano at a lounge. That guy doesn't wait on you either, but you're free to tip him. Same goes for the coffee place. They put the jar there, I'm sure, initially because some people want to tip. If you don't want to, then don't. That's why it's called a tip or "gratuity", because you don't have to do it if you don't want.
Are you ok with bars? The exist largely on the same concept. You go in, stand in line (they don't all have waitresses), and order an overpriced drink. Someone decided to apply that to coffee and you're all up in arms.
Or you could just get up and keep an eye on it while ordering another coffee. I have yet to go to a coffee shop that was so big that you couldn't see every table and booth from the counter. Are you so fat and quiet that you can't yell or run after someone if they try to snatch your laptop?
My god, the level of entitlement around here is sickening.
Maybe even some kind of forced government pool. I personally want there to be a huge investment in games and other entertainment and I think if people understood the whole process they'd agree.
Here we go again trying to get the government involved. Why do people on Slashdot always see the need for the government to get involved in everything these days?!
I think the reality is that there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't give a shit about game (PC, console) development. To them, and I know some of them, they would rather see it all go away. To them, it's a huge waste of time. I may enjoy it and you may enjoy it, but they don't enjoy it at all. A game like Day of Defeat, which I can spend hours playing at a time, they see as simply a waste of several hours a day.
Some of these same people work with very high tech development projects and would rather just go outside and play frisbee or something else in their free time. The idea of playing a game on the computer that they just spent hours doing productive development work on sickens them.
This is exactly why having a "forced government pool" is a stupid idea. We don't need the government involved. What we need are people that consider pirating a game to be "no big deal" to stop doing it. You even said yourself that you know someone that makes six figures and still pirates because buying the game is "stupid". That person is in fact ruining the industry for the rest of us. He gets entertainment value out of all those games, but isn't funding the necessary R&D to bring new games to market. He probably pirates all of his movies too.
Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.
Doubling your revenue doesn't necessarily mean doubling your earnings. In some cases, the licensor of an underlying work (such as music, characters, a setting, etc.) wants a fixed royalty in dollars per copy, not as a percentage.
Valve didn't seem to complain when this happened. In fact, they had a huge press release on it after the fact. That doesn't sound like a company that didn't like what they saw.
In your example the towing company partners with AAA (so AAA directs customers to them) and the towing company guarantees quick service.
It's as if AAA partnered with the towing company to get normal service for their customers, and in return the towing company would agree to show up late for everyone else.
Uh, no, it's exactly as he stated. AAA partners with a towing company to get faster response to their customers. Everyone that doesn't have AAA is effectively delayed.
Having Google partner with Verizon to make sure video gets through quicker doesn't automatically mean Verizon is going to slow everyone else down. It just means that Verizon is going to prioritize Google's video packets. Why is this a problem? If you want your packets prioritized, pay Verizon to prioritize them.
At work, our phone lines run over VOIP. The phone company prioritizes VOIP traffic. They do that because it's their business to make sure the voice call gets through. If it means delaying YouTube or some other download, so be it.
Switching your phone number to another network is a pain in the ass.
What? Switching a phone number to another network is easy as pie. People do it all the time. Porting your number is a standard part of the procedure for getting a new subscription. At least in the EU. Here, phone companies are required to support it, and it's a good thing too.
The only way customers are bound to networks is through their contracts, and phone companies pull some weird shit to keep existing customers in.
I'm currently writing software for mobile phone contracts. It's ridiculous how many different kinds of discounts existing customers can get for renewing their contract. (Of course the discounts are optional. You don't get them automatically, but only when you're planning to leave. Don't forget to renew your contract every time it ends, or you'll be missing out on tons of discounts!)
Switching numbers on wireless phones use to be impossible in the States. The wireless providers weren't required by law to allow people to port their numbers, so they didn't do it. If you wanted to keep your number, you effectively had to keep your wireless provider. That all changed a few years ago when the government extended phone number porting laws to the wireless providers. It had been like that for years on land lines.
I'd say it's impossible. Google is too big to ignore. Frankly, if something like that happened you'd see congressional involvement.
Ha! Just like the "congressional involvment" we saw when Facebook set the privacy controls to default open? So a letter from a congressman is "congressional involvment"? Ha! In that case, Facebook actually made privacy controls easier to understand and use, but that letter from Schumer had nothing to do with it. The market (read as the users) through a fit and Facebook responded. So the market worked.
I actually support Google for this. This is the market talking. Keep the government out of it. If I want faster access to some site, I damn well should be able to pay for it. Oh, that's right, I already can by paying for a faster connection.
FYI, 10 years ago everyone said Microsoft was to big to ignore. No one's saying that anymore. Google isn't to big to ignore and it's why they have to be on their toes. If they get lazy and don't continue to improve their stuff, they will die out and be replaced by someone else. It won't happen overnight (FireFox and Chrome didn't gain their marketshare overnight), but it will happen.
I don't want politicians getting involved in much of anything unless fraud is involved somewhere (and we already have laws for that). They screw up enough things as it is. See AT&T circa 1914, Social Security, Medicare, the Post Office, and many more examples where "the government" got involved and made a mess.
Wouldn't it be easy enough to build a simple device that you could put the glasses on (so two eyes) and have that go to a single "pipe" that goes right into the camera lens? Sure, the camera will still record a flat 2D image, but it seems like fighting piracy would be pretty difficult with 3D.
I don't like people. I don't like dealing with the crowds, the cell phones, the kids, etc.
I know the feeling ;)
There are theaters around now that have policies prohibiting cell phones and children in the theater. You can also pick your seat. I know in So Cal, there's one in Hollywood, the Arclight, and one in Orange County (can't remember the name of it right now, but it's at the Garden Walk in Anaheim). If you like to go to movies and don't like all those things, check out one of those theaters. You get the movie experience without the bullshit.
Jar Jar wasn't a triumph. He was almost unilaterally hated in the franchise with actual 'hate jar jar' fan sites dedicated to the topic. I wouldn't hold him up as an good example.
Wrong. Just because lots of people hated him doesn't mean he wasn't successful.
If you rate success based on the amount of money a movie makes, then you'd be right. If, however, success is rated not only on how much a movie makes but also it's staying power, you'd be dead wrong. Ask the kids that saw Episode 1 how they feel about it today (they're 17-20 years old today) and you will universally hear "OMG, I can't believe I ever liked that crap!"
No matter how well Jar Jar did to draw in the 10 and under crowd, his character, and the prequels with him, are now universally hated.
So the prequels made a lot of money, but they have no staying power. Those same kids are still enjoying the original trilogy along with their parents.
"A special effect without a story isn't much of anything" - George Lucas, circa 1980. I got the quote partially wrong, but the general idea is there and he did say something to that effect on a making of video.
This is why the United States is failing as a nation. No one seems to want to respect the choices that other people want to make. You all want the Nanny State to make the choices for you.
The problem with it being opt-in is that it also makes it lazy.
And in a free society, you have the right to be lazy/ignorant/stupid/insert whatever here. Until the United States becomes a dictatorship or a Communist government, it needs to be opt-in.
Once again, the Slashdotters show their own hypocrisy. You probably think email subscriptions should be opt-in instead of opt-out, but when it comes to organ donations, that needs to be opt-out because, in your words, opt-in makes it lazy.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a very good thing. Any time one can get remuneration to the actual content creators instead of the middle-men is a good idea in my book. Now, maybe the prices will drop a little on these things. And in the future, maybe the movie industry can move this way too (yeah, I know, wishful thinking).
Except in the case of the movie, who created the content? Is it the writer, the director, producer(s), or actors? Scripts change all the time and are even changed during filming, so who would get the payments? And you can't forget the cameraman and microphone operators.
Stop making excuses for the technological ineptitude of the masses of asses.
It's not an excuse. It's a fact: people don't understand this stuff. I agree with you about this. I don't think Google did anything wrong; instead of suing Google, the states should spend their money on educating people about how to secure their home networks. DUH!
Bullshit! This stuff gets easier and easier to do every day. It's not that they don't understand it, it's that they just don't care. The language of the setup screens can't get any easier to understand.
I've just about had it with people saying "Do your magic" when all I'm doing is setting up a shortcut on their desktop, not to mention turning on security for a WAP. If they had to do it themselves, they'd understand it just fine. But when they have "a computer guy" there, they decide to be stupid and just have "the computer guy" do it.
If someone can fix their toilet and redo their kitchen sink, they can secure their wireless. But since it's a computer, it must be a complex and difficult thing to do, right? Bullshit!
Your local government did that, and only because things were setup so that the federal government had no regulatory control over local cable companies.
Requiring an open infrastructure can only be enforced at the federal level. Either way, it's not going to happen unless government is involved.
Requiring an open infrastructure was established in 1996 with the TeleComm act of 1996. That required local companies to lease their lines to competitors. Why our Congress thinks laws like that need to be revisited just because it's been a little over 10 years is beyond me.
I have far more choices now for Internet access than I did back then. I can choose between the phone company (AT&T), cable (Time Warner), satellite (Dish and DirecTV), mobile phone (Tmobile, AT&T, Verizon, Spring, MetroPCS) for any of my Internet needs. If I need always on connectivity, I can get business accounts from all of those places.
I wonder what the old phone system would be like if it hadn't had common carrier net neutrality status, or roads, or railroads, or airplanes.
You do realize that the old phone system was a government granted monopoly because they (the government) felt it was a waste to have multiple companies running lines in parallel, right? Competition was alive and well until the government handed AT&T a monopoly and said "It's all yours"
In fact, I wonder about so-called business-friendly conservatives who think it's perfectly hunky dory to have racism in publicly accessible businesses. Can they even imagine a world where every single place you went, every single thing you did, was subject to a zillion different whims? Oh, no, don't shop there, the owner hates left handed people, red headed people, people taller than him ....
You do realize that there are places like this that exist, despite laws to "protect us". And the business friendly conservatives don't think it's ok to have racism in the workplace, they're just not about to tell someone else who they can and can't hate. What they know is that those places would go out of business very fast because no one would want to work there and no one would do business with them. Or maybe you just think that if some of those laws were repealed, suddenly businesses would stop hiring black people. Yeah, I'm sure that's what would happen.
The whole point of all these laws, from anti-racism to net neutrality, is to level the playing ground.
Uh, no. The whole point of these laws is so the morons in congress can make it look like they're doing something. Slavery had been effectively abolished in this country by 1807 until the southern Democrats started repealing the laws that banned it. We're still fighting racism to this day, but I never hear a Republican call somebody a racist, it's always the Democrats. It was even a Republican president fighting southern Democrats that ended slavery, so you can stop with the "pro business" bullshit.
These so-called business-friendly nincompoops can't think past the end of their noses, that fragmenting life like that would send the economy back to the stone ages.
Aside from the basic fairness of it all, of course. But from the pragmatic point of view, they are short sighted beyond belief.
Bah. The rights wingers want big business to control big government, and the left wing wants big government to control big business. Neither of them has any faith in individual power.
The "right wingers" want nothing of the sort. What we want is for the government to get the hell out of the way and stop taxing and regulating business to the point that makes it impossible to even run a business unless you're a huge corporation. We want the federal government to be as small as possible. We want businesses to be able to do what they do best: make products that people want to buy and employee people to make those products. The problem now is that it's getting harder and harder for small businesses to compete with the big boys due to the increasing government regulations (which the big companies want because then they can run the small business competition out of business with the mountains of paperwork that's required to comply with all the regulation).
Without net neutrality, there's nothing stopping a site like Amazon from paying Comcast to slow traffic to any other retail site. Similarly, there's be great disincentive for network owners to allow access to bandwidth-hogging sites, so YouTube, Hulu, and most other video sites would never have been created, let alone new ones allowed to thrive.
Sure there is, it's called negative user feedback. Amazon would backpedal so fast your head would spin. Look at what happened when Blizzard tried to make all their users use their real name on their forums. They reversed course the next day due to the overwhelming negative response.
Unlike the current administration, businesses realize that if they piss off their customers, their customers will go elsewhere. The competition between Comcast and whoever else may be scant in some areas, but it does exist.
Net neutrality means that access remains free (as in freedom). Lack of it is a massive gift to network providers at the expense of free information. When the government abuses their power, then it's time to get your panties in a bunch. This bill abuses nothing, and grants no powers that the government doesn't already have.
Net neutrality means nothing of the sort. Net neutrality tells the providers that they can't charge for tiered access, something they already do. So your $40 per month cable bill will instantly go to over $100. If they have to give the same quality of service to everyone, you can bet your ass that they're going to make sure you pay for it. This bill removes the freedom we all enjoy right now. I'll take throttled traffic over a tripled bill any day of the week.
We are a Republic so we don't have the masses deciding "what's good for everyone". It is a representative Republic. What's good for one State might not be good for another.
My God, the FCC attempts a blatant power grab and the Slashdot crowd thinks it's great. The President does a blatant power grab with warrantless wiretapping and suddenly facism is upon us. It's the same damn thing you idiots! Wake the fuck up!
You mean when they threatened Comcast with action after Comcast's users cried foul and Comcast backed off before the FCC even did anything? Yeah, that was real effective.
The ruling you cited has to do with illegal search and seizure i.e. protection from the government. Google is not the government and as long as they don't give it to the government, they've done nothing wrong. As someone else pointed out, this is no different then someone wardriving through a neighbor collecting the information. The information is already in public.
This would be like saying that the cop illegally searched your car or house when he could clearly see the dead body through the window. That's not illegal search and seizure, that's enforcing the law.
Therein lies the problem. The average consumer does not think of wireless networking as "broadcast" information. They still consider it private. This is partially a lack of understand of the technology, and partially because it does not occur to most people that anyone else might try to snoop.
The hell they don't. I can't tell you the number of people that I have had to tell to "get your own" because they were trying to use their neighbors wireless access because they're to cheap to get their own Internet. This is exactly why I lock my down. They don't care that it's not their service. It's "free" and they want to use it.
I've even talked to people that don't want to bother locking it down because they think their Windows passwords will keep them secure. The guy was running XP with shares available to "Everyone". To bad I can't go back and show him that.
Which doesn't matter to much anyway. Besides the Laffer curve, there's another curve that's really just a straight line. That "curve" shows that no matter how high you raise taxes, the government keeps taking in the same amount of money. And it's for one very obvious reason: when you raise taxes, people that have money that they don't want taxed find ways of making it so it's not taxed. They either put it in non dividend yield stocks or they send it offshore or they buy bonds (which I don't think are taxed). Either way, they end up holding on to their money while everyone else is kept out of the upper brackets because they keep getting taxed so much that they can't break into those brackets.
The only time the government takes in more revenue is when they cut taxes. Business start hiring, which leads to more people paying taxes, which leads to higher tax revenue. Why this is still not understood is completely beyond me.
The government doesn't deserve any of it anyway! The government only needs enough revenue to secure the borders and run the military. Cut all the other social spending and entitlements (and yes I'm talking about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) and the government won't need half of what it's taking in right now.
Simply making it legal would break the drug smugglers. If it's legal, why in the hell would you buy it from a drug smuggler? There'd be no point!
Complexity? Give me a break. An old friend of mine once grew a plant in his closet at home with a blue light. Unfortunately, he never got to try out the quality since he left the light on one night. His mom saw the glow from his room and checked it out. Lucky for him, his dad just made him throw out the plant (his mom wanted him out of the house).
The point is, it doesn't take much to grow a pot plant.