I used to think that TV a la carte was the solution too but after talking with someone in the cable business I'm convinced this "cure" would be worse then the original "disease".
The cable companies would run the numbers so they are even _more_ profitable. Here's an example of how the cable companies would spin it:
They know that you can get basic for $80, tier 1 for another $40, tier 2 for another $40, so your current bill is $160.
Since people will want to lower their bill they will just charge more per channel. i.e. They would offer the channels at outrageous prices, say $50/channel, because they know you don't want to pay for the bundles. You want 2 channels you are already up to $100. You want 3 channels, that is $150. You want 4 channels that is $200. They are basically figuring out what the average consumer "needs". Sure they will make less money on a few people that have the discipline to order just 1 channel, but the majority of people won't.
The wildcard in all this is still Google and Apple. They just don't have the infrastructure to support "the last mile."
So the cable companies have no motivation to give the customer better deals -- they also can't afford to with the way the licenses costs. Some analysts estimate there is a ~5.. 10% increase in license costs per contract.
> After all, they own the physical wires that will be used to deliver content to the customer. In whatever form that is, the cable companies will be in a position to monetize that position.
Ironically, that is actually a sore point for the cable companies. They have millions invested in copper wire -- that "last mile to the house." They charge people for internet access but people can easily saturate it by a competitor say Netflix. To use a car analogy, they charge for a driveway to access the (internet) highway. They also offer vehicles (TV shows) but people are able to use a different vehicle (netflix) that puts wear and tear on the road (traffic).
They kind of made their own bed. They _could_ deploy fiber but they don't want to invest in their future.
> Worse than content, they have a near-monopoly on Internet access
Yes, that's a second, but related problem.
> Many are also setting bandwidth caps with overage fees to limit Internet video use (while their own video services remain cap-free
Yup -- they "claim" they don't cap "competitors" like Netflix but that is hard to prove. Regardless they definitely give preferential treatment to their own data streams.
Cable TV can't lower their bills much -- the licensing fees for the premium cable networks are spiraling out of control.
Netflix doesn't have the money to license cable networks like Starz. Netflix philosophy is "if we can't afford to license the content, we'll simply make our own." They really don't have much of a choice.
Cable TV isn't in any trouble (yet). They have a near monopoly on content.
> What would happen if we diverted most of the Colorado river to a piping system to southern California?
The worlds longest garden hose? California already tried that.
See the fantastic documentary Cadillac Desert. Details Mulholland's Dream, aka the rape and pillage of Owen's Lake and then tried to do the same with other river systems.
Thankfully the other states told California to fuck off before they destroyed their ecosystem.
-- First Contact is coming ~2024. Are you ready for a new perspective?
> YouTube allows you to watch videos in exchange of seeing some advertisements.
First, allows, as in "not required."
> This is the deal that they offer. If you use AdBlock, you drop your part,
Second: You are failing to understand what a contract is. There is no obligation to something that was never agreed upon in the first place.
You keep assuming that a user gave their tacit consent to this behavior. That is a fallacy.
When a user watches a video there is no checkbox to agree to their obnoxious Terms of Service. Ergo, there is no "ethical choice" to be made, because there never was one in the first place.
> you are being unfair towards the other party.
Quick, somebody call the wambulance.
Are you next going to arguing the stupidity of "someone closing their eyes for a youtube ad" is "being "unfair" and unethical" ??
That horse has already left the barn. Closing the barn doors aren't going to work, no matter how hard they try. Trying to force users to watch ads they don't want is only idiotic and damages the YouTube brand. If their business model is broken and archaic they are being unfair to all their shareholders.
When YouTube beings to pay my internet bill for _my bandwidth_ for their shitty ads THEN, maybe, they can talk. Until then, they are just wasting my time AND bandwidth.
> The only way they can win is to render the ads into the video itself.
The technical term is "Dynamic (content) Ingestion"
That's what the cable industry does. Want to watch something on demand? Be prepared for a 30 second ad every 20 minutes.
Fortunately Google hasn't figured this out, yet. They are still probably weighing the pro's and con's.
That's the funny thing about the internet. Piss the mass community off too much and they will abandon ship for yet-another-site that offers the same functionality without the hassles.
> English is the most beautiful language, and it keeps getting better. It needs no fixing and iIts not going anywhere. So get used to it [if you haven't already].
I see someone forgot the sarcasm tag.
English is a pretty fucked up language simply due to its inconsistency
* When the same word can both be a noun and verb, this is a problem. This IS a valid sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo http://mentalfloss.com/article...
* J wasn't invented until after the 1611 King James Bible. Is J pronounced like Y or not??
Hallelujah -- like y
Why the hell would you invent a new glyph for the same bloody sound when you _already_ have one??
* Is G is hard or soft?
Is gib pronounced like gib or jib ?
* Stupid plurality
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes. Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice, But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen? The cow in the plural may be cows or kine, But the plural of vow is vows, not vine. And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet, But I give a boot⦠would a pair be beet? If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?
If the singular is this, and the plural is these, Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese? Then one may be that, and three be those, Yet the plural of hat would never be hose. We speak of a brother, and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim. So our English, I think you will agree, Is the trickiest language you ever did see.
I take it you already know of tough, and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you on hiccough, through, slough and though. Well done! And now you wish, perhaps To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead; it's said like bed, not bead! For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat, (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt) A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there, Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward. And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart. Come, come, I've hardly made a start. A dreadful language: Why, man alive, I'd learned to talk when I was five. And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Right now the web has been relegated to content consumption, posting stupid obvious questions, posting controversial material to get eyeballs (clickbait), trying to get as many clicks as possible by splitting articles up into N pages, or even bullshit like only liking to articles on the same site./glares at Phoronix
The web has become a clusterfuck of bad design and worse implementations.
> The devs refused to bow down to their orders and shut down the project. > Here in the free world, the devs say no and shut it down, because we have more freedom than they do.
Huh?
Cognitive dissonance much??
You are going to argue they have _more_ freedom yet under duress they complied? How the fuck is this "more" freedom??
**IF** they had this mythical freedom you claim then the original TrueCrypt devs would NOT have felt the need to shut it down.
The only think the TrueCrypt devs showed is that they have no balls against bad laws.
The article summary doesn't pass the mother test. i.e. If you can't explain the topic to your mother, the summary is not plain enough, and not descriptive enough.
* How does this a normal user? * What can they or not do now? * What do they have watch out for?
Easter eggs were "par for the course" back in the day. It was a way for us to blow off some steam for the very long crunch. i.e. Our physics guy added a machine easter egg.
Context: The high score screen only allowed N characters. My last name of course had N+1 characters so I made the code detect it and append the last character.:-)
Harmless, but fun.
Years later, the younger brother of my best friend was doing QA for the company and was testing a port. He came across this easter egg and told his older brother that "I had hacked the game!"
He didn't realize I had worked on the original game and _wrote_ that easter egg.:-)
Easter Eggs, when they are small cosmetic things, are harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think that TV a la carte was the solution too but after talking with someone in the cable business I'm convinced this "cure" would be worse then the original "disease".
The cable companies would run the numbers so they are even _more_ profitable. Here's an example of how the cable companies would spin it:
They know that you can get basic for $80, tier 1 for another $40, tier 2 for another $40, so your current bill is $160.
Since people will want to lower their bill they will just charge more per channel. i.e. They would offer the channels at outrageous prices, say $50/channel, because they know you don't want to pay for the bundles. You want 2 channels you are already up to $100. You want 3 channels, that is $150. You want 4 channels that is $200. They are basically figuring out what the average consumer "needs". Sure they will make less money on a few people that have the discipline to order just 1 channel, but the majority of people won't.
The wildcard in all this is still Google and Apple. They just don't have the infrastructure to support "the last mile."
So the cable companies have no motivation to give the customer better deals -- they also can't afford to with the way the licenses costs. Some analysts estimate there is a ~5 .. 10% increase in license costs per contract.
> After all, they own the physical wires that will be used to deliver content to the customer. In whatever form that is, the cable companies will be in a position to monetize that position.
Ironically, that is actually a sore point for the cable companies. They have millions invested in copper wire -- that "last mile to the house." They charge people for internet access but people can easily saturate it by a competitor say Netflix. To use a car analogy, they charge for a driveway to access the (internet) highway. They also offer vehicles (TV shows) but people are able to use a different vehicle (netflix) that puts wear and tear on the road (traffic).
They kind of made their own bed. They _could_ deploy fiber but they don't want to invest in their future.
Definitely an interesting time.
> Worse than content, they have a near-monopoly on Internet access
Yes, that's a second, but related problem.
> Many are also setting bandwidth caps with overage fees to limit Internet video use (while their own video services remain cap-free
Yup -- they "claim" they don't cap "competitors" like Netflix but that is hard to prove. Regardless they definitely give preferential treatment to their own data streams.
Cable TV can't lower their bills much -- the licensing fees for the premium cable networks are spiraling out of control.
Netflix doesn't have the money to license cable networks like Starz. Netflix philosophy is "if we can't afford to license the content, we'll simply make our own." They really don't have much of a choice.
Cable TV isn't in any trouble (yet). They have a near monopoly on content.
> What would happen if we diverted most of the Colorado river to a piping system to southern California?
The worlds longest garden hose? California already tried that.
See the fantastic documentary Cadillac Desert . Details Mulholland's Dream, aka the rape and pillage of Owen's Lake and then tried to do the same with other river systems.
Thankfully the other states told California to fuck off before they destroyed their ecosystem.
--
First Contact is coming ~2024. Are you ready for a new perspective?
Indeed. Cadillac Desert is a fantastic documentary about Mulhollands Dream, aka the rape and pillage of Owen's Lake.
In 9 parts
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
--
First Contact is coming 2024. Are you ready for a new perspective?
If you are single, the "correct" answer is mu which means "not applicable."
As in, the question _presupposes_ conditions which are not true. If you are single, you are not married by definition.
Truth is not a mutually exclusive binary state of True / False.
> One can stop before performing the action.
No, one never started
100% agree!
Sometimes information is incorrect, or out-of-date.
Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
> This is the deal that they offer. If you use AdBlock, you drop your part,
Read what you wrote again.
You keep assuming there is an obligation, namely, an ethical obligation.
You are begging the question.
There is no ethical obligation because there never was an agreement in the first place.
Your ethical claim is meritless.
Already got it. :-) It's the 7th entry, right below pragprog ...
* https://pragprog.com/book/ahmi... [pragprog.com]
* http://codecombat.com/ [codecombat.com]
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Can we get a FAQ please? Here are the common answers:
* Visually with Angry Birds characters: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
* Scratch
* http://coderdojo.com/
* Minecraft mods
* http://www.learntomod.com./
* https://pragprog.com/book/ahmi...
* http://codecombat.com/
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://boardgamegeek.com/board...
* http://www.gamebooks.org/show_...
* http://venturebeat.com/2014/06...
* http://meetedison.com/
* BASIC
* Vic-20 C64 Compute! magazine
* Raspberry Pi
* Arduino
* Logo
> YouTube allows you to watch videos in exchange of seeing some advertisements.
First, allows, as in "not required."
> This is the deal that they offer. If you use AdBlock, you drop your part,
Second: You are failing to understand what a contract is. There is no obligation to something that was never agreed upon in the first place.
You keep assuming that a user gave their tacit consent to this behavior. That is a fallacy.
When a user watches a video there is no checkbox to agree to their obnoxious Terms of Service. Ergo, there is no "ethical choice" to be made, because there never was one in the first place.
> you are being unfair towards the other party.
Quick, somebody call the wambulance.
Are you next going to arguing the stupidity of "someone closing their eyes for a youtube ad" is "being "unfair" and unethical" ??
That horse has already left the barn. Closing the barn doors aren't going to work, no matter how hard they try. Trying to force users to watch ads they don't want is only idiotic and damages the YouTube brand. If their business model is broken and archaic they are being unfair to all their shareholders.
When YouTube beings to pay my internet bill for _my bandwidth_ for their shitty ads THEN, maybe, they can talk. Until then, they are just wasting my time AND bandwidth.
Quit being a shill of ignoring the actual problem.
Half-assed "solutions" are still "half-assed"
> The only way they can win is to render the ads into the video itself.
The technical term is "Dynamic (content) Ingestion"
That's what the cable industry does. Want to watch something on demand? Be prepared for a 30 second ad every 20 minutes.
Fortunately Google hasn't figured this out, yet. They are still probably weighing the pro's and con's.
That's the funny thing about the internet. Piss the mass community off too much and they will abandon ship for yet-another-site that offers the same functionality without the hassles.
> Aren't you worried about the ethical choices you are making there?
[Citation]
You're begging the question.
You haven't defined ethical choices, and you are implying / assuming there are some when you haven't even proved there are.
Why is YouTube not being respectful of my time?
> YouTube lets you watch videos for free, provided that you watch these small advertisements every now and then.
You keep using this word "Free." It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Free means: "No Strings Attached"
Not "First you need to fulfill this requirement."
Quite hijacking "free" and perverting its definition.
Except you str ignoring the facts that YouTube was started in 2005 and adverts didn't show up until 2006.
And before you whine about Wikipedia, this graphic confirms ads didn't exist at first either.
Giving something away for free and then switching to "mandatory viewing" is classic bait-n-switch.
> English is the most beautiful language, and it keeps getting better. It needs no fixing and iIts not going anywhere. So get used to it [if you haven't already].
I see someone forgot the sarcasm tag.
English is a pretty fucked up language simply due to its inconsistency
* When the same word can both be a noun and verb, this is a problem.
This IS a valid sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
* words containing "ough" are inconsistent
http://www.say-it-in-english.c...
* Stupid homonyms
How is 'read' pronounced? I read the book -- like red? Did you read the book ? like reed? Why does tense change the pronunciation?
Which witch? Whether Weather?
* In some cases we *transform* "ay" to "aid"
Lay -> laid
Overlay -> overlaid
Pay -> paid
Say -> said
* In other cases we *add* "ed" to "ay"
belay -> belayed
delay -> delayed
inlay -> inlaid
relay -> relayed
* J wasn't invented until after the 1611 King James Bible. Is J pronounced like Y or not??
Hallelujah -- like y
Why the hell would you invent a new glyph for the same bloody sound when you _already_ have one??
* Is G is hard or soft?
Is gib pronounced like gib or jib ?
* Stupid plurality
* I before E except after C
beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign, dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty, foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige, greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist, leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient, rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik, society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird ??????
Concur 100%!!
I think your line says it all:
We've gone from the walled garden of services like AOL and Compuserve to the walled garden of Facebook and Twitter.
The hypocrisy over the female nipple is a perfect example! The Huffington Post did a good writeup:
#FreeTheNipple: Facebook Changes Breastfeeding Mothers Photo Policy
* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"Deep links" are only the tip of the iceberg.
As Alan Kay pointed out almost 20 years ago (!) when the web get reinvented twice over it STILL kept missing its true potential.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Right now the web has been relegated to content consumption, posting stupid obvious questions, posting controversial material to get eyeballs (clickbait), trying to get as many clicks as possible by splitting articles up into N pages, or even bullshit like only liking to articles on the same site. /glares at Phoronix
The web has become a clusterfuck of bad design and worse implementations.
When you have standards misspelling referrer in the HTTP header standard it is depressing that everything about the web is literally half-assed.
What's new? :-/
> The devs refused to bow down to their orders and shut down the project.
> Here in the free world, the devs say no and shut it down, because we have more freedom than they do.
Huh?
Cognitive dissonance much??
You are going to argue they have _more_ freedom yet under duress they complied? How the fuck is this "more" freedom??
**IF** they had this mythical freedom you claim then the original TrueCrypt devs would NOT have felt the need to shut it down.
The only think the TrueCrypt devs showed is that they have no balls against bad laws.
The article summary doesn't pass the mother test. i.e. If you can't explain the topic to your mother, the summary is not plain enough, and not descriptive enough.
* How does this a normal user?
* What can they or not do now?
* What do they have watch out for?
Dev's are even putting ASCII art easter eggs in HTML. This is the easter egg hidden in the free-to-play pay-to-win Warframe MMO website.
Posting as a pic: http://i.imgur.com/eJz6qbd.png
Since /.'s ecode completely broken. e.g.
The funny thing is that with the old Leisure Suit Larry games that you could simply "brute force" it, and learn something.
Motivation is a strong desire, education be damned. :-)
Easter eggs were "par for the course" back in the day. It was a way for us to blow off some steam for the very long crunch. i.e. Our physics guy added a machine easter egg.
Context: The high score screen only allowed N characters. My last name of course had N+1 characters so I made the code detect it and append the last character. :-)
Harmless, but fun.
Years later, the younger brother of my best friend was doing QA for the company and was testing a port. He came across this easter egg and told his older brother that "I had hacked the game!"
He didn't realize I had worked on the original game and _wrote_ that easter egg. :-)
Easter Eggs, when they are small cosmetic things, are harmless.
Wow, the size of those home button icons look cluttered and hard to be precise.