I know, right?
I mean, why would anyone go to a concert when they can listen to the same music on their headphones, pause when they want, not have to worry if the lead singer has a sore throat, or deal with the second-hand pot smoke?Or go to the theater to see a play when it's probably been made into a movie you could torrent and watch for free?
There are a lot of people that enjoy the live sports experience. The NFLs problem with blackouts isn't the overall product or experience. Blackouts are only a problem in small markets with perennially shitty teams Even the team with the worst attendance had 400,000 attendees at home games last year.
The problem consumers have with blackouts isn't that it prevents them from seeing their local team, it's that it prevents them from seeing other out of market teams. Even though the networks broadcast two early and two late games, if your local team is playing, they have to show that and can't show the other conference games. It's twice as bad if you live in a television market with one team from each conference.
Because I don't have to have the phone *on* me, I just have to have it *near* me, which it almost always is. It's on the desk in the apartment, it's in my pocket, it's on my desk at work, wherever. It's a secondary display/interface that I don't have to have a hand free to use, don't have to fumble with on the subway, and don't have to walk across the room to read.
It's a convenience, but kind of a nice one. A split second glance at my wrist to see if the email that just arrived requires my immediate attention, one-button canned replies to text messages so I can tell the friend waiting for me at the airport that I'm on my way, etc.
Clearly you don't live in a large city in the U.S. where mail frequently disappears, often found months (or years) later in a dumpster or a postal workers basement.
I'll take the same 99.99% delivery rate and the near-instant turnaround possible with email, thanks.
Idle developers are the devil's playthings.
If you've got programmers on staff, they're never going to say 'Hey, that's pretty good, we're done.' Their continued desire to draw a paycheck requires them to constantly fuck with stuff that works until it doesn't, so then they can get paid to fix it.
I'm a frequent and long-term Amazon customer (their first year, I even got some swag from them for being an early adopter). I rarely buy something on Amazon because it's cheaper, and when price is the deciding factor, it's between Amazon and another online retailer, not between Amazon and a local retailer.
I'm picky about what I buy, and I do not miss at all the days of walking into a retail establishment with the goal of buying a specific (shoe, gadget, book, whatever), being told that they don't have it in stock, and then either having to settle for something less than I wanted, deal with being upsold by some sales rat, or wait for them to order it and deal with another trip to the location. I don't miss at all the days of the $5 trip on the subway to buy an $8 book, assuming there was something at the bookstore that appealed to me when I got there.
Governments that think that levying sales taxes on online companies will magically cure retailer woes are morons, because for the people that are buying the stuff, it's selection, convenience, and then price. Physical stores are always going to lose the first, quite often the second, and at best tie on the third. And I bet the guys stocking the local supermarket would be happier with a full-time with benefits job at an Amazon warehouse than where they are now.
Retailers are middle-men. Good ones offer services and experiences beyond the mere exchange of cash for goods, but they're still middle-men, and if the internet has taught us anything, it's that it eats middle-men. Record stores, game stores, drug stores, book stores...
Myth is a monumental pain in the ass and has nowhere near the 'fire and forget' utility of TiVo. Unarguably more powerful, but that's not an issue in 99% of the living rooms.
And streaming is nice, but most don't have an easy quick rewind, can't be downloaded for offline use, and are often of lesser visual and audio quality.
Horseshit. It's almost certainly of no interest to anyone outside academics. Our ancestors didn't give a shit about history, and we turned out ok. Look at any really old European/Mediterranean city, and you'll see new construction piled on old construction every couple centuries for hundreds or thousands of years.
If you think it's that important, than you pay for it. Your attitude is exactly why government is the problem; tons of power, no willingness to assume responsiblity.
Clearly you're either 7' tall or don't spend a lot of time at parades if you think looking at everything from a 5' eye level in a crowded place is going to improve things.
I've only had my Pebble for a few days, but I'm finding it pretty convenient when I'm out and about. A lot quicker when I'm walking somewhere, or on the subway, to glance at my wrist to see if I need to respond to an email right away or if it can wait. And the (currently) rudimentary music controls are convenient, too.
It's still in a primitive state, but hopefully the developer community will come up with some killer apps for it. Time will tell if it becomes useful enough to survive past the toy stage and become a regular fixture on my arm.
I agree that there's a reason we have free public libraries. I'm not suggesting that the need for free public libraries goes away. I'm suggesting that what the need for a physical presence and tangible books is going the way of the vinyl LP and the record store.
Posting a semi-releveant Wikipedia article isn't much of a counter.
The Kindle is a delivery mechanism. I can already check books out of the local library on it without ever spending another $1 at Amazon. But the selection sucks, because instead of buying digital copies that will never wear out, and will never be returned late, won't be unavailable because the only copy is at branch X instead of Branch Y,etc, they're buying dead tree versions.
Digital distribution could dramaticallt expand a library's reach with the same resources.
Prattlings from a worker in yet another doomed profession.
I have several friends who work at libraries, and I'm constantly amazed at their delusions of relevance. More and more money spent acquiring multiple copies of best sellers rather than expanding the breadth of the library. Money wasted on video games and popular DVDs.
A single years' budget could buy everyone in my city one of the subsidized Kindles. Lease the real estate to purchase e-books for lending.
Instead, they're expanding the number of libraries but keeping the budget the same, so it'll mean more of the pie going for facilities and salaries and less on content.
It's absolutely possible. Tuition is $6500 a year for California state schools, $5500 or so for Florida, etc. The $10k+ figures include room and board, transportation, books at retail vs used prices, etc. You're going to have to have a place to live, food, and some way to get to work anyway, so those costs are a wash.
Vancouver is more expensive than Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco and Chicago (actually, more expensive than any US city except New York).. It's certainly possible to live in those areas with public transportation, local parks, schools, and supermarkets. But you've got to be rich or live in the crappy part of town.
If you make it desirable to live there, you're going to drive prices up to the point where only the well-to-do can afford it. But the well-to-do aren't going to mow the lawns, clean the toilets, haul the garbage, or teach the kids. So you end up forcing the people that will do those jobs out to the suburbs..
The result is places like San Francisco that can't hire teachers, because they can't afford to live near their schools. And since they can't get good teachers, the families with kids are fleeing to the suburbs. Or Washington, D.C., which is on the verge of not being a majority-black city because gentrification is driving up property values. They've had to abandon residency requirements for municipal employees because they couldn't fill vacancies anymore, so even trying to force people to live in cities doesn't work.
People are willing to accept a certain degree of misery in their daily commute in exchange for larger homes, bigger yards, better schools, and less crime. If someone is already willing to live with a 2-hour commute each way, there's not much you can do to punish him further.
Maybe the lure is not having to deal with all the Powerpoint happy middle managers that keep the program mired in bureaucracy. Just because 'the best and the brightest' want to leave doesn't mean there isn't a fuck-ton of 'mediocre and not so smart' left behind.
99.9% of those Linksys routers will have no need to run IPv6 in their effective lifetime. When did people develop this sense of entitlement that every little cheap-ass consumer product they buy ought to be future-proof?
I've used this feature on Steam several times. Start a long game of Civ 5 (huge maps, epic speed) and play till the sun comes up. Save to the Steam Cloud. Get stuck at work patching servers or something, fire up Civ on the laptop and pick up where I left off.
But, it's my choice to save to the cloud or save locally, as it should be.
Actually, this is probably an improvement. Half the people in line already have their damn iPhones out anyway, paying more attention to someone's inane tweet than to actually ordering or paying for their coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, right? I mean, why would anyone go to a concert when they can listen to the same music on their headphones, pause when they want, not have to worry if the lead singer has a sore throat, or deal with the second-hand pot smoke?Or go to the theater to see a play when it's probably been made into a movie you could torrent and watch for free?
There are a lot of people that enjoy the live sports experience. The NFLs problem with blackouts isn't the overall product or experience. Blackouts are only a problem in small markets with perennially shitty teams Even the team with the worst attendance had 400,000 attendees at home games last year. The problem consumers have with blackouts isn't that it prevents them from seeing their local team, it's that it prevents them from seeing other out of market teams. Even though the networks broadcast two early and two late games, if your local team is playing, they have to show that and can't show the other conference games. It's twice as bad if you live in a television market with one team from each conference.
Because I don't have to have the phone *on* me, I just have to have it *near* me, which it almost always is. It's on the desk in the apartment, it's in my pocket, it's on my desk at work, wherever. It's a secondary display/interface that I don't have to have a hand free to use, don't have to fumble with on the subway, and don't have to walk across the room to read. It's a convenience, but kind of a nice one. A split second glance at my wrist to see if the email that just arrived requires my immediate attention, one-button canned replies to text messages so I can tell the friend waiting for me at the airport that I'm on my way, etc.
Clearly you don't live in a large city in the U.S. where mail frequently disappears, often found months (or years) later in a dumpster or a postal workers basement. I'll take the same 99.99% delivery rate and the near-instant turnaround possible with email, thanks.
Idle developers are the devil's playthings. If you've got programmers on staff, they're never going to say 'Hey, that's pretty good, we're done.' Their continued desire to draw a paycheck requires them to constantly fuck with stuff that works until it doesn't, so then they can get paid to fix it.
Careful you don't fall off that high horse.
I'm a frequent and long-term Amazon customer (their first year, I even got some swag from them for being an early adopter). I rarely buy something on Amazon because it's cheaper, and when price is the deciding factor, it's between Amazon and another online retailer, not between Amazon and a local retailer.
I'm picky about what I buy, and I do not miss at all the days of walking into a retail establishment with the goal of buying a specific (shoe, gadget, book, whatever), being told that they don't have it in stock, and then either having to settle for something less than I wanted, deal with being upsold by some sales rat, or wait for them to order it and deal with another trip to the location. I don't miss at all the days of the $5 trip on the subway to buy an $8 book, assuming there was something at the bookstore that appealed to me when I got there.
Governments that think that levying sales taxes on online companies will magically cure retailer woes are morons, because for the people that are buying the stuff, it's selection, convenience, and then price. Physical stores are always going to lose the first, quite often the second, and at best tie on the third. And I bet the guys stocking the local supermarket would be happier with a full-time with benefits job at an Amazon warehouse than where they are now.
Retailers are middle-men. Good ones offer services and experiences beyond the mere exchange of cash for goods, but they're still middle-men, and if the internet has taught us anything, it's that it eats middle-men. Record stores, game stores, drug stores, book stores...
Nature also takes 40 years to give me a two-by-four.
For one thing, it's a lot harder to spy on you when you're on your private yacht.
Myth is a monumental pain in the ass and has nowhere near the 'fire and forget' utility of TiVo. Unarguably more powerful, but that's not an issue in 99% of the living rooms. And streaming is nice, but most don't have an easy quick rewind, can't be downloaded for offline use, and are often of lesser visual and audio quality.
Horseshit. It's almost certainly of no interest to anyone outside academics. Our ancestors didn't give a shit about history, and we turned out ok. Look at any really old European/Mediterranean city, and you'll see new construction piled on old construction every couple centuries for hundreds or thousands of years. If you think it's that important, than you pay for it. Your attitude is exactly why government is the problem; tons of power, no willingness to assume responsiblity.
Almost assuredly. Every contest no matter how trivial has 'Must be 18 years old to enter' in the fine print.
A 747 gets terrible gas mileage for a car, too.
Clearly you're either 7' tall or don't spend a lot of time at parades if you think looking at everything from a 5' eye level in a crowded place is going to improve things.
I've only had my Pebble for a few days, but I'm finding it pretty convenient when I'm out and about. A lot quicker when I'm walking somewhere, or on the subway, to glance at my wrist to see if I need to respond to an email right away or if it can wait. And the (currently) rudimentary music controls are convenient, too. It's still in a primitive state, but hopefully the developer community will come up with some killer apps for it. Time will tell if it becomes useful enough to survive past the toy stage and become a regular fixture on my arm.
We'll have to hire white people to follow you around to trip the cameras.
I agree that there's a reason we have free public libraries. I'm not suggesting that the need for free public libraries goes away. I'm suggesting that what the need for a physical presence and tangible books is going the way of the vinyl LP and the record store.
Posting a semi-releveant Wikipedia article isn't much of a counter. The Kindle is a delivery mechanism. I can already check books out of the local library on it without ever spending another $1 at Amazon. But the selection sucks, because instead of buying digital copies that will never wear out, and will never be returned late, won't be unavailable because the only copy is at branch X instead of Branch Y,etc, they're buying dead tree versions. Digital distribution could dramaticallt expand a library's reach with the same resources.
Prattlings from a worker in yet another doomed profession. I have several friends who work at libraries, and I'm constantly amazed at their delusions of relevance. More and more money spent acquiring multiple copies of best sellers rather than expanding the breadth of the library. Money wasted on video games and popular DVDs. A single years' budget could buy everyone in my city one of the subsidized Kindles. Lease the real estate to purchase e-books for lending. Instead, they're expanding the number of libraries but keeping the budget the same, so it'll mean more of the pie going for facilities and salaries and less on content.
It's absolutely possible. Tuition is $6500 a year for California state schools, $5500 or so for Florida, etc. The $10k+ figures include room and board, transportation, books at retail vs used prices, etc. You're going to have to have a place to live, food, and some way to get to work anyway, so those costs are a wash.
I absolutely concur. However, when the government won't give you an ATO unless the product is certified, you've got no choice.
TrueCrypt is great in most circumstances. But if you need (for example) FIPS140-2 compliance, you' need something more.
Vancouver is more expensive than Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco and Chicago (actually, more expensive than any US city except New York).. It's certainly possible to live in those areas with public transportation, local parks, schools, and supermarkets. But you've got to be rich or live in the crappy part of town.
.
If you make it desirable to live there, you're going to drive prices up to the point where only the well-to-do can afford it. But the well-to-do aren't going to mow the lawns, clean the toilets, haul the garbage, or teach the kids. So you end up forcing the people that will do those jobs out to the suburbs.
The result is places like San Francisco that can't hire teachers, because they can't afford to live near their schools. And since they can't get good teachers, the families with kids are fleeing to the suburbs. Or Washington, D.C., which is on the verge of not being a majority-black city because gentrification is driving up property values. They've had to abandon residency requirements for municipal employees because they couldn't fill vacancies anymore, so even trying to force people to live in cities doesn't work. People are willing to accept a certain degree of misery in their daily commute in exchange for larger homes, bigger yards, better schools, and less crime. If someone is already willing to live with a 2-hour commute each way, there's not much you can do to punish him further.
Maybe the lure is not having to deal with all the Powerpoint happy middle managers that keep the program mired in bureaucracy. Just because 'the best and the brightest' want to leave doesn't mean there isn't a fuck-ton of 'mediocre and not so smart' left behind.
99.9% of those Linksys routers will have no need to run IPv6 in their effective lifetime. When did people develop this sense of entitlement that every little cheap-ass consumer product they buy ought to be future-proof?
I've used this feature on Steam several times. Start a long game of Civ 5 (huge maps, epic speed) and play till the sun comes up. Save to the Steam Cloud. Get stuck at work patching servers or something, fire up Civ on the laptop and pick up where I left off. But, it's my choice to save to the cloud or save locally, as it should be.
Actually, this is probably an improvement. Half the people in line already have their damn iPhones out anyway, paying more attention to someone's inane tweet than to actually ordering or paying for their coffee.