To be fair here, I think ominous people behind the scenes to be concerned about are the Hollywood content providers. Content providers are the ones who insist that the cable companies enforce their rules and who have the power to bankrupt some of these supplier companies if they wanted to.
They're the SAME GODDAMN PEOPLE! Comcast owns NBC, remember?
Their own set top boxes are only provided because of customer demand and I suspect they'd rather not be in that business at all.
Totally false. I can easily prove that cable companies love their shitty cable-boxes. How? Just go and ask them to let you use your TV's built-in ClearQAM tuner instead and see what they say!
The idea of a software CableCard has been around for a while, but to maintain control you have to be able to trust the software an some random hardware, or have rigid controls on which hardware is certified to run the software, and have the software validate the hardware before allowing access. It isn't easy, it doesn't really make anyone happy, it takes forever, and the market tends to move on before the issues are solved.
This.
I'd like to believe the FCC is trying to make things better for cable TV subscribers, but what I actually believe is that the FCC is trying to destroy the freedom of computer users by encouraging the entrenchment of DRM.
IIRC, it was relatively easy to tell TYCO blocks apart because they tended to be different colors than LEGO blocks (at least, the ones I had) and the plates were thicker -- 1/2 the thickness of blocks, instead of 1/3.
What does it say about society that standards have fallen so much they're contemplating buying a DeLorean ? The real DeLorean IS NOT what was portrayed in BBTF.
Of course it was! Its unreliability was a plot point!
There's no way many ISP's are going to be able to meet the baseline without a shit load of cash to upgrade their networks. Where do suppose the money for all that is going to come from?
The money comes from the ISPs' bank accounts because WE ALREADY FUCKING GAVE THEM ALL THE SUBSIDIES THEY COULD POSSIBLY NEED!
Even if cellphones are technically trackable, what "everyone knows" is that the government is legally required to refrain from using that information without a warrant. You know, the whole "rule of law" and all that? Any government official who has problem with that concept should be removed from office.
other companies should be allowed to make Star Wars, too
Indeed they should! Star Wars is 39 years old. Under sane copyright law (i.e., 14 years + 14 year optional extension) it would be Public Domain by now.
No, the GP knew what he was saying: ultranova was criticizing the fact that, while cayenne8 is generally conservative and in favor of the government treating people unequally based on their particular circumstances, he's suddenly upset at the prospect of insurance companies (roughly equivalent to government since car insurance is required by law) doing the same to him. It's hypocritical.
The challenge then was that computers were slow so you had to figure out how to make programs go fast. The problem today is rather one of managing complexity. And this is where scratch beats wolfram as a language. Scratch has the ingredients we now consider essential most notably event dispatch, listeners and everything that makes objects work. The objects scratch mainly uses are literally iconified (usually a cat or something).
So, what does it do that Squeak didn't already do 20 years ago?
But I have also come to the conclusion that my tastes must completely differ from the rest of the world. I didn't like the Kylo Ren character and in particular his lame wisecracks, as I found nothing about him to be dark or intimidating.
I just figured they made him a lame wanna-be Sith on purpose. Even the name/title ("Kylo" instead of "Darth") makes it seem like he's not a genuine full-fledged Sith Lord.
Years later they're still flying around in a highly visible bright white ship pointlessly adorned with christmas lights as if they're trying to say to the closest romulan cruiser "HEY, WE'RE OVERE HERE!"
Painting the Enterprise pitch black would make zero difference whatsoever. It would still be perfectly visible in infrared, as would be anything with a temperature above 2.7 Kelvin. Aside from magical plot contrivances like cloaking devices, there's no such thing as camouflage in space.
Then they take and endanger a crew of hundreds of people all over when on several occasions they've proved you really only need about a half dozen people to make the ship go.
This is valid criticism, especially since they created another plot contrivance (saucer separation) to address that very issue, then barely used it.
There should be a law say that they must get free updates for at least 5-7 years even if there needs to be a computer replacement to fix an safety issue that must be done at there cost.
FUCK THAT! All of my cars are at least three times older than that, and trying to claim that I should throw away my property because I'm not "allowed" to maintain it is complete and utter bullshit.
First of all, the fact that you're conversing in English makes it relatively unlikely that you're in Africa or Asia, and describing the US as "halfway around the world" eliminates Canada.
Second, because I'm stupid and forgot to consider the possibility of Australia/New Zealand.
Nothing against US made stuff but you pay extra because of the cost of shipping it half way around the world, and generally the exchange rate makes importing those goods expensive because the of the high US dollar.
If you live in Europe, substitute "made in Germany" instead of "made in the USA" for the purpose of this article.
No, what I'd heard was definitely about ballot access -- e.g., candidate X failed to get enough petition signatures to meet the filing deadline in state Y -- I just don't recall which candidate(s) and how many states were involved.
The current system only requires O(1) bandwidth for n available channels.
No, the current digital cable system is still QAM, and still sending all the channels. It's just that Comcast was allowed to encrypt the streams, which "justifies" the requirement for cable boxes, which then (can, and probably do) phone home your viewing habits in addition to sucking your wallet dry.
Although concepts like IPTV exist, Comcast* has only implemented it in the form of "on demand" along side it's traditional "broadcasted**" channels, not replaced them with it.
(* I mention Comcast because it is the dominant cable system in my market.)
(** By "broadcasted," I mean sent to every user on the wired network, not sent over-the-air.)
But I don't want a benchmark score that is dictated by a graphics card and it's driver set. I want a cpu score that is based on CPU performance
That's like someone in the 486 era saying they don't want a benchmark that's dictated by the floating-point coprocessor. Face it, there's no such thing as a "graphics" card anymore; there's just a coprocessor that's very good at very parallel workloads.
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They're the SAME GODDAMN PEOPLE! Comcast owns NBC, remember?
Totally false. I can easily prove that cable companies love their shitty cable-boxes. How? Just go and ask them to let you use your TV's built-in ClearQAM tuner instead and see what they say!
This.
I'd like to believe the FCC is trying to make things better for cable TV subscribers, but what I actually believe is that the FCC is trying to destroy the freedom of computer users by encouraging the entrenchment of DRM.
IIRC, it was relatively easy to tell TYCO blocks apart because they tended to be different colors than LEGO blocks (at least, the ones I had) and the plates were thicker -- 1/2 the thickness of blocks, instead of 1/3.
Of course it was! Its unreliability was a plot point!
The money comes from the ISPs' bank accounts because WE ALREADY FUCKING GAVE THEM ALL THE SUBSIDIES THEY COULD POSSIBLY NEED!
Even if cellphones are technically trackable, what "everyone knows" is that the government is legally required to refrain from using that information without a warrant. You know, the whole "rule of law" and all that? Any government official who has problem with that concept should be removed from office.
Indeed they should! Star Wars is 39 years old. Under sane copyright law (i.e., 14 years + 14 year optional extension) it would be Public Domain by now.
Or indicating that he was making the double meaning of "Progressive" into an intentional pun.
No, the GP knew what he was saying: ultranova was criticizing the fact that, while cayenne8 is generally conservative and in favor of the government treating people unequally based on their particular circumstances, he's suddenly upset at the prospect of insurance companies (roughly equivalent to government since car insurance is required by law) doing the same to him. It's hypocritical.
If you don't like this sort of thing, buy devices that support Coreboot.
So, what does it do that Squeak didn't already do 20 years ago?
I just figured they made him a lame wanna-be Sith on purpose. Even the name/title ("Kylo" instead of "Darth") makes it seem like he's not a genuine full-fledged Sith Lord.
And replace droids with slaves -- an issue which Star Trek (at least, pre-Abrams) would not just gloss over the way Star Wars does.
William Shatner isn't that great, but somebody like Avery Brooks, Jeffrey Combs or maybe Connor Trinneer could have made a great Han Solo.
Painting the Enterprise pitch black would make zero difference whatsoever. It would still be perfectly visible in infrared, as would be anything with a temperature above 2.7 Kelvin. Aside from magical plot contrivances like cloaking devices, there's no such thing as camouflage in space.
This is valid criticism, especially since they created another plot contrivance (saucer separation) to address that very issue, then barely used it.
FUCK THAT! All of my cars are at least three times older than that, and trying to claim that I should throw away my property because I'm not "allowed" to maintain it is complete and utter bullshit.
So what? Digital cable-ready TVs can decode MPEG so that still does not excuse the use of cable boxes.
First of all, the fact that you're conversing in English makes it relatively unlikely that you're in Africa or Asia, and describing the US as "halfway around the world" eliminates Canada.
Second, because I'm stupid and forgot to consider the possibility of Australia/New Zealand.
If you live in Europe, substitute "made in Germany" instead of "made in the USA" for the purpose of this article.
No, what I'd heard was definitely about ballot access -- e.g., candidate X failed to get enough petition signatures to meet the filing deadline in state Y -- I just don't recall which candidate(s) and how many states were involved.
There are compression algorithms for gpus now.
Given that an AMD chip tends to have more cores than a similarly-priced Intel one, that's a use case I'd expect AMD to be relatively good at.
No, the current digital cable system is still QAM, and still sending all the channels. It's just that Comcast was allowed to encrypt the streams, which "justifies" the requirement for cable boxes, which then (can, and probably do) phone home your viewing habits in addition to sucking your wallet dry.
Although concepts like IPTV exist, Comcast* has only implemented it in the form of "on demand" along side it's traditional "broadcasted**" channels, not replaced them with it.
(* I mention Comcast because it is the dominant cable system in my market.)
(** By "broadcasted," I mean sent to every user on the wired network, not sent over-the-air.)
That's like someone in the 486 era saying they don't want a benchmark that's dictated by the floating-point coprocessor. Face it, there's no such thing as a "graphics" card anymore; there's just a coprocessor that's very good at very parallel workloads.
Apparently, AMD was pissed off about SYSMark even when it used to be a member, and quit the organization in protest.