I can't think of anyone on the planet from whom I could care less about their opinion or thoughts on *anything*. It'd be fantastic if we stopped treating him like some elected politician. And, if he were, I certainly wouldn't give to shits of credit to someone who can't even oblige the REAL WORLD etiquette of not covering up the rape of children.
And yeah, you can mark me a troll for all I fucking care.
I can get the fact that someone might really dig a movie, but why anyone would give a fuck about an event to award people in an industry that they're not even part of is beyond me. If you sell vacuums, you might be super keen on who the Vacuum Engineer/Salesman/Manager of the year is. Otherwise . . . well . . . who cares? Even though I own and use a vacuum, it's irrelevant to me.
Of course, as the ratings reportedly show, people care less and less every year, so . . . good.
I would give anything for Netflix to get the mother fucking clue, already. I can't tell you how many times I have clicked the "DO NOT FUCKING RECOMMEND THIS PIECE OF SHIT TO ME" button and yet it keeps popping up EVERY time as a suggestion. I said I didn't give a shit about this Banksy fucktard yesterday and I still don't care about him today. STOP SUGGESTING IT TO ME!
The only thing even nearly as annoying is how it keeps suggesting fucking stand up comedy films to me. Comedians are boring assholes. How many times do I have to vote down comedian films before you figure me out, you shitty fucking algorithm! GAAAAR!
I've *never* cared. For the same reason that I don't care about the Employee of the Month or Employee of the Year at wherever it is you work. Or why I don't care about MVP for some sports team. Or the same reason I don't care who wins the Best Real Estate Agent of the Year award from the Realtor industry.
I sometimes think I'm the only person on earth who hasn't seen Inception. However, I also feel like there is absolutely no reason to see it. I've heard enough comments that I can probably recite the plot and be 80% accurate just from my fifth hand osmosis.
It doesn't matter, because The Social Network or that stupid Ballet movie will win, anyway.
Of course, it also doesn't matter, because nobody with a lick of sense gives a damn about a stupid fucking industry award. I mean, really, there couldn't be anything less relevant to our lives than an award given by a bunch of celebrities to a bunch of other celebrities about who plays pretend the best.
Also, you can tell you're getting old when you look at the entire Slashdot submission and say "didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, and didn't see it".
Why do you need THAT much bandwidth? 56k modems are enormously faster than 300 baud modems. And 300 baud modems are significantly faster than smoke signals and carrier pigoeons.
Tell me how well that 5mbps (and that's down -- not up, which is far more restricted) works for you when you're watching HD on Netflix (about 2gb/hr) while downloading an On-Demand game in the background on xbox. Or maybe a game on steam. And maybe all the computers in your house are backing up to an offsite service (BackBlaze, Carbonite, roll-your-own, whatever), and someone else in your household is watching hulu or using VPN to the office and another is streaming audio and downloading HD podcasts or something.
If one is primarily "surfing" and they're the only one in the household doing so, it doesn't require very much bandwidth. However, that's 1998. In 2011, people are receiving almost all content via their internet feed. All of their entertainment -- movies, television, podcasts, video streams, youtube, radio stations, live feeds. All of their backup and retrieval. Much of their work. Much of their shopping. Their telephony.
I imagine "nobody needs more than Xmbps of bandwidth!" comments today are a lot like kids in the 70s or 80s hearing their dad shout at them about "two phone lines?! who in the hell needs more than one phone line?!" or bitching about how nobody needs call waiting or something.
I believe you need a *minimum* of 5mbps for Netflix and OnLive to work. I have 22/10 and if it weren't double the price ($200/mo instead of $100/mo), I'd probably jump to the 50/50 plan, right now. I imagine it's even worse when you have several people in your household doing several combined netfix-ish/youtube-ish streams, audio streams, downloads, surfing, VNC/VPN, etc.
According to ISPs, only about 2% of all users do anything more than read their email and look at a couple recipes online. It's only "pirates" and "criminals" that need bandwidth.
Not particularly. It was a flash in the pan that everyone thought was cool and you never heard about, again. It was sort of an early Wikipedia; more like Everything (which in itself was a concept that was exciting and fun for about 48hrs and then you never thought about, again).
I think it all kind of went away with the 1990s. There were almost ten years there where everything was awesomely dark and brooding and foreboding and cybery and gothy and dirty. Think of X-Files (which had plenty of cyber-punk/dark stuff), Millenium, Matrix and so on.
I always said that after the millennium, things would start to suck. People's pointless fear of the world ending (even if they didn't REALLY think it would) at the end of the millennium provided for a lot of very dark and fatalistic content, which catered to the cyber-punk theme quite a lot.
Now, it's mostly back to pop-music and shows about singing highschool kids with the occasional middle east terrorist show or movie thrown in.
Clearly, they needed to form a giant board of chairmen like Wikipedia, since it was essentially a take on Wikipedia, anyway. They needed to get all of the content to be created for free by the community. And moderated for free by the community. And edited for free by the community. And promoted for free by Google and other places that contribute to them and serve their content. And then have all that expensive primarily-text-based bandwidth to serve that apparently costs more than gold. Then hire on a ton of board members so they could justify a $20,000,000.00/yr non-profit expense to keep it running.
Computers were not exactly "new" a decade ago. Even as far as movie CG, it was about 25 years old. It was the use of new camera and filming technology and techniques that really set the first Matrix apart - aside from a really great story. What Matrix accomplished was doing something amazing in a post-Jurassic-Park time period, when special effects had finally reached the point where it could realistically accomplish anything and we should have otherwise not have been impressed by anything that we saw, anywhere.
I could go for more Keanu. I could go for more cyber-punk type of stuff. I just don't see the need to make it more Matrix stuff. Do two or three whole new movies independent of the franchise. They don't need to have anything to do with it. Sometimes it's good enough to just have one singular great self-contained story. Not sequels. Not game DLC. Not prequels. Just more good stories.
Also, I really just wanted to reply to this whole story with a single post that just said "Whoa....".
Would it be boring if it was showing towering heroes of science and exploration landing on the moon? Or landing on Mars, for the first time? of course not. It's boring, precisely because of the lack of encouragement and support to do great things that we're talking about in the first place.
It's essentially the same as saying "you're not making less money -- everything is just costing a hell of a lot more" and whichever direction is up or sideways, the result to you individually is the same. In a century, when the water has lifted all boats to equal, that'll be fine. In the meantime, there is opportunity for a tremendous disparity in leverage capability when the same work can be done in places of such differing costs of living. Until employees can all buy their milk and pay their rent on a global "cheapest value wins" scale the same way their employers can pull from a global labor pool, at least.
Americans learn a lot about history in school. I can summarize almost the entire curriculum, here:
* Washington never told a lie and chopped down a tree. And threw a coin across the Potomac. * Abe Lincoln was called Honest Abe and freed the slaves (though, I've recently heard young people attribute this to MLK). * There was a New Deal or something back in the old days when people lived in tents and jumped out of windows or whatever. * Martha Washington sewed our flag. * Some guy invented the Cotton Gin. * A black guy named Washington, but not related to the president, invented like 300 things that can be done with Peanuts. * MLK lead the civil rights movement to allow all men to have an extra day every year off of work, so they can BBQ and drink beer.
I might have missed one or two things, but that's largely it. Of course, in my public school, our "literature" class also consisted not of things like reading Antigone, but Jurassic Park. So . . you know . . . whatever.
And, note that Dilbert is just a creation perpetuated to placate cubicle drones into being content with their lives.
Really, it's only a matter of time before most legal work is pawned off elsewhere, The only reliable work in America going forward are those that must be physically done here. Like being a bus-boy, stocking grocery shelves, or folding clothes at the GAP. Anything that is primarily knowledge-based can and will be outsourced to the cheapest global bidder and as long as there are places where they can live well for an entire year on the amount you have to pay for a cheap studio apartment in your city for one month, you'll never be able to compete.
If you don't have representatives for knowledge and advancement in politics, you're forfeiting everything to the decisions of the ignorant and selfish who pursue nothing but personal agendas on the backs of the masses that they placate with more religious and anti-intellectual rhetoric.
The average American eagerly pays the stupidity tax by forking out cash for lottery tickets on a regular basis. They don't understand probability. Hell, they barely understand the most basic of arithmetic. Having children is just like having a giant lottery ticket that takes a lot longer to get the results for.
I'm not sure that a lack of respect for science is necessarily somehow tied to the reduction of male television parts being reduced to blubbering buffoon that natters at his wife's apron strings.
I think a better example of the changes can be seen by recalling how much astronauts were admired and their pursuits followed by every man, woman, and child in the country (and outside of it), when my mom was growing up. The names and accomplishments stick with us today. Their generation watched it live on television in absolute awe.
In my life, the only big events were two exploding shuttles about twenty years apart. The only time there is television coverage is during the launch of the shuttle that directly follows the one that just blew up. The only modern astronauts any of us can think of are the crazy cross-country-driving adult-diaper lady and the husband of the blonde chick that was shot in the head a couple weeks ago. There is no major mission expected in the foreseeable future and most of us don't expect to have an experience like our parents in our life time. Exploration and advancement is seen as a waste. I don't need me no space explorations -- I need the potholes in mah gawd-dayum street fixed and a bigger social security check, so I can afford me some smokes when I go play bingo!
Politicians in America (especially at the higher levels) are almost exclusively lawyers, with a handful of businessmen and sports or movie stars. The only exception are the two or maybe three former doctors that I can think of out of about a thousand in the house and senate. There are a few religious nuts sprinkled in, too -- but for the most part, almost 100% of politicians merely cater to the religious nut angle, because that's the lowest common denominator which consistently wins them elections.
Who cares? Can't we just outsource that, too? Actually, *don't* we just outsource that, too?
Anyway, America is about money, jesus, and big tits. Success is about catering to the common denominator. Intellectual advancement and pursuit is for "elitist" pricks with their fancy words and all. Anyway, America loves Jesus and Jesus doesn't give a shit about it. Jesus cares about celebrity and sports. If you need proof, just think of the last time you heard a scientist thank jesus for their discovery? Never! Because jesus only helps football players blond bimbos accepting their Golden Globes.
And society reinforces this. I've been a jock and a nerd my entire life and I probably don't need to tell anyone what activities and accomplishments got audiences, rewards, cheerleaders, public acknowledgement, and respect . . . and which didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't think of anyone on the planet from whom I could care less about their opinion or thoughts on *anything*. It'd be fantastic if we stopped treating him like some elected politician. And, if he were, I certainly wouldn't give to shits of credit to someone who can't even oblige the REAL WORLD etiquette of not covering up the rape of children.
And yeah, you can mark me a troll for all I fucking care.
I can get the fact that someone might really dig a movie, but why anyone would give a fuck about an event to award people in an industry that they're not even part of is beyond me. If you sell vacuums, you might be super keen on who the Vacuum Engineer/Salesman/Manager of the year is. Otherwise . . . well . . . who cares? Even though I own and use a vacuum, it's irrelevant to me.
Of course, as the ratings reportedly show, people care less and less every year, so . . . good.
I would give anything for Netflix to get the mother fucking clue, already. I can't tell you how many times I have clicked the "DO NOT FUCKING RECOMMEND THIS PIECE OF SHIT TO ME" button and yet it keeps popping up EVERY time as a suggestion. I said I didn't give a shit about this Banksy fucktard yesterday and I still don't care about him today. STOP SUGGESTING IT TO ME!
The only thing even nearly as annoying is how it keeps suggesting fucking stand up comedy films to me. Comedians are boring assholes. How many times do I have to vote down comedian films before you figure me out, you shitty fucking algorithm! GAAAAR!
I've *never* cared. For the same reason that I don't care about the Employee of the Month or Employee of the Year at wherever it is you work. Or why I don't care about MVP for some sports team. Or the same reason I don't care who wins the Best Real Estate Agent of the Year award from the Realtor industry.
Wow, I haven't even heard of half of those films.
I sometimes think I'm the only person on earth who hasn't seen Inception. However, I also feel like there is absolutely no reason to see it. I've heard enough comments that I can probably recite the plot and be 80% accurate just from my fifth hand osmosis.
It doesn't matter, because The Social Network or that stupid Ballet movie will win, anyway.
Of course, it also doesn't matter, because nobody with a lick of sense gives a damn about a stupid fucking industry award. I mean, really, there couldn't be anything less relevant to our lives than an award given by a bunch of celebrities to a bunch of other celebrities about who plays pretend the best.
Also, you can tell you're getting old when you look at the entire Slashdot submission and say "didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, didn't see it, and didn't see it".
Why do you need THAT much bandwidth? 56k modems are enormously faster than 300 baud modems. And 300 baud modems are significantly faster than smoke signals and carrier pigoeons.
Tell me how well that 5mbps (and that's down -- not up, which is far more restricted) works for you when you're watching HD on Netflix (about 2gb/hr) while downloading an On-Demand game in the background on xbox. Or maybe a game on steam. And maybe all the computers in your house are backing up to an offsite service (BackBlaze, Carbonite, roll-your-own, whatever), and someone else in your household is watching hulu or using VPN to the office and another is streaming audio and downloading HD podcasts or something.
If one is primarily "surfing" and they're the only one in the household doing so, it doesn't require very much bandwidth. However, that's 1998. In 2011, people are receiving almost all content via their internet feed. All of their entertainment -- movies, television, podcasts, video streams, youtube, radio stations, live feeds. All of their backup and retrieval. Much of their work. Much of their shopping. Their telephony.
I imagine "nobody needs more than Xmbps of bandwidth!" comments today are a lot like kids in the 70s or 80s hearing their dad shout at them about "two phone lines?! who in the hell needs more than one phone line?!" or bitching about how nobody needs call waiting or something.
I believe you need a *minimum* of 5mbps for Netflix and OnLive to work. I have 22/10 and if it weren't double the price ($200/mo instead of $100/mo), I'd probably jump to the 50/50 plan, right now. I imagine it's even worse when you have several people in your household doing several combined netfix-ish/youtube-ish streams, audio streams, downloads, surfing, VNC/VPN, etc.
According to ISPs, only about 2% of all users do anything more than read their email and look at a couple recipes online. It's only "pirates" and "criminals" that need bandwidth.
No, they'll just open up a socket and put a filter on it.
Not particularly. It was a flash in the pan that everyone thought was cool and you never heard about, again. It was sort of an early Wikipedia; more like Everything (which in itself was a concept that was exciting and fun for about 48hrs and then you never thought about, again).
1999: http://slashdot.org/story/99/04/28/1821246/Web-Based-Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy
I think it all kind of went away with the 1990s. There were almost ten years there where everything was awesomely dark and brooding and foreboding and cybery and gothy and dirty. Think of X-Files (which had plenty of cyber-punk/dark stuff), Millenium, Matrix and so on.
I always said that after the millennium, things would start to suck. People's pointless fear of the world ending (even if they didn't REALLY think it would) at the end of the millennium provided for a lot of very dark and fatalistic content, which catered to the cyber-punk theme quite a lot.
Now, it's mostly back to pop-music and shows about singing highschool kids with the occasional middle east terrorist show or movie thrown in.
Clearly, they needed to form a giant board of chairmen like Wikipedia, since it was essentially a take on Wikipedia, anyway. They needed to get all of the content to be created for free by the community. And moderated for free by the community. And edited for free by the community. And promoted for free by Google and other places that contribute to them and serve their content. And then have all that expensive primarily-text-based bandwidth to serve that apparently costs more than gold. Then hire on a ton of board members so they could justify a $20,000,000.00/yr non-profit expense to keep it running.
Computers were not exactly "new" a decade ago. Even as far as movie CG, it was about 25 years old. It was the use of new camera and filming technology and techniques that really set the first Matrix apart - aside from a really great story. What Matrix accomplished was doing something amazing in a post-Jurassic-Park time period, when special effects had finally reached the point where it could realistically accomplish anything and we should have otherwise not have been impressed by anything that we saw, anywhere.
I could go for more Keanu. I could go for more cyber-punk type of stuff. I just don't see the need to make it more Matrix stuff. Do two or three whole new movies independent of the franchise. They don't need to have anything to do with it. Sometimes it's good enough to just have one singular great self-contained story. Not sequels. Not game DLC. Not prequels. Just more good stories.
Also, I really just wanted to reply to this whole story with a single post that just said "Whoa....".
Would it be boring if it was showing towering heroes of science and exploration landing on the moon? Or landing on Mars, for the first time? of course not. It's boring, precisely because of the lack of encouragement and support to do great things that we're talking about in the first place.
It's essentially the same as saying "you're not making less money -- everything is just costing a hell of a lot more" and whichever direction is up or sideways, the result to you individually is the same. In a century, when the water has lifted all boats to equal, that'll be fine. In the meantime, there is opportunity for a tremendous disparity in leverage capability when the same work can be done in places of such differing costs of living. Until employees can all buy their milk and pay their rent on a global "cheapest value wins" scale the same way their employers can pull from a global labor pool, at least.
Americans learn a lot about history in school. I can summarize almost the entire curriculum, here:
* Washington never told a lie and chopped down a tree. And threw a coin across the Potomac.
* Abe Lincoln was called Honest Abe and freed the slaves (though, I've recently heard young people attribute this to MLK).
* There was a New Deal or something back in the old days when people lived in tents and jumped out of windows or whatever.
* Martha Washington sewed our flag.
* Some guy invented the Cotton Gin.
* A black guy named Washington, but not related to the president, invented like 300 things that can be done with Peanuts.
* MLK lead the civil rights movement to allow all men to have an extra day every year off of work, so they can BBQ and drink beer.
I might have missed one or two things, but that's largely it. Of course, in my public school, our "literature" class also consisted not of things like reading Antigone, but Jurassic Park. So . . you know . . . whatever.
Hey, screw you! We *also* overwhelmingly believe in alien abductions and psychics!
And, note that Dilbert is just a creation perpetuated to placate cubicle drones into being content with their lives.
Really, it's only a matter of time before most legal work is pawned off elsewhere, The only reliable work in America going forward are those that must be physically done here. Like being a bus-boy, stocking grocery shelves, or folding clothes at the GAP. Anything that is primarily knowledge-based can and will be outsourced to the cheapest global bidder and as long as there are places where they can live well for an entire year on the amount you have to pay for a cheap studio apartment in your city for one month, you'll never be able to compete.
If you don't have representatives for knowledge and advancement in politics, you're forfeiting everything to the decisions of the ignorant and selfish who pursue nothing but personal agendas on the backs of the masses that they placate with more religious and anti-intellectual rhetoric.
The average American eagerly pays the stupidity tax by forking out cash for lottery tickets on a regular basis. They don't understand probability. Hell, they barely understand the most basic of arithmetic. Having children is just like having a giant lottery ticket that takes a lot longer to get the results for.
I'm not sure that a lack of respect for science is necessarily somehow tied to the reduction of male television parts being reduced to blubbering buffoon that natters at his wife's apron strings.
I think a better example of the changes can be seen by recalling how much astronauts were admired and their pursuits followed by every man, woman, and child in the country (and outside of it), when my mom was growing up. The names and accomplishments stick with us today. Their generation watched it live on television in absolute awe.
In my life, the only big events were two exploding shuttles about twenty years apart. The only time there is television coverage is during the launch of the shuttle that directly follows the one that just blew up. The only modern astronauts any of us can think of are the crazy cross-country-driving adult-diaper lady and the husband of the blonde chick that was shot in the head a couple weeks ago. There is no major mission expected in the foreseeable future and most of us don't expect to have an experience like our parents in our life time. Exploration and advancement is seen as a waste. I don't need me no space explorations -- I need the potholes in mah gawd-dayum street fixed and a bigger social security check, so I can afford me some smokes when I go play bingo!
Politicians in America (especially at the higher levels) are almost exclusively lawyers, with a handful of businessmen and sports or movie stars. The only exception are the two or maybe three former doctors that I can think of out of about a thousand in the house and senate. There are a few religious nuts sprinkled in, too -- but for the most part, almost 100% of politicians merely cater to the religious nut angle, because that's the lowest common denominator which consistently wins them elections.
Who cares? Can't we just outsource that, too? Actually, *don't* we just outsource that, too?
Anyway, America is about money, jesus, and big tits. Success is about catering to the common denominator. Intellectual advancement and pursuit is for "elitist" pricks with their fancy words and all. Anyway, America loves Jesus and Jesus doesn't give a shit about it. Jesus cares about celebrity and sports. If you need proof, just think of the last time you heard a scientist thank jesus for their discovery? Never! Because jesus only helps football players blond bimbos accepting their Golden Globes.
And society reinforces this. I've been a jock and a nerd my entire life and I probably don't need to tell anyone what activities and accomplishments got audiences, rewards, cheerleaders, public acknowledgement, and respect . . . and which didn't.