Last I heard, the average person watches an astonishing eight hours of television per day. Switching to entertainment on the internet to replace cable won't happen until data caps are lifted. Let's say people don't even have to watch HD content. Just regular digital/standard content. And let us say you have a family of four. Or are a few roommates sharing a place. That's an average of 32 hours of streaming video content per day or almost 700 hours of content per month. Not counting all the other bandwidth suckers you have going on like radio, gaming, etc.
The only thing infusing the news with twitter comments and real time viewer feedback does for me on television is anger me by having the typical mouth-breathing idiot's opinion spewed from their trailer to the rest of the world on a massive broadcast when I'd rather just be getting news. I just want to know what events are right now. I don't need to hear @bootycakes (a real twitter name I saw on CNN once) have their uninformed opinion in 65 characters parroted by Don Lemon over live TV.
CNN was the last news I bothered to watch on TV and I haven't even really watched that since just after the election. I'm a bit of a news-hound and a political junkie, but too much of this "ireport" and "udecide" and "twitter" and "facebook" and "call in and share your opinion" and "youtube the news" crap has kind of driven me away entirely. I'll just grab the headlines from google news and skip the commentary.
Agreed. When I saw this Slashdot article, my first thought was "you mean there's someone on earth who doesn't know the answer to this question?!".
It's common knowledge. Exercise increases muscle mass, which weighs more than fat. Therefore fat loss with increasing muscle results in a smaller drop in actual scale-weight. Of course, exercising regularly has the long-term effect of increasing your metabolism which results in more calories burned at rest and when exercising. I can't believe the researchers even bothered "testing to see if there was any increase in metabolism immediately after working out". Who in the hell ever thought there WAS an increase? The change and impact is long-term. Not something that happens over night.
Also, it's not rocket science that exercise alone is a miserable way to burn calories. About the most calorie-burning activity you can do is swimming. You'd have to swim for an hour non-stop to burn 400 to 800 calories. That means that you could dedicate one hour every single day of your life to swimming non-stop and lose a "whopping" one pound per week. Or, instead of spending those seven hours busting your ass, you could just drink a diet soda or water each day instead of a regular soda.
Exercise is good for a lot of things in the long term well beyond simple weight control. But when it comes to burning calories, it's kind of a miserable trade off between effort and reward.
Personally, I prefer to pay $65 for a game, take it home, unwrap it, put it in my console, play it for ten minutes, then discover that it's complete shit after they've already gotten a nice big chunk of my money.
Also, isn't the app store where guys get insanely rich ripping off "scorched earth" from twenty years ago?
Actually, I'm a little confused by this and I'm pretty sure this isn't what patents are for. Years ago, could you have really filed a patent for "displaying advertising on a television during breaks in shows" and therefore nobody else could do it without your permission? I know you can patent a certain technical methodology for accomplishing this, but you surely can't patent the entire concept?
And because someone could feasibly smash their way through my door or window or the side of my house to get in, I shouldn't ever bother locking it. And because the police could get a warrant to search my person or property, I should just build my house out of plexiglass so that everyone everywhere can see into my day to day personal life with absolutely zero effort or need for justification.
Agreed. Only thing keeping me from the Kindle right now is that I can't justify $260 for what you get. Drop another $60 and I'd be all over that. I'm not to pleased with the prices, though. Ten bucks starting price for a book when it's all bits and nothing physical? That seems like money-grab on the other side. So I can pay a couple dollars more than a paperback costs, but read it on a little six inch screen, instead? Um . . Hurrah . . . I guess? It's the same kind of digital videogame download money grab that puts me off. If your only expense is bandwidth, why are you charging me the same price as the version you have to manufacture, transport, store, and shelve?
The kindle part, sure. But if you're a person of "culture and class and refinement", you probably only write with a quill pen and light your home by candle.
As soon as a netbook can fit in my hand and use an e-ink screen, I might be all over that. In the meantime, I really don't want to spend even more hours staring at a big bright back-lit computer screen.
Also, google trying to *add* middemen to the process by involving retailers seems a bit odd, to me. How about google and I cut them out and I just buy it at a discount? I mean, you're not selling a physical service here -- so what are they a "wholesaler" of? Bits?
Exactly. I have nothing but positive things to say about Pitchford, but I don't agree with him on this one. At least to the extent that I believe I understand his point.
It seems to me that any argument out there is essentially centered around people not merely wanting their products on a digital download service, but _Steam_ specifically. And to do that, they have to give a bigger cut (apparently) to Valve and also compete with Valve's own games.
There's competition out there. I have about 100 titles from Steam, but I also have a few dozen titles spread over Direct2Drive and Stardock's _Impulse_. It doesn't seem like Valve has a monopoly on the business whatsoever.
So the real complaint here -- unless I'm missing something -- is "yeah, but I want my title on *STEAM*. . . but without the strings that are attached!".
It certainly is valid to complain about those attached strings, but suggesting that it is anti-competitive is a bit of a stretch, in my observation.
What does government health care have to do with "affordable health care"? How does making the government (that is, me and every other tax payer) foot the bill for an $800 aspirin versus you and your HMO paying $800 for the aspirin change anything? The problem is inherent to the industry itself and the ridiculous costs and exploitations. Having an expensive health care system run by the government (with their sterling reputation for efficiency and organization, of course!) is no better than having an expensive private health care system.
The simpler solution that falls in line with the principals of our nation's constructs is to deal with the nature of the industry to rip people off and deal with the prices. For example, isn't the entire premise of insurance that you use it to pay for unforeseen emergencies that you could not possibly pay for on your own? You pool your money together with the collective on the mathematical probability that far fewer will ever need to reach in than ever put in. When you start using it for every fucking thing -- like checkups, routine visits, prescriptions, births, etc -- it's no longer insuring for/against anything now, is it?
If the costs were dealt with, health *insurance* could properly survive at an affordable rate, because everyone who wants to can contribute into it and they only withdraw for catastrophic emergencies that no individual could shoulder on their own (major surgeries, terminal illness, etc). Everything else? Well, it would optimally be cheap enough that you could afford it out of your own pocket.
You know, kind of how your car insurance covers car accidents but you have to pay for your own gas and your own oil change and tire rotation.
The slight of hand "let's make nationalized health care, instead of dealing with the real problem!" is clearly to push another agenda far beyond and aside from affordability. It's unfortunate all the idiots on all sides are too wrapped up in their narrow world views and foaming at the mouth to bet beyond that and deal with the true underlying issues.
Also, in MY world, I don't want to spend needless billions of dollars helping breeders squirt out children in a hospital **OR** funding a pointless military action. One stupid waste of money does not justify the other.
I don't like the idea of a government run health care system sucking away my tax dollars for the benefit of someone else who can't acquire health care through working hard for a company or paying it themselves (mostly because I question any government involvement in anything and I like keeping my own damn money for my own damn self) . . .
. . . HOWEVER . . . Have you seen some of the fucking nutjobs who are absolutely apoplectic over the whole health care thing? They can't string a full sentence together between their dentures or gaping toothless maws and an awful lot of them are armed and misinformed (amazing how the government getting involved in health care is the most abhorrent infringement on civil liberties and our societal foundation EVER, but subsidizing churches through tax-free status and dictating who people can sleep with, what movies and music and books should be censored or banned, etc is just fine, right?).
You have to remember that this is the country where there are always at least a few people who react to things they don't like through violence.
I would posit that maybe Arafat qualifies as doing not only "so little" but in fact falling into "negative" measurement. I wouldn't exactly say Obama winning is a bigger WTF than that. A major WTF, still, though.
To be fair, this news was only announced within the past few hours and I don't hold the president to any obligation to speak on the subject at 4:00am. I would not be surprised if he wisely commented on it to some degree today or this week and dropped in a "I clearly have a lot to live up to" or something of that nature, since he and his advisers clearly are aware of the massive wave of "what the hell for?!" from the lunatic fringes, the supporters and the rest of us who simply don't care one way or the other.
It's a shame that the award couldn't be given to some people who had truly accomplished real quantifiable contributions to humanity through determination, leadership, and selflessness. CNN has a great award show every year where they showcase just a few such people and in my opinion, all of them are more deserving than any politician ever has or will be.
If you think Ghandi deserves a peace prize, you probably need to read up a bit more on Ghandi. He's not the selfless saint that society has conditioned itself to portray him as, much in the same way they've misrepresented Mother Theresa (who we've been groomed since birth to regard as the ultimate in selflessness and altruism, without any real cause).
The death of cursive is a sign of societal progress (replaced with other methods for long-piece writing... like a computer or typewriter), unlike what should be a much greater concern that kids have horrible grammar and spelling and it seems to be slowly becoming more accepted and expected of them.
I think you're confusing cursive with the ability to write by hand -- and neither have anything to do with literacy.
There is definitely intrinsic value in being able to write by hand and the death of that would be embarrassing. The death of cursive, however is fairly irrelevant. The point of cursive is that it was constructed to make writing smoother, faster, and less painful for the hand. For anything of great length, we now use computers.
It's odd to comprehend a world without cursive, but it has served its purpose. If it moves on to the eventual world of enthusiasts the way caligraphy has, it's no huge loss.
Also, a calculator makes the process more efficient for someone who knows the underlying fundamentals of what they're working through, but is essentially a useless tool if you lack that knowledge. A
What does writing in cursive have to do with power outages or blackouts? Do power outages cripple your hands? You can't write using standard hand writing? I find this cursive-worship a lot of people have to be completely arbitrary and silly. Do you hunt and kill and butcher all of your own food? Do you make and can all of your own fruits and vegetables and preserves? Do you skin and tan your own leather clothing? Do you use kerosene lamps? Do you own a horse instead of a car for transportation?
Of course not. There is no inherent value in something simply because it is old or because it is tradition.
Cursive is intended as a smoother, quicker, easier-on-the-hand form of writing. If you write a hell of a lot by hand, it can be very necessary to speed things up and keep your hand from cramping. However, it has been a couple of decades since most people actually needed to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write reams of content in a single sitting. Writing is largely for notes and lists these days and we use devices -- computer, etc -- for anything of great length. It's faster and less stressful on the hand (I say this as a person who grew up wanting to be a writer and therefore producing hundreds upon hundreds of pages of sheets full of cursive-written material and frequently had a very pained hand as a result).
If we were talking the death of hand writing, that's one thing. It's a fundamental necessity to be able to know how to, among other things, write your damn name. Or leave a note on someone's car when you scratch it with a shopping cart. Or write a thoughtful note to a loved one. But the death of cursive? Meh. So what. What about short-hand? Morse code? Olde English?
And yes, this whole article already appeared on Slashdot like a month ago.
You are being intentionally obtuse as my point was quite clearly that your mother knew one tends to mimic the behavior and attitude of those he or she associates with and therefore presents you with a ridiculous proposition to point out why you should go against that innate tendency to go along with them.
My point was quite clear. You are simply being deliberately dense.
I find it amazing that you failed to comprehend the obvious point that eveyrone's mom (and therefore, society) made that statement was because they knew the propensity of people to mimic the behavior and attitude of those they associate with, therefore warning you against it by asking if you'd _even jump off a bridge_ if your friends did it.
Your mom drilled it into your head, when she asked if you'd jump off a bridge if all of your friends are. Yet more ridiculous waste of scarce research funding. Also, being far less connected is better than being connected to lots of *idiots*.
Borloug has to be the most influential and under-appreciated man who has ever lived and most will never know or care, because he doesn't have a sex-tape, play basketball or football, or star in movies.
Borloug has not only been on my list of heroes for a very long time, but has been on my list of "guys who will die in the next decade or two during my lifetime that I am dreading."
The world could never possibly thank Borloug enough. If anyone deserves his own holiday, it's this man. If anyone deserves statues and his face on currency and battleships named after him. It's this man.
That such an amazing man who contributed so much in his life died not of old age, but of *cancer* is evidence that there can be no great deity out there watching over everything. If any man deserved a peaceful, painless, quick passing it was this man.
Right, because if there's one thing that's needed after a rough four or five hours of being awake, it's a nice long nap. I mean, gosh. FOUR HOURS. That's just exhausting. I bet people need a second nap after the second four hours of work before that long ride home.
Am I the only one who didn't understand a fucking word of the above poster's meaningless rambling platitudes? You sound like Mother Theresa. "Why help people? Just tell them to suffer in agony because it's beautiful."
I hope when you're confronted with that situation you can look at your pain-stricken loved one and tell them "toughen up you fucking pussy".
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard, the average person watches an astonishing eight hours of television per day. Switching to entertainment on the internet to replace cable won't happen until data caps are lifted. Let's say people don't even have to watch HD content. Just regular digital/standard content. And let us say you have a family of four. Or are a few roommates sharing a place. That's an average of 32 hours of streaming video content per day or almost 700 hours of content per month. Not counting all the other bandwidth suckers you have going on like radio, gaming, etc.
The only thing infusing the news with twitter comments and real time viewer feedback does for me on television is anger me by having the typical mouth-breathing idiot's opinion spewed from their trailer to the rest of the world on a massive broadcast when I'd rather just be getting news. I just want to know what events are right now. I don't need to hear @bootycakes (a real twitter name I saw on CNN once) have their uninformed opinion in 65 characters parroted by Don Lemon over live TV.
CNN was the last news I bothered to watch on TV and I haven't even really watched that since just after the election. I'm a bit of a news-hound and a political junkie, but too much of this "ireport" and "udecide" and "twitter" and "facebook" and "call in and share your opinion" and "youtube the news" crap has kind of driven me away entirely. I'll just grab the headlines from google news and skip the commentary.
Agreed. When I saw this Slashdot article, my first thought was "you mean there's someone on earth who doesn't know the answer to this question?!".
It's common knowledge. Exercise increases muscle mass, which weighs more than fat. Therefore fat loss with increasing muscle results in a smaller drop in actual scale-weight. Of course, exercising regularly has the long-term effect of increasing your metabolism which results in more calories burned at rest and when exercising. I can't believe the researchers even bothered "testing to see if there was any increase in metabolism immediately after working out". Who in the hell ever thought there WAS an increase? The change and impact is long-term. Not something that happens over night.
Also, it's not rocket science that exercise alone is a miserable way to burn calories. About the most calorie-burning activity you can do is swimming. You'd have to swim for an hour non-stop to burn 400 to 800 calories. That means that you could dedicate one hour every single day of your life to swimming non-stop and lose a "whopping" one pound per week. Or, instead of spending those seven hours busting your ass, you could just drink a diet soda or water each day instead of a regular soda.
Exercise is good for a lot of things in the long term well beyond simple weight control. But when it comes to burning calories, it's kind of a miserable trade off between effort and reward.
Personally, I prefer to pay $65 for a game, take it home, unwrap it, put it in my console, play it for ten minutes, then discover that it's complete shit after they've already gotten a nice big chunk of my money.
Also, isn't the app store where guys get insanely rich ripping off "scorched earth" from twenty years ago?
Actually, I'm a little confused by this and I'm pretty sure this isn't what patents are for. Years ago, could you have really filed a patent for "displaying advertising on a television during breaks in shows" and therefore nobody else could do it without your permission? I know you can patent a certain technical methodology for accomplishing this, but you surely can't patent the entire concept?
And because someone could feasibly smash their way through my door or window or the side of my house to get in, I shouldn't ever bother locking it. And because the police could get a warrant to search my person or property, I should just build my house out of plexiglass so that everyone everywhere can see into my day to day personal life with absolutely zero effort or need for justification.
Agreed. Only thing keeping me from the Kindle right now is that I can't justify $260 for what you get. Drop another $60 and I'd be all over that. I'm not to pleased with the prices, though. Ten bucks starting price for a book when it's all bits and nothing physical? That seems like money-grab on the other side. So I can pay a couple dollars more than a paperback costs, but read it on a little six inch screen, instead? Um . . Hurrah . . . I guess? It's the same kind of digital videogame download money grab that puts me off. If your only expense is bandwidth, why are you charging me the same price as the version you have to manufacture, transport, store, and shelve?
The kindle part, sure. But if you're a person of "culture and class and refinement", you probably only write with a quill pen and light your home by candle.
As soon as a netbook can fit in my hand and use an e-ink screen, I might be all over that. In the meantime, I really don't want to spend even more hours staring at a big bright back-lit computer screen.
Also, google trying to *add* middemen to the process by involving retailers seems a bit odd, to me. How about google and I cut them out and I just buy it at a discount? I mean, you're not selling a physical service here -- so what are they a "wholesaler" of? Bits?
Exactly. I have nothing but positive things to say about Pitchford, but I don't agree with him on this one. At least to the extent that I believe I understand his point.
It seems to me that any argument out there is essentially centered around people not merely wanting their products on a digital download service, but _Steam_ specifically. And to do that, they have to give a bigger cut (apparently) to Valve and also compete with Valve's own games.
There's competition out there. I have about 100 titles from Steam, but I also have a few dozen titles spread over Direct2Drive and Stardock's _Impulse_. It doesn't seem like Valve has a monopoly on the business whatsoever.
So the real complaint here -- unless I'm missing something -- is "yeah, but I want my title on *STEAM*. . . but without the strings that are attached!".
It certainly is valid to complain about those attached strings, but suggesting that it is anti-competitive is a bit of a stretch, in my observation.
What does government health care have to do with "affordable health care"? How does making the government (that is, me and every other tax payer) foot the bill for an $800 aspirin versus you and your HMO paying $800 for the aspirin change anything? The problem is inherent to the industry itself and the ridiculous costs and exploitations. Having an expensive health care system run by the government (with their sterling reputation for efficiency and organization, of course!) is no better than having an expensive private health care system.
The simpler solution that falls in line with the principals of our nation's constructs is to deal with the nature of the industry to rip people off and deal with the prices. For example, isn't the entire premise of insurance that you use it to pay for unforeseen emergencies that you could not possibly pay for on your own? You pool your money together with the collective on the mathematical probability that far fewer will ever need to reach in than ever put in. When you start using it for every fucking thing -- like checkups, routine visits, prescriptions, births, etc -- it's no longer insuring for/against anything now, is it?
If the costs were dealt with, health *insurance* could properly survive at an affordable rate, because everyone who wants to can contribute into it and they only withdraw for catastrophic emergencies that no individual could shoulder on their own (major surgeries, terminal illness, etc). Everything else? Well, it would optimally be cheap enough that you could afford it out of your own pocket.
You know, kind of how your car insurance covers car accidents but you have to pay for your own gas and your own oil change and tire rotation.
The slight of hand "let's make nationalized health care, instead of dealing with the real problem!" is clearly to push another agenda far beyond and aside from affordability. It's unfortunate all the idiots on all sides are too wrapped up in their narrow world views and foaming at the mouth to bet beyond that and deal with the true underlying issues.
Also, in MY world, I don't want to spend needless billions of dollars helping breeders squirt out children in a hospital **OR** funding a pointless military action. One stupid waste of money does not justify the other.
I don't like the idea of a government run health care system sucking away my tax dollars for the benefit of someone else who can't acquire health care through working hard for a company or paying it themselves (mostly because I question any government involvement in anything and I like keeping my own damn money for my own damn self) . . .
. . . HOWEVER . . . Have you seen some of the fucking nutjobs who are absolutely apoplectic over the whole health care thing? They can't string a full sentence together between their dentures or gaping toothless maws and an awful lot of them are armed and misinformed (amazing how the government getting involved in health care is the most abhorrent infringement on civil liberties and our societal foundation EVER, but subsidizing churches through tax-free status and dictating who people can sleep with, what movies and music and books should be censored or banned, etc is just fine, right?).
You have to remember that this is the country where there are always at least a few people who react to things they don't like through violence.
I would posit that maybe Arafat qualifies as doing not only "so little" but in fact falling into "negative" measurement. I wouldn't exactly say Obama winning is a bigger WTF than that. A major WTF, still, though.
To be fair, this news was only announced within the past few hours and I don't hold the president to any obligation to speak on the subject at 4:00am. I would not be surprised if he wisely commented on it to some degree today or this week and dropped in a "I clearly have a lot to live up to" or something of that nature, since he and his advisers clearly are aware of the massive wave of "what the hell for?!" from the lunatic fringes, the supporters and the rest of us who simply don't care one way or the other.
It's a shame that the award couldn't be given to some people who had truly accomplished real quantifiable contributions to humanity through determination, leadership, and selflessness. CNN has a great award show every year where they showcase just a few such people and in my opinion, all of them are more deserving than any politician ever has or will be.
If you think Ghandi deserves a peace prize, you probably need to read up a bit more on Ghandi. He's not the selfless saint that society has conditioned itself to portray him as, much in the same way they've misrepresented Mother Theresa (who we've been groomed since birth to regard as the ultimate in selflessness and altruism, without any real cause).
This is irrelevant. Doing ANYTHING _well_ takes practice and discipline.
The death of cursive is a sign of societal progress (replaced with other methods for long-piece writing... like a computer or typewriter), unlike what should be a much greater concern that kids have horrible grammar and spelling and it seems to be slowly becoming more accepted and expected of them.
I think you're confusing cursive with the ability to write by hand -- and neither have anything to do with literacy.
There is definitely intrinsic value in being able to write by hand and the death of that would be embarrassing. The death of cursive, however is fairly irrelevant. The point of cursive is that it was constructed to make writing smoother, faster, and less painful for the hand. For anything of great length, we now use computers.
It's odd to comprehend a world without cursive, but it has served its purpose. If it moves on to the eventual world of enthusiasts the way caligraphy has, it's no huge loss.
Also, a calculator makes the process more efficient for someone who knows the underlying fundamentals of what they're working through, but is essentially a useless tool if you lack that knowledge. A
What does writing in cursive have to do with power outages or blackouts? Do power outages cripple your hands? You can't write using standard hand writing? I find this cursive-worship a lot of people have to be completely arbitrary and silly. Do you hunt and kill and butcher all of your own food? Do you make and can all of your own fruits and vegetables and preserves? Do you skin and tan your own leather clothing? Do you use kerosene lamps? Do you own a horse instead of a car for transportation?
Of course not. There is no inherent value in something simply because it is old or because it is tradition.
Cursive is intended as a smoother, quicker, easier-on-the-hand form of writing. If you write a hell of a lot by hand, it can be very necessary to speed things up and keep your hand from cramping. However, it has been a couple of decades since most people actually needed to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write reams of content in a single sitting. Writing is largely for notes and lists these days and we use devices -- computer, etc -- for anything of great length. It's faster and less stressful on the hand (I say this as a person who grew up wanting to be a writer and therefore producing hundreds upon hundreds of pages of sheets full of cursive-written material and frequently had a very pained hand as a result).
If we were talking the death of hand writing, that's one thing. It's a fundamental necessity to be able to know how to, among other things, write your damn name. Or leave a note on someone's car when you scratch it with a shopping cart. Or write a thoughtful note to a loved one. But the death of cursive? Meh. So what. What about short-hand? Morse code? Olde English?
And yes, this whole article already appeared on Slashdot like a month ago.
You are being intentionally obtuse as my point was quite clearly that your mother knew one tends to mimic the behavior and attitude of those he or she associates with and therefore presents you with a ridiculous proposition to point out why you should go against that innate tendency to go along with them.
My point was quite clear. You are simply being deliberately dense.
I find it amazing that you failed to comprehend the obvious point that eveyrone's mom (and therefore, society) made that statement was because they knew the propensity of people to mimic the behavior and attitude of those they associate with, therefore warning you against it by asking if you'd _even jump off a bridge_ if your friends did it.
Don't fault me for your obtuseness.
Your mom drilled it into your head, when she asked if you'd jump off a bridge if all of your friends are. Yet more ridiculous waste of scarce research funding. Also, being far less connected is better than being connected to lots of *idiots*.
More like billions.
Borloug has to be the most influential and under-appreciated man who has ever lived and most will never know or care, because he doesn't have a sex-tape, play basketball or football, or star in movies.
Borloug has not only been on my list of heroes for a very long time, but has been on my list of "guys who will die in the next decade or two during my lifetime that I am dreading."
The world could never possibly thank Borloug enough. If anyone deserves his own holiday, it's this man. If anyone deserves statues and his face on currency and battleships named after him. It's this man.
That such an amazing man who contributed so much in his life died not of old age, but of *cancer* is evidence that there can be no great deity out there watching over everything. If any man deserved a peaceful, painless, quick passing it was this man.
Right, because if there's one thing that's needed after a rough four or five hours of being awake, it's a nice long nap. I mean, gosh. FOUR HOURS. That's just exhausting. I bet people need a second nap after the second four hours of work before that long ride home.
Am I the only one who didn't understand a fucking word of the above poster's meaningless rambling platitudes? You sound like Mother Theresa. "Why help people? Just tell them to suffer in agony because it's beautiful."
I hope when you're confronted with that situation you can look at your pain-stricken loved one and tell them "toughen up you fucking pussy".