Except what's actually happening here is that I need a baked potato and a side of beans to survive, I'm *planning* on eating five double cheeseburgers, instead . . . and I only *get* two double cheeseburgers. That doesn't mean I cut my calorie consumption by 60%.
I have not heard one single news outlet (other than the biased political nutjob blogs, of course) point out that there are no cuts; that the cuts are only in projected budget increase, that they're happening over a period of two years, and that they're only a measely total of $84b.
Instead, the coverage makes it sounds like we're chopping the budget funding by 50% overnight, that it applies to the amount needed now and not against an *increase*, and that the sky is fucking falling.
But hey, if people are stupid enough to be so easily mislead and cheated, then fuck 'em. I only wish more of them had to foot the financial penalty for their lack of concern.
I'm fortunately child-free and I enjoy working. I'm in no rush to not be working and even if I weren't paid to do what I do for a living, I would probably be doing some form of it on the side, for free. I always enjoyed having a cafeteria with several restaurants in it open for at least two meals a day (and good food, too -- made by a variety of professional chefs). I've always enjoyed the free drinks and coffee. The free donuts, muffins, bagels, and fruit. The on-site star-bucks (with ice-cream parlor). The recreational activities. Bringing the dogs to work. Having a concierge to help with arranging, planning, or finding things around town. The high quality vending machines. The giant beanbags and comfortable community seating and open-areas.
All of these things contribute to a positive and friendly atmosphere for the place you spend more than a third of your life at. Just because some people might be in a rush to get home to park themselves in front of the television all night with a house full of noisy kids doesn't mean everyone is and creating a great work environment doesn't mean that people who don't want to be there more than they have to be can't just go home and do whatever it is they're itching to go do.
Besides, I've gotten far more value out of such amenities and environments over my career than I ever got from countless stock options (even restricted options).:D
How is at-work entertainment a fad? At Netscape, we had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and arcade machines. It builds camaraderie and is a great way to blow off some stress when you need to clear your mind for ten minutes.
Seriously, I just don't get what's with the Slashdot crowd, half the time. It's like they just want to hate what they do for a living so much and hate their work environment so much that when the opportunity to enjoy both comes along, they have to attack it with one ridiculous mentality or another.
The next best thing to loving what you do for a living is at least loving the environment you do it in. By some of the comments, here, you'd think everyone wanted to work in a coal mine and have people whipping them.
I don't agree with any of them. Making work life an enjoyable place and taking care of an employee's needs is more "being an awesome employer" and less "mind control".
If you really want to go home at the end of the day and/or eat with other people, go do that. Some people enjoy working. Some people enjoy putting in the long hours. If you can make it so they don't have to leave the office, drive around go find a place to eat and waste their whole evening, then that's fantastic.
I mean, what's next - "child care at work is mind control"? How about "bathrooms at work are mind control"?
I remember the article a few years ago where high school students took a poll which showed they generally feel there is too much free speech, press should be regulated by government, etc. Then, you have many going around saying things like "well, we have to give up some liberties for safety". And . . . well, none of this should surprise any of us.
We are destined to lose our freedom and our civil liberties. It is unavoidable. Every generation of children are raised in a society just a little less free than the prior one. For instance, young adults in 2013 don't know of a world without a TSA or a world where you didn't have to show your ID before boarding a domestic flight or a world where they weren't fear-mongered with threats of terror every single day. The things that have occurred in the last twenty years that repulse us about infringements on every citizen's rights are things which are just "every day life" and "normal" for young adults, today. Kids born today will know nothing of a world when there weren't cameras constantly monitoring and archiving their every move or drones in every city minding the behavior of citizens.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that creating multiple online personas and putting in occasionally fake information doesn't make them "smarter about it". Haven't we all learned, by now, that your identity can be derived by advertisers with only a few minimal pieces of data? Just because you're using a different username and email address at a site or to register for something doesn't mean *shit*.
Exactly. Access to a service or a social network is not "something in it for them". In fact, even if someone is willing to pay for your data, you shouldn't be willing to do that and it's hard to even accept that as "something in it for them".
Worse, this article says they're smarter about it, yet the reasons they give for sharing information by these twits are "for coupons and local deals" and "in exchange for targeted advertising" those two things are the same thing, obviously) and... Well, actually, those are the only reasons the article gives. What as shitty, meaningless, irrelevant article. It's literally just an infographic full of information from which the author has derived the most absurd conclusion.
"Teens are smarter about privacy, because they don't care about their privacy as long as it's being used for something in their benifit... like advertise to them".
To be fair, Dexter actually *is* fucking terrible. The first two seasons were fantastic. The rest was stupid pandering idiotic crap that made it even worse than Tru Blood (and that's saying something).
I should clarify that I meant the shows in my list vary in quality from pretty good (Lost, Alias, Eureka!, Walking Dead) to great (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc) -- not that the list is, itself, ordered or ranked from good to great.
Claiming there hasn't been any good television for the last decade is fucking idiotic. If you haven't found good television, it's because you've had your head in the sand. I don't even have or watch live television (I ditched cable ages ago) and I'm sure I have missed a lot of other things to add to the list, but in the last decade, you have had some really great shows from pretty good to great:
Battlestar Galactica Doctor Who Sopranos The Shield The Wire Friday Night Lights Breaking Bad, Mad Men Sons of Anarchy, Firefly Arrested Development The Office, Sherlock Luther Game of Thrones Fringe Boardwalk Empire Always Sunny in Philadelphia Archer The IT Crowd Walking Dead Louie Justified Community Eastbound and Down Californication Deadwood Oz Curb Your Enthusiasm Venture Brothers Lost Futurama Eureka! Farscape Blood in the Wire Alias The Killing Mythbusters
There's a lack of great science fiction stuff out there, but there's still a lot of great programming to be found, if you bother.
Interesting, because most people I have encountered who are particularly pre-occupied with their phone don't seem to actually possess a brain, to begin with.
That's the problem with every form of media. Magazines, radio, television, the internet, news papers. Even PBS and NPR (people who don't think those are beholden to advertisers, because they have advertisers are out of their mind as they have advertisements at the start of every show and, now days, every 15 minutes).
I mean, even with things like Hulu you're not the customer. You're *paying* for the programming, but you're still getting ads. The advertisers are the customer and you're the product. It's very hard to find any content production these days where the consumer is also the customer, instead of the product. It's very unfortunate. There are plenty of places I'd even gladly pay for their content at, but they also still run ads, which means they get the benefit of me paying them, but I don't get the benefit of not being their product.
No, it wouldn't. It's not a matter of viewership. It's a matter of production cost. Remember, the SciFi channel went through all this many times. They canceled great shows great ratings and the highest viewership of any other content on their network. Shows like First Wave, Farscape, and Eureka!. They replaced them with wrestling and a conman talking to dead people in an audience of desperate suckers and a bunch of idiots "hunting ghosts". Why? Because the production costs were too high for those shows. Producing a high quality show is too expensive. Networks would rather product things that are ridiculously cheap and still get a huge audience, like reality television, wrestling, etc.
I don't think Netflix or Amazon or Hulu can last long doing these "original series", though. The SciFi channel had to cancel Farscape because even though it was their best-performing show that constantly won awards and was one of the best programs on television, it cost too much to make. It's better for them to have a smaller audience and smaller budget than quality and a bigger audience. Same goes for the program "Eureka!" that they recently canceled. Decent show. Great reputation. Lots of awards. Lots of viewers. But production cost too much, so they canceled it.
These streaming companies can not afford several million dollars per episode. Especially when they're not charging anything additional for it. Long term, I don't see how they could even afford a million an episode. Maybe if they start to increase their subscription fee, they could (frankly, I'd be fine doubling the $8/mo I pay to Netflix - it's worth it). The problem, then, is that you will not have all your content in one place. So you'll have to pay a big subscription to Netflix to get their back catalog plus their custom programming. Then another to Hulu. Then your Prime subscription to Amazon. Then another at some other place. By the end of it, you'll be paying more than you did for a full-blown cable subscription and you'll have to go through 10 different places to get it.
I can't remember the last time I saw an episode of South Park (or Futurama, The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc). I have to say that it was probably the Human CentiPad episode, maybe? And even then, it was only because someone alerted me to it -- and it had been years prior to that since I watched an episode, either.
The thing is, all this stuff is still more than good enough to find an audience. It's just that the audience they're aiming for doesn't watch much live television and, many, have even move don from DVRs and cable subscriptions. They're airing a program on a medium whose primary demographic is aging gray-hairs that still miss Murder, She Wrote.
I thought it was canceled a long time ago. I know Family Guy came back, but I thought Futurama just came back for a few episodes and vanished again?
This is a failure on their part, then, frankly. I don't watch South Park often (maybe I binge on it every few years, to catch up), but I know that it's still on. More, I know that I can watch current episodes on Hulu (ugh) and that I can watch all episodes (delayed by a few weeks or something?) on South Park's own website.
Short of watching live television (which I don't even have and haven't for many years, like many fellow geeks), I wouldn't have a clue how to get Futurama. I mean, other than torrents, I guess. Actually, the same goes for The Simpsons, except I do know they're still going, apparently.
There's a world of geeks out there to keep your show going. You just are doing a shitty job at delivering it to them. They're not 90 year old grandmothers sitting by the television all day and night.
Which is just fine and that's your responsibility; not the retailers. You are the one with ties to the state you live in; not the online retailer.
I mean, unless we just want to ditch the tenth amendment. Let's ONLY have federal laws and let's force them to trump state laws. Then we can tax the ever loving shit out of everyone and we can squash those pesky states that are allowing things like gay marriage and pot smoking, while we're at it.
Or... are we just gonna pick and choose when we give a shit about the tenth amendment and when we don't?
How is this any different than advertising, where a company usually makes statements that are technically true, yet still dishonest in the extent to which they convey their product or its benefit to the customers? As far as I'm concerned, the ranting is a matter of opinion and as long as the actual activity and event she asserts is factual, then I don't see an issue.
I mean, what's next -- stating that absolutely nothing negative can ever be stated on the internet, because even if it is completely true, it is being broadcast to such a large audience as to be "unfair" to the target of the criticism?
If you mistreat me, as a customer (or any other entity), why should I not be allowed to state the truth (or even opinion) with intent to damage or malice? If you're a shitty person or a shitty company doing shitty things, then I have every right to have malice and want to damage your reputation. IT DESERVES TO BE DAMAGED.
It seems very clear to me that what is meant is that LIBEL is punishable whereby LIBEL would be defined not only as FALSE statements made as facts which damage a company, but where it is done INTENTIONALLY to damage a company. I mean, am I the only one not seeing this? It would seem the intent is not to punish people who air dirty laundry about a company or person, but is a point of PROTECTING someone who damages a reputation WITHOUT MALICE OR INTENTIONAL HARM. That is, where one is repeating false claims because they understood them to be true when they really werent, that person would be protected (because they don't have the same malicious intent). While someone intentionally manufacturing false statements of fact to damage a company or person WOULD be punishable by libel law.
If that isn't the case, then how the fuck does a law get passed like this and why aren't there people overturning cars in the streets over this absurdity?
Slashdot Mirror
Except what's actually happening here is that I need a baked potato and a side of beans to survive, I'm *planning* on eating five double cheeseburgers, instead . . . and I only *get* two double cheeseburgers. That doesn't mean I cut my calorie consumption by 60%.
I have not heard one single news outlet (other than the biased political nutjob blogs, of course) point out that there are no cuts; that the cuts are only in projected budget increase, that they're happening over a period of two years, and that they're only a measely total of $84b.
Instead, the coverage makes it sounds like we're chopping the budget funding by 50% overnight, that it applies to the amount needed now and not against an *increase*, and that the sky is fucking falling.
But hey, if people are stupid enough to be so easily mislead and cheated, then fuck 'em. I only wish more of them had to foot the financial penalty for their lack of concern.
I'm fortunately child-free and I enjoy working. I'm in no rush to not be working and even if I weren't paid to do what I do for a living, I would probably be doing some form of it on the side, for free. I always enjoyed having a cafeteria with several restaurants in it open for at least two meals a day (and good food, too -- made by a variety of professional chefs). I've always enjoyed the free drinks and coffee. The free donuts, muffins, bagels, and fruit. The on-site star-bucks (with ice-cream parlor). The recreational activities. Bringing the dogs to work. Having a concierge to help with arranging, planning, or finding things around town. The high quality vending machines. The giant beanbags and comfortable community seating and open-areas.
All of these things contribute to a positive and friendly atmosphere for the place you spend more than a third of your life at. Just because some people might be in a rush to get home to park themselves in front of the television all night with a house full of noisy kids doesn't mean everyone is and creating a great work environment doesn't mean that people who don't want to be there more than they have to be can't just go home and do whatever it is they're itching to go do.
Besides, I've gotten far more value out of such amenities and environments over my career than I ever got from countless stock options (even restricted options). :D
How is at-work entertainment a fad? At Netscape, we had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and arcade machines. It builds camaraderie and is a great way to blow off some stress when you need to clear your mind for ten minutes.
Seriously, I just don't get what's with the Slashdot crowd, half the time. It's like they just want to hate what they do for a living so much and hate their work environment so much that when the opportunity to enjoy both comes along, they have to attack it with one ridiculous mentality or another.
The next best thing to loving what you do for a living is at least loving the environment you do it in. By some of the comments, here, you'd think everyone wanted to work in a coal mine and have people whipping them.
I don't agree with any of them. Making work life an enjoyable place and taking care of an employee's needs is more "being an awesome employer" and less "mind control".
If you really want to go home at the end of the day and/or eat with other people, go do that. Some people enjoy working. Some people enjoy putting in the long hours. If you can make it so they don't have to leave the office, drive around go find a place to eat and waste their whole evening, then that's fantastic.
I mean, what's next - "child care at work is mind control"? How about "bathrooms at work are mind control"?
I remember the article a few years ago where high school students took a poll which showed they generally feel there is too much free speech, press should be regulated by government, etc. Then, you have many going around saying things like "well, we have to give up some liberties for safety". And . . . well, none of this should surprise any of us.
We are destined to lose our freedom and our civil liberties. It is unavoidable. Every generation of children are raised in a society just a little less free than the prior one. For instance, young adults in 2013 don't know of a world without a TSA or a world where you didn't have to show your ID before boarding a domestic flight or a world where they weren't fear-mongered with threats of terror every single day. The things that have occurred in the last twenty years that repulse us about infringements on every citizen's rights are things which are just "every day life" and "normal" for young adults, today. Kids born today will know nothing of a world when there weren't cameras constantly monitoring and archiving their every move or drones in every city minding the behavior of citizens.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that creating multiple online personas and putting in occasionally fake information doesn't make them "smarter about it". Haven't we all learned, by now, that your identity can be derived by advertisers with only a few minimal pieces of data? Just because you're using a different username and email address at a site or to register for something doesn't mean *shit*.
Exactly. Access to a service or a social network is not "something in it for them". In fact, even if someone is willing to pay for your data, you shouldn't be willing to do that and it's hard to even accept that as "something in it for them".
Worse, this article says they're smarter about it , yet the reasons they give for sharing information by these twits are "for coupons and local deals" and "in exchange for targeted advertising" those two things are the same thing, obviously) and... Well, actually, those are the only reasons the article gives. What as shitty, meaningless, irrelevant article. It's literally just an infographic full of information from which the author has derived the most absurd conclusion.
"Teens are smarter about privacy, because they don't care about their privacy as long as it's being used for something in their benifit... like advertise to them".
I give up. Fuck it.
To be fair, Dexter actually *is* fucking terrible. The first two seasons were fantastic. The rest was stupid pandering idiotic crap that made it even worse than Tru Blood (and that's saying something).
I should clarify that I meant the shows in my list vary in quality from pretty good (Lost, Alias, Eureka!, Walking Dead) to great (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc) -- not that the list is, itself, ordered or ranked from good to great.
Claiming there hasn't been any good television for the last decade is fucking idiotic. If you haven't found good television, it's because you've had your head in the sand. I don't even have or watch live television (I ditched cable ages ago) and I'm sure I have missed a lot of other things to add to the list, but in the last decade, you have had some really great shows from pretty good to great:
Battlestar Galactica
Doctor Who
Sopranos
The Shield
The Wire
Friday Night Lights
Breaking Bad, Mad Men
Sons of Anarchy, Firefly
Arrested Development
The Office, Sherlock
Luther
Game of Thrones
Fringe
Boardwalk Empire
Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Archer
The IT Crowd
Walking Dead
Louie
Justified
Community
Eastbound and Down
Californication
Deadwood
Oz
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Venture Brothers
Lost
Futurama
Eureka!
Farscape
Blood in the Wire
Alias
The Killing
Mythbusters
There's a lack of great science fiction stuff out there, but there's still a lot of great programming to be found, if you bother.
Interesting, because most people I have encountered who are particularly pre-occupied with their phone don't seem to actually possess a brain, to begin with.
Right, it's exactly like passively starting at a glowing box for 8 hours after getting home from work.
There are almost as many slashdotters out there who are anime hounds as there are slashdotters with self-diagnosed apsergers.
That's the problem with every form of media. Magazines, radio, television, the internet, news papers. Even PBS and NPR (people who don't think those are beholden to advertisers, because they have advertisers are out of their mind as they have advertisements at the start of every show and, now days, every 15 minutes).
I mean, even with things like Hulu you're not the customer. You're *paying* for the programming, but you're still getting ads. The advertisers are the customer and you're the product. It's very hard to find any content production these days where the consumer is also the customer, instead of the product. It's very unfortunate. There are plenty of places I'd even gladly pay for their content at, but they also still run ads, which means they get the benefit of me paying them, but I don't get the benefit of not being their product.
No, it wouldn't. It's not a matter of viewership. It's a matter of production cost. Remember, the SciFi channel went through all this many times. They canceled great shows great ratings and the highest viewership of any other content on their network. Shows like First Wave, Farscape, and Eureka!. They replaced them with wrestling and a conman talking to dead people in an audience of desperate suckers and a bunch of idiots "hunting ghosts". Why? Because the production costs were too high for those shows. Producing a high quality show is too expensive. Networks would rather product things that are ridiculously cheap and still get a huge audience, like reality television, wrestling, etc.
I don't think Netflix or Amazon or Hulu can last long doing these "original series", though. The SciFi channel had to cancel Farscape because even though it was their best-performing show that constantly won awards and was one of the best programs on television, it cost too much to make. It's better for them to have a smaller audience and smaller budget than quality and a bigger audience. Same goes for the program "Eureka!" that they recently canceled. Decent show. Great reputation. Lots of awards. Lots of viewers. But production cost too much, so they canceled it.
These streaming companies can not afford several million dollars per episode. Especially when they're not charging anything additional for it. Long term, I don't see how they could even afford a million an episode. Maybe if they start to increase their subscription fee, they could (frankly, I'd be fine doubling the $8/mo I pay to Netflix - it's worth it). The problem, then, is that you will not have all your content in one place. So you'll have to pay a big subscription to Netflix to get their back catalog plus their custom programming. Then another to Hulu. Then your Prime subscription to Amazon. Then another at some other place. By the end of it, you'll be paying more than you did for a full-blown cable subscription and you'll have to go through 10 different places to get it.
I can't remember the last time I saw an episode of South Park (or Futurama, The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc). I have to say that it was probably the Human CentiPad episode, maybe? And even then, it was only because someone alerted me to it -- and it had been years prior to that since I watched an episode, either.
The thing is, all this stuff is still more than good enough to find an audience. It's just that the audience they're aiming for doesn't watch much live television and, many, have even move don from DVRs and cable subscriptions. They're airing a program on a medium whose primary demographic is aging gray-hairs that still miss Murder, She Wrote.
Wow. No way. That's almost four months of Netflix. There is no television show I would pay $30/season for. Not even if it was The Wire.
I thought it was canceled a long time ago. I know Family Guy came back, but I thought Futurama just came back for a few episodes and vanished again?
This is a failure on their part, then, frankly. I don't watch South Park often (maybe I binge on it every few years, to catch up), but I know that it's still on. More, I know that I can watch current episodes on Hulu (ugh) and that I can watch all episodes (delayed by a few weeks or something?) on South Park's own website.
Short of watching live television (which I don't even have and haven't for many years, like many fellow geeks), I wouldn't have a clue how to get Futurama. I mean, other than torrents, I guess. Actually, the same goes for The Simpsons, except I do know they're still going, apparently.
There's a world of geeks out there to keep your show going. You just are doing a shitty job at delivering it to them. They're not 90 year old grandmothers sitting by the television all day and night.
By "Facebook", you might as well add NSA and CIA as synonyms.
Which is just fine and that's your responsibility; not the retailers. You are the one with ties to the state you live in; not the online retailer.
I mean, unless we just want to ditch the tenth amendment. Let's ONLY have federal laws and let's force them to trump state laws. Then we can tax the ever loving shit out of everyone and we can squash those pesky states that are allowing things like gay marriage and pot smoking, while we're at it.
Or... are we just gonna pick and choose when we give a shit about the tenth amendment and when we don't?
If you don't see that as "too much government", then I don't know what the fuck is.
How is this any different than advertising, where a company usually makes statements that are technically true, yet still dishonest in the extent to which they convey their product or its benefit to the customers? As far as I'm concerned, the ranting is a matter of opinion and as long as the actual activity and event she asserts is factual, then I don't see an issue.
I mean, what's next -- stating that absolutely nothing negative can ever be stated on the internet, because even if it is completely true, it is being broadcast to such a large audience as to be "unfair" to the target of the criticism?
If you mistreat me, as a customer (or any other entity), why should I not be allowed to state the truth (or even opinion) with intent to damage or malice? If you're a shitty person or a shitty company doing shitty things, then I have every right to have malice and want to damage your reputation. IT DESERVES TO BE DAMAGED.
It seems very clear to me that what is meant is that LIBEL is punishable whereby LIBEL would be defined not only as FALSE statements made as facts which damage a company, but where it is done INTENTIONALLY to damage a company. I mean, am I the only one not seeing this? It would seem the intent is not to punish people who air dirty laundry about a company or person, but is a point of PROTECTING someone who damages a reputation WITHOUT MALICE OR INTENTIONAL HARM. That is, where one is repeating false claims because they understood them to be true when they really werent, that person would be protected (because they don't have the same malicious intent). While someone intentionally manufacturing false statements of fact to damage a company or person WOULD be punishable by libel law.
If that isn't the case, then how the fuck does a law get passed like this and why aren't there people overturning cars in the streets over this absurdity?