I fall into that heavy geek group of go-fuck-yourself when you want to search me, track me, or otherwise invade my privacy or my right to not be cattle. However, I could do without people like her standing up and taking on that position, publicly. The taint of religious idiocy just contaminates everyone else who actually takes issue with it for real-world concerns and sensibilities that don't involve the battle of two deities and an attempt by some "new world order" to track a human being by some goofy stamp at the behest of the super evil devil guy.
It's kind of like I'm sure everyone (including myself) felt when they saw Alex Jones "defending" our second amendment. Just a collective shout of "shut the fuck up, you birther, truther, new-world-order, end-of-the-world, religion spewing dipshit -- you are speaking in front of the world and making every other person who gives a shit about gun rights look like a fucking lunatic by association!".
Why couldn't she just say "hey, I take issue with this on the same grounds that any other person would have the right not; not on some silly religious preclusion"? It's like when I see all these news reports about the shitty behavior of the TSA when it comes to people in wheel chairs, or elderly nuns, or toddlers, or war veterans -- as if somehow it's wrong to violate them, but if you're just a regular every day everybody else, then fuck it.
Gah. This whole thing is just frustrating as hell. If another student has the guts to stand up to this, I hope they do it without the trappings of crap she came with. Unfortunately, I guess this also sets precedent for whoever the next student is and they won't get anywhere. Meh.
We, Americans, are stubbornly proud of our ignorance. Additionally, adoption by the rest of the world has the opposite affect on us. We won't use your UN black-helicopter, atheist, communist, baby-killing, freedom-hating, pussy-ass, pinko, bullshit metric garbage. Jesus came down and gave us the imperial system, because that's what man was meant to use, you fucking heathens!
Seriously, metric may take hold in America, but it won't be in my life time or the life time of anyone who is alive during your life time.
CES has been drowning for awhile, now. It's too soon after the new year for people to have any energy and really prepare. It's filled with crap that is too far in the future to be relevant, but too close to today to be interesting (for example, 4k televisions -- which are too expensive and far away from being even remotely affordable but too near in our future to be pie-in-the-sky-fantasy-interesting). It's filled with wireless speakers, soundbars, ipad covers, iphone attachments, shitty phones, next year's shitty ultrabooks and tablets that will be considered a failure the year after *that*, and lots of shitty little gimmicks. It's basically like being subscribed to the Engadget website's RSS feed, but in meats-space. Ick.
I feel bad for people who have to attend CES to report on it, these days. Especially those doing it for TV and net shows, where they have to produce a lot of content in quick succession. Dealing with the crowds and Vegas itself and the endless halls of schlocky garbage for what amounts to very little that really gets your tech-buzz or day-dreaming purring seems like an absolutely miserable task.
Get everyone to install it on the premise that "it'll help you detect if you have bad breath". Make it sensitive enough that it can also detect traces of explosives, chemicals used to produce meth and other drugs, gunpowder, and so on. When it does, call home with the geolocation of the individual and full report of chemicals detected. Maybe force it to take a few snapshots and some audio recording of the user and their surroundings, without alerting them with any type of notifications. You don't need to make citizens spy on each other, because they'll gladly spy on themselves!:D
Yep. The only downfall I see (other than a back-lit screen kind of sucks for reading) is DRM and the inability to maintain ebooks if the world came to an end. One of those can eventually be dealt with; the other not so much. Either way, I'm a big fan of keeping things on the digital side, where I don't have to have my life and home cluttered with crap, like generations before us.
But, man, that DRM thing . . . is really a major killjoy. The only real stab against fully embracing digital.
It's hard not to love the idea of having more content on a device that you can carry in your hand than you could store in your home, even if you turned every wall into a stack of filled shelves. Unfortunately, publishing is like every other content industry. They have to be kicked dragging and screaming into the modern world and undermine their own interests every step of the way, by doing things to drive customers *away* and foster ill-will with them.
As an avid reader, I am entirely fine with not having a house full of books and DVDs. It's fantastic to have so much space reclaimed that other homes have stuffed with shelf upon shelf of books, video games, movies, and albums. It kind of sucks on a tablet, because of the back-light, but that's what I use due to the fact that I don't want to carry a tablet *and* an e-reader (e-ink, that is -- which would be preferable, all other things being equal). But a physical book? Nope. I saw enough homes when I was growing up that were just consumed with walls full of books that just sat there forever. I'll take the option without clutter, thanks.
Also, you don't have the worries of fingerprints, bent spines, dogeared pages, and everything else that drives a book-lover like me nuts with a physical copy.
That actually got a loud laugh out of me. Thanks.:)
Even three years after buying this house, I still get mail for the old owners, every day. And the people who lived here before that (almost 15 years ago). It just never stops. I do everything online, so 95% of mail is literally just someone else's junk. I tried stamping it with a "NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS". Still nothing.
So, I've taken to using the time when I'm on long holds for operators or something to write intricate stories on envelopes, before stamping them with "NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS" and returning them to my mailbox for the postman to return. Usually things about the recipient having a gender reassignment surgery and moving to Vegas or reassessing their life and joining the French Foreign Legion.
Wow, I didn't realize all of that. I had forgotten about K5 for so long, until I saw it mentioned one day. It's really hard to say it has "survived', of course. I mean, it looks like someone's abandoned blog that has been over-taken by spambots. There is zero content on there and it's a solid mix of idiotic and incoherent. If you remember K5 during its prime and you return today, you seriously think something is wrong with the site -- like you've somehow wound up at a domain squatter's site or something. I can't understand what the point of keeping the site up is? It's not even worth the $10/yr for domain registration. I don't even know if anyone even shows up anymore -- bots included. When I looked last, the Sandra Fluke is a Whore stuff (fine, whatever your opinion, not sure what it has to do with a geek tech site) was about the only new thing that had been posted since 2010.
Also sad to hear about Advogato.
What's left? I mean, Slashdot is a shadow of its former self and, other than that, there's nothing -- unless you accept Reddit, which has basically become the 1990s AOL hub of internet forums. Blech.
I stopped over at Kuro5hin a couple years ago. Curious as to how things had come along, since I last was there. It used to be a decent mix of deep content, generated by its users. Usually heavily tech oriented and definitely geek oriented, otherwise.
HOLY SHIT WHAT HAS IT BECOME?!
When I last looked, it was just article after article about the most vile shit that makes the comments on articles that drudgereport links to look intelligent. It was just a bunch of crap by anti-abortion nuts, anti-gay nuts, and shit about Sandra Fluke being a slutty cunt. I am completely baffled as to what happened. It used to be on par with slashdot. Maybe even better, in some ways. Now it looks like it's just a place of navel-gazing propoganda for hate-filled truthers, birthers, anti-everything idiots. I thought it had been attacked, actually, and returned a couple weeks later to see if they had fixed their website. Then I googled a bit and found that it had been in this disgusting state of ruin for *years* and nobody really knew why.
Actually, it's run by scum-bag Ed Magedson (a right cunt). It's purportedly a "customer advocacy" site, but as people have experienced, you don't have to be a business or even be a person who does any business to be a victim of the scam. They've also caused a lot of discussion over their SEO behavior which somehow Google doesn't penalize the way they should (Yahoo! actually lowers the site's ranking for their scummy behavior).
It's stuff like this that makes me sometimes second guess my whole "total freedom on the internet" thing. It's one thing to deal with a "bully" or a total dickwad. It's another to deal with people who are seriously damaging you (or your business, I guess) and have no recourse, because of "total freedom on the internet". I don't know what the right middle ground for that is.:/
Angry at an ex? Angry at an employer? Angry at your neighbor? Pissed off that you hit on a guy and he wasn't interested and shot you down? You can easily ruin someone's life by just posting shit about them on a site called the Rip Off Report. Google curiously gives them incredibly high page ranking, but the site is nothing more than a scam. They NEVER REMOVE ANYTHING and they're proud of it. Even if you go to court. And you can be anonymous, while putting up real information (including name, etc) of your "target". It'll sit there forever. It'll get ranked high up on the first page of Google. They exploit shady SEO practices. And the only way they'll work with you is IF YOU PAY THEM for a "partnership service" that they advertise. Reportedly, it's around $5,000 -- give or take.
You can google for all sorts of controversy regarding it. It has ruined a lot of people's lives -- and you're not even dealing with international issues or anything.
I had someone defrauding users on my site, once. I banned them for it and next thing I knew, I had a really scummy "review/complaint/whatever" on this site. Absolutely no recourse and the other person is anonymous (though, obviously not -- since I recognized their insane babbling just like the hundreds of emails they sent me for a year after they were banned).
It's really really shady shit and I don't think they're the only site that does it.
It's not like this has only started happening. Does anyone seriously give any weight to the advertisements for things like NOD32 and others, where they claim "so and so reports that they have never missed a virus in the wild in the last ten years"?
Holy shit Six to eight times a year? I haven't watched a movie in the theater since X-Files in 1998. I haven't even averaged six to age movies at *home* per year (new movies released around that year, that is). Every movie I've enjoyed, I feel I'd enjoy far less in a movie theater than at home. Granted, I have a pretty sweet dedicated home theater that I put a lot of work into and had specially constructed, but still . . .
The value of a theater is especially diminished by the ever-lowering behavior of people who attend films, who have to be constantly texting or talking or browsing on their iphones and the ever-shrinking size of movie screens. I remember being a kid and it seemed like movie screens were the biggest thing on the planet. Either they changed or my perspective did, because as an adult, they seemed tiny as fuck. Sure, you could fit fifteen of them in a multiplex, but sitting 50 feet away from a 25 foot wide screen didn't really seem to do much more than sitting 8 feet from a 60" screen at home.
I think theaters are going to quickly become a thing of the past. They're about on par with landlines, pay-phones, and news papers. If they rolled out a way for people to watch films the day they're released on their home theater for $10, it'd be huge.
I don't get it. You want billionaires to rescue theaters under the guise of some "cultural" value to everyone packing theaters to watch Meet the Spartans and the Fockers?
Movie theaters serve absolutely no purpose, except as a gate through which films must pass as a delay to everyone else watching them. Unless you absolutely have to watch a movie the month it comes out, there's no reason to deal with the costs, the sticky floors, the shitty seats, the noisy assholes, the crying children, the lines, the driving there and back, the parking, the treats. Save all the money and save making it an all-night event and just watch shit at home. Maybe that wasn't feasible in the 90s, but 50" and 65" HD televisions are common place, movies are cheap to buy or rent, and the sound system that you'd want to experience could be covered after the years of money you'd save from seeing films in theaters and all the associated costs (even if you only payed $20/mo for some subscription).
Frankly, let 'em die out and lets get on with same-day-everywhere-releases.
Besides, at $20 and you can only see each film one time? You'd need three movies to make up for just the savings on tickets and there aren't three movies worth seeing in the theater every month.
By the same logic, I should keep buying expensive home furnishings and electronics, so that I don't put the workers all along that supply chain out of business. There are no excuses that, ultimately, save us from having to tighten the belt. That is, if we give a shit about balancing the budget or paying off the debt. Quite simply, we have to stop spending. This isn't rocket science. You tell a fat person to consume fewer calories than their body burns to lose weight and you tell someone with debt problems to STOP SPENDING. Yes, it hurts. That's irrelevant.
On the other hand, we could also just determine that we have such massive debt and that our money actually doesn't mean a fucking thing, so let's just print an endless supply of it (after all, I believe most of our debt is actually owed TO OURSELVES, so we could just wipe that out if we really felt like it).
Either one -- fine. I don't really give a fuck. But for fuck's sake, let's stop going around talking about how important it is to have fiscal responsibility and to be concerned with the budget, if we're never actually going to do a god damn thing about it.
I'm a grown ass man, so I don't wank off to a change in the calender. I believe I've worked every eve/day of the past fifteen years (though it was particularly fun, during Y2K).
Radio has been in dire straights for most of the past decade. Mass layoffs all over the place, fewer local and regional programs in favor of more mass syndication and automation. Stations shutting down left and right. Consolidations. I have many friends in the radio business (broadcasting, programming, managing, etc) and it has only become worse as time goes on. The only niche that isn't on life-support is talk-radio, which pretty much reduces the medium to the comments section of any news article linked to by DrudgeReport.
There aren't ever going to be any "spending cuts".
When both sides talk about "spending cuts", they really mean "instead of increasing spending by a $500 million for this project over the next five years, we're going to increase it by $400 million -- HURRAH, WE CUT $100 MILLION IN SPENDING! YAY!".
And if there's anything the internet is good for, it's "restricting content", so that something you don't want getting out there doesn't get out there. Yup.
If Slashdot is just going to turn into a slew of these crappy articles, why shouldn't I just finally give up the ship and go read Mashable or TechCrunch, which focus on this kind of shitty content that nobody cares about unless they're a talking-head on a shitty tech podcast that has to dig up content to fill time for the masses every morning?
Slashdot Mirror
I fall into that heavy geek group of go-fuck-yourself when you want to search me, track me, or otherwise invade my privacy or my right to not be cattle. However, I could do without people like her standing up and taking on that position, publicly. The taint of religious idiocy just contaminates everyone else who actually takes issue with it for real-world concerns and sensibilities that don't involve the battle of two deities and an attempt by some "new world order" to track a human being by some goofy stamp at the behest of the super evil devil guy.
It's kind of like I'm sure everyone (including myself) felt when they saw Alex Jones "defending" our second amendment. Just a collective shout of "shut the fuck up, you birther, truther, new-world-order, end-of-the-world, religion spewing dipshit -- you are speaking in front of the world and making every other person who gives a shit about gun rights look like a fucking lunatic by association!".
Why couldn't she just say "hey, I take issue with this on the same grounds that any other person would have the right not; not on some silly religious preclusion"? It's like when I see all these news reports about the shitty behavior of the TSA when it comes to people in wheel chairs, or elderly nuns, or toddlers, or war veterans -- as if somehow it's wrong to violate them, but if you're just a regular every day everybody else, then fuck it.
Gah. This whole thing is just frustrating as hell. If another student has the guts to stand up to this, I hope they do it without the trappings of crap she came with. Unfortunately, I guess this also sets precedent for whoever the next student is and they won't get anywhere. Meh.
We, Americans, are stubbornly proud of our ignorance. Additionally, adoption by the rest of the world has the opposite affect on us. We won't use your UN black-helicopter, atheist, communist, baby-killing, freedom-hating, pussy-ass, pinko, bullshit metric garbage. Jesus came down and gave us the imperial system, because that's what man was meant to use, you fucking heathens!
Seriously, metric may take hold in America, but it won't be in my life time or the life time of anyone who is alive during your life time.
CES has been drowning for awhile, now. It's too soon after the new year for people to have any energy and really prepare. It's filled with crap that is too far in the future to be relevant, but too close to today to be interesting (for example, 4k televisions -- which are too expensive and far away from being even remotely affordable but too near in our future to be pie-in-the-sky-fantasy-interesting). It's filled with wireless speakers, soundbars, ipad covers, iphone attachments, shitty phones, next year's shitty ultrabooks and tablets that will be considered a failure the year after *that*, and lots of shitty little gimmicks. It's basically like being subscribed to the Engadget website's RSS feed, but in meats-space. Ick.
I feel bad for people who have to attend CES to report on it, these days. Especially those doing it for TV and net shows, where they have to produce a lot of content in quick succession. Dealing with the crowds and Vegas itself and the endless halls of schlocky garbage for what amounts to very little that really gets your tech-buzz or day-dreaming purring seems like an absolutely miserable task.
Oh no! Removing a trivial task so you can do something else during your commute. That would be awful!
Get everyone to install it on the premise that "it'll help you detect if you have bad breath". Make it sensitive enough that it can also detect traces of explosives, chemicals used to produce meth and other drugs, gunpowder, and so on. When it does, call home with the geolocation of the individual and full report of chemicals detected. Maybe force it to take a few snapshots and some audio recording of the user and their surroundings, without alerting them with any type of notifications. You don't need to make citizens spy on each other, because they'll gladly spy on themselves! :D
Yep. The only downfall I see (other than a back-lit screen kind of sucks for reading) is DRM and the inability to maintain ebooks if the world came to an end. One of those can eventually be dealt with; the other not so much. Either way, I'm a big fan of keeping things on the digital side, where I don't have to have my life and home cluttered with crap, like generations before us.
But, man, that DRM thing . . . is really a major killjoy. The only real stab against fully embracing digital.
It's hard not to love the idea of having more content on a device that you can carry in your hand than you could store in your home, even if you turned every wall into a stack of filled shelves. Unfortunately, publishing is like every other content industry. They have to be kicked dragging and screaming into the modern world and undermine their own interests every step of the way, by doing things to drive customers *away* and foster ill-will with them.
As an avid reader, I am entirely fine with not having a house full of books and DVDs. It's fantastic to have so much space reclaimed that other homes have stuffed with shelf upon shelf of books, video games, movies, and albums. It kind of sucks on a tablet, because of the back-light, but that's what I use due to the fact that I don't want to carry a tablet *and* an e-reader (e-ink, that is -- which would be preferable, all other things being equal). But a physical book? Nope. I saw enough homes when I was growing up that were just consumed with walls full of books that just sat there forever. I'll take the option without clutter, thanks.
Also, you don't have the worries of fingerprints, bent spines, dogeared pages, and everything else that drives a book-lover like me nuts with a physical copy.
That actually got a loud laugh out of me. Thanks. :)
Even three years after buying this house, I still get mail for the old owners, every day. And the people who lived here before that (almost 15 years ago). It just never stops. I do everything online, so 95% of mail is literally just someone else's junk. I tried stamping it with a "NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS". Still nothing.
So, I've taken to using the time when I'm on long holds for operators or something to write intricate stories on envelopes, before stamping them with "NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS" and returning them to my mailbox for the postman to return. Usually things about the recipient having a gender reassignment surgery and moving to Vegas or reassessing their life and joining the French Foreign Legion.
Wow, I didn't realize all of that. I had forgotten about K5 for so long, until I saw it mentioned one day. It's really hard to say it has "survived', of course. I mean, it looks like someone's abandoned blog that has been over-taken by spambots. There is zero content on there and it's a solid mix of idiotic and incoherent. If you remember K5 during its prime and you return today, you seriously think something is wrong with the site -- like you've somehow wound up at a domain squatter's site or something. I can't understand what the point of keeping the site up is? It's not even worth the $10/yr for domain registration. I don't even know if anyone even shows up anymore -- bots included. When I looked last, the Sandra Fluke is a Whore stuff (fine, whatever your opinion, not sure what it has to do with a geek tech site) was about the only new thing that had been posted since 2010.
Also sad to hear about Advogato.
What's left? I mean, Slashdot is a shadow of its former self and, other than that, there's nothing -- unless you accept Reddit, which has basically become the 1990s AOL hub of internet forums. Blech.
I stopped over at Kuro5hin a couple years ago. Curious as to how things had come along, since I last was there. It used to be a decent mix of deep content, generated by its users. Usually heavily tech oriented and definitely geek oriented, otherwise.
HOLY SHIT WHAT HAS IT BECOME?!
When I last looked, it was just article after article about the most vile shit that makes the comments on articles that drudgereport links to look intelligent. It was just a bunch of crap by anti-abortion nuts, anti-gay nuts, and shit about Sandra Fluke being a slutty cunt. I am completely baffled as to what happened. It used to be on par with slashdot. Maybe even better, in some ways. Now it looks like it's just a place of navel-gazing propoganda for hate-filled truthers, birthers, anti-everything idiots. I thought it had been attacked, actually, and returned a couple weeks later to see if they had fixed their website. Then I googled a bit and found that it had been in this disgusting state of ruin for *years* and nobody really knew why.
No. Irony is the opposite of what is expected.
This is hypocrisy.
Actually, it's run by scum-bag Ed Magedson (a right cunt). It's purportedly a "customer advocacy" site, but as people have experienced, you don't have to be a business or even be a person who does any business to be a victim of the scam. They've also caused a lot of discussion over their SEO behavior which somehow Google doesn't penalize the way they should (Yahoo! actually lowers the site's ranking for their scummy behavior).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripoff_Report#Corporate_advocacy_program_and_extortion_claims
It's stuff like this that makes me sometimes second guess my whole "total freedom on the internet" thing. It's one thing to deal with a "bully" or a total dickwad. It's another to deal with people who are seriously damaging you (or your business, I guess) and have no recourse, because of "total freedom on the internet". I don't know what the right middle ground for that is. :/
News report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmhGLYHBbj8
Angry at an ex? Angry at an employer? Angry at your neighbor? Pissed off that you hit on a guy and he wasn't interested and shot you down? You can easily ruin someone's life by just posting shit about them on a site called the Rip Off Report. Google curiously gives them incredibly high page ranking, but the site is nothing more than a scam. They NEVER REMOVE ANYTHING and they're proud of it. Even if you go to court. And you can be anonymous, while putting up real information (including name, etc) of your "target". It'll sit there forever. It'll get ranked high up on the first page of Google. They exploit shady SEO practices. And the only way they'll work with you is IF YOU PAY THEM for a "partnership service" that they advertise. Reportedly, it's around $5,000 -- give or take.
You can google for all sorts of controversy regarding it. It has ruined a lot of people's lives -- and you're not even dealing with international issues or anything.
I had someone defrauding users on my site, once. I banned them for it and next thing I knew, I had a really scummy "review/complaint/whatever" on this site. Absolutely no recourse and the other person is anonymous (though, obviously not -- since I recognized their insane babbling just like the hundreds of emails they sent me for a year after they were banned).
It's really really shady shit and I don't think they're the only site that does it.
It's not like this has only started happening. Does anyone seriously give any weight to the advertisements for things like NOD32 and others, where they claim "so and so reports that they have never missed a virus in the wild in the last ten years"?
Holy shit Six to eight times a year? I haven't watched a movie in the theater since X-Files in 1998. I haven't even averaged six to age movies at *home* per year (new movies released around that year, that is). Every movie I've enjoyed, I feel I'd enjoy far less in a movie theater than at home. Granted, I have a pretty sweet dedicated home theater that I put a lot of work into and had specially constructed, but still . . .
The value of a theater is especially diminished by the ever-lowering behavior of people who attend films, who have to be constantly texting or talking or browsing on their iphones and the ever-shrinking size of movie screens. I remember being a kid and it seemed like movie screens were the biggest thing on the planet. Either they changed or my perspective did, because as an adult, they seemed tiny as fuck. Sure, you could fit fifteen of them in a multiplex, but sitting 50 feet away from a 25 foot wide screen didn't really seem to do much more than sitting 8 feet from a 60" screen at home.
I think theaters are going to quickly become a thing of the past. They're about on par with landlines, pay-phones, and news papers. If they rolled out a way for people to watch films the day they're released on their home theater for $10, it'd be huge.
I don't get it. You want billionaires to rescue theaters under the guise of some "cultural" value to everyone packing theaters to watch Meet the Spartans and the Fockers?
Movie theaters serve absolutely no purpose, except as a gate through which films must pass as a delay to everyone else watching them. Unless you absolutely have to watch a movie the month it comes out, there's no reason to deal with the costs, the sticky floors, the shitty seats, the noisy assholes, the crying children, the lines, the driving there and back, the parking, the treats. Save all the money and save making it an all-night event and just watch shit at home. Maybe that wasn't feasible in the 90s, but 50" and 65" HD televisions are common place, movies are cheap to buy or rent, and the sound system that you'd want to experience could be covered after the years of money you'd save from seeing films in theaters and all the associated costs (even if you only payed $20/mo for some subscription).
Frankly, let 'em die out and lets get on with same-day-everywhere-releases.
Besides, at $20 and you can only see each film one time? You'd need three movies to make up for just the savings on tickets and there aren't three movies worth seeing in the theater every month.
By the same logic, I should keep buying expensive home furnishings and electronics, so that I don't put the workers all along that supply chain out of business. There are no excuses that, ultimately, save us from having to tighten the belt. That is, if we give a shit about balancing the budget or paying off the debt. Quite simply, we have to stop spending. This isn't rocket science. You tell a fat person to consume fewer calories than their body burns to lose weight and you tell someone with debt problems to STOP SPENDING. Yes, it hurts. That's irrelevant.
On the other hand, we could also just determine that we have such massive debt and that our money actually doesn't mean a fucking thing, so let's just print an endless supply of it (after all, I believe most of our debt is actually owed TO OURSELVES, so we could just wipe that out if we really felt like it).
Either one -- fine. I don't really give a fuck. But for fuck's sake, let's stop going around talking about how important it is to have fiscal responsibility and to be concerned with the budget, if we're never actually going to do a god damn thing about it.
I'm a grown ass man, so I don't wank off to a change in the calender. I believe I've worked every eve/day of the past fifteen years (though it was particularly fun, during Y2K).
Radio has been in dire straights for most of the past decade. Mass layoffs all over the place, fewer local and regional programs in favor of more mass syndication and automation. Stations shutting down left and right. Consolidations. I have many friends in the radio business (broadcasting, programming, managing, etc) and it has only become worse as time goes on. The only niche that isn't on life-support is talk-radio, which pretty much reduces the medium to the comments section of any news article linked to by DrudgeReport.
There aren't ever going to be any "spending cuts".
When both sides talk about "spending cuts", they really mean "instead of increasing spending by a $500 million for this project over the next five years, we're going to increase it by $400 million -- HURRAH, WE CUT $100 MILLION IN SPENDING! YAY!".
Fucking thieving scum.
Getting into televisions in 2013 seems a lot like getting into the radio business post 2005.
And if there's anything the internet is good for, it's "restricting content", so that something you don't want getting out there doesn't get out there. Yup.
I haven't seen any pop-ups and I'm on Chrome on Win7 at the moment.
If Slashdot is just going to turn into a slew of these crappy articles, why shouldn't I just finally give up the ship and go read Mashable or TechCrunch, which focus on this kind of shitty content that nobody cares about unless they're a talking-head on a shitty tech podcast that has to dig up content to fill time for the masses every morning?