The first three doctors are definitely worth watching, but the tone of the shows are decidedly different. It'd be worth catching a couple episode of each of the three to see if one is open to watching the rest of them -- but they're so different that I think you can survive entirely without them. There was some charming stuff and I liked the "cranky old doctor" version a lot. Ever since, the roles keep being filled by younger and younger guys.
I liked the doctors all the way up to the modern ones, but they definitely aren't quite up to the same snuff. A lot of the episodes I happened to catch as a kid were re-runs of McCoy, so I kind of like him a bit.
I agree wholeheartedly that Tom Baker and Davidson are must-watches, if you can only bother to watch two old doctors series. They seem to embody the show the most.
This is a pertinent point. If you're watching Doctor Who because "it has this attractive person in it" or "because I like the romantic tones", then you're not the audience for actual Doctor Who. The recent Doctor Who has some gorgeous women in it and some really great moments between them and the good Doctor, but they are incidental when you watch Doctor Who because the doctor is awesome and you like science fiction.
Keeping this in mind will help one decide whether or not it's worth the effort of expanding someone's doctor who experience if they only came to it post 2005.
I think there's a distinct problem to be found in trying to associate modern viewers who like modern Doctor Who with fans of science fiction. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, I think that a huge portion of the audience that never heard of Doctor Who until this century would care as much about the actual earlier seasons as someone's girlfriend who says "gosh, this ipad thing is neat!" would be interested in sitting down and writing software.
The series may consist of time travel, but the doctor exists sequentially and chronologically (more or less). Wouldn't really be any harm in not watching sequentially, but if you're going to make the effort to go back to the older doctors (again, I'd say start at Baker and watch everything from there onward), then you might as well watch those in order. Not that you need to watch them before watching the modern shows -- but once you've watched the current ones, that's the order I'd advise (or you could watch the old concurrent with the new).
Doctor Who is all ABOUT being a low budget special effects science fiction show. Despite Eccleston being a great version of the doctor, Tom Baker remains "the" Doctor, in most people's eyes (not everyone's, but clearly most). Peter Davison is also considered the favorite of (I believe) Russel Davies and it would be a shame to miss him.
It also brings more meaning to characters that show up or are hinted at in the reboot of Doctor Who. The Master probably means jack to anyone who hasn't gone back and watched the original series. And you'd miss out on K9. And you'd miss out on Sarah Jane. The awesome original Tardis that looked less like a used antiques store and more like a space ship. You'd miss great (some would say, awful) stories like The Happiness Patrol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Patrol ).
You could definitely get by with only the modern incarnation of the show, but if you have any appreciation for this type of science fiction (Red Dwarf, Blake's Seven, etc) then you definitely have to at least consider going back as far as the fourth doctor and catching up from there.
First, you need to remember that Doctor Who started life as a children's show. Thus, the first bunch of seasons were very oriented toward the 60s serial audience for children. As a Doctor Who lover, I had to really push myself through the first three doctors worth of shows. That isn't to say that there aren't some really great shows to be found early on, but I can see how it might not be the cup of tea of most viewers.
The show really kicks off with the fourth doctor (Tom Baker), often heralded as the most popular doctor. For a certain generation (such as myself, being around thirty years old), Tom Baker is "the" doctor, kind of the same way that for people around my age think of Ronald Reagan as our concept of what "the" president should look like.
Anyway, I would say Tom Baker is the place to start and if you discover that you have a hunger for even more, you can go back and watch the rest. There's a good chunk of missing content over the first three doctor's, however. There's some beyond the third doctor that is still missing, too, but the most content is missing from early on. Back in the day, the BBC just threw out films in order to make room to store more. And at another point, I believe a fire destroyed a lot of it. Where possible, people have recreated episodes by merging audio recordings with still photos from the set.
Beginning with the 2005 Doctor Who, the show technically had a "reboot". You could reasonably only have ever watched these episodes and nothing before. While it's a reboot, the doctor's still count in order and the chronology of everything still happened. So it's a reboot, but . . . . not really. The tone of the show also changed, dramatically. While the doctor always had companions, it was never a show about a brooding sad doctor alone in the world having one romantic interest after another with all the intrinsic undertones. This puts a lot of fans off. If the early doctor who shows (the first three doctor's, at least) were very oriented toward young children, the latest three doctor's were very oriented toward the female "Lifetime" channel audience (to a degree). I find it a noticeable change, but honestly, I don't have a huge problem with it. I like the additional depth the doctor has grown to have.
Anyway, my advice would best be summarized as:
+ You can get away with just watching the modern Doctor Who. + I'd really suggest watching everything beginning with Tom Baker onward. + If you're hungry for more, afterward, go back and pick up what you can of the first three doctors.
Then you can add on the rest of the shows, like Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (none of which I have watched yet, but will, eventually -- I don't know much about them).
As for how to find them? You can find old episodes on Netflix. Not sure how much is there. I'm not sure what the legal status is of the copyright and distribution on the content is, but if you know where to look around, you can find collections of all Doctor Who episodes available to the world on bit torrent. It comes out to 26 seasons and about 750 episodes (none of this including 2005+). I would absolutely love to have some sort of an official collection of every single Doctor Who content out there (they also have lots of books, comics, and radio plays . . . all of which I've owned to some extent over the years, because I'm a raging dork). Unfortunately, I don't know where you can find a lot of the content, commercially, and torrent seems possibly the only way for much of it.
Subjecting the public to "checkpoints" is a bad thing, also.
I have an idea. The guy should offer to remove the app when they cease this type of bullshit violation. Just because it's supposedly done for a good cause doesn't mean that checkpoints are a good thing.
If they really gave a fuck about the problem, they could protect people's rights and be effective. How? Well, don't have checkpoints (yes, I know they get around the civil liberty issues by saying that they're searching EVERYONE and not targeting any specific people - so what?). Instead, how about when you pick up someone committing a DUI, you strike their right to drive for the rest of their life. Of course, that impacts your bottom line. You don't make money from a single offense. You generate revenue from repeat offenders. Therefore, we subject people to these bullshit checkpoints AND give light penalties so that we get all these stories of guys who finally kill some unfortunate party after a guy has had a dozen DUIs.
As a rational person, I appreciated Art Bell's seeming patronization of his callers. His replacement (George Noorey) seems less patronizing and more coddling. Plus, I always dug Bell's voice. It just felt like the kind of voice I was supposed to be listening to in the middle of the night and early morning over the radio when the rest of the world was sleeping.
Plus, I actually befriended the famous hacker John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) thanks to learning of him on Art Bell's show when I was a teenager (he was a guest, once or twice). I've always been grateful of that, because that small change in my life gave me the extra little nudge I needed to pursue the career I wanted to have as an adult.
That's because it wasn't the trademarked SyFy back when John Edwards had his show on there, even though that was around the time that they did give up entirely on even pretending to have the slightest to do with "science fiction" (you know, get rid of Farscape and First Wave and replace it with a guy who does supposed "cold reads"). Otherwise I was going to spell it their trademarked way, which I think represents their distance from actual sci-fi much better.:)
It's all 100% crap. Still, I agree that "EVP recordings" sometimes make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It's just a natural human reaction. I also get a kick out of listening to Art Bell (more so when it used to actually HAVE Art Bell, because he made it clear that he thought most of these people were nuts, but had a good time anyway -- the new guy always seemed too into it and too forgiving). It's all bullshit, but it's fun to entertain the thoughts of nutjobs and pseudo-scientists and scammers sort of the same way it's fun to entertain the stories of Piers Anthony and others.
As for suckers who buy into this crap and get scammed. Who cares? I don't feel any worse for them than I do for idiots who give 10% of their income to a religious organization to pay for their church's expenses or people who pay for psychics or the schmucks who used to attend those John Edwards readings on the Sci-Fi channel. Or those fucktards that get pet psychics.
No, because they don't *have* to update the firmware and as long as they're not planning to connect to the Playstation Network with it, they don't even *need* to update to the latest firmware that removes that functionality. Of course, if they did have to, I bet it sure would come in handy if there was some guy who could "jailbreak" the system to allow people to make further use of it. *ahem*
I wish I had mod points, because that is awesome. I thought about doing that, but I don't even have photoshop or gimp installed, so I punked out. That is just astonishing. And, remember, those are $100 bills! Imagine if we were talking single dollars! It'd be another 100 times THAT image! Holy crap!
As you point out, bundling in and of itself isn't a monopolistic activity. Using your leverage to wedge everyone else out and force your stuff to be bundled with third party deliverables may be considered such, depending on circumstances.
Additionally, so would doing things like making special APIs that only iTunes has access to which accelerates speed and response and reliability, while not providing the same access (since you're the OS maker) that other application developers would benefit from for their music players. Or worse, if you not only provided yourself special higher-performing API stuff, but impacted the one you allowed everyone else to use.
As far as we know, Apple isn't doing that, either. Hell, anyone who uses iTunes on a regular basis can tell you the last thing it seems to have is access to anything meant to improve speed.
I think about the best claim one could make is that Apple is a bit obsessed with what is and isn't allowed to be sold in their store and in some cases at what price and under what conditions. So does Wal-mart. Not sure what's wrong with that. I might see an issue if they were the only game in town, but Amazon is a very strong competitor. Of course, Amazon has their own problems where that's concerned. Perhaps nothing "monopolistic", but certainly tending towards "unfriendly to the author/content-creator/publisher". And even if Apple didn't have any competition, I wouldn't see a problem unless they didn't have any competition, because they unfairly undermined and prevented any said competition from popping up through nefarious means.
Then you are free to use Amazon's service (and I guess there may be others).
I'm not really sure how they have a monopoly, when it's dead simple to opt for Amazon, instead. I use iTunes as my player and it's the most convenient podcast client I've found (because I listen to a lot of them), but I've never bought a single song on iTunes. I save that for Amazon. Better quality. Better prices. Re-downloadable. No DRM.
They may have some shitty business practices, when it comes to the operation of their app stores and itunes stores, but they have almost single-handedly kept music from being tied to nothing more than CDs for another twenty years, which is what would have happened if they hadn't leveraged against the music industry to strong-arm them into the 21st century, as they bit and kicked every inch of the way.
That amount of money doesn't physically exist. According to this, there is something like $650 to $800 billion dollars in circulation in America at any one time. So this guy would some how have to get his hands on almost 150 times the current cash in physical circulation.
More accurately, it's about $750,000 per tax-payer in the USA. And ridiculously more when you break down the people who only pay a small percentage of the taxes.
A bundle of $100 bills totaling 75 trillion bucks would weigh 10,000 tons (20 million pounds). It would be what you see in the linked photo below (notice the human for size comparison, in the very left bottom corner) . . . MULTIPLIED BY 75 MORE PILES HIGH.
And yet every fucking jackass on the planet has to plaster their shitty little project sites or even personal blogs with ads of all sorts. Nobody does anything for kicks anymore or just to provide a service (like BBS operators did when I was a kid). Now, even every little shitty blogger blog about your collection of frogs has to have ads on it, just in case you can monetize it into a couple nickels a year.
Yes, but I can't rest my feet on a laptop, like I can my table.
Anyway, the cost of the device is hardly relevant. Aside from portability, the real differences are consuming versus creating. So far, tablets are basically giant consumption devices. Listen to music, read books, watch videos, visit other people's websites. Not so much made for creating (unless the limit of creating, your case, is writing blog updates).
It's kind of like comparing a television with a video camera.
Slashdot Mirror
The first three doctors are definitely worth watching, but the tone of the shows are decidedly different. It'd be worth catching a couple episode of each of the three to see if one is open to watching the rest of them -- but they're so different that I think you can survive entirely without them. There was some charming stuff and I liked the "cranky old doctor" version a lot. Ever since, the roles keep being filled by younger and younger guys.
I liked the doctors all the way up to the modern ones, but they definitely aren't quite up to the same snuff. A lot of the episodes I happened to catch as a kid were re-runs of McCoy, so I kind of like him a bit.
I agree wholeheartedly that Tom Baker and Davidson are must-watches, if you can only bother to watch two old doctors series. They seem to embody the show the most.
This is a pertinent point. If you're watching Doctor Who because "it has this attractive person in it" or "because I like the romantic tones", then you're not the audience for actual Doctor Who. The recent Doctor Who has some gorgeous women in it and some really great moments between them and the good Doctor, but they are incidental when you watch Doctor Who because the doctor is awesome and you like science fiction.
Keeping this in mind will help one decide whether or not it's worth the effort of expanding someone's doctor who experience if they only came to it post 2005.
I think there's a distinct problem to be found in trying to associate modern viewers who like modern Doctor Who with fans of science fiction. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, I think that a huge portion of the audience that never heard of Doctor Who until this century would care as much about the actual earlier seasons as someone's girlfriend who says "gosh, this ipad thing is neat!" would be interested in sitting down and writing software.
The series may consist of time travel, but the doctor exists sequentially and chronologically (more or less). Wouldn't really be any harm in not watching sequentially, but if you're going to make the effort to go back to the older doctors (again, I'd say start at Baker and watch everything from there onward), then you might as well watch those in order. Not that you need to watch them before watching the modern shows -- but once you've watched the current ones, that's the order I'd advise (or you could watch the old concurrent with the new).
Doctor Who is all ABOUT being a low budget special effects science fiction show. Despite Eccleston being a great version of the doctor, Tom Baker remains "the" Doctor, in most people's eyes (not everyone's, but clearly most). Peter Davison is also considered the favorite of (I believe) Russel Davies and it would be a shame to miss him.
It also brings more meaning to characters that show up or are hinted at in the reboot of Doctor Who. The Master probably means jack to anyone who hasn't gone back and watched the original series. And you'd miss out on K9. And you'd miss out on Sarah Jane. The awesome original Tardis that looked less like a used antiques store and more like a space ship. You'd miss great (some would say, awful) stories like The Happiness Patrol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Patrol ).
You could definitely get by with only the modern incarnation of the show, but if you have any appreciation for this type of science fiction (Red Dwarf, Blake's Seven, etc) then you definitely have to at least consider going back as far as the fourth doctor and catching up from there.
First, you need to remember that Doctor Who started life as a children's show. Thus, the first bunch of seasons were very oriented toward the 60s serial audience for children. As a Doctor Who lover, I had to really push myself through the first three doctors worth of shows. That isn't to say that there aren't some really great shows to be found early on, but I can see how it might not be the cup of tea of most viewers.
The show really kicks off with the fourth doctor (Tom Baker), often heralded as the most popular doctor. For a certain generation (such as myself, being around thirty years old), Tom Baker is "the" doctor, kind of the same way that for people around my age think of Ronald Reagan as our concept of what "the" president should look like.
Anyway, I would say Tom Baker is the place to start and if you discover that you have a hunger for even more, you can go back and watch the rest. There's a good chunk of missing content over the first three doctor's, however. There's some beyond the third doctor that is still missing, too, but the most content is missing from early on. Back in the day, the BBC just threw out films in order to make room to store more. And at another point, I believe a fire destroyed a lot of it. Where possible, people have recreated episodes by merging audio recordings with still photos from the set.
Beginning with the 2005 Doctor Who, the show technically had a "reboot". You could reasonably only have ever watched these episodes and nothing before. While it's a reboot, the doctor's still count in order and the chronology of everything still happened. So it's a reboot, but . . . . not really. The tone of the show also changed, dramatically. While the doctor always had companions, it was never a show about a brooding sad doctor alone in the world having one romantic interest after another with all the intrinsic undertones. This puts a lot of fans off. If the early doctor who shows (the first three doctor's, at least) were very oriented toward young children, the latest three doctor's were very oriented toward the female "Lifetime" channel audience (to a degree). I find it a noticeable change, but honestly, I don't have a huge problem with it. I like the additional depth the doctor has grown to have.
Anyway, my advice would best be summarized as:
+ You can get away with just watching the modern Doctor Who.
+ I'd really suggest watching everything beginning with Tom Baker onward.
+ If you're hungry for more, afterward, go back and pick up what you can of the first three doctors.
Then you can add on the rest of the shows, like Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (none of which I have watched yet, but will, eventually -- I don't know much about them).
As for how to find them? You can find old episodes on Netflix. Not sure how much is there. I'm not sure what the legal status is of the copyright and distribution on the content is, but if you know where to look around, you can find collections of all Doctor Who episodes available to the world on bit torrent. It comes out to 26 seasons and about 750 episodes (none of this including 2005+). I would absolutely love to have some sort of an official collection of every single Doctor Who content out there (they also have lots of books, comics, and radio plays . . . all of which I've owned to some extent over the years, because I'm a raging dork). Unfortunately, I don't know where you can find a lot of the content, commercially, and torrent seems possibly the only way for much of it.
Subjecting the public to "checkpoints" is a bad thing, also.
I have an idea. The guy should offer to remove the app when they cease this type of bullshit violation. Just because it's supposedly done for a good cause doesn't mean that checkpoints are a good thing.
If they really gave a fuck about the problem, they could protect people's rights and be effective. How? Well, don't have checkpoints (yes, I know they get around the civil liberty issues by saying that they're searching EVERYONE and not targeting any specific people - so what?). Instead, how about when you pick up someone committing a DUI, you strike their right to drive for the rest of their life. Of course, that impacts your bottom line. You don't make money from a single offense. You generate revenue from repeat offenders. Therefore, we subject people to these bullshit checkpoints AND give light penalties so that we get all these stories of guys who finally kill some unfortunate party after a guy has had a dozen DUIs.
As a rational person, I appreciated Art Bell's seeming patronization of his callers. His replacement (George Noorey) seems less patronizing and more coddling. Plus, I always dug Bell's voice. It just felt like the kind of voice I was supposed to be listening to in the middle of the night and early morning over the radio when the rest of the world was sleeping.
Plus, I actually befriended the famous hacker John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) thanks to learning of him on Art Bell's show when I was a teenager (he was a guest, once or twice). I've always been grateful of that, because that small change in my life gave me the extra little nudge I needed to pursue the career I wanted to have as an adult.
That's because it wasn't the trademarked SyFy back when John Edwards had his show on there, even though that was around the time that they did give up entirely on even pretending to have the slightest to do with "science fiction" (you know, get rid of Farscape and First Wave and replace it with a guy who does supposed "cold reads"). Otherwise I was going to spell it their trademarked way, which I think represents their distance from actual sci-fi much better. :)
It's all 100% crap. Still, I agree that "EVP recordings" sometimes make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It's just a natural human reaction. I also get a kick out of listening to Art Bell (more so when it used to actually HAVE Art Bell, because he made it clear that he thought most of these people were nuts, but had a good time anyway -- the new guy always seemed too into it and too forgiving). It's all bullshit, but it's fun to entertain the thoughts of nutjobs and pseudo-scientists and scammers sort of the same way it's fun to entertain the stories of Piers Anthony and others.
As for suckers who buy into this crap and get scammed. Who cares? I don't feel any worse for them than I do for idiots who give 10% of their income to a religious organization to pay for their church's expenses or people who pay for psychics or the schmucks who used to attend those John Edwards readings on the Sci-Fi channel. Or those fucktards that get pet psychics.
And I'm all out of bubblegum!
Seriously, though, this is obviously an amusing publicity stunt by Pitchford's team. No harm done.
No, because they don't *have* to update the firmware and as long as they're not planning to connect to the Playstation Network with it, they don't even *need* to update to the latest firmware that removes that functionality. Of course, if they did have to, I bet it sure would come in handy if there was some guy who could "jailbreak" the system to allow people to make further use of it. *ahem*
I wish I had mod points, because that is awesome . I thought about doing that, but I don't even have photoshop or gimp installed, so I punked out. That is just astonishing. And, remember, those are $100 bills! Imagine if we were talking single dollars! It'd be another 100 times THAT image! Holy crap!
As you point out, bundling in and of itself isn't a monopolistic activity. Using your leverage to wedge everyone else out and force your stuff to be bundled with third party deliverables may be considered such, depending on circumstances.
Additionally, so would doing things like making special APIs that only iTunes has access to which accelerates speed and response and reliability, while not providing the same access (since you're the OS maker) that other application developers would benefit from for their music players. Or worse, if you not only provided yourself special higher-performing API stuff, but impacted the one you allowed everyone else to use.
As far as we know, Apple isn't doing that, either. Hell, anyone who uses iTunes on a regular basis can tell you the last thing it seems to have is access to anything meant to improve speed.
I think about the best claim one could make is that Apple is a bit obsessed with what is and isn't allowed to be sold in their store and in some cases at what price and under what conditions. So does Wal-mart. Not sure what's wrong with that. I might see an issue if they were the only game in town, but Amazon is a very strong competitor. Of course, Amazon has their own problems where that's concerned. Perhaps nothing "monopolistic", but certainly tending towards "unfriendly to the author/content-creator/publisher". And even if Apple didn't have any competition, I wouldn't see a problem unless they didn't have any competition, because they unfairly undermined and prevented any said competition from popping up through nefarious means.
Then you are free to use Amazon's service (and I guess there may be others).
I'm not really sure how they have a monopoly, when it's dead simple to opt for Amazon, instead. I use iTunes as my player and it's the most convenient podcast client I've found (because I listen to a lot of them), but I've never bought a single song on iTunes. I save that for Amazon. Better quality. Better prices. Re-downloadable. No DRM.
They may have some shitty business practices, when it comes to the operation of their app stores and itunes stores, but they have almost single-handedly kept music from being tied to nothing more than CDs for another twenty years, which is what would have happened if they hadn't leveraged against the music industry to strong-arm them into the 21st century, as they bit and kicked every inch of the way.
Maybe the defendant can start pirating money?
And Iran. Iran so far away.
I don't quite understand that. Can you award punitive damages in a civil case, which is what copyright infringement should be?
I'm pretty sure the entire bailout package between the last two presidents was around eight trillion dollars (including TARP).
That amount of money doesn't physically exist. According to this, there is something like $650 to $800 billion dollars in circulation in America at any one time. So this guy would some how have to get his hands on almost 150 times the current cash in physical circulation.
More accurately, it's about $750,000 per tax-payer in the USA. And ridiculously more when you break down the people who only pay a small percentage of the taxes.
A bundle of $100 bills totaling 75 trillion bucks would weigh 10,000 tons (20 million pounds). It would be what you see in the linked photo below (notice the human for size comparison, in the very left bottom corner) . . . MULTIPLIED BY 75 MORE PILES HIGH.
http://media.mercola.com/imageserver/public/2009/March/pallet_x_10000.jpg
With 75 trillion, they could pay off the national debt five times over.
And yet every fucking jackass on the planet has to plaster their shitty little project sites or even personal blogs with ads of all sorts. Nobody does anything for kicks anymore or just to provide a service (like BBS operators did when I was a kid). Now, even every little shitty blogger blog about your collection of frogs has to have ads on it, just in case you can monetize it into a couple nickels a year.
I'm pretty sure that MSIE is only available for one of the four operating systems I use every day.
Yes, but I can't rest my feet on a laptop, like I can my table.
Anyway, the cost of the device is hardly relevant. Aside from portability, the real differences are consuming versus creating. So far, tablets are basically giant consumption devices. Listen to music, read books, watch videos, visit other people's websites. Not so much made for creating (unless the limit of creating, your case, is writing blog updates).
It's kind of like comparing a television with a video camera.