I had one idiot... I mean coworker go to our boss and say, "Things are kinda slow. Do you have something for me to work on?" He was let go on Thursday.
Maybe you have the causal relationship backwards. Perhaps things seemed "kind of slow" to this guy because he was being phased out.
Are you saying you don't know any sheep who bought a BluRay player and thought, "Wow, I really need to get the HD version of Blade Runner!"? Most of the people I know who have BR attached to their big screen TVs have an old collection of several hundred dollars' worth of DVDs, and another pile of BR discs, and there is typically a significant overlap between the two piles.
Yes, that's correct. The humor value of a response climbs and falls along a predictable curve. There were other ways I could have phrased my response as well, but this was indeed the most effective approach.
Most people simply aren't a member of the cult and will be doing things contrary to all of the silly remarks made by fanboys.
Riiiiiiiight. It's so much better to drink Sony's kool-aid, isn't it? BR is, at its core, a way to get people to buy their video libraries all over again.
I'm not suggesting your other points aren't reasonable, but when you drop "cult" and "fanboi", it's clear your argument is more emotional than anything else.
Consider this:
- There's no reason, technically, that alternate audio and/or subtitle tracks couldn't be selected and streamed as well.
- There's no technical reason that a movie being "too new" means it can't be on Netflix. The reason this is the case is that the studios want to push sales of higher margin disks. And don't forget, at least one of the major studios has a stake in the underlying technology, so they're double-dipping, to some degree.
I think the latter point is the most ironic one. Effectively, you're saying, "Streaming or downloading doesn't work because the people who want to sell me a BRD version won't let me stream or download it. The solution, obviously, is to let me buy pay more for BRD technology so that I can continue to support them in this endeavor."
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm suggesting only that there are other elements to the equation worth considering. What exactly, is your attachment to the physical disc? Is there any way, technically, that you could see fit to never using a disc again?
Unless they make an iPhone and/or Android app (yeah yeah, WP7 and WebOS, too) to allow those users to keep in touch with their BBM-using friends. They'd have to come up with some really compelling use for it--like maybe it'd also provide a front-end for Facebook or Twitter--but the issue you raised could indeed be addressed with some creativity.
I read it differently. My understanding is that some of that data is not even necessarily towers that you've been near, but towers that are in the vicinity of ones that you're near. So if the phone detects that you're near downtown Whoville, it'll log that, but it'll also pull down information about surrounding towers from the "crowdsourced cache" so that if you wander out a few miles, you'll still have relatively fast geolocation.
So where your own data may be a fine line through the cell network, the info on your phone might include a broad splattering around that line. Of course, it still shows that you're in downtown Whoville, or more importantly, that you were there three months ago, which is reasonably described as too invasive, but I think that the faster cache truncation should take care of the significant privacy concerns.
It's possible that I'm reading this wrong, but I think there's more to that data than meets the eye, and not necessarily in a bad way.
In their official statement (via an interview on All Things D), they made it appear that the length of storage for users with location services enabled was a function of an arbitrary decision to limit the log to 2 MB. "Less than half a song," they said. But that's a lot of location data. So they're changing it.
It depends on your priorities. If there are plenty of movies available that you're interested in at a lower rate, there's no reason to pay for something that just came out which eventually will become cheaper, unless you absolutely must have it now.
Remember, $2.99 isn't just $2.99. If you watch three movies a week, that starts to stack up.
And to your bread analogy, we buy a new loaf of bread twice a week in my house. My wife *must* have the fresh bread and will always start working on the new one. I find that the old one is typically good for a couple more days and unless it gets stale or moldy, I will keep eating that one.
If we both had the same mindset, then we'd be buying at least one more loaf per week, maybe two. We're currently spending about $6 a week on bread, but that could easily jump to $9 or $12. It's not that much, but wasting $300 a year on bread when what you have is good enough is pretty silly in my book.
Or less for less. If I can get a movie for less cost than it would be on, say, iTunes, but with a longer rental period (have a toddler, so it often takes me three evenings to finish watching a movie), and faster than Netflix (maybe it's only available on DVD so I'd have to wait for it) or Blockbuster (have to run out, again a hassle with the toddler), then it might be worthwhile.
Of course, balance that against the hassle of having to think about all the variables and it might not work out. What would be cool is if one device like a Roku or AppleTV would have access to YouTube, Amazon Streaming, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and... whatever else, and would automatically choose the version of the movie that would be cheapest to watch right then.
I still don't understand why the studios don't allow the Netflix's of the world to stream anything that's available on DVD as soon as that DVD is available for rental. I have never, ever bought a DVD nor ventured out to Blockbuster because I couldn't stream it; it just means I have to wait for some movies, which is arbitrary and punitive to the customer.
Thanks for the calm, reasoned answer. Although to your point about organic foods, again, there are some aspects that are indeed silly--I don't care if that chicken I'm eating was free-range and happy--but others that are worth considering. Pesticides are poisons, and it's not like pesticides haven't been released, termed safe, and wrought all sorts of havoc on people in the past. Modern ones may be better, but that may just mean that the effects take longer to show up and are more difficult to correlate.
Some years back, my doctor prescribed me something called Seldane for my seasonal allergies, and it was indeed the best drug I've ever taken for that purpose. It was a miracle. No drowsiness, totally stopped my allergies. But six months later, they took it off the market because people were dying of heart attacks left and right. Since then, I basically have a rule that I won't take anything that hasn't been in the common market for at least 20 years, unless it's an emergent situation and I need it to save my life.
I realize it's a totally different industry, but the FDA is the regulating body for both, and it seems to me that it's reasonable to believe that some of the toxins that are being put onto (and into) our foods are not fully understood. Yes, DDT was 40 years ago, but Seldane was 15 years ago. I'm sure there are others. Now if only Jenny McCarthy would leave immunizations alone and go after the farma/pharma-chemical industry...
There are some guys who make plug-in kits for the Prius. Slightly bigger battery and some other doodads, and your first 60 (?) miles is purely off the battery, after which the standard operations kicks in. Charge overnight when electricity is cheap, potentially never tank up on your commute. Ain't too bad.
Oooh, I want to play... When you install AmigaDOS, you're installing the dystopian future. When you install GeOS... Oh, darn, I can't think of anything.
Assuming this is true, there are lots of ways to skin that cat. Like provide incentives for using hybrids paid for by additional taxes on gasoline. Triple the price of gasoline and even if someone has a car that's twice as efficient, they'll reduce their driving by 30%, by your logic.
However, there are a lot of factors that it's not immediately apparent are being taken into account here. Maybe someone who's got a Prius volunteers to be the driver on outings more often, so while they're drving more, they've got one or two friends also in the car who would have driven themselves to the movies or whatever in their Humvees, burning 12 barrels of oil in the process.
But this is the up-is-down, black-is-white, what's-good-for-you-is-bad-for-you logic that ultra-right-wing nuts have been trumpeting for years. I remember when Michelle Obama put in an organic garden at the White House, some commentator at Fox showed, with rigorous logic how urban farming would cause *both* starvation *and* obesity and decried her as irresponsible for modeling that behavior. Please tell me you don't really buy into that.
It's exceptionally dubious that this author of the linked conflates efficient vehicles with "efficient" washing machines. I put the latter in quotes because if a washer isn't washing, it's not efficient no matter how little water it's using. True efficiency means getting the job done with as little waste as possible, not reducing consumption at all costs. If the regulations are poorly written, or if these washers are poorly implemented, that's not a case against efficiency, it's a case against idiocy.
But that's not the same as a car that uses half the gas. A hybrid car isn't false efficiency, it's real efficiency; the human behavior factor is something on top of that which can be addressed by different means. But there's no reason to deride hybrid technology as nonsensical in and of itself.
Let's just imagine for a moment that there could be another far reaching effect of more common use of this technology: it could lead to reduced cost of the technology and greater research into even greater efficiencies. What if instead of increasing MPG by a factor of two, MPG was instead increased by something astronomical--say 100x? You know what would happen? Oil companies would see the writing on the wall and would move out of the oil business and finally spur innovations in other areas. You like nukes? How about clean, safe nuclear power for your car? A self-contained, suitcase-sized reactor which would power your car for 100 years or 10 million miles?
Of course I'm making stuff up here, but do you really think it's nonsensical to make vehicles more efficient? Holy heck, I thought I was going to hear something about pollution from the batteries, or chronic safety issues, or even deaths caused by people not hearing these quiet cars coming. But, "Give them a more efficient car and they'll just drive more?" That is not the most intelligent argument I've ever heard, to say the least.
It seems to me that this especially makes sense in places like Arizona, where in the summer, air conditioning is an absolute must. The days where you'd need the most air-con, you'd be getting the strongest rays from the sun. May as well use them to provide some of the juice for the AC.
There's a solar charging station a few miles from my place which has ports for people to plug in electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars and electric bikes, and little charging lockers where you can plug in just about anything that needs a charge. I don't know how much it's used or what the costs are--I think it's sort of a proof-of-concept and may only be used by the city or some such--but it is very much like what you describe with the fresh-squeezed eco-energy.
That's one way to think of it. We've probably also warded off planetary invasions. The Zonkoids almost attacked, but then after sampling our atmosphere determined that we'd made the place too inhospitable. So they left. Thank god for our carbon emissions! We should call the eco-nutters pro-invasionists, since they want to make our planet a welcoming place for potential attackers.
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My first real calculator was the HP11c, although I got it in '84 or '85, not '81.
I had one idiot... I mean coworker go to our boss and say, "Things are kinda slow. Do you have something for me to work on?" He was let go on Thursday.
Maybe you have the causal relationship backwards. Perhaps things seemed "kind of slow" to this guy because he was being phased out.
Are you saying you don't know any sheep who bought a BluRay player and thought, "Wow, I really need to get the HD version of Blade Runner!"? Most of the people I know who have BR attached to their big screen TVs have an old collection of several hundred dollars' worth of DVDs, and another pile of BR discs, and there is typically a significant overlap between the two piles.
Yes, that's correct. The humor value of a response climbs and falls along a predictable curve. There were other ways I could have phrased my response as well, but this was indeed the most effective approach.
Most people simply aren't a member of the cult and will be doing things contrary to all of the silly remarks made by fanboys.
Riiiiiiiight. It's so much better to drink Sony's kool-aid, isn't it? BR is, at its core, a way to get people to buy their video libraries all over again.
I'm not suggesting your other points aren't reasonable, but when you drop "cult" and "fanboi", it's clear your argument is more emotional than anything else.
Consider this:
- There's no reason, technically, that alternate audio and/or subtitle tracks couldn't be selected and streamed as well.
- There's no technical reason that a movie being "too new" means it can't be on Netflix. The reason this is the case is that the studios want to push sales of higher margin disks. And don't forget, at least one of the major studios has a stake in the underlying technology, so they're double-dipping, to some degree.
I think the latter point is the most ironic one. Effectively, you're saying, "Streaming or downloading doesn't work because the people who want to sell me a BRD version won't let me stream or download it. The solution, obviously, is to let me buy pay more for BRD technology so that I can continue to support them in this endeavor."
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm suggesting only that there are other elements to the equation worth considering. What exactly, is your attachment to the physical disc? Is there any way, technically, that you could see fit to never using a disc again?
So you're saying it's the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Mail Transfer Protocol?
Unless they make an iPhone and/or Android app (yeah yeah, WP7 and WebOS, too) to allow those users to keep in touch with their BBM-using friends. They'd have to come up with some really compelling use for it--like maybe it'd also provide a front-end for Facebook or Twitter--but the issue you raised could indeed be addressed with some creativity.
Seriously! Who thought "Ogg Vorbis" was a good name for anything? Sounds like a denture cream!
Again, it's a question of priorities. Day old sushi != day old bread.
I read it differently. My understanding is that some of that data is not even necessarily towers that you've been near, but towers that are in the vicinity of ones that you're near. So if the phone detects that you're near downtown Whoville, it'll log that, but it'll also pull down information about surrounding towers from the "crowdsourced cache" so that if you wander out a few miles, you'll still have relatively fast geolocation.
So where your own data may be a fine line through the cell network, the info on your phone might include a broad splattering around that line. Of course, it still shows that you're in downtown Whoville, or more importantly, that you were there three months ago, which is reasonably described as too invasive, but I think that the faster cache truncation should take care of the significant privacy concerns.
It's possible that I'm reading this wrong, but I think there's more to that data than meets the eye, and not necessarily in a bad way.
In their official statement (via an interview on All Things D), they made it appear that the length of storage for users with location services enabled was a function of an arbitrary decision to limit the log to 2 MB. "Less than half a song," they said. But that's a lot of location data. So they're changing it.
It depends on your priorities. If there are plenty of movies available that you're interested in at a lower rate, there's no reason to pay for something that just came out which eventually will become cheaper, unless you absolutely must have it now.
Remember, $2.99 isn't just $2.99. If you watch three movies a week, that starts to stack up.
And to your bread analogy, we buy a new loaf of bread twice a week in my house. My wife *must* have the fresh bread and will always start working on the new one. I find that the old one is typically good for a couple more days and unless it gets stale or moldy, I will keep eating that one.
If we both had the same mindset, then we'd be buying at least one more loaf per week, maybe two. We're currently spending about $6 a week on bread, but that could easily jump to $9 or $12. It's not that much, but wasting $300 a year on bread when what you have is good enough is pretty silly in my book.
Or less for less. If I can get a movie for less cost than it would be on, say, iTunes, but with a longer rental period (have a toddler, so it often takes me three evenings to finish watching a movie), and faster than Netflix (maybe it's only available on DVD so I'd have to wait for it) or Blockbuster (have to run out, again a hassle with the toddler), then it might be worthwhile.
Of course, balance that against the hassle of having to think about all the variables and it might not work out. What would be cool is if one device like a Roku or AppleTV would have access to YouTube, Amazon Streaming, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and... whatever else, and would automatically choose the version of the movie that would be cheapest to watch right then.
I still don't understand why the studios don't allow the Netflix's of the world to stream anything that's available on DVD as soon as that DVD is available for rental. I have never, ever bought a DVD nor ventured out to Blockbuster because I couldn't stream it; it just means I have to wait for some movies, which is arbitrary and punitive to the customer.
Stop that! I like romanticizing other cultures, imagining they're better than my own.
Me, I always speak in hyperbole. Always.
Thanks for the calm, reasoned answer. Although to your point about organic foods, again, there are some aspects that are indeed silly--I don't care if that chicken I'm eating was free-range and happy--but others that are worth considering. Pesticides are poisons, and it's not like pesticides haven't been released, termed safe, and wrought all sorts of havoc on people in the past. Modern ones may be better, but that may just mean that the effects take longer to show up and are more difficult to correlate.
Some years back, my doctor prescribed me something called Seldane for my seasonal allergies, and it was indeed the best drug I've ever taken for that purpose. It was a miracle. No drowsiness, totally stopped my allergies. But six months later, they took it off the market because people were dying of heart attacks left and right. Since then, I basically have a rule that I won't take anything that hasn't been in the common market for at least 20 years, unless it's an emergent situation and I need it to save my life.
I realize it's a totally different industry, but the FDA is the regulating body for both, and it seems to me that it's reasonable to believe that some of the toxins that are being put onto (and into) our foods are not fully understood. Yes, DDT was 40 years ago, but Seldane was 15 years ago. I'm sure there are others. Now if only Jenny McCarthy would leave immunizations alone and go after the farma/pharma-chemical industry...
There are some guys who make plug-in kits for the Prius. Slightly bigger battery and some other doodads, and your first 60 (?) miles is purely off the battery, after which the standard operations kicks in. Charge overnight when electricity is cheap, potentially never tank up on your commute. Ain't too bad.
Yeah, I like the ones where very little is moving except maybe someone's eyes or hair, or their breathing. This one is one of my faves.
Should have included more description: they're small sections of great films, some of which are silly and loopy, some are subtle and creepy.
These are some of the best animated gifs I've ever seen.
Oooh, I want to play... When you install AmigaDOS, you're installing the dystopian future. When you install GeOS... Oh, darn, I can't think of anything.
Assuming this is true, there are lots of ways to skin that cat. Like provide incentives for using hybrids paid for by additional taxes on gasoline. Triple the price of gasoline and even if someone has a car that's twice as efficient, they'll reduce their driving by 30%, by your logic.
However, there are a lot of factors that it's not immediately apparent are being taken into account here. Maybe someone who's got a Prius volunteers to be the driver on outings more often, so while they're drving more, they've got one or two friends also in the car who would have driven themselves to the movies or whatever in their Humvees, burning 12 barrels of oil in the process.
But this is the up-is-down, black-is-white, what's-good-for-you-is-bad-for-you logic that ultra-right-wing nuts have been trumpeting for years. I remember when Michelle Obama put in an organic garden at the White House, some commentator at Fox showed, with rigorous logic how urban farming would cause *both* starvation *and* obesity and decried her as irresponsible for modeling that behavior. Please tell me you don't really buy into that.
It's exceptionally dubious that this author of the linked conflates efficient vehicles with "efficient" washing machines. I put the latter in quotes because if a washer isn't washing, it's not efficient no matter how little water it's using. True efficiency means getting the job done with as little waste as possible, not reducing consumption at all costs. If the regulations are poorly written, or if these washers are poorly implemented, that's not a case against efficiency, it's a case against idiocy.
But that's not the same as a car that uses half the gas. A hybrid car isn't false efficiency, it's real efficiency; the human behavior factor is something on top of that which can be addressed by different means. But there's no reason to deride hybrid technology as nonsensical in and of itself.
Let's just imagine for a moment that there could be another far reaching effect of more common use of this technology: it could lead to reduced cost of the technology and greater research into even greater efficiencies. What if instead of increasing MPG by a factor of two, MPG was instead increased by something astronomical--say 100x? You know what would happen? Oil companies would see the writing on the wall and would move out of the oil business and finally spur innovations in other areas. You like nukes? How about clean, safe nuclear power for your car? A self-contained, suitcase-sized reactor which would power your car for 100 years or 10 million miles?
Of course I'm making stuff up here, but do you really think it's nonsensical to make vehicles more efficient? Holy heck, I thought I was going to hear something about pollution from the batteries, or chronic safety issues, or even deaths caused by people not hearing these quiet cars coming. But, "Give them a more efficient car and they'll just drive more?" That is not the most intelligent argument I've ever heard, to say the least.
It seems to me that this especially makes sense in places like Arizona, where in the summer, air conditioning is an absolute must. The days where you'd need the most air-con, you'd be getting the strongest rays from the sun. May as well use them to provide some of the juice for the AC.
There's a solar charging station a few miles from my place which has ports for people to plug in electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars and electric bikes, and little charging lockers where you can plug in just about anything that needs a charge. I don't know how much it's used or what the costs are--I think it's sort of a proof-of-concept and may only be used by the city or some such--but it is very much like what you describe with the fresh-squeezed eco-energy.
That's one way to think of it. We've probably also warded off planetary invasions. The Zonkoids almost attacked, but then after sampling our atmosphere determined that we'd made the place too inhospitable. So they left. Thank god for our carbon emissions! We should call the eco-nutters pro-invasionists, since they want to make our planet a welcoming place for potential attackers.