I'm about 35 miles outside of Seattle, and get 56 Digital OTA channels. Tell me again why I would want cable?
You might not. Someone who doesn't happen to live where 56 distinct OTA channels can be received with a store-bought stationary indoor antenna might. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I get about a dozen. Do you want me to list them?
Retransmission fees pay for only a portion of the cost of acquiring programming. Advertisements also pay for only a portion. Only when combined do they cover the entire cost. If there were no ads, retransmission fees would rise to make cable TV bills several times larger than they are.
Why do you people always single out sports channels and whine about them?
Because ESPN's retransmission fee is by far the largest among basic cable channels, and because sports are among the few things that people prefer to watch live rather than on-demand.
Any downloads scheduled between midnight and 8 am don't count towards your usage.
Which major PC and mobile operating systems' network connection settings provide a way to express this metering policy, such that your Ethernet connection to your router becomes metered at 8 AM and no longer metered at midnight?
If Apple is allowed to use Google's essential patents only on condition that Apple doesn't use Apple's essential patents against Google or other users of VP9, then Apple's essential patents are in effect licensed to Google and other users of VP9, even if no formal written instrument has been signed.
Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).
Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.
VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard
What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386, and standardization of VP9 is ongoing.
How much does it cost to take a license from all patent pools that control at least one essential HEVC patent? If your codec license budget is zero, then a royalty-free codec such as VP9 is superior to HEVC.
The company to whose service you subscribe to receive video on demand is more likely to stay in business if it doesn't have to pay a cut of its subscription revenue to codec patent pools. The amateurs who produce video and provide it for your viewing without charge are more likely to make such video available to you if they don't have to buy a licensed encoder.
I only use safari.
When you as an end user make a choice to use only Safari, you as an end user make a choice to limit the variety of video programming available to you. Instead of viewing video programming from both VP9 users and HEVC licensees, you can view only programming from HEVC licensees.
As I understand it, venture capitalists tend to be unwilling to fund clinical trials that don't result in a patent or other exclusive rights that keep free riders from unfairly benefiting from the VC's investment.
I agree with you that streetball is as different from college or professional indoor basketball as hard court tennis is from, say, grass court tennis. But it's still a case of showing up in a public place and seeking players for a sport match.
One problem with snake oil is that not all snake species produce eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). This led some snake oil makers to end up producing ineffective products. So long as you can document that it's from a snake species whose oil is rich in EPA, I'll buy.
In areas where the Chinese water snake isn't available, producers switched to imitation snake oils with other ingredients, some of which have since been proven effective. Brands have included Stanley's (capsaicin/camphor), Vicks VapoRub (camphor/menthol), Capzasin (capsaicin), and ActivOn (menthol). The famous ruling against Stanley's in the Rhode Island District Court was mostly that it wasn't clearly marked as an imitation with different active ingredients.
But the other problem with snake oil is how regulations handle claims not yet proven. Silicon Valley relies on public beta before wide release. But currently a drug product can't reach the market until it's both safe and effective. There's a "supplement" marketing regime where safety is guaranteed and effectiveness is "as is," but there appears to be no "public beta" regime to sell something as a "supplement" between when it is proven safe and then switch to "drug" marketing once it is proven effective.
If your computer happens to be something other than a Mac, a Mac app runs at zero speed.
QT, GTK, WXWidgets, & etc solve this problem.
Provided the application's publisher has the staff to build and QA the application in Qt for Windows, Qt for macOS, Qt for GNU/Linux, Qt for iOS, and Qt for Android. Many especially smaller publishers do not. And even if the developer distributes an application as free software and says "here's an app that works on GNU/Linux; feel free to port this", end users who aren't programmers are by and large unwilling to learn to program so that they can spend hours excising the developer's inadvertent platform-dependent assumptions.
You can't just show up at some sport field and say "hey can I play?" to whoever is there.
Then what are the 10-foot-high hoop and backboard at the city park for if not pickup basketball? Or are you like Willie, finding that a match has almost always started without you?
But what works for soccer and gridiron football might not work for basketball and ice hockey. A football pitch is much bigger than a basketball court or ice hockey rink. This means there are fewer seats per match to sell, which requires more matches per year for a given revenue level.
Require permission from a game's inventor just to start your own league. Many publishers of proprietary video games used as esports assert their exclusive right to perform their games publicly, demanding either a royalty per match or even to shut down streams entirely. See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland.
I am aware that the MLB, NFL, and NBA leagues tightly control broadcasts of their matches. But they have no legal standing against broadcasts of matches of a different league playing the same sport, unlike publishers of proprietary video games. The closest thing in ball sports to the exclusive right of the publisher of a proprietary video game is probably Arena Football League's patent on the use of rebound nets in indoor gridiron football. But other indoor gridiron football leagues successfully designed around that patent, and patents expire much sooner than copyrights anyway.
So the real problem is that the device is so locked down that the user can't install IRC. Shouldn't have bought it if you wanted any rights like that. If everyone knew better, eventually they would sell one you could install IRC on.
The problem is that someone who offers a service and wants more than a negligible share of paying users has to interoperate with devices purchased by people who did not know better at the time they purchased their respective devices. Their prospective users are unwilling to buy a new device and a new Internet access subscription for said new device just to run one application. That or they bought a device to do something else, and because it also includes a web browser, anything that runs on the web platform is a "sure why not".
There is already a program or two for chatting. Why do I need it in my web browser?
Tell me how to set up a conversation between a user of iMessage and a user of any operating system other than macOS and iOS, and I'll explain.
Which can in theory be done mostly server-side, with the client touching only HTTP, TLS, HTML, and CSS, not the larger attack surface of JavaScript or WebAssembly. Worse comes to worst, it could be done with an even smaller client attack surface over SSH, just as online banking and shopping used to be done over dial-up with a terminal emulator back when CompuServe was still hot $#!+.
You think that you can bring all this stuff back to plain HTML, and - what? - Perl on the CGI backend of a server and be immune? We thought that 20 years ago, it didn't work out.
It doesn't have to be Perl; it can be something more "modern" like Python or Java or C# or Go or whatever. But some see value in containing the attack surface on the server side rather than expanding it to the client.
At some point you have to take user input, or input from a remote website, and interpret it in a way that cannot possibly be compromised while letting the user accomplish what they want to
The server needs to authoritatively validate the user's input anyway. Why require the client to download code that only expands the attack surface while duplicating the validation effort?
You're telling me I could communicate faster on Fidonet than on the current internet? REALLY? I suppose having a video chat with 8 people was a snap of the fingers?
People with this mentality find text chat superior to video chat. Anyone over twelve without a serious learning disability can read silently faster than he can listen, which particularly helps when eight users are sending messages to a channel at once.
I would bet 1 million time machine dollars that by the time you had finished your modem hand shake I could order something with my voice without even turning on a screen.
It's called a voice call to Domino's over Plain Old Telephone Service.
One cannot possibly write and distribute a native app for each and every supported OS.
Correct. That's why you write your native application for one operating system and hire five contractors to port your native application to each of the other five operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about 35 miles outside of Seattle, and get 56 Digital OTA channels. Tell me again why I would want cable?
You might not. Someone who doesn't happen to live where 56 distinct OTA channels can be received with a store-bought stationary indoor antenna might. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I get about a dozen. Do you want me to list them?
Retransmission fees pay for only a portion of the cost of acquiring programming. Advertisements also pay for only a portion. Only when combined do they cover the entire cost. If there were no ads, retransmission fees would rise to make cable TV bills several times larger than they are.
Why do you people always single out sports channels and whine about them?
Because ESPN's retransmission fee is by far the largest among basic cable channels, and because sports are among the few things that people prefer to watch live rather than on-demand.
Any downloads scheduled between midnight and 8 am don't count towards your usage.
Which major PC and mobile operating systems' network connection settings provide a way to express this metering policy, such that your Ethernet connection to your router becomes metered at 8 AM and no longer metered at midnight?
If Apple is allowed to use Google's essential patents only on condition that Apple doesn't use Apple's essential patents against Google or other users of VP9, then Apple's essential patents are in effect licensed to Google and other users of VP9, even if no formal written instrument has been signed.
Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).
Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.
VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard
What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386, and standardization of VP9 is ongoing.
How much does it cost to take a license from all patent pools that control at least one essential HEVC patent? If your codec license budget is zero, then a royalty-free codec such as VP9 is superior to HEVC.
I'll relevant to me as an end user.
The company to whose service you subscribe to receive video on demand is more likely to stay in business if it doesn't have to pay a cut of its subscription revenue to codec patent pools. The amateurs who produce video and provide it for your viewing without charge are more likely to make such video available to you if they don't have to buy a licensed encoder.
I only use safari.
When you as an end user make a choice to use only Safari, you as an end user make a choice to limit the variety of video programming available to you. Instead of viewing video programming from both VP9 users and HEVC licensees, you can view only programming from HEVC licensees.
Surface Pro can run Visual Studio. Android can run AIDE. I guess by now, it takes courage to make a tablet that can't build apps for itself.
As I understand it, venture capitalists tend to be unwilling to fund clinical trials that don't result in a patent or other exclusive rights that keep free riders from unfairly benefiting from the VC's investment.
"Public beta" for software generally doesn't kill people.
If your concern is safety, have a private trial for safety and a public trial for efficacy.
I agree with you that streetball is as different from college or professional indoor basketball as hard court tennis is from, say, grass court tennis. But it's still a case of showing up in a public place and seeking players for a sport match.
If anyone doesn't get the joke: High Sierra is also the name of an early version of the ISO 9660 file system used for CDs.
That's largely because the information 23andme wants to present has not been proven to be true.
Which in turn is because nobody has suggested an efficient way to fund said proof.
One problem with snake oil is that not all snake species produce eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). This led some snake oil makers to end up producing ineffective products. So long as you can document that it's from a snake species whose oil is rich in EPA, I'll buy.
In areas where the Chinese water snake isn't available, producers switched to imitation snake oils with other ingredients, some of which have since been proven effective. Brands have included Stanley's (capsaicin/camphor), Vicks VapoRub (camphor/menthol), Capzasin (capsaicin), and ActivOn (menthol). The famous ruling against Stanley's in the Rhode Island District Court was mostly that it wasn't clearly marked as an imitation with different active ingredients.
But the other problem with snake oil is how regulations handle claims not yet proven. Silicon Valley relies on public beta before wide release. But currently a drug product can't reach the market until it's both safe and effective. There's a "supplement" marketing regime where safety is guaranteed and effectiveness is "as is," but there appears to be no "public beta" regime to sell something as a "supplement" between when it is proven safe and then switch to "drug" marketing once it is proven effective.
If your computer happens to be something other than a Mac, a Mac app runs at zero speed.
QT, GTK, WXWidgets, & etc solve this problem.
Provided the application's publisher has the staff to build and QA the application in Qt for Windows, Qt for macOS, Qt for GNU/Linux, Qt for iOS, and Qt for Android. Many especially smaller publishers do not. And even if the developer distributes an application as free software and says "here's an app that works on GNU/Linux; feel free to port this", end users who aren't programmers are by and large unwilling to learn to program so that they can spend hours excising the developer's inadvertent platform-dependent assumptions.
You can't just show up at some sport field and say "hey can I play?" to whoever is there.
Then what are the 10-foot-high hoop and backboard at the city park for if not pickup basketball? Or are you like Willie, finding that a match has almost always started without you?
i.e. a baseball fan who wants to steam has to pony up at least $100. This is only a month of cable
A month? Try a year, if the local ISP offers Internet for $62 per month or a bundle of Internet and TV for $70 per month.
I sort of see your point for baseball.
But what works for soccer and gridiron football might not work for basketball and ice hockey. A football pitch is much bigger than a basketball court or ice hockey rink. This means there are fewer seats per match to sell, which requires more matches per year for a given revenue level.
Ball sports doesn't:
Require permission from a game's inventor just to start your own league. Many publishers of proprietary video games used as esports assert their exclusive right to perform their games publicly, demanding either a royalty per match or even to shut down streams entirely. See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland.
I am aware that the MLB, NFL, and NBA leagues tightly control broadcasts of their matches. But they have no legal standing against broadcasts of matches of a different league playing the same sport, unlike publishers of proprietary video games. The closest thing in ball sports to the exclusive right of the publisher of a proprietary video game is probably Arena Football League's patent on the use of rebound nets in indoor gridiron football. But other indoor gridiron football leagues successfully designed around that patent, and patents expire much sooner than copyrights anyway.
So the real problem is that the device is so locked down that the user can't install IRC. Shouldn't have bought it if you wanted any rights like that. If everyone knew better, eventually they would sell one you could install IRC on.
The problem is that someone who offers a service and wants more than a negligible share of paying users has to interoperate with devices purchased by people who did not know better at the time they purchased their respective devices. Their prospective users are unwilling to buy a new device and a new Internet access subscription for said new device just to run one application. That or they bought a device to do something else, and because it also includes a web browser, anything that runs on the web platform is a "sure why not".
There is already a program or two for chatting. Why do I need it in my web browser?
Tell me how to set up a conversation between a user of iMessage and a user of any operating system other than macOS and iOS, and I'll explain.
Not only does WebAssembly not require packages to be signed
Every response sent over an HTTPS connection is signed by the TLS endpoint sending it. This includes js files and wasm files.
The fact is, however, that you still want to go on Netflix and watch your programs
No, you would want to cancel Netflix, forgo its exclusive programs, and watch different programs that do not use digital restrictions management.
log into your bank account, buy stuff on Amazon
Which can in theory be done mostly server-side, with the client touching only HTTP, TLS, HTML, and CSS, not the larger attack surface of JavaScript or WebAssembly. Worse comes to worst, it could be done with an even smaller client attack surface over SSH, just as online banking and shopping used to be done over dial-up with a terminal emulator back when CompuServe was still hot $#!+.
You think that you can bring all this stuff back to plain HTML, and - what? - Perl on the CGI backend of a server and be immune? We thought that 20 years ago, it didn't work out.
It doesn't have to be Perl; it can be something more "modern" like Python or Java or C# or Go or whatever. But some see value in containing the attack surface on the server side rather than expanding it to the client.
At some point you have to take user input, or input from a remote website, and interpret it in a way that cannot possibly be compromised while letting the user accomplish what they want to
The server needs to authoritatively validate the user's input anyway. Why require the client to download code that only expands the attack surface while duplicating the validation effort?
You're telling me I could communicate faster on Fidonet than on the current internet? REALLY? I suppose having a video chat with 8 people was a snap of the fingers?
People with this mentality find text chat superior to video chat. Anyone over twelve without a serious learning disability can read silently faster than he can listen, which particularly helps when eight users are sending messages to a channel at once.
I would bet 1 million time machine dollars that by the time you had finished your modem hand shake I could order something with my voice without even turning on a screen.
It's called a voice call to Domino's over Plain Old Telephone Service.
One cannot possibly write and distribute a native app for each and every supported OS.
Correct. That's why you write your native application for one operating system and hire five contractors to port your native application to each of the other five operating systems.