I believe that Bill Hicks had something to say to people in your line of work...
Seriously, though: if people have actually paid to receive the channels already, why should they be subjected to the ads as well? In the UK, the BBC is paid for by the "licence fee" and consequently, BBC viewers are not shown ads. The other UK channels are not covered by the fee, & are therefore supported by ads. That seems fair enough to me. It's basically the Google model: the advertisers are your actual customers, and the viewers are the product sold.
In light of this, I have never understood why US TV audiences were willing to pay for a cable TV service *with* advertisements. It always seemed to me to be corporate double-dipping of the worst kind. Of course, in this case, the bad guys are clearly the cable service providers.
Just don't get me started on their resistance to "a la carte" channel choices as well...
FWIW, I was given the option to electronically opt out of the dataset during the Borders buyout process, took it, & haven't had any subsequent B&N spam.
While I get that people on here don't generally like these litigation stories, I'm genuinely surprised to see the level of some of the Nokia hatred on display here (I'm not referring ti the parent post in particular, just commenting on the thread as a whole). I dunno, maybe it's because Slashdot's a US site, and (at least in a broad sense), Nokia never really understood the US market, & the US market never really understood Nokia?
The really sad thing here is that they could have indeed competed. Nokia has (and probably still do) make some fantastic hardware. For clear evidence of innovation, just Google for "Nokia Communicator". Yup, this was a full, web-enabled smartphone with a proper keyboard, on sale back when a lot of people in the US were still using pagers. Some of their mid-life software was iffy, but they subsequently had good, solid Linux-based OSes, which were more open than any of the currently popular ones (Android included), and when they purchased QT, it looked like they were going to be able to produce a new generation of polished, well-developed products that'd be easy for developers to work with. The N900 is still much loved by many on Slashdot.
Unfortunately, long-term inter-departmental politics and the lack of a strong, focused leadership meant that the company kept pulling itself in half a dozen directions at once. Some of this was probably due to the more-collaborative, less-aggressive-than-the-Americans Finnish way of doing business. When they finally realized that leadership was the issue, the company jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire by appointing a MS Trojan horse as the CEO. They're not the first company to make the mistake of jumping into bed with MS during a panic attack, and they (sadly) probably won't be the last.
As a longtime Communicator owner (and yup, I bought 'em off-contract, but us Nokia fans are probably not shouty enough to be called "fanboys") I just think it's a real shame that a company that produced so many great products and innovations has found itself in the current situation. Even in the current circumstances, they're innovating (see their new 41 megapixel camera phone for evidence of this). I just hope that the US marketspotters are (as usual) painting a more negative picture of Nokia's current situation than reality.
In all fairness, though, the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs (terrible though they were) were relatively small atomic devices, not the much larger nuclear weapons that still number in the thousands today.
Yes, but isn't it the case that is going to be a Windows CE-style cut-down, brain-damaged version of Office?
And if so, is it really going to be that much better/compatible than things like "Documents To Go" that people already have on the iPads they already have?
I don't think it is a tiny minority. Saurik has claimed that something like 8.5% of iPhones and iPods are jailbroken, & I suspect that a large majority of those people probably don't want to trust to "teh Cloud" (I know I don't). Even when I just had Macs, I was never remotely tempted by their MobileMe-type offerings.
Add in a few more percent who (e.g.) travel a lot and hence don't always reliably have access to a suitably rapid internet connection, & I'd conservatively argue that you're easily talking about more than 1/10 of iDevice owners at the absolute minimum, possibly significantly more.
In general, & speaking as a keen user of Apple products for a long time now, what Apple deems progress is not always progress. On the podcast point: I think it's also worth mentioning that built-in podcast support was much better under iOS 4.
Wasn't this in the above novella (or something like it)?
I vaguely remember reading some story years ago about how they made cars for the stupid people that actually went really slowly, but had huge tail-fins & made really impressive growly engine noises, so as to fool the drivers into thinking they were going a lot faster than they were.
I think one of the big problems with the debate is that the Creationism/ID/Faith/whatever side of the discussion deliberately muddies the issue by misusing the word "theory". Science has a rather clear definition of this word, but most of the things that the Faith side of the argument present as "theories" are hypotheses (at best).
Routine common misuse of the word "theory" promotes a false sense of equivalency between a true scientific theory and a non-scientific (non-)"theory".
For example, compare the measurements and predictions of accuracy of a theory like QED (within ten parts in a billion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED ) against the predictive power of a "theory" like Intelligent Design. *That* is why professional scientists have faith in theories like the former, and most have little more than justified scorn for the latter.
Indeed. I also personally think that "Titanic" was the (down)-turning point of Cameron's career.
"A Night to Remember" was a much more dignified, respectful and authentic film in many ways. It also didn't rely on the audience to all be 15-year-old girls with a DiCaprio crush, and didn't drag on for 3 hours...
Worth a look for all the young cinephiles on here who don't already know it.
Be aware, though: no gratuitous 3D, no gratuitous colo(u)r and no gratuitous naked Kate Winslet, either. It does have a young, clothed Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman in it, though.
Extended and ongoing environmental impact studies are part and parcel of the final process of choosing a telescope site these days. We do try to be very careful to be considerate when building these facilities & work with teams of local environmental biologists. Also, in most cases nowadays, one of the preconditions for site use is that the site is returned to its original pristine state once the telescope in finally removed again.
There is, however, sometimes still local opposition. E.g. in Hawaii, this is usually on native cultural grounds, & nowadays, an effort is made to involve local native cultural leaders (in the early days, some culturally insensitive decisions were made, and both sides of the debate are aware of this).
In the case of Chile, such facilities are often welcomed, as they're much less damaging than the extensive mining operations already in existence there, but still provide good engineering and other technical jobs for Chileans. Plus, many Chileans are proud that their country can boast some of the finest such research facilities in the world.
(Full disclosure: I am both a professional observatory staff astronomer and a longtime member of Greenpeace).
Although I can't comment on Norway from personal experience, I've had to complete tax forms in Finland, the UK and the USA.
The Finnish ones were genuinely trivial: check option A or option B, sign it, date it and send it back: done. The tax office there knew exactly what was going on, the money was transferred electronically and the only other piece of correspondence I received was a confirmation slip.
The British one was oh, a couple of sheets of A4 or so. Annoying, but manageable. The tax office there had actually issued it despite my not actually needing to file a manual return at all, so I had to fill it in with mostly zeroes and send it back. They initially seemed confused, and then just went quiet after a couple of clarifying conversations with people at the local office.
The USA one was about 6 or 7 forms (I never did work out how many in the end), all with accompanying small-print documentation which in turn contained references to additional supporting documentation that contained "calculation tables" to supposedly help me understand the supporting documentation, so that I could then go back and fill in the tax form itself, and all its add-on appendices. I was told that I had the option of supplying a shoe-box full of receipts that I should have been religiously collecting for the previous year, or I could just take some standard number. I was also told that if I filled the forms in by following the incorrect advice of an official of the tax office, I was still liable for any additional fines arising. I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, so I'm not unfamiliar with mathematics and logic, and even I just went ahead and hired an accountant.
The USA's taxation scheme is far and away the most complex bureaucratic structure I have ever encountered. The 19th Century British Empire's mightiest bureaucrats would have wept in joy at its sheer scale and complexity. Kafkaesque doesn't begin to describe it.
I think it's probably a matter of picking & choosing. I just went back & re-watched the whole of the Tom Baker run (which is frequently regarded as Golden Age Doctor Who), & there were a few duff ones even then.
Of the new show, I think one could legitimately claim that (e.g.) "Dalek", "The Empty Child", "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" were all high quality stories, with some creepy moments.
I do have to concede, though, that while composing this post, I scanned back through the list of the new series episodes, & really great stand-out ones may indeed be a bit thinner on the ground. Maybe part of it is simply that there's less time to build up and then resolve stories than in the old show, so it often feels rushed?
I don't agree. Smith's probably the most Patrick Troughton-like Doctor since, um, Patrick Troughton. And that's a really good thing. He's probably my fave of the new show so far. From both new & old, though, it's Tom Baker FTW for me.
I also think that Matt Smith comes across as less self-conscious of having to play "The Doctor" than Tennant. I always found Tennant's portrayal to be decent, but a bit too obviously "Oh, I'm mad, me! Look! Look!" Maybe that works better for US TV audience expectations, though? I know that he's probably the favourite on that side of the Pond.
Of the new ones, my wife liked Eccleston the best. Plus, he at least had that interesting "survivor guilt" thing going on - he did come across as genuinely broken from PTSD a few times. And his scene where he first faces down the chained-up Dalek was awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction to own post: the bad guys here may also be the networks, if they're the ones that insist on the inclusion of ads on paid-for services.
I believe that Bill Hicks had something to say to people in your line of work...
Seriously, though: if people have actually paid to receive the channels already, why should they be subjected to the ads as well? In the UK, the BBC is paid for by the "licence fee" and consequently, BBC viewers are not shown ads. The other UK channels are not covered by the fee, & are therefore supported by ads. That seems fair enough to me. It's basically the Google model: the advertisers are your actual customers, and the viewers are the product sold.
In light of this, I have never understood why US TV audiences were willing to pay for a cable TV service *with* advertisements. It always seemed to me to be corporate double-dipping of the worst kind. Of course, in this case, the bad guys are clearly the cable service providers.
Just don't get me started on their resistance to "a la carte" channel choices as well...
As a a professional astronomer myself, I just hope they have more luck than this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Gentil
Where's the CowboyNeal option?
Mod parent up. NA never really "got" Nokia.
FWIW, I was given the option to electronically opt out of the dataset during the Borders buyout process, took it, & haven't had any subsequent B&N spam.
While I get that people on here don't generally like these litigation stories, I'm genuinely surprised to see the level of some of the Nokia hatred on display here (I'm not referring ti the parent post in particular, just commenting on the thread as a whole). I dunno, maybe it's because Slashdot's a US site, and (at least in a broad sense), Nokia never really understood the US market, & the US market never really understood Nokia?
The really sad thing here is that they could have indeed competed. Nokia has (and probably still do) make some fantastic hardware. For clear evidence of innovation, just Google for "Nokia Communicator". Yup, this was a full, web-enabled smartphone with a proper keyboard, on sale back when a lot of people in the US were still using pagers. Some of their mid-life software was iffy, but they subsequently had good, solid Linux-based OSes, which were more open than any of the currently popular ones (Android included), and when they purchased QT, it looked like they were going to be able to produce a new generation of polished, well-developed products that'd be easy for developers to work with. The N900 is still much loved by many on Slashdot.
Unfortunately, long-term inter-departmental politics and the lack of a strong, focused leadership meant that the company kept pulling itself in half a dozen directions at once. Some of this was probably due to the more-collaborative, less-aggressive-than-the-Americans Finnish way of doing business. When they finally realized that leadership was the issue, the company jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire by appointing a MS Trojan horse as the CEO. They're not the first company to make the mistake of jumping into bed with MS during a panic attack, and they (sadly) probably won't be the last.
As a longtime Communicator owner (and yup, I bought 'em off-contract, but us Nokia fans are probably not shouty enough to be called "fanboys") I just think it's a real shame that a company that produced so many great products and innovations has found itself in the current situation. Even in the current circumstances, they're innovating (see their new 41 megapixel camera phone for evidence of this). I just hope that the US marketspotters are (as usual) painting a more negative picture of Nokia's current situation than reality.
Why not just get them for free from Project Gutenberg? (Genuine question)
In all fairness, though, the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs (terrible though they were) were relatively small atomic devices, not the much larger nuclear weapons that still number in the thousands today.
Regarding Braben's software development and release background, I present Exhibit A:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_First_Encounters#History
Ah, OK. Cool: thanks for the clarification. A lot of the stuff I'd read on this hadn't been very clear on this point.
Yes, but isn't it the case that is going to be a Windows CE-style cut-down, brain-damaged version of Office?
And if so, is it really going to be that much better/compatible than things like "Documents To Go" that people already have on the iPads they already have?
I don't think it is a tiny minority. Saurik has claimed that something like 8.5% of iPhones and iPods are jailbroken, & I suspect that a large majority of those people probably don't want to trust to "teh Cloud" (I know I don't). Even when I just had Macs, I was never remotely tempted by their MobileMe-type offerings.
Add in a few more percent who (e.g.) travel a lot and hence don't always reliably have access to a suitably rapid internet connection, & I'd conservatively argue that you're easily talking about more than 1/10 of iDevice owners at the absolute minimum, possibly significantly more.
In general, & speaking as a keen user of Apple products for a long time now, what Apple deems progress is not always progress. On the podcast point: I think it's also worth mentioning that built-in podcast support was much better under iOS 4.
Wasn't this in the above novella (or something like it)?
I vaguely remember reading some story years ago about how they made cars for the stupid people that actually went really slowly, but had huge tail-fins & made really impressive growly engine noises, so as to fool the drivers into thinking they were going a lot faster than they were.
I think one of the big problems with the debate is that the Creationism/ID/Faith/whatever side of the discussion deliberately muddies the issue by misusing the word "theory". Science has a rather clear definition of this word, but most of the things that the Faith side of the argument present as "theories" are hypotheses (at best).
Routine common misuse of the word "theory" promotes a false sense of equivalency between a true scientific theory and a non-scientific (non-)"theory".
For example, compare the measurements and predictions of accuracy of a theory like QED (within ten parts in a billion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED ) against the predictive power of a "theory" like Intelligent Design. *That* is why professional scientists have faith in theories like the former, and most have little more than justified scorn for the latter.
I don't quite understand what the point was that you're apparently trying to make here.
I don't think that anyone here was trying to equate evolutionary theory to biogenesis, least of all the atheists.
Obligatory "The Onion" link:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int,1778/
Minor nitpick, but I thought Mac Office 2011 brought back support for Visual Basic scripting?
Or even "A Night to Remember" for an actual film about the Titanic: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051994/
Indeed. I also personally think that "Titanic" was the (down)-turning point of Cameron's career.
"A Night to Remember" was a much more dignified, respectful and authentic film in many ways. It also didn't rely on the audience to all be 15-year-old girls with a DiCaprio crush, and didn't drag on for 3 hours...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051994/
Worth a look for all the young cinephiles on here who don't already know it.
Be aware, though: no gratuitous 3D, no gratuitous colo(u)r and no gratuitous naked Kate Winslet, either. It does have a young, clothed Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman in it, though.
Extended and ongoing environmental impact studies are part and parcel of the final process of choosing a telescope site these days. We do try to be very careful to be considerate when building these facilities & work with teams of local environmental biologists. Also, in most cases nowadays, one of the preconditions for site use is that the site is returned to its original pristine state once the telescope in finally removed again.
There is, however, sometimes still local opposition. E.g. in Hawaii, this is usually on native cultural grounds, & nowadays, an effort is made to involve local native cultural leaders (in the early days, some culturally insensitive decisions were made, and both sides of the debate are aware of this).
In the case of Chile, such facilities are often welcomed, as they're much less damaging than the extensive mining operations already in existence there, but still provide good engineering and other technical jobs for Chileans. Plus, many Chileans are proud that their country can boast some of the finest such research facilities in the world.
(Full disclosure: I am both a professional observatory staff astronomer and a longtime member of Greenpeace).
Although I can't comment on Norway from personal experience, I've had to complete tax forms in Finland, the UK and the USA.
The Finnish ones were genuinely trivial: check option A or option B, sign it, date it and send it back: done. The tax office there knew exactly what was going on, the money was transferred electronically and the only other piece of correspondence I received was a confirmation slip.
The British one was oh, a couple of sheets of A4 or so. Annoying, but manageable. The tax office there had actually issued it despite my not actually needing to file a manual return at all, so I had to fill it in with mostly zeroes and send it back. They initially seemed confused, and then just went quiet after a couple of clarifying conversations with people at the local office.
The USA one was about 6 or 7 forms (I never did work out how many in the end), all with accompanying small-print documentation which in turn contained references to additional supporting documentation that contained "calculation tables" to supposedly help me understand the supporting documentation, so that I could then go back and fill in the tax form itself, and all its add-on appendices. I was told that I had the option of supplying a shoe-box full of receipts that I should have been religiously collecting for the previous year, or I could just take some standard number. I was also told that if I filled the forms in by following the incorrect advice of an official of the tax office, I was still liable for any additional fines arising. I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, so I'm not unfamiliar with mathematics and logic, and even I just went ahead and hired an accountant.
The USA's taxation scheme is far and away the most complex bureaucratic structure I have ever encountered. The 19th Century British Empire's mightiest bureaucrats would have wept in joy at its sheer scale and complexity. Kafkaesque doesn't begin to describe it.
I think it's probably a matter of picking & choosing. I just went back & re-watched the whole of the Tom Baker run (which is frequently regarded as Golden Age Doctor Who), & there were a few duff ones even then.
Of the new show, I think one could legitimately claim that (e.g.) "Dalek", "The Empty Child", "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" were all high quality stories, with some creepy moments.
I do have to concede, though, that while composing this post, I scanned back through the list of the new series episodes, & really great stand-out ones may indeed be a bit thinner on the ground. Maybe part of it is simply that there's less time to build up and then resolve stories than in the old show, so it often feels rushed?
Them's fightin' words, Neelix-lover...
I don't agree. Smith's probably the most Patrick Troughton-like Doctor since, um, Patrick Troughton. And that's a really good thing. He's probably my fave of the new show so far. From both new & old, though, it's Tom Baker FTW for me.
I also think that Matt Smith comes across as less self-conscious of having to play "The Doctor" than Tennant. I always found Tennant's portrayal to be decent, but a bit too obviously "Oh, I'm mad, me! Look! Look!" Maybe that works better for US TV audience expectations, though? I know that he's probably the favourite on that side of the Pond.
Of the new ones, my wife liked Eccleston the best. Plus, he at least had that interesting "survivor guilt" thing going on - he did come across as genuinely broken from PTSD a few times. And his scene where he first faces down the chained-up Dalek was awesome.