I watched the leaked copies too. My opinion for what it's worth.
Chuck -- looks great, the pilot had me interested in seeing how the characters develop.
Big Bang Theory -- if this makes it beyond 6 episodes I'll be astonished. It's the same old tired 4 camera sitcom format, with a slight geek twist. The the format is very wrong. Do it single camera and maybe...
Journeyman -- I'll not be watching that again. My guess is it makes it to either a mid season or one full season before getting axed. It has all the charisma and writing grace of Jericho. Which probably means there will be rabid minority cult following.
The IT Crowd -- Being British I fail to understand why anyone in the US likes UK comedies. This one is the perfect example - underwritten, overacted, lousy camera work, cheap sets, and directed with sledgehammer blows. The concept is great, the execution more painful that that of Marie Antoinette. I know the US one has already been canceled, but I do hope it was better -- the US versions usually are (see The Office for proof of concept). You usually have to have talent to get on TV in the US, you just have to know the right people in the UK. (I have worked in UK TV, I speak from experience)
Bionic Woman - the remake makes the original look slick and deeply artistic. God awful acting. God awful writing. despite what I said above, there sometimes are people with no talent on US TV. Here's one of those times. It will be huge success I'm sure. It's as shallow as it gets though. Not geek fayre at all -- pure mainstream.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Not sure about the actor who plays Sarah Connor, however the rest of the show is great. Summer is perfect as a Terminatrix.
Pushing Up Daises -- I want to see all the episodes of this right now. This looks wonderful. Very original design and script. I think I'm going to love it. It'll probably get canceled after one season -- it's far too intelligent to make it beyond that. A cult classic though.
I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.
The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, because your competition / opposition most certainly is.
No, the most serious abuses of trust where Wikipedia is concerned lie with their admins. Some (if not in fact many) of them are corrupt and have a clear agenda. It seems to start at the top. Jimmy's agenda has been (rightly) questioned here many times.
Adding a new technology layer to that won't change a thing. If anything it will make it more obscured.
The fundamental issue is that the Wikipedia goals are arrogant and impossible. The solution is simple. Remove all admins. All of them. Put a big disclaimer at the top of every page saying something like that "the info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth".
That will go a long way to solving the issue. Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity and control. It's very clear that some people become admins because they believe their truth, and inwardly that they themselves, are better than everyone else. Their Wikiality is what you will accept... or else.
No. Fire all the admins, and Reality will take care of itself...
Agreed. I think Firefox's success is at least 50% attributable to the fact that it sounds exciting.
"Gimp" on the other hand sounds like an insult, something inferior, and It rhymes with pimp -- and not in a good way. I have no desire to ever speak that word to anyone. They will never get word of mouth marketing from me.
This is by no means the only drawback that gimp faces, but it is a pretty major one. A great first step towards increased usage would be to change the name along with the UI redesign.
That doesn't sound like Gordon Brown was against the idea. It sounds like he was being cautious to test the waters. The BBC reported that the Home Office supported this judge's ideas. In fact the BBC reported this in a very matter of fact way, as they always do with any Labour idea, without the usual hyperbole they have over something they are trying to promote.
Well I don't know about the rest of you living in the UK, but I'm leaving while I still can. I strongly advise everyone else who can to do the same. This country is only one or two small steps away from a fascist dictatorship. The glibness and matteroffactness of the UK media about this is horrifying.
Yes, the MLB site is stuffed full of all sorts of crap. Much of which slows the pages down horrifically. Even using flashblock and adblock don't help much there. Their quality control on some of their links and code is pretty poor too.
I recommend using their narrowband portal whenever you can. It's here. It's cunningly hidden in the depths of the site.
I actually welcome competition for Flash, a technology I have always despised, even if it does come from MS. However an open source version would be much better.
Still, since Flash must be the most misused technology on the web, we can assume that Silverlight will be misused even faster. When is the Silverlightblock Fx extension coming. Please say within days. I feel I'm going to love that as much as I currently love flashblock.
Small businesses most often are successful based on quality of service. It is therefore perfectly understandable that small business owners should be concerned when a service provider completely fails in their core business task causing them inconvenience and confusion.
Paypal is clearly not interested in quality of service -- they never have been -- although they are much worse since the eBay purchase. It's milk the cash cow all the way. If they were concerned with service they'd:
1. explain what was going on and when they expected to fix it. (before confusion sets it)
2. offer compensation for the inconvenience.
These are steps that a small business would take if there was a problem. It is absolutely reasonable and fair for small business owners and the Slashdot community to put pressure on a very wealthy company to attempt to get them to provide basic quality services. This is NOT an overreaction.
Personally I don't really understand why Paypal continues to have the success it does; considering it's cavalier attitude to its customers.
No. Not sure the parent should really be modded insightful. This is a simplistic and naive statement. And actually for the most part incorrect. It's little more than an I-drank-the-koolaid observation.
I'm a westerner that spent many years in the former communist countries. Much of what you read in the west of the hardships in these countries was western propaganda. It really wasn't as bad as you were told it was in many cases, there were some very good things about the systems they had. Sure, yes, there were some really evil ones too.
It is true that there are now benefits to these countries being capitalist. There are however, some significant problems too.
I'm not advocating socialism, nor capitalism. Both can be good systems. The problem is politicians, doesn't matter what card they carry, what their purported beliefs are, what their rhetoric is -- they are all in it for themselves.
The problems in most countries are caused by selfish greedy corrupt humans -- be they communist, socialist, republican, democrat, liberal or whatever. In Czech, Slovakia, and Poland for example there are still some instances of corruption in Government. Different politics, different economy, same old shit. And LOOK at Russia as conclusive proof that the parent is FAR from insightful.
Living in the UK I can see the beginning many of the problems that the communist countries had -- restricted travel, cameras everywhere, ID cards on the horizon, children trained to be "Young Pioneer-style" graffiti and vandalism wardens, etc etc...
However, there seem to be few of the benefits -- good health care, quality affordable housing, emphasis on education -- none of that truly exists in the UK for everyone. Especially not health care, despite what Michael Moore may tell you. And the health care system in East Germany was superior to the present one in Federal Germany
Interestingly countries that have traditionally balanced social welfare and capitalism seem to have the highest happiness indexes.
I'm fine with JJ blowing the canon open. Caveat: I'm not a Trek fan.
I appreciate that die hard fans will be upset by that, however my feeling is that Star Trek has basically had about 12 plot lines that have essentially been recycled in various guises throughout all the seasons. They've finally flogged that deceased horse one too many times.
The fundamental issues I see is the utopian nature of the universe Roddenberry created. Ignoring the probability or possibility of human nature being so utterly warped into an utopia (I personally can't suspend my disbelief that far), as a basis for a TV or movie it's all very nice and all, but it makes for dull writing and little drama.
You're left with creating drama by have characters behave out of character by alien possession or secret starfleet order etc etc etc. Or time travel (which is a clichéd story, almost always in any medium - paradox, protect timeline, yawn blah blah, seen it a thousand times)
No, Star Trek needs its ass kicked. I'm not entirely sure that JJ Abrams is the best guy to do that, but he's probably better than anyone who's been in charge of that franchise for the past 20 years.
Unlocking a phone isn't illegal. (nor should it be)
Apple doesn't lose out of this, so I can't see them rushing to redesign the hardware or software.
The only loser it AT&T. And one can easily argue that if the provided a good connection product, at a competitive price and backed it up with quality service they'd have nothing to worry about.
But, of course, the only reason for all service providers all over the globe to use lock-ins is because the last thing any phone company offers is any of the above.
So, yeah, let's hear those world's smallest violins.
"URGE" always seemed to me to be one of the ugliest, dumbest-sounding names of all the music download services
I agree. I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft's Marketingdroids run on Win ME. By word association, "urge" connects in my head to "bowel movement". Brown Zunes don't help this. Nor, for that matter, does the use of the word "squirt".
My tip for MS though is that it's time to call it quits. When you are losing contracts to a company whose media player is so universally reviled that even die hard Linux fanboys would install Windows Media Player first -- that's the clue for you to get the fact that you have a seriously flawed business plan.
I wonder why they picked Wikipedia? All the others seem pretty geeky low visibility things that would have trouble raising non-geek funds whereas Wikipedia is pretty widely known.
Yes, this is very questionable. Particularly with the relentless controversies that pursue Wikipedia like a pack of hounds. And will continue to do so for a long time to come.
Also, while the wiki template is open, large parts of the content are very much not open in any true sense. You can very easily get your IP address banned if some Wikinazi disagrees with your opinion, no matter who knowledgeable or correct your opinion is. Entire countries have had their IP addresses banned. This in not in any way open by my definition.
In addition the relationship with Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia is not as distinct as anyone claims.
There are a great many open source projects that really benefit the community. There are projects that are struggling and this funding would help them. Wikipedia is not one of them.
Wikipedia shouldn't be funded by anything other than advertising (especially since a significant percentage of its content is already advertising copy anyway), or by donations from those who are so inclined to spend their money that way. I'm sure political parties and NGOs would cough up something for ensuring their views continue to be "freely" expressed. Especially the right-wing ones.
Internet providers like Comcast will simply do what they've been doing. They've been throttling bittorrent because of the bandwidth it can take up. They'll simply throttle or block any internet TV that they don't specifically provide since it would be considered competitive to their cable TV offerings.
Yes, that is likely what the will do. However... when online business in Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, Eastern Europe etc. overtakes that of Western Europe, Australia and North America then everyone's going to be sorry.
If they put their customers first -- and tried to compete with ISPs in countries that are already far ahead of, and far cheaper than the west -- then they'd make lots more money and there would be no question of us hearing this "breaking the internet" nonsense.
If you work for an ISP in the west then listen! Listen closely. Shhh! Hear that? That's the sound of the World's smallest violin.
The fundamental problem with Wikipedia is that these are at the bottom of the page.
If they were prominently explicit at the top of the page in plain view, people would stop taking Wikipedia seriously. And that is a GOOD thing. Then, and only then, will it become a useful tool.
Although seriously curtailing the power and activities of its moderators would also add trust and value too admittedly. Nobody likes Netzis.
I have to say that this seems normal behavior for any phone company the world over. I've never had the full features of any phone I've ever owned from many carriers in several countries.
It's what phone companies do. It's usually a question of finding the provider that sucks the least.
Although, in this case it seems a little back-to-front. I would guess that there may be users who end up with a Blackberry because they can't afford one, or their company prefers that system. I would seriously doubt there are many (non-corporation based) users who actually prefer a Blackberry now. Cost aside.
And, can I ask that maybe it's time to have a moratorium on iPhone stories. Yes, I think it's cool too -- but I am sick and tired reading of about it. The Firehose if clogged with iPhone stories. I want to read about something else now. Thanks.
Face it, registrations like this are pretty harmless on itself, but also a part of the slow and seemingly unstoppable, erosion of privacy.
This is exactly why things like this are a problem -- and one would think Germans, of all people, would recognize the potential for abuse. All it takes is a new leader with popular support and a few minor legal changes to launch a fascist regime. That's exactly what happened in Germany before -- millions upon millions of people died because of that.
Germany, Britain (especially), are only a few very thin ice changes away from that possibility happening again.
Americans, you need to uphold your constitution. Never trust your law makers. Stop these cameras now while you can. For all the nearly 5 million cameras in the UK, there's just as much crime and and just as much of it unsolved. The road pricing schemes don't reduce traffic, nor pollution.
It's already too late for much of Europe -- it's not yet too late for you.
Slashdot Mirror
They could -- at least -- bring The Hoff back to play the old guy, Devon. It would increase the sales in Germany after all.
I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.
The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, because your competition / opposition most certainly is.
No, the most serious abuses of trust where Wikipedia is concerned lie with their admins. Some (if not in fact many) of them are corrupt and have a clear agenda. It seems to start at the top. Jimmy's agenda has been (rightly) questioned here many times.
Adding a new technology layer to that won't change a thing. If anything it will make it more obscured.
The fundamental issue is that the Wikipedia goals are arrogant and impossible. The solution is simple. Remove all admins. All of them. Put a big disclaimer at the top of every page saying something like that "the info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth".
That will go a long way to solving the issue. Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity and control. It's very clear that some people become admins because they believe their truth, and inwardly that they themselves, are better than everyone else. Their Wikiality is what you will accept... or else.
No. Fire all the admins, and Reality will take care of itself...
Agreed. I think Firefox's success is at least 50% attributable to the fact that it sounds exciting.
"Gimp" on the other hand sounds like an insult, something inferior, and It rhymes with pimp -- and not in a good way. I have no desire to ever speak that word to anyone. They will never get word of mouth marketing from me.
This is by no means the only drawback that gimp faces, but it is a pretty major one. A great first step towards increased usage would be to change the name along with the UI redesign.
Bet his walk's been silly for hours...
That doesn't sound like Gordon Brown was against the idea. It sounds like he was being cautious to test the waters. The BBC reported that the Home Office supported this judge's ideas. In fact the BBC reported this in a very matter of fact way, as they always do with any Labour idea, without the usual hyperbole they have over something they are trying to promote.
Well I don't know about the rest of you living in the UK, but I'm leaving while I still can. I strongly advise everyone else who can to do the same. This country is only one or two small steps away from a fascist dictatorship. The glibness and matteroffactness of the UK media about this is horrifying.
Leave, leave now. Before it's too late.
Yes, the MLB site is stuffed full of all sorts of crap. Much of which slows the pages down horrifically. Even using flashblock and adblock don't help much there. Their quality control on some of their links and code is pretty poor too.
I recommend using their narrowband portal whenever you can. It's here. It's cunningly hidden in the depths of the site.
I actually welcome competition for Flash, a technology I have always despised, even if it does come from MS. However an open source version would be much better.
Still, since Flash must be the most misused technology on the web, we can assume that Silverlight will be misused even faster. When is the Silverlightblock Fx extension coming. Please say within days. I feel I'm going to love that as much as I currently love flashblock.
For that matter... is Phishing and Pharming agriculture or service industry? There certainly seems to be no shortage of people employed doing that.
Yep absolutely right. I, for one, spotted that while this story was in the firehose, and appropriately, I feel, modded it binspam.
It bothers me that others here didn't.
Vagina was the first thing I thought of too. Mind you, it is one of the first things I always think about.
The fact that this will be run by a company called Virgin doesn't help.
Man, re-entry is going to be fun.
You miss one fundamental point...
Small businesses most often are successful based on quality of service. It is therefore perfectly understandable that small business owners should be concerned when a service provider completely fails in their core business task causing them inconvenience and confusion.
Paypal is clearly not interested in quality of service -- they never have been -- although they are much worse since the eBay purchase. It's milk the cash cow all the way. If they were concerned with service they'd:
1. explain what was going on and when they expected to fix it. (before confusion sets it)
2. offer compensation for the inconvenience.
These are steps that a small business would take if there was a problem. It is absolutely reasonable and fair for small business owners and the Slashdot community to put pressure on a very wealthy company to attempt to get them to provide basic quality services. This is NOT an overreaction.
Personally I don't really understand why Paypal continues to have the success it does; considering it's cavalier attitude to its customers.
No. Not sure the parent should really be modded insightful. This is a simplistic and naive statement. And actually for the most part incorrect. It's little more than an I-drank-the-koolaid observation.
I'm a westerner that spent many years in the former communist countries. Much of what you read in the west of the hardships in these countries was western propaganda. It really wasn't as bad as you were told it was in many cases, there were some very good things about the systems they had. Sure, yes, there were some really evil ones too.
It is true that there are now benefits to these countries being capitalist. There are however, some significant problems too.
I'm not advocating socialism, nor capitalism. Both can be good systems. The problem is politicians, doesn't matter what card they carry, what their purported beliefs are, what their rhetoric is -- they are all in it for themselves.
The problems in most countries are caused by selfish greedy corrupt humans -- be they communist, socialist, republican, democrat, liberal or whatever. In Czech, Slovakia, and Poland for example there are still some instances of corruption in Government. Different politics, different economy, same old shit. And LOOK at Russia as conclusive proof that the parent is FAR from insightful.
Living in the UK I can see the beginning many of the problems that the communist countries had -- restricted travel, cameras everywhere, ID cards on the horizon, children trained to be "Young Pioneer-style" graffiti and vandalism wardens, etc etc...
However, there seem to be few of the benefits -- good health care, quality affordable housing, emphasis on education -- none of that truly exists in the UK for everyone. Especially not health care, despite what Michael Moore may tell you. And the health care system in East Germany was superior to the present one in Federal Germany
Interestingly countries that have traditionally balanced social welfare and capitalism seem to have the highest happiness indexes.
I'm fine with JJ blowing the canon open. Caveat: I'm not a Trek fan.
I appreciate that die hard fans will be upset by that, however my feeling is that Star Trek has basically had about 12 plot lines that have essentially been recycled in various guises throughout all the seasons. They've finally flogged that deceased horse one too many times.
The fundamental issues I see is the utopian nature of the universe Roddenberry created. Ignoring the probability or possibility of human nature being so utterly warped into an utopia (I personally can't suspend my disbelief that far), as a basis for a TV or movie it's all very nice and all, but it makes for dull writing and little drama.
You're left with creating drama by have characters behave out of character by alien possession or secret starfleet order etc etc etc. Or time travel (which is a clichéd story, almost always in any medium - paradox, protect timeline, yawn blah blah, seen it a thousand times)
No, Star Trek needs its ass kicked. I'm not entirely sure that JJ Abrams is the best guy to do that, but he's probably better than anyone who's been in charge of that franchise for the past 20 years.
A snake!!!
I, for one, welcome our new elderly cyborg overlords...
Well, someone had to...
Unlocking a phone isn't illegal. (nor should it be)
Apple doesn't lose out of this, so I can't see them rushing to redesign the hardware or software.
The only loser it AT&T. And one can easily argue that if the provided a good connection product, at a competitive price and backed it up with quality service they'd have nothing to worry about.
But, of course, the only reason for all service providers all over the globe to use lock-ins is because the last thing any phone company offers is any of the above.
So, yeah, let's hear those world's smallest violins.
What? He's a well known expert on the movement of spheres. Look at his last book -- "Using Your Head in the Outfield"
My tip for MS though is that it's time to call it quits. When you are losing contracts to a company whose media player is so universally reviled that even die hard Linux fanboys would install Windows Media Player first -- that's the clue for you to get the fact that you have a seriously flawed business plan.
Also, while the wiki template is open, large parts of the content are very much not open in any true sense. You can very easily get your IP address banned if some Wikinazi disagrees with your opinion, no matter who knowledgeable or correct your opinion is. Entire countries have had their IP addresses banned. This in not in any way open by my definition.
In addition the relationship with Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia is not as distinct as anyone claims.
There are a great many open source projects that really benefit the community. There are projects that are struggling and this funding would help them. Wikipedia is not one of them.
Wikipedia shouldn't be funded by anything other than advertising (especially since a significant percentage of its content is already advertising copy anyway), or by donations from those who are so inclined to spend their money that way. I'm sure political parties and NGOs would cough up something for ensuring their views continue to be "freely" expressed. Especially the right-wing ones.
If they put their customers first -- and tried to compete with ISPs in countries that are already far ahead of, and far cheaper than the west -- then they'd make lots more money and there would be no question of us hearing this "breaking the internet" nonsense.
If you work for an ISP in the west then listen! Listen closely. Shhh! Hear that? That's the sound of the World's smallest violin.
The fundamental problem with Wikipedia is that these are at the bottom of the page.
If they were prominently explicit at the top of the page in plain view, people would stop taking Wikipedia seriously. And that is a GOOD thing. Then, and only then, will it become a useful tool.
Although seriously curtailing the power and activities of its moderators would also add trust and value too admittedly. Nobody likes Netzis.
I have to say that this seems normal behavior for any phone company the world over. I've never had the full features of any phone I've ever owned from many carriers in several countries.
It's what phone companies do. It's usually a question of finding the provider that sucks the least.
Although, in this case it seems a little back-to-front. I would guess that there may be users who end up with a Blackberry because they can't afford one, or their company prefers that system. I would seriously doubt there are many (non-corporation based) users who actually prefer a Blackberry now. Cost aside.
And, can I ask that maybe it's time to have a moratorium on iPhone stories. Yes, I think it's cool too -- but I am sick and tired reading of about it. The Firehose if clogged with iPhone stories. I want to read about something else now. Thanks.
Germany, Britain (especially), are only a few very thin ice changes away from that possibility happening again.
Americans, you need to uphold your constitution. Never trust your law makers. Stop these cameras now while you can. For all the nearly 5 million cameras in the UK, there's just as much crime and and just as much of it unsolved. The road pricing schemes don't reduce traffic, nor pollution.
It's already too late for much of Europe -- it's not yet too late for you.