pay the actors less money - they aren't worth 20+ million a movie.
While I don't disagree with you, can we start with cutting the salaries of the executives first? Those are the real salaries I want nixed and they are paid far more than the actors.
This is probably old news to most/.ers, but to those who just joined up yesterday, everything is going to be over the internet soon. Phone and Music was first to be made popular. Soon Videos will be mass marketed, and then TV and Movies. You can get them already, but I'm talking an iTunes type store for content, not P2P.
This is all due to Network Layer Abstraction. The internet is based on the idea that networks have different layers. The physical cable is one layer, while the protocol, TCP/IP is another. The data itself is yet another. The is a bit simplified, but idea is that if you change one layer, the other layers remain unchanged. I can use DSL or cable or dialup for internet data, but I can get music from iTunes no matter which service I chose. I could replace IP4 with IP6 and again still get that data. I could switch to Napster from iTunes and not affect my Internet service. I can switch from Vonage to Speakeasy or even to that godawfully expensive comcast phone service if I wanted (though it's more likely I'll switch from that TO vonage).
This is what truly opens us up to innovation and competition. The internet simply transfers data, but that data can literally be anything. Phone networks can only transfer voice information, and their transmission of data is limited. By separating out all these services, people can insert themselves anywhere in the network chain and make something new.
Under law it's illegal to tamper with slot machines, use slugs, play with tampered cards, etc. It's also quasi-illegal to do things like posting, which means changing your bet after the game has started. There are tons of gambler cheats.
The most common "cheat" which isn't a cheat, however, is card counting in Black Jack. Casinos have been known to harass and eject gamblers who are expert card counters. The process is not illegal but they are labelled as cheats anyway. Card counting is little more than being really good at math and concentration and coming up with a consistent pattern. Casinos don't appreciate it because most games have an automatic "profit margin." Roulette, for example, has lots of ways to bet, but if you were to down the same amount of money on every number, you'd end up with winnings of only 80-90% of what you initially put down, essentially losing money. Mathematically they are designed to win unless you cheat.
Blackjack is not the same. You can beat blackjack because the odds say if you play things right, you can come out on top even in the long run. That's why so many organizations have popped up in the past few decades running "black jack" companies. They are made up of math wizzes who train at card counting.
Then the casinos find them, repeatedly showing up, figure out they are counting cards, and then eject them from the casino. It's completely legal so they can't arrest you, but because it's a private company they can refuse your business and ban you from their business, and future excursions to their casino would be considered trespassing.
It's pretty scummy, though I must say it's an improvement over getting your knee caps shot off for being a good poker player, like in the good old mob days.
I was just making a joke you know. And frankly, I do think most of our political leaders have a level of psychopathy. They just don't kill millions of people only because they'd not be able to get away with it.
I'll see your half dozen communist dictators and raise you 100 US Senators. I'll hold onto my President card just in case you have any thing else to play.
1) The Community managers are similar to support reps. They deal with the user base. Developers neither have the time nor often do they have the skills to deal with a populace. The answers you get often come from the developers, what you have to understand is that those answers are often santized. Santizing an answer isn't always that bad, because I've known developers to make something rather nice sound downright dreadful all because they have diarhea of the mouth.
2) The term "developers" these days has been morphed. Developers could mean just the guys who grind the code, and yet it might mean the product managers who actually design the code. Then again, it might not be. Frankly, the Community managers could deal more with the product managers who actually design those changes you loath on every update, or whatever. Bottom line is you should ask for who to talk to by name and by learning what they do. Don't just blanketly ask to "speak to a developer."
3) Developers aren't always ultimately responsible for the decisions. Developers, like in #2, could just be people who grind out code. Managers make decisions, you should ask them. And ask for them by name, and by responsibility. Again don't blanketly ask to "talk to developers."
Many hardcore file shares and hosters, dare I say most that would call themselves hardcore, are not in it for getting free content on demand when they want it. They are into collecting absolutely anything and everything they can get their hands on. In some collections, people wouldn't possibly, in their lifetimes,be able to listen to all the music or watch all those movies. But just the thought of having it makes many hoarders happy. And it's not even necessarily reputation amongst others. It could be in many cases, but not always. They just have to have it.
What's my point? Well, this is the greatest strength and weakness of peer to peer. Hoarders ensure a healthy flow of files, but they rarely actually check what they have. They don't check to see the software works, or if the music is a complete copy, or that the movie was cut down to a quarter of the original screen size.
This is what companies take advantage of, both those who want to hurt swapping, and those who just want to seed files for the purpose of installing some evil spyware. It's nice to have a bunch of people trying to seed the masses but cmon the point of file sharing is to pool our independent resources. For someone who doesn't have all day to search for files and test quality and whatnot, it is sometimes less painful to just go buy the CD than it is to actually try to download it amongst the mess of files that are out there.
Particularly, we need similar statistics on other industries in the UK, and similar statistics on IT companies in other countries. You could come up with several reasons, such as IT employees tend to be more jaded than other types, or that UKers tend to be more cynical. However, one couldn't possibly make that comparison without the right figures for the comparison. Without that, these are just random figures the media put into a story to stir up attention and hits to the site.
Then again, what story with statistics posted to slashdot hasn't fit this description lately?
Slashdotters have a distinguished history of calling b.s. on fiction authors who get technical details wrong.
Shashdotters call b.s. on anything because they like to do this! They are natural born devil's advocates and kill-joys who look for the flaws in things. And it makes them happy, if not on the outside then deep on the geeky inside.
But what happens when the problem is reversed? Can authors with awesome technical credentials, but little literary background, teach by using story?
The same thing would happen. Slashdotters are nitpickers because they can be. Slashdotters, while a majority of them are tech heads, are not limited to tech heads. Nerd and geeks take many forms, including literary geeks. Enough of them exist in the slashdot base to properly rend a poorly written and poorly thought-out story to quivering shreds.
On the minus side, Football, like a lot of sports, can teach you to push the limits and try to cheat, or bend the rules unfairly, or hide your fouls from refs. It can also make you feel "better" than other people because you are the center of attention and can do things other people can't. This can make you feel arrogant and want to flaunt the rules.
But then again, it's all how you teach the game. I.E. it's the parents, coaches, teachers, and mentors you deal with that teach you to be an ass, not games.
I just don't feel they've taken the "good" parts of Microsoft's monopoly into account (kill me for saying that.) Considering all of the features included with the OS that we used to pay for-- Browser, media, utils, etc, Microsoft has "given" a lot to maintain their monopoly. While I support competition whole heartedly (and look forward to a day where I can "choose Mac OS to run on my custom intel hardware) I don't think this is an honest assesment. You get a LOT with what you pay for, and there hasn't even been a new version in 4 years. And they still support you with security fixes for FREE (all jokes aside).
1) You used to pay for browsers and media tools? Since when? Quicktime pro is something you pay for but the basic quicktime has ALWAYS been free, and versions existed back in Windows 3.1. Netscape was free unless you were a business, and frankly the only people who paid were large businesses who cared. As for utils, I really can't think of much that was truly useful. The only useful utilities, ever, I could remember are both for Mac, Norton (which was good until OS X made it obsolete) and Techtool pro (which has a great interface for testing hardware and not just software, which is more useful).
2) Giving away things for free is BAD BAD BAD under a monopoly! It's been posted so many times that slashdotters who read microsoft articles should be able to recite the sherman anti-trust act and the subsequent laws by heart by now! Christ!
When a monopoly gives away something, they are trying to use their huge power and cash reserves to force the competition out of the market. Netscape is the key example. Netscape was trying to make money by making companies buy their web browser while giving it away for free to personal users. Well, microsoft undercut that and gave IE away for free. They used their considerable power in the OS to make a free product and undercut someone who could have legally competed with their own product. That's wrong, and that's illegal under US law.
And Microsoft didn't begin giving away anything substantial until I.E. anyway.
Now, Media player doesn't count here, because Quicktime and realplayer (if you can count real as competition) already give their media viewers away for free, so there's nothing to undercut.
Office is no more expensive now than when Word Perfect was still alive and kicking.. And the features keep coming. (Though I gladly use openOffice, myself.)
Bullshit, it's feature bloat, no reasonably good features have been introduced since Office 95 except to tighten down the security on their buggy visual macros, and Office costs around $500. My parents bought me the Apple II version of wordperfect for $50, and when I worked at a hospital installing software, business licenses were $20 an install (though there may be other contract fees but when you have to manage 7000 PCs I doubt the fees came out to a $500 a piece price tag, that's what volume discounts are for).
I think the worry should be "Let's not make this a total monopoly so one company can't hold all the keys to human technology in the future" rather than, man, they're screwing us out of cash.. because I think the sheer volume of units they ship actually causes the price to be CHEAPER, not more expensive.
You need economics 101. Monopolies do not follow standard supply and demand theories that competitive markets do. This is because they have total control of the market. They set the price to maximize their profit based on what they can get away with, not based on demand of their product.
However, in conclusion basic sentiment is, that as many figures are these days, they are overblown, and I would tend to agree with you. However I completely disagree that Microsoft has "provided value" to offset any additional costs of "goodness." Besides these figures are overblown anyway, you are coming at the whole thing from the wrong angle.
1) It was written by Mark Pilgrim, one of the major minds behind creating the specification for Atom. 2) Mark's a personal friend of mine, and I personally think he makes sense.
The point of the article is, however, that RSS is terribly broken and fragmented, versions aren't compatible with each other, and it's just a plain mess. Look further on his site and you'll see articles as to not only why he helped create Atom 1.0 but articles with early specs.
RSS is a wonderful idea, now it has to be implemented properly. One good way to do this is to start over.
I was making a point as to why Friday was a good time slot for ratings for Sci-fi. Techno geeks and sci-fi geeks don't overlap 100%, many technogeeks don't have the time or inclination to go messing around in a myth TV, and those who chose this route have excluded themselves from the whole rating system anyway.
A lot of factors go to the social makeup of who watches TV throughout the week. I think however the factor that sci-fi tapped into that's not sociological is the fact that all the other networks put crap on friday anyway.
On the other days there might be good shows a geek wants to watch. Don't make me pick between galactica and CSI, that would kill me to have to chose only one or the other. CSI wins out over stargate in my mind too, so why pick a fight you can't win?
So given a choice between crap and a fine sci-fi show, I'll pick sci-fi thank you. It makes the choice as to what to watch a lot easier for sci-fi fans who actually like more than just sci-fi.
Yep, I can bet I'm gonna burn a lot of karma on this one.
*transforms into an industrial strength flamethrower and proceeds to turn you into a slashdot burger*
It wasn't just a cheesy SatAM cartoon designed as a half-hour long toy advertisement. It was a Cheesy SatAM cartoon with the greatest action cartoon character of all time, Optimus Prime designed as a half-hour long advertisement for really fuckin' cool toys. You're a slashdotter you can get understand really fuckin' cool toys can't you?:)
You also failed to mention email. It's easy to get an email account (and free) and you can transport small files (under 2-4 MB, whatever you consider small I don't care) instantly. Anyone can use this medium without hassle. Email is the final nail in the floppy coffin.
Now you can't email large backups or media files to many people because of hard set limits on attached files. However, there are lots of alternatives that should be considered which are better for such functions anyway.
The problem with this thinking is that one assumes there is one replacement to a floppy. The floppy was so ubiquitous because it was the ONLY means of transporting data for a while so you HAD to have a floppy. Nowadays, there are dozens of different types of replacements. You don't need one specific type. I've transported files via my camera, a thumb drive, a hard drive and via email. They all just carry files in one form or another.
All of the ideas you mention, thumb drives, hard drives, CDs, etc fill different niches, and fill them very effectively. There is no one all encompassing storage medium any more, yet all of these mediums are relatively compatible with most computer systems.
This seems like a gross generalization of all VoIP services. You know if one VoIP service is bad, you could always switch to another and try them.
And this is the brilliance of VoIP, you can switch to a new voip system very easily. The wire into your building is your internet connection, and its the same no matter what VOIP system you use. Perhaps you should have tried other VOIP systems first? I'm not a small business owner but I have Vonage and the only connection problems I have ever had I had confirmed were due to my comcast internet connection, and not Vonage. Even still, those outages were few and far between, and I hope to get a better service sometime in the future.
That was a tremendously funny post but I had to make a correction.
Sauron's defense then proceded to testify that, due to the fact that Mr. Baggins' father was, in fact, recruited as a "burglar" by the late Thorin Oakenshield.
Bilbo Baggins is Frodo Baggin's uncle, not father!!!
Would have been hysterical had that not been botched.
Considering the cable companies are in fact part of greater media conglomerates, I don't think they care. They WANT to have this kind of control over the content they have on their network, and this ruling in this area is in fact to their advantage, not disadvantage.
My main problem with Paypal is that Paypal has every right to say "go fuck yourself" if something goes wrong or a customer gets screwed. Credit card companies cannot do this. If I don't get my merchandise, I can issue a charge back and get my money back. With paypal it's a crapshoot as to if I get my money back. Paypal has also been notorious for taking money from people's accounts without authorization.
Credit card companies are bastards, paypal is full of bastards, but credit cards are regulated. Bastard or not, as a consumer I want to be able to tell a company "go to hell" if they try to screw with my money.
Apple, just like every other big company, knows that the software patent system and the current rubber stamp policy at the PTO only benefits large corporations.
This policy means that the company who wins is the one with the most power and the biggest pocket book. They want to make it, own it, protect it, fight for it, and make money off of it, and make damn sure no one else is, not even if doing so would be more fair to consumers.
They'll get sued for silly things like this, but they also sued that maker of the Gem computer that was almost a complete visual ripoff of the original flavored iMac. And Apple won, the company didn't distribute the computer, and Apple didn't have to compete against that computer maker. Their product was both visually and technically inferior, but knockoffs still take money out of your hands and force you to find another way to compete.
It's not surprising someone other than MasterCard actually had a list of card numbers stolen. I have customers all the time tell me how they don't like what they feel are draconian measures to protect the credit card numbers people have in their own systems. What they fail to understand is that Visa and Mastercard require us to do this, and the protections we have are customer service.
But they still complain, because their customers and they themselves don't ever notice. Hell at one point I was told by a demanding customer to remove the protections because he said "I'll risk it." I was tempted to show him how insecure he was by remotely accessing his system, getting his list of customer phone numbers, and telling all his customers that he was careless with credit card numbers and their numbers could have easily been stolen from his system.
People are pretty careless about credit card security. It's usually in the name of convenience and visible customer service. Credit card security is invisible service. Being able to purchase something conveniently flies right in the face of having security which just might prevent you from selling something to someone, so some people don't care, as long as they are selling. Owners care once they find out that they'll be issued chargebacks, but individual salesreps will write down every credit card number on a piece of paper if it means making money for them personally.
Visa and Mastercard have the right idea, and in the press release I like how they said that they gave cardsystems a "limited amount of time" to basically get their act together so this doesn't happen again. Education and enforcement of regulations... nice to see an organization, especially one that is a corporation, actually give a damn.
Slashdot Mirror
pay the actors less money - they aren't worth 20+ million a movie.
While I don't disagree with you, can we start with cutting the salaries of the executives first? Those are the real salaries I want nixed and they are paid far more than the actors.
This is probably old news to most /.ers, but to those who just joined up yesterday, everything is going to be over the internet soon. Phone and Music was first to be made popular. Soon Videos will be mass marketed, and then TV and Movies. You can get them already, but I'm talking an iTunes type store for content, not P2P.
This is all due to Network Layer Abstraction. The internet is based on the idea that networks have different layers. The physical cable is one layer, while the protocol, TCP/IP is another. The data itself is yet another. The is a bit simplified, but idea is that if you change one layer, the other layers remain unchanged. I can use DSL or cable or dialup for internet data, but I can get music from iTunes no matter which service I chose. I could replace IP4 with IP6 and again still get that data. I could switch to Napster from iTunes and not affect my Internet service. I can switch from Vonage to Speakeasy or even to that godawfully expensive comcast phone service if I wanted (though it's more likely I'll switch from that TO vonage).
This is what truly opens us up to innovation and competition. The internet simply transfers data, but that data can literally be anything. Phone networks can only transfer voice information, and their transmission of data is limited. By separating out all these services, people can insert themselves anywhere in the network chain and make something new.
Under law it's illegal to tamper with slot machines, use slugs, play with tampered cards, etc. It's also quasi-illegal to do things like posting, which means changing your bet after the game has started. There are tons of gambler cheats.
The most common "cheat" which isn't a cheat, however, is card counting in Black Jack. Casinos have been known to harass and eject gamblers who are expert card counters. The process is not illegal but they are labelled as cheats anyway. Card counting is little more than being really good at math and concentration and coming up with a consistent pattern. Casinos don't appreciate it because most games have an automatic "profit margin." Roulette, for example, has lots of ways to bet, but if you were to down the same amount of money on every number, you'd end up with winnings of only 80-90% of what you initially put down, essentially losing money. Mathematically they are designed to win unless you cheat.
Blackjack is not the same. You can beat blackjack because the odds say if you play things right, you can come out on top even in the long run. That's why so many organizations have popped up in the past few decades running "black jack" companies. They are made up of math wizzes who train at card counting.
Then the casinos find them, repeatedly showing up, figure out they are counting cards, and then eject them from the casino. It's completely legal so they can't arrest you, but because it's a private company they can refuse your business and ban you from their business, and future excursions to their casino would be considered trespassing.
It's pretty scummy, though I must say it's an improvement over getting your knee caps shot off for being a good poker player, like in the good old mob days.
I was just making a joke you know. And frankly, I do think most of our political leaders have a level of psychopathy. They just don't kill millions of people only because they'd not be able to get away with it.
I'll see your half dozen communist dictators and raise you 100 US Senators. I'll hold onto my President card just in case you have any thing else to play.
Has anyone taken a look at the artists rendition of the Milky Way in the article?
:)
Could that be an early version of the total perspective vortex?
1) The Community managers are similar to support reps. They deal with the user base. Developers neither have the time nor often do they have the skills to deal with a populace. The answers you get often come from the developers, what you have to understand is that those answers are often santized. Santizing an answer isn't always that bad, because I've known developers to make something rather nice sound downright dreadful all because they have diarhea of the mouth.
2) The term "developers" these days has been morphed. Developers could mean just the guys who grind the code, and yet it might mean the product managers who actually design the code. Then again, it might not be. Frankly, the Community managers could deal more with the product managers who actually design those changes you loath on every update, or whatever. Bottom line is you should ask for who to talk to by name and by learning what they do. Don't just blanketly ask to "speak to a developer."
3) Developers aren't always ultimately responsible for the decisions. Developers, like in #2, could just be people who grind out code. Managers make decisions, you should ask them. And ask for them by name, and by responsibility. Again don't blanketly ask to "talk to developers."
Many hardcore file shares and hosters, dare I say most that would call themselves hardcore, are not in it for getting free content on demand when they want it. They are into collecting absolutely anything and everything they can get their hands on. In some collections, people wouldn't possibly, in their lifetimes,be able to listen to all the music or watch all those movies. But just the thought of having it makes many hoarders happy. And it's not even necessarily reputation amongst others. It could be in many cases, but not always. They just have to have it.
What's my point? Well, this is the greatest strength and weakness of peer to peer. Hoarders ensure a healthy flow of files, but they rarely actually check what they have. They don't check to see the software works, or if the music is a complete copy, or that the movie was cut down to a quarter of the original screen size.
This is what companies take advantage of, both those who want to hurt swapping, and those who just want to seed files for the purpose of installing some evil spyware. It's nice to have a bunch of people trying to seed the masses but cmon the point of file sharing is to pool our independent resources. For someone who doesn't have all day to search for files and test quality and whatnot, it is sometimes less painful to just go buy the CD than it is to actually try to download it amongst the mess of files that are out there.
Particularly, we need similar statistics on other industries in the UK, and similar statistics on IT companies in other countries. You could come up with several reasons, such as IT employees tend to be more jaded than other types, or that UKers tend to be more cynical. However, one couldn't possibly make that comparison without the right figures for the comparison. Without that, these are just random figures the media put into a story to stir up attention and hits to the site.
Then again, what story with statistics posted to slashdot hasn't fit this description lately?
Slashdotters have a distinguished history of calling b.s. on fiction authors who get technical details wrong.
Shashdotters call b.s. on anything because they like to do this! They are natural born devil's advocates and kill-joys who look for the flaws in things. And it makes them happy, if not on the outside then deep on the geeky inside.
But what happens when the problem is reversed? Can authors with awesome technical credentials, but little literary background, teach by using story?
The same thing would happen. Slashdotters are nitpickers because they can be. Slashdotters, while a majority of them are tech heads, are not limited to tech heads. Nerd and geeks take many forms, including literary geeks. Enough of them exist in the slashdot base to properly rend a poorly written and poorly thought-out story to quivering shreds.
Yes that was my point, I was being ironic.
On the minus side, Football, like a lot of sports, can teach you to push the limits and try to cheat, or bend the rules unfairly, or hide your fouls from refs. It can also make you feel "better" than other people because you are the center of attention and can do things other people can't. This can make you feel arrogant and want to flaunt the rules.
But then again, it's all how you teach the game. I.E. it's the parents, coaches, teachers, and mentors you deal with that teach you to be an ass, not games.
I just don't feel they've taken the "good" parts of Microsoft's monopoly into account (kill me for saying that.) Considering all of the features included with the OS that we used to pay for-- Browser, media, utils, etc, Microsoft has "given" a lot to maintain their monopoly. While I support competition whole heartedly (and look forward to a day where I can "choose Mac OS to run on my custom intel hardware) I don't think this is an honest assesment. You get a LOT with what you pay for, and there hasn't even been a new version in 4 years. And they still support you with security fixes for FREE (all jokes aside).
1) You used to pay for browsers and media tools? Since when? Quicktime pro is something you pay for but the basic quicktime has ALWAYS been free, and versions existed back in Windows 3.1. Netscape was free unless you were a business, and frankly the only people who paid were large businesses who cared. As for utils, I really can't think of much that was truly useful. The only useful utilities, ever, I could remember are both for Mac, Norton (which was good until OS X made it obsolete) and Techtool pro (which has a great interface for testing hardware and not just software, which is more useful).
2) Giving away things for free is BAD BAD BAD under a monopoly! It's been posted so many times that slashdotters who read microsoft articles should be able to recite the sherman anti-trust act and the subsequent laws by heart by now! Christ!
When a monopoly gives away something, they are trying to use their huge power and cash reserves to force the competition out of the market. Netscape is the key example. Netscape was trying to make money by making companies buy their web browser while giving it away for free to personal users. Well, microsoft undercut that and gave IE away for free. They used their considerable power in the OS to make a free product and undercut someone who could have legally competed with their own product. That's wrong, and that's illegal under US law.
And Microsoft didn't begin giving away anything substantial until I.E. anyway.
Now, Media player doesn't count here, because Quicktime and realplayer (if you can count real as competition) already give their media viewers away for free, so there's nothing to undercut.
Office is no more expensive now than when Word Perfect was still alive and kicking.. And the features keep coming. (Though I gladly use openOffice, myself.)
Bullshit, it's feature bloat, no reasonably good features have been introduced since Office 95 except to tighten down the security on their buggy visual macros, and Office costs around $500. My parents bought me the Apple II version of wordperfect for $50, and when I worked at a hospital installing software, business licenses were $20 an install (though there may be other contract fees but when you have to manage 7000 PCs I doubt the fees came out to a $500 a piece price tag, that's what volume discounts are for).
I think the worry should be "Let's not make this a total monopoly so one company can't hold all the keys to human technology in the future" rather than, man, they're screwing us out of cash.. because I think the sheer volume of units they ship actually causes the price to be CHEAPER, not more expensive.
You need economics 101. Monopolies do not follow standard supply and demand theories that competitive markets do. This is because they have total control of the market. They set the price to maximize their profit based on what they can get away with, not based on demand of their product.
However, in conclusion basic sentiment is, that as many figures are these days, they are overblown, and I would tend to agree with you. However I completely disagree that Microsoft has "provided value" to offset any additional costs of "goodness." Besides these figures are overblown anyway, you are coming at the whole thing from the wrong angle.
I freely admit that I'm linking to this article that might show some bias. Why might it be biased?
1) It was written by Mark Pilgrim, one of the major minds behind creating the specification for Atom.
2) Mark's a personal friend of mine, and I personally think he makes sense.
The point of the article is, however, that RSS is terribly broken and fragmented, versions aren't compatible with each other, and it's just a plain mess. Look further on his site and you'll see articles as to not only why he helped create Atom 1.0 but articles with early specs.
RSS is a wonderful idea, now it has to be implemented properly. One good way to do this is to start over.
I was making a point as to why Friday was a good time slot for ratings for Sci-fi. Techno geeks and sci-fi geeks don't overlap 100%, many technogeeks don't have the time or inclination to go messing around in a myth TV, and those who chose this route have excluded themselves from the whole rating system anyway.
A lot of factors go to the social makeup of who watches TV throughout the week. I think however the factor that sci-fi tapped into that's not sociological is the fact that all the other networks put crap on friday anyway.
On the other days there might be good shows a geek wants to watch. Don't make me pick between galactica and CSI, that would kill me to have to chose only one or the other. CSI wins out over stargate in my mind too, so why pick a fight you can't win?
So given a choice between crap and a fine sci-fi show, I'll pick sci-fi thank you. It makes the choice as to what to watch a lot easier for sci-fi fans who actually like more than just sci-fi.
Yep, I can bet I'm gonna burn a lot of karma on this one.
:)
*transforms into an industrial strength flamethrower and proceeds to turn you into a slashdot burger*
It wasn't just a cheesy SatAM cartoon designed as a half-hour long toy advertisement. It was a Cheesy SatAM cartoon with the greatest action cartoon character of all time, Optimus Prime designed as a half-hour long advertisement for really fuckin' cool toys. You're a slashdotter you can get understand really fuckin' cool toys can't you?
You also failed to mention email. It's easy to get an email account (and free) and you can transport small files (under 2-4 MB, whatever you consider small I don't care) instantly. Anyone can use this medium without hassle. Email is the final nail in the floppy coffin.
Now you can't email large backups or media files to many people because of hard set limits on attached files. However, there are lots of alternatives that should be considered which are better for such functions anyway.
The problem with this thinking is that one assumes there is one replacement to a floppy. The floppy was so ubiquitous because it was the ONLY means of transporting data for a while so you HAD to have a floppy. Nowadays, there are dozens of different types of replacements. You don't need one specific type. I've transported files via my camera, a thumb drive, a hard drive and via email. They all just carry files in one form or another.
All of the ideas you mention, thumb drives, hard drives, CDs, etc fill different niches, and fill them very effectively. There is no one all encompassing storage medium any more, yet all of these mediums are relatively compatible with most computer systems.
This seems like a gross generalization of all VoIP services. You know if one VoIP service is bad, you could always switch to another and try them.
And this is the brilliance of VoIP, you can switch to a new voip system very easily. The wire into your building is your internet connection, and its the same no matter what VOIP system you use. Perhaps you should have tried other VOIP systems first? I'm not a small business owner but I have Vonage and the only connection problems I have ever had I had confirmed were due to my comcast internet connection, and not Vonage. Even still, those outages were few and far between, and I hope to get a better service sometime in the future.
That was a tremendously funny post but I had to make a correction.
Sauron's defense then proceded to testify that, due to the fact that Mr. Baggins' father was, in fact, recruited as a "burglar" by the late Thorin Oakenshield.
Bilbo Baggins is Frodo Baggin's uncle, not father!!!
Would have been hysterical had that not been botched.
Considering the cable companies are in fact part of greater media conglomerates, I don't think they care. They WANT to have this kind of control over the content they have on their network, and this ruling in this area is in fact to their advantage, not disadvantage.
My main problem with Paypal is that Paypal has every right to say "go fuck yourself" if something goes wrong or a customer gets screwed. Credit card companies cannot do this. If I don't get my merchandise, I can issue a charge back and get my money back. With paypal it's a crapshoot as to if I get my money back. Paypal has also been notorious for taking money from people's accounts without authorization.
Credit card companies are bastards, paypal is full of bastards, but credit cards are regulated. Bastard or not, as a consumer I want to be able to tell a company "go to hell" if they try to screw with my money.
This is what I want in a google payment service.
this can have an echo chamber effect such as when a group of liberals and conservatives fight it out about who's got the bigger penis and/or breasts
Let's put this to bed right now. Liberals have the bigger breasts and penises!
This is because we are more willing to have them surgically altered.
Apple, just like every other big company, knows that the software patent system and the current rubber stamp policy at the PTO only benefits large corporations.
This policy means that the company who wins is the one with the most power and the biggest pocket book. They want to make it, own it, protect it, fight for it, and make money off of it, and make damn sure no one else is, not even if doing so would be more fair to consumers.
They'll get sued for silly things like this, but they also sued that maker of the Gem computer that was almost a complete visual ripoff of the original flavored iMac. And Apple won, the company didn't distribute the computer, and Apple didn't have to compete against that computer maker. Their product was both visually and technically inferior, but knockoffs still take money out of your hands and force you to find another way to compete.
It's not surprising someone other than MasterCard actually had a list of card numbers stolen. I have customers all the time tell me how they don't like what they feel are draconian measures to protect the credit card numbers people have in their own systems. What they fail to understand is that Visa and Mastercard require us to do this, and the protections we have are customer service.
But they still complain, because their customers and they themselves don't ever notice. Hell at one point I was told by a demanding customer to remove the protections because he said "I'll risk it." I was tempted to show him how insecure he was by remotely accessing his system, getting his list of customer phone numbers, and telling all his customers that he was careless with credit card numbers and their numbers could have easily been stolen from his system.
People are pretty careless about credit card security. It's usually in the name of convenience and visible customer service. Credit card security is invisible service. Being able to purchase something conveniently flies right in the face of having security which just might prevent you from selling something to someone, so some people don't care, as long as they are selling. Owners care once they find out that they'll be issued chargebacks, but individual salesreps will write down every credit card number on a piece of paper if it means making money for them personally.
Visa and Mastercard have the right idea, and in the press release I like how they said that they gave cardsystems a "limited amount of time" to basically get their act together so this doesn't happen again. Education and enforcement of regulations... nice to see an organization, especially one that is a corporation, actually give a damn.