While "SyFy" is on cable and therefore sees a bit of revenue off your cable bill, a big percentage of their revenue comes from advertising. Unfortunately their target market (geeky males) generally don't watch ads. They torrent SyFy shows or PVR them and skip through the ads - So it's likely harder for SyFy to recoup their costs for expensive shows with lots of FX if ad revenues are down. Yeah, yeah, I know 'content wants to be free' blah blah blah, but anyone who has watched fan-produced Star Trek or Star Wars webisodes knows that producing quality Science Fiction television programming is complex and expensive.
Because then you can retract your statements and game modding up for nefarious reasons. Slashdot has permaposting for a good reason.
???
Surely the solution to this is just to remove any mod points if a post is edited? Or allow editing for 15 minutes, and in those 15 minutes, no moderation is allowed.
The thing is, it's very easy for educated Slashdotters with lots of job options to formulate a response like this. Very different story if you've been unemployed for a long while, benefits are running out and you've got mouths at home to feed - In that scenario it's pretty tough to flip off a prospective employer with whom you've gotten as far as an interview...
How about building computers that are meant to last instead of being meant to be thrown away and "recycled" after 3 years?
I'm writing this on a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop from 2001 - A P3 with 768 meg of RAM running streamlined XP. Works perfectly well for most things. Runs Office 2000 very well, plays DVDs well. About the only things that run very poorly on it are the 'new' Slashdot and Firefox. IE 7 works fine. as does Chrome.
People always need more memory or more disk or a better video card.
No they don't. Lots of people buy laptops, use them quite happily for four or five years with zero upgrades (other than perhaps an external drive for backup) and then "trade up" to a new model.
Why would a healthy person need a flu vaccine anyway? Flu's [sic] are normal and should exist, and, if you're healthy you'll manage through a flu just fine.
I'm married, I have two kids under the age of 3, why on earth would I want to risk catching the flu? I'm not going to die, but I am going to be miserable, my wife's going to stress having to look after me *and* the kids and I'm going to pass it to everyone at home.
Stop playing with nature.
Vaccines aren't 'playing with nature' - They're using one of nature's own greatest inventions (the immune system) to protect you.
Do you think chemotherapy for cancer patients is "playing with nature" and my friends who've had cancer should have just been left to die? Do you think antibiotics (which target bacteria) are "playing with nature" and we should amputate infected limbs instead? What a crazy nonsensical thing to say.
There's already a bunch of them who say bafflingly stupid things like 'smallpox wasn't stopped by vaccines' and 'measles never hurt anyone.'
The most bafflingly (great modifier, btw) stupid is when the anti-vaxxers (great noun, btw) say "We don't vaccinate our children because we believe that living a healthy lifestyle is the best protection." Whatever the hell that means.
Of all the insanity on Slashdot, the thing that probably drives me the most crazy is the number of people who reply with "The USA is just as bad" when someone complains about human rights in a totalitarian nation. (And no, I'm not American.) Could the USA do a lot better in the human rights department? Absolutely. Are they orders-of-magnitude better than many, many, many places on this planet? Also absolutely.
Are you joking? Have you ever walked around the outside of the White House? There are protesters camped out all over the place, all the time, none of whom are arrested, and many of whom have been there for months.
>it the USA that is out of control and evil and crazy
Put your sister in a bikini and have her walk down the sidewalk in Times Square. Then have her do the same in Tehran's Grand Bazaar. Report back and let us know which scenario goes best.
The problem is that even the 'basic' information dissemination sites these days are bandwidth-intensive. Facebook / Twitter - They're unusable on a low-bandwidth connection what with all their imbedded features. Heck, even the 'new' Slashdot is barely usable on my older system.
...so not only do you need new networks, you need 'light' interfaces to those networks, a la Lynx or the WAP browsers we were using on our phones a decade ago.
And you do realize that ripping your own encrypted DVD and putting it on your own iPod is 100% illegal because you circumnavigated the DRM of the disc, right?
Yes, of course. I never said I *agree* with all of these laws - I'm just saying that they're currently the law of the land and if you bittorrent you're going to get caught sooner or later, and it's going to cost you time and money. Ripping a DVD to your iPod is, on the other hand, very low risk as there's no easy way for the copyright holder to know you've done it.
Most signs point to the mass lawsuits not holding up, and on an individual level it's completely unprofitable.
TFA indicates that 100K people were sued last year alone, with the average defendant settling out of court for $1000, as $1K is considerably cheaper than the cost of going to court. Doesn't sound to me like it's not working...
See, you keep this cycle of being fed crap. You keep this cycle of DRM going, and you keep this cycle of corps crying over non existance loss in profits going.
You're missing my point- You can get on whatever rightous high horse you want, but the fact remains that if you keep torrenting Dexter or Star Trek or whatever then sooner or later you are going to get bitten, and it's going to cost you a lot of money. You can spend thousands and go all the way to the courts, and you'll lose. If you don't want to get bitten, go on Rotten Tomatoes to see what's good, then order it from Netflix.
Seriously, if you want the content then pay for it
Mod parent up.
It's time to face facts - Torrenting copywritten videos and audio files is eventually going to get you bitten - And you can make all the academic arguements you want about 'data wanting to be free' and blah blah blah but the fact remains that as things sit today the law isn't on your side. Do I rip my DVDs and put them on my iPod? Absolutely. Do I share those rips online? No damn way.
How about installing some 'regular' phones that inmates can use, but monitor all calls? "Hi honey, I miss, how're the kids?" calls are ignored/allowed, but "I need you to go WHACK that bitch!" calls result in punishment...
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for
+1
This is another example of why I get p1ssed off when people refer to the USA as a "police state" (I'm Canadian). People who use this term so loosely really have no idea what living in a police state truly means - It means the internet being shut off with a few phone calls, something that wouldn't happen in the USA without court orders, time, and much protest. To use the term "police state" to refer to nations like the USA belittles the risks people in true police states are actually taking..
Works pretty well here (Vancouver, Canada). You get a bill, you go online, enter your license plate and CC # and pay the bill. Of course the toll is $4, so it makes more sense to mail out a bill.
"Mr. Jones, you testified that Mr. Smith has never been to Las Vegas, and he has never met you. However, Mr. Smith's facebook page indicates that on April 15th he was in fact in Las Vegas, meeting with you. Is this true? Remember, you're under oath."
On my TV room laptop (P3 / optimized XP / IE7) it's a mess. Impossibly slow, crazy illegible formatting, random scrolling. There isn't even a button I can use to make this post. And yeah yeah I know it's an old laptop with old OSes and browers, but yesterday it worked fine - I've made hundreds of posts on this old gadget. Digg, Flickr, Reddit, BoingBoing - They all work fine. It's only Slashdot that doesn't.any more.
As a Hungarian, I'm also pleased that the one and only time the Goblin was downed was at the hands of a Hungarian commander, one Zoltán Dani, who used an old modified Russian radar unit operating at very long wavelengths to defeat the F-117's stealth capability, and used manual guidance on the missiles along with several spotters who reported the flight path.
I'm Canadian and very DISpleased that one of your fellow countryman tried to kill the pilot of one of our friends and NATO allies. Perhaps you'd like to go live under a communist dictatorship again.
Slashdot Mirror
While "SyFy" is on cable and therefore sees a bit of revenue off your cable bill, a big percentage of their revenue comes from advertising. Unfortunately their target market (geeky males) generally don't watch ads. They torrent SyFy shows or PVR them and skip through the ads - So it's likely harder for SyFy to recoup their costs for expensive shows with lots of FX if ad revenues are down. Yeah, yeah, I know 'content wants to be free' blah blah blah, but anyone who has watched fan-produced Star Trek or Star Wars webisodes knows that producing quality Science Fiction television programming is complex and expensive.
Because then you can retract your statements and game modding up for nefarious reasons. Slashdot has permaposting for a good reason.
???
Surely the solution to this is just to remove any mod points if a post is edited? Or allow editing for 15 minutes, and in those 15 minutes, no moderation is allowed.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
Here's what I'd say
The thing is, it's very easy for educated Slashdotters with lots of job options to formulate a response like this. Very different story if you've been unemployed for a long while, benefits are running out and you've got mouths at home to feed - In that scenario it's pretty tough to flip off a prospective employer with whom you've gotten as far as an interview...
How about building computers that are meant to last instead of being meant to be thrown away and "recycled" after 3 years?
I'm writing this on a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop from 2001 - A P3 with 768 meg of RAM running streamlined XP. Works perfectly well for most things. Runs Office 2000 very well, plays DVDs well. About the only things that run very poorly on it are the 'new' Slashdot and Firefox. IE 7 works fine. as does Chrome.
People always need more memory or more disk or a better video card.
No they don't. Lots of people buy laptops, use them quite happily for four or five years with zero upgrades (other than perhaps an external drive for backup) and then "trade up" to a new model.
>I now want to find some who's said that and punch them right in the face until the stupid bleeds out
By all means. You can start with these morons:
http://www.whale.to/a/smallpox_hoax.html
If only I had mod points...
Why would a healthy person need a flu vaccine anyway? Flu's [sic] are normal and should exist, and, if you're healthy you'll manage through a flu just fine.
I'm married, I have two kids under the age of 3, why on earth would I want to risk catching the flu? I'm not going to die, but I am going to be miserable, my wife's going to stress having to look after me *and* the kids and I'm going to pass it to everyone at home.
Stop playing with nature.
Vaccines aren't 'playing with nature' - They're using one of nature's own greatest inventions (the immune system) to protect you.
Do you think chemotherapy for cancer patients is "playing with nature" and my friends who've had cancer should have just been left to die? Do you think antibiotics (which target bacteria) are "playing with nature" and we should amputate infected limbs instead? What a crazy nonsensical thing to say.
There's already a bunch of them who say bafflingly stupid things like 'smallpox wasn't stopped by vaccines' and 'measles never hurt anyone.'
The most bafflingly (great modifier, btw) stupid is when the anti-vaxxers (great noun, btw) say "We don't vaccinate our children because we believe that living a healthy lifestyle is the best protection." Whatever the hell that means.
Amen to that, brother.
Of all the insanity on Slashdot, the thing that probably drives me the most crazy is the number of people who reply with "The USA is just as bad" when someone complains about human rights in a totalitarian nation. (And no, I'm not American.) Could the USA do a lot better in the human rights department? Absolutely. Are they orders-of-magnitude better than many, many, many places on this planet? Also absolutely.
>they'll be arrested
Are you joking? Have you ever walked around the outside of the White House? There are protesters camped out all over the place, all the time, none of whom are arrested, and many of whom have been there for months.
>it the USA that is out of control and evil and crazy
Put your sister in a bikini and have her walk down the sidewalk in Times Square. Then have her do the same in Tehran's Grand Bazaar. Report back and let us know which scenario goes best.
The problem is that even the 'basic' information dissemination sites these days are bandwidth-intensive. Facebook / Twitter - They're unusable on a low-bandwidth connection what with all their imbedded features. Heck, even the 'new' Slashdot is barely usable on my older system.
...so not only do you need new networks, you need 'light' interfaces to those networks, a la Lynx or the WAP browsers we were using on our phones a decade ago.
And you do realize that ripping your own encrypted DVD and putting it on your own iPod is 100% illegal because you circumnavigated the DRM of the disc, right?
Yes, of course. I never said I *agree* with all of these laws - I'm just saying that they're currently the law of the land and if you bittorrent you're going to get caught sooner or later, and it's going to cost you time and money. Ripping a DVD to your iPod is, on the other hand, very low risk as there's no easy way for the copyright holder to know you've done it.
Most signs point to the mass lawsuits not holding up, and on an individual level it's completely unprofitable.
TFA indicates that 100K people were sued last year alone, with the average defendant settling out of court for $1000, as $1K is considerably cheaper than the cost of going to court. Doesn't sound to me like it's not working...
See, you keep this cycle of being fed crap. You keep this cycle of DRM going, and you keep this cycle of corps crying over non existance loss in profits going.
You're missing my point- You can get on whatever rightous high horse you want, but the fact remains that if you keep torrenting Dexter or Star Trek or whatever then sooner or later you are going to get bitten, and it's going to cost you a lot of money. You can spend thousands and go all the way to the courts, and you'll lose. If you don't want to get bitten, go on Rotten Tomatoes to see what's good, then order it from Netflix.
Seriously, if you want the content then pay for it
Mod parent up.
It's time to face facts - Torrenting copywritten videos and audio files is eventually going to get you bitten - And you can make all the academic arguements you want about 'data wanting to be free' and blah blah blah but the fact remains that as things sit today the law isn't on your side. Do I rip my DVDs and put them on my iPod? Absolutely. Do I share those rips online? No damn way.
How about installing some 'regular' phones that inmates can use, but monitor all calls? "Hi honey, I miss, how're the kids?" calls are ignored/allowed, but "I need you to go WHACK that bitch!" calls result in punishment...
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for
+1
This is another example of why I get p1ssed off when people refer to the USA as a "police state" (I'm Canadian). People who use this term so loosely really have no idea what living in a police state truly means - It means the internet being shut off with a few phone calls, something that wouldn't happen in the USA without court orders, time, and much protest. To use the term "police state" to refer to nations like the USA belittles the risks people in true police states are actually taking..
Vacume [sic] tubes
Lots of tube amps still around - For example:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-10423476-47.html
They're going to *mail* bills?
Works pretty well here (Vancouver, Canada). You get a bill, you go online, enter your license plate and CC # and pay the bill. Of course the toll is $4, so it makes more sense to mail out a bill.
...but can they be used as evidence?
"Mr. Jones, you testified that Mr. Smith has never been to Las Vegas, and he has never met you. However, Mr. Smith's facebook page indicates that on April 15th he was in fact in Las Vegas, meeting with you. Is this true? Remember, you're under oath."
On my TV room laptop (P3 / optimized XP / IE7) it's a mess. Impossibly slow, crazy illegible formatting, random scrolling. There isn't even a button I can use to make this post. And yeah yeah I know it's an old laptop with old OSes and browers, but yesterday it worked fine - I've made hundreds of posts on this old gadget. Digg, Flickr, Reddit, BoingBoing - They all work fine. It's only Slashdot that doesn't.any more.
As a Hungarian, I'm also pleased that the one and only time the Goblin was downed was at the hands of a Hungarian commander, one Zoltán Dani, who used an old modified Russian radar unit operating at very long wavelengths to defeat the F-117's stealth capability, and used manual guidance on the missiles along with several spotters who reported the flight path.
I'm Canadian and very DISpleased that one of your fellow countryman tried to kill the pilot of one of our friends and NATO allies. Perhaps you'd like to go live under a communist dictatorship again.