I wonder how this compares to Microsoft's Xbox and their Live service. When I first bought my Xbox 360 and subscribed to Live, the device had NO paid advertisements on it. Since then, they've revamped the Xbox interface in order to allow a massive amount of advertisement (on some screens, the majority of the screen is nothing but advertisements now), and all this on a paid device while subscribing to their paid premium service. If I wanted to keep using Xbox Live to play with friends, I had no choice but to start watching all those advertisements.
The Xbox is a little different than Sling, I suppose, in that the advertisements are passive and don't actively interrupt my activities. However, we've seen games that have attempted to patch an advertisement into a loading screen. What would happen if Microsoft patched the OS so that you saw a streamed advertisement at the beginning of each game you played? It sounds ludicrous, but you know that some bean-counter has probably suggested this at some point, although wiser heads knew they'd be looking at mass outrage+lawsuits if they actually tried this.
Should companies be able to "alter the deal" via patches after you've bought and paid for hardware, especially if that alteration makes for an arguably *worse* consumer experience?
Actually, someone in the comments below the original article indicated that they couldn't use the feature because their hardware didn't meet the minimum specification. So, it may actually require a minimum level of GPU compliance. This would make sense, as this is specifically targeted at gamers and not a "general purpose" desktop recording system.
It's not all wasted effort, just... a lot of it. Consider the advertising of putting up a sign outside your restaurant (yep, that's advertising too). The type of sign you choose is a reflection of the business you have. Is it a high-class, exclusive restaurant, or a family eatery, or a sports bar? The type of sign, it's design, and so on, all let passers-by on the street know that there's a place to eat nearby, and what sort of place it is. The trick is to put reasonable regulations in place (typically local ordinances) that make sure businesses don't have to get into a pissing match of building bigger and taller signs to compete with each other. That way, the neighborhood stays nice looking and businesses can still advertise their location to passers-by.
Internet advertising is the same way, in that it can be reasonable and informative, or loud, ugly, and obnoxious. I don't bother ticking Slashdot's "hide advertisements", because I've found them to be quite unobtrusive. Contrast this with Microsoft's Xbox Live service, where now the MAJORITY of the space on a number of pages is actually taken up by advertisements. Some are advertising other games, which is passably acceptable in moderation (I've picked up some downloadable games on sale thanks to those ads). One would assume that's relevant to an Xbox owner's interests. But WTF do Doritos have to do with anything, and why am I paying a lot of money to see those ads? They also intersperse advertisements in the middle of search results. It's definitely going a bit overboard, and there's financial incentive to add more and more advertisement until either consumers or regulators finally push back.
If they'd lost, they'd have been ignored. Have you noticed that the PAVAs* (Penis And Vagina Accountants) only seem to focus on highly successful enterprises and organizations? Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc. They don't really talk much about Yahoo because a) their market value is bleeding away, and b) their CEO is a woman, so it's hard to play the "institutional sexism" card there.
* Thanks first post AC. I'm going to use this from now on. It's a far better description than "Social Justice Warrior". It's apparently also the name of a liquid that incapacitates people with a severe burning sensation when it comes in contact with their eyes. Seems appropriate.
Behind my house growing up was an unfinished gravel road. Every year or so, a truck would drive down it and spew some sort of oil mix on it. If you drove on it shortly after, your car would be a mess of oil spatters. After a day or two, it hardened into a sort of poor-man's asphalt. So, yes, you actually can vastly improve the condition of the road by dumping a lot of oil on it.
I've heard an experimental variant of this is actually spreading used canola oil on the road. Apparently, the only downside is that your roads smell like french fries for a day or two after the application.
The US went through a period where individual citizens were being targeted in RIAA lawsuits en masse and fined anywhere from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars for distribution of copyright materials via file sharing programs. These laws were likely written with the intent of punishing those who commercially distributed illegal copyrighted materials, but were later turned on individuals. College students, housewives, single mothers, grandparents, disabled persons... didn't matter. Tens of thousands of individuals were sued in a five-year campaign deliberately designed to strike fear into the hears of people using file sharing programs.
Let's just say that some are not so trusting as you that this will *only* target criminal enterprises and not individuals.
I've been wanting to see that documentary for quite some time, but have never gotten around to it. Actually, I've *really* wanted to see a nuke go off in person for a long time as well, as it would be the most amazing fireworks display imaginable. Of course, that's the "irrational" side of me. The "rational" side of me understands fully well that if I ever manage to see a nuke go off in person, it's likely going to be a very, very bad day.
I think human heads grow a bit slower than other parts of the body. A child's skull is proportionally larger to their body than an adult's. So I'd guess that works in her favor. From what I could see in the pictures and according to the article, the skull top was not build in one piece, but three disconnected pieces. I think the idea is that as she grows, it will expand, and the spaces between the pieces will be filled in with her own bone structure.
As imperfect a solution as this may be, what's the alternative here? Apparently, pretty much just death. I hope things go well for her.
These people are only after attention, and by putting this story on slashdot, we've given them exactly what they wanted. No sane person seriously believes this or gives it even the least bit of credibility. Oh, and it's not really even funny either, if that was the angle - it's just sad. I'm not even going to bother reading the article, because I don't want to contribute any advertising traffic.
My summary: Still plenty of attention-seeking morons in the world. News at 11.
A good point. I took a closer look at the specs of higher end dynamic studio mics, and the difference is pretty clear. A very flat, extended range that likely extends past 20kHz, although since charts never seem to extend beyond that, it's hard to tell. Thanks for the correction, embarrassing as it may be.
I'll stand by the rest of my comments, though. Fortunately, I know a bit more about audio compression and research into subjective AB tests than I do about studio microphones, so I believe the rest of my statements will hold up to scrutiny.
Well, that's why I threw in the "most" qualifier.;-) According to Wikipedia, typical frequencies of dog whistles are 23 to 53kHz. How high above 20kHz have you recorded?
That unit uses the same mic as the H4N, btw, whose frequency specs are listed here. It definitely goes above 20kHz (and unfortunately cuts off there), but you can see by the curve it starts dropping off fairly rapidly just before that. So, some microphones definitely go beyond, but just lose their flat characteristics. I'm curious what the curve looks like beyond 20kHz, and what the maximum range is.
Pfft. Not that I care if people want to blow their money on formats or equipment that's over-engineered by several factors beyond what they could possibly hear. And if they feel a bit more special believing that, unlike most other humans, they alone have "golden ears" that can hear the difference... well, that's fine with me too. Just don't try to shovel that shit in my direction. Prove it to me with a blind A/B test, and then I'll take your claims seriously.
It's pretty telling when you actually hear what Neil Young thinks about compressed audio file formats:
“We’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78 [rpm record]. What happened?
“The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
“If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good? “
It's clear he doesn't really understand the technology, and thinks that compressing a song to 1/20th of the original size means that it's only 5% of the value of the original. Yes, you can overcompress audio until it sounds like crap, and MP3 is getting a bit long in the tooth. That's why most people have switched to 256kbps AAC (Apple music streams at this quality, btw), and the overwhelming majority of people in A/B tests can't tell the difference between compressed and non-compressed audio, nor between 16-bit/44.1kHz vs high resolution audio.
Also... because every single sci-fi movie *ever* has shown domed cities with tube-based vehicles shuttling people between them. It's not exactly the biggest mental leap to make.
What if politicians couldn't receive any money, at all ?
Campaigns were financed npr style in a series of debates, all other campaigning illegal. Politicians paid a modest income and all other income illegal.
Statesman, you say ?
It's tempting to go that route, but that gives an awful lot of power and influence over whoever organizes those debates, and you get into a whole mess of who you invite, etc. And there's another tiny problem:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
You can make the argument that political speech is the most important speech to protect, and you can argue that part of political speech is promoting the candidate who best matches your beliefs. Should the government deny you the ability to send $20 to your candidate of choice so they can print flyers, signs, and create radio, TV, and internet ads, or organize a local rally or town hall? And if that's prohibited, should the government be able to prohibit an individual or organization from doing the same with their own finances? Can you even blog favorably about the candidate of your choice if you're paying for the hosting and traffic? You can start moving down a very uncomfortable slope, because I saw no exceptions listed in that text above that protects our speech and freedom of the press.
It's sort of easy to say "no money", but what you're really doing then is denying entry to the field of anyone that doesn't already have a platform or name recognition, which may unintentionally cause even more favoritism toward the rich and powerful, as odd as that might seem. While you can point to cases of some corporation "buying the vote", you can also find examples of grass-roots campaigns that were largely made up of small, individual donations and grew to a national level. Quash one and you tend to get them both.
It's a nice sentiment, but absurdly naive, if you think that politics can be solved by applying programming-type *logic*. Hell, we can't even get rid of *office politics*, and you think you're going to take on the real thing? Some of the smartest programmers I know would likely get chewed up and spat out by actual politicians and media.
So, here's the problem with such straightforward thinking:
What if we could, for example, write a program which will show you at a glance, which politicians have the highest or lowest correlation of campaign contributions to supported policy?
And? I'm not sure what that tells you. A campaign contribution does not indicate corruption. Let's say I'm a big believer in the same sorts of principles as the NRA, and the NRA donates $1000 to get me elected. Have I been bribed or bought by the NRA? Your answer might depend on whether or not you personally *agree with* what the NRA stands for. Let's change it to the EFF. I've been given $1000 by the EFF. In these cases, have the politicians been bought, or are they being supported because the organizations believe them to hold views which they agree with?
There are all sorts of gray areas in politics as well. If you never compromise on your beliefs, but your principled stand either ends up blocking or stalling otherwise useful legislation, or gets you entirely excluded from the decision-making process, did you do the right thing? If you've got what you believe to be a bad bill in front of you, and your choices are to: a) oppose it, and have it pass as it, or b) engage and make it slightly less bad, then which is the better option?
I'm not sure I have a real answer for what *should* be done, but I don't think it's helpful to pretend that technology can solve what are ultimately very *human* problems. Can an algorithm fix your personal relationships as well? Same principle, I think. I'm all for getting more technically-minded people in office simply because they'll have a better understanding of technology-related issues, but I'm not going to hold my breath that a more analytical sort of mind will make a better politician.
From what I've heard, some sites like Crunchyroll are still contractually obligated to use Flash because of the DRM that Flash uses. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon Prime is similarly constrained. Maybe that will change if, as you say, HTML5 can use DRM now, but things like that take a while to change.
It's ridiculous, because it's not exactly hard to grab a torrent of just about any show you want with just a tiny bit of effort. The DRM prevents NO ONE from pirating their shows. I pay for service for a few reasons: I'd like to support the development of my favorite programming, as well as the fact that streaming services are convenient and a reasonable price compared to cable. They'd probably get more subscribers if they didn't force people to use crappy, obsolete plug-in technology like Flash or Silverlight in the first place.
That's all true. But do we wish to compromise the security of the internet for the sake of those (and other) sites? Every computer that gets infected via Flash (or any vector like the Java plugin, which is arguably even worse than Flash) is likely to become a bot, which will then in turn attack other sites and individual computers. It's really the same reason we want to shut down crusty, unpatched Windows XP machines that are sitting exposed on the internet, infested with goodness knows what malware, and attacking others.
But honestly, don't worry. My guess is that Flash will hang around for another five years at the very least, if not a decade (in purely a maintenance mode, of course). Flash just has too much traction to disappear in 18 months, despite what the FB security chief is calling for. If you want to be cynical, it's a way to generate some headlines without actually accomplishing anything while looking like they're being tough about security issues.
Public transportation makes a lot of sense in very high-density areas, or between two dispersed high-density regions. This is pretty obvious, because you're optimizing the nature of inherent point-to-point travel. It even works pretty well for the case in point-to-area patterns, where large numbers of people are converting from different areas to a single point, then moving back out. You can build your transportation in a hub-like pattern in this case.
However, when there's very little overlap in point to point destinations, public transportation is a horrible option. For instance, if you live in one outlying city (most major cities have large rings of smaller cities scattered among the suburbs) but work in another, there's no easy way to build enough public transportation infrastructure to cover all those areas. People will need to either walk a large difference, hop on two or three lines, or both. My experience has been that, among my colleagues, those who have tried public transportation have largely given up because of the three to four times increase in their commuting time. It's just not worth it.
Maybe something like SkyTran? Sure, but I don't want my city to be the first one to try it out. Let some other sucker work out the bugs and pay ten times more than the original estimated price, which is always a ridiculous lowball figure anyhow.
Pretty hilarious that the summary goes to such lengths to describe Pluto for us, but the next article with drop some acronym like DPITMD*, and everyone but a few people who happen to be in a relevant industry will scratch their heads and think "okay, but wtf is DPITMD?"
Seems like a desperation move for a company with under-target earnings, if they're willing to poison long-term relationships with their customers like that. You're going to see businesses deciding that they don't like having a gun held to their head. They'll pay the ransom for now, but some of them will probably start investigating other options in the background.
Slashdot Mirror
*facepalm* Damn, I'm typically fairly careful about spelling and grammar, and then I screw up like that in a submission.
Sigh... at least I'm consistent in my screwups, huh?
I wonder how this compares to Microsoft's Xbox and their Live service. When I first bought my Xbox 360 and subscribed to Live, the device had NO paid advertisements on it. Since then, they've revamped the Xbox interface in order to allow a massive amount of advertisement (on some screens, the majority of the screen is nothing but advertisements now), and all this on a paid device while subscribing to their paid premium service. If I wanted to keep using Xbox Live to play with friends, I had no choice but to start watching all those advertisements.
The Xbox is a little different than Sling, I suppose, in that the advertisements are passive and don't actively interrupt my activities. However, we've seen games that have attempted to patch an advertisement into a loading screen. What would happen if Microsoft patched the OS so that you saw a streamed advertisement at the beginning of each game you played? It sounds ludicrous, but you know that some bean-counter has probably suggested this at some point, although wiser heads knew they'd be looking at mass outrage+lawsuits if they actually tried this.
Should companies be able to "alter the deal" via patches after you've bought and paid for hardware, especially if that alteration makes for an arguably *worse* consumer experience?
Actually, someone in the comments below the original article indicated that they couldn't use the feature because their hardware didn't meet the minimum specification. So, it may actually require a minimum level of GPU compliance. This would make sense, as this is specifically targeted at gamers and not a "general purpose" desktop recording system.
It's not all wasted effort, just... a lot of it. Consider the advertising of putting up a sign outside your restaurant (yep, that's advertising too). The type of sign you choose is a reflection of the business you have. Is it a high-class, exclusive restaurant, or a family eatery, or a sports bar? The type of sign, it's design, and so on, all let passers-by on the street know that there's a place to eat nearby, and what sort of place it is. The trick is to put reasonable regulations in place (typically local ordinances) that make sure businesses don't have to get into a pissing match of building bigger and taller signs to compete with each other. That way, the neighborhood stays nice looking and businesses can still advertise their location to passers-by.
Internet advertising is the same way, in that it can be reasonable and informative, or loud, ugly, and obnoxious. I don't bother ticking Slashdot's "hide advertisements", because I've found them to be quite unobtrusive. Contrast this with Microsoft's Xbox Live service, where now the MAJORITY of the space on a number of pages is actually taken up by advertisements. Some are advertising other games, which is passably acceptable in moderation (I've picked up some downloadable games on sale thanks to those ads). One would assume that's relevant to an Xbox owner's interests. But WTF do Doritos have to do with anything, and why am I paying a lot of money to see those ads? They also intersperse advertisements in the middle of search results. It's definitely going a bit overboard, and there's financial incentive to add more and more advertisement until either consumers or regulators finally push back.
If they'd lost, they'd have been ignored. Have you noticed that the PAVAs* (Penis And Vagina Accountants) only seem to focus on highly successful enterprises and organizations? Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc. They don't really talk much about Yahoo because a) their market value is bleeding away, and b) their CEO is a woman, so it's hard to play the "institutional sexism" card there.
* Thanks first post AC. I'm going to use this from now on. It's a far better description than "Social Justice Warrior". It's apparently also the name of a liquid that incapacitates people with a severe burning sensation when it comes in contact with their eyes. Seems appropriate.
Behind my house growing up was an unfinished gravel road. Every year or so, a truck would drive down it and spew some sort of oil mix on it. If you drove on it shortly after, your car would be a mess of oil spatters. After a day or two, it hardened into a sort of poor-man's asphalt. So, yes, you actually can vastly improve the condition of the road by dumping a lot of oil on it.
I've heard an experimental variant of this is actually spreading used canola oil on the road. Apparently, the only downside is that your roads smell like french fries for a day or two after the application.
The US went through a period where individual citizens were being targeted in RIAA lawsuits en masse and fined anywhere from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars for distribution of copyright materials via file sharing programs. These laws were likely written with the intent of punishing those who commercially distributed illegal copyrighted materials, but were later turned on individuals. College students, housewives, single mothers, grandparents, disabled persons... didn't matter. Tens of thousands of individuals were sued in a five-year campaign deliberately designed to strike fear into the hears of people using file sharing programs.
Let's just say that some are not so trusting as you that this will *only* target criminal enterprises and not individuals.
Nah, like this.
I've been wanting to see that documentary for quite some time, but have never gotten around to it. Actually, I've *really* wanted to see a nuke go off in person for a long time as well, as it would be the most amazing fireworks display imaginable. Of course, that's the "irrational" side of me. The "rational" side of me understands fully well that if I ever manage to see a nuke go off in person, it's likely going to be a very, very bad day.
Slashdot is barely a blip on anyone's radar these days.
I think human heads grow a bit slower than other parts of the body. A child's skull is proportionally larger to their body than an adult's. So I'd guess that works in her favor. From what I could see in the pictures and according to the article, the skull top was not build in one piece, but three disconnected pieces. I think the idea is that as she grows, it will expand, and the spaces between the pieces will be filled in with her own bone structure.
As imperfect a solution as this may be, what's the alternative here? Apparently, pretty much just death. I hope things go well for her.
These people are only after attention, and by putting this story on slashdot, we've given them exactly what they wanted. No sane person seriously believes this or gives it even the least bit of credibility. Oh, and it's not really even funny either, if that was the angle - it's just sad. I'm not even going to bother reading the article, because I don't want to contribute any advertising traffic.
My summary: Still plenty of attention-seeking morons in the world. News at 11.
A good point. I took a closer look at the specs of higher end dynamic studio mics, and the difference is pretty clear. A very flat, extended range that likely extends past 20kHz, although since charts never seem to extend beyond that, it's hard to tell. Thanks for the correction, embarrassing as it may be.
I'll stand by the rest of my comments, though. Fortunately, I know a bit more about audio compression and research into subjective AB tests than I do about studio microphones, so I believe the rest of my statements will hold up to scrutiny.
Well, that's why I threw in the "most" qualifier. ;-) According to Wikipedia, typical frequencies of dog whistles are 23 to 53kHz. How high above 20kHz have you recorded?
That unit uses the same mic as the H4N, btw, whose frequency specs are listed here. It definitely goes above 20kHz (and unfortunately cuts off there), but you can see by the curve it starts dropping off fairly rapidly just before that. So, some microphones definitely go beyond, but just lose their flat characteristics. I'm curious what the curve looks like beyond 20kHz, and what the maximum range is.
Most studio microphone frequency charts typically drop off before or near 20kHz anyhow
44KHz is the sampling rate, not the playback rate.
See Nyquist theorem
The Nyquist theorum has nothing to do with analog devices like microphones or speakers.
Most studio microphone frequency charts typically drop off before or near 20kHz anyhow, so it's unlikely it would even be captured in the first place.
Pfft. Not that I care if people want to blow their money on formats or equipment that's over-engineered by several factors beyond what they could possibly hear. And if they feel a bit more special believing that, unlike most other humans, they alone have "golden ears" that can hear the difference... well, that's fine with me too. Just don't try to shovel that shit in my direction. Prove it to me with a blind A/B test, and then I'll take your claims seriously.
It's pretty telling when you actually hear what Neil Young thinks about compressed audio file formats:
“We’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78 [rpm record]. What happened?
“The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
“If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good? “
It's clear he doesn't really understand the technology, and thinks that compressing a song to 1/20th of the original size means that it's only 5% of the value of the original. Yes, you can overcompress audio until it sounds like crap, and MP3 is getting a bit long in the tooth. That's why most people have switched to 256kbps AAC (Apple music streams at this quality, btw), and the overwhelming majority of people in A/B tests can't tell the difference between compressed and non-compressed audio, nor between 16-bit/44.1kHz vs high resolution audio.
Also... because every single sci-fi movie *ever* has shown domed cities with tube-based vehicles shuttling people between them. It's not exactly the biggest mental leap to make.
What if politicians couldn't receive any money, at all ?
Campaigns were financed npr style in a series of debates, all other campaigning illegal. Politicians paid a modest income and all other income illegal.
Statesman, you say ?
It's tempting to go that route, but that gives an awful lot of power and influence over whoever organizes those debates, and you get into a whole mess of who you invite, etc. And there's another tiny problem:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
You can make the argument that political speech is the most important speech to protect, and you can argue that part of political speech is promoting the candidate who best matches your beliefs. Should the government deny you the ability to send $20 to your candidate of choice so they can print flyers, signs, and create radio, TV, and internet ads, or organize a local rally or town hall? And if that's prohibited, should the government be able to prohibit an individual or organization from doing the same with their own finances? Can you even blog favorably about the candidate of your choice if you're paying for the hosting and traffic? You can start moving down a very uncomfortable slope, because I saw no exceptions listed in that text above that protects our speech and freedom of the press.
It's sort of easy to say "no money", but what you're really doing then is denying entry to the field of anyone that doesn't already have a platform or name recognition, which may unintentionally cause even more favoritism toward the rich and powerful, as odd as that might seem. While you can point to cases of some corporation "buying the vote", you can also find examples of grass-roots campaigns that were largely made up of small, individual donations and grew to a national level. Quash one and you tend to get them both.
Just some food for thought.
It's a nice sentiment, but absurdly naive, if you think that politics can be solved by applying programming-type *logic*. Hell, we can't even get rid of *office politics*, and you think you're going to take on the real thing? Some of the smartest programmers I know would likely get chewed up and spat out by actual politicians and media.
So, here's the problem with such straightforward thinking:
What if we could, for example, write a program which will show you at a glance, which politicians have the highest or lowest correlation of campaign contributions to supported policy?
And? I'm not sure what that tells you. A campaign contribution does not indicate corruption. Let's say I'm a big believer in the same sorts of principles as the NRA, and the NRA donates $1000 to get me elected. Have I been bribed or bought by the NRA? Your answer might depend on whether or not you personally *agree with* what the NRA stands for. Let's change it to the EFF. I've been given $1000 by the EFF. In these cases, have the politicians been bought, or are they being supported because the organizations believe them to hold views which they agree with?
There are all sorts of gray areas in politics as well. If you never compromise on your beliefs, but your principled stand either ends up blocking or stalling otherwise useful legislation, or gets you entirely excluded from the decision-making process, did you do the right thing? If you've got what you believe to be a bad bill in front of you, and your choices are to: a) oppose it, and have it pass as it, or b) engage and make it slightly less bad, then which is the better option?
I'm not sure I have a real answer for what *should* be done, but I don't think it's helpful to pretend that technology can solve what are ultimately very *human* problems. Can an algorithm fix your personal relationships as well? Same principle, I think. I'm all for getting more technically-minded people in office simply because they'll have a better understanding of technology-related issues, but I'm not going to hold my breath that a more analytical sort of mind will make a better politician.
From what I've heard, some sites like Crunchyroll are still contractually obligated to use Flash because of the DRM that Flash uses. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon Prime is similarly constrained. Maybe that will change if, as you say, HTML5 can use DRM now, but things like that take a while to change.
It's ridiculous, because it's not exactly hard to grab a torrent of just about any show you want with just a tiny bit of effort. The DRM prevents NO ONE from pirating their shows. I pay for service for a few reasons: I'd like to support the development of my favorite programming, as well as the fact that streaming services are convenient and a reasonable price compared to cable. They'd probably get more subscribers if they didn't force people to use crappy, obsolete plug-in technology like Flash or Silverlight in the first place.
It's a power-trip thing. For the arresting officer, I mean... not the phone.
That's all true. But do we wish to compromise the security of the internet for the sake of those (and other) sites? Every computer that gets infected via Flash (or any vector like the Java plugin, which is arguably even worse than Flash) is likely to become a bot, which will then in turn attack other sites and individual computers. It's really the same reason we want to shut down crusty, unpatched Windows XP machines that are sitting exposed on the internet, infested with goodness knows what malware, and attacking others.
But honestly, don't worry. My guess is that Flash will hang around for another five years at the very least, if not a decade (in purely a maintenance mode, of course). Flash just has too much traction to disappear in 18 months, despite what the FB security chief is calling for. If you want to be cynical, it's a way to generate some headlines without actually accomplishing anything while looking like they're being tough about security issues.
Public transportation makes a lot of sense in very high-density areas, or between two dispersed high-density regions. This is pretty obvious, because you're optimizing the nature of inherent point-to-point travel. It even works pretty well for the case in point-to-area patterns, where large numbers of people are converting from different areas to a single point, then moving back out. You can build your transportation in a hub-like pattern in this case.
However, when there's very little overlap in point to point destinations, public transportation is a horrible option. For instance, if you live in one outlying city (most major cities have large rings of smaller cities scattered among the suburbs) but work in another, there's no easy way to build enough public transportation infrastructure to cover all those areas. People will need to either walk a large difference, hop on two or three lines, or both. My experience has been that, among my colleagues, those who have tried public transportation have largely given up because of the three to four times increase in their commuting time. It's just not worth it.
Maybe something like SkyTran? Sure, but I don't want my city to be the first one to try it out. Let some other sucker work out the bugs and pay ten times more than the original estimated price, which is always a ridiculous lowball figure anyhow.
Pretty hilarious that the summary goes to such lengths to describe Pluto for us, but the next article with drop some acronym like DPITMD*, and everyone but a few people who happen to be in a relevant industry will scratch their heads and think "okay, but wtf is DPITMD?"
* Describing Pluto In Too Much Detail
Seems like a desperation move for a company with under-target earnings, if they're willing to poison long-term relationships with their customers like that. You're going to see businesses deciding that they don't like having a gun held to their head. They'll pay the ransom for now, but some of them will probably start investigating other options in the background.