I remember back in the 70s the Three Stooges were banned from TV in a lot of areas due to violent content. The original Baretta show died when it was on top because the standard was one violent act per half hour and Robert Blake refused to limit the shows based on the standard, definate hindsight irony. Europe tends to be far more sensitive to violence and far less sensitive to sex. The US has been the opposite traditionally but of late both tend to be red flags.
Youtube's business model has depended on copyrighted material for roughly half it's content. Their stance is tell us what you don't like and we'll take it down. Well they are effectively asking the copyright holders to police their site. Viacom will have to create an entire department just to police Youtube. Youtube benefits from the traffic while Viacom takes on the expense of tracking down copyrighted content. Let's say I start a TV network based on old TV shows. Half are in public domain and the other half are copyrighted. My policy is is you complain about a specific episode I'll stop broadcasting that episode. It's even worse with Youtube because it's like tens of thousands of TV stations running at the same time and even if they take down the episode some one can post it again minutes later. It's an impossible situation for Viacom. The only option other than fighting it is to let them run content for free. If they do that the advertisers will refuse to pay when large numbers watch commercial free postings. There's already been a drop in commerical revenues. The networks are facing a loosing battle and what it means is eventually little or no new content. In the old days just for primetime the networks would do three hours or more of content with even more non primetime content. Now nearly half of television is paid advertisements and a lot of the rest is reruns. The average for primetime content is less than two hours and dropping and a lot of that is reality TV. Network TV won't survive in the long run. People may not post and file share lesser shows but they will the popular ones and those are the profitable ones due to commercials. Take away the profit and TV goes away. The only other option is going to a BBC system where tax money is used for broadcast TV and the budgets of the average show is pocket change.
At exactly what point do we accept that change is happening? I hear more and more elaborate explainations for what is happening to try to discount Global Warming when the global warming model has been in place for years. This is hardly a new thing the media simply woke up a few years ago. There's been evidence since the 60s and compelling evidence since the 80s. Now even laymen are noticing. Exactly how many record years in a row do we have to have to make clear? All the models say the lower hemisphere will be less affected and New Zealand is very isolated with ocean temperatures creating most of the weather. Ocean temperatures have only risen one degree. At the poles it's been more like six or seven. If the change had happened in a single year there'd be panic but climates change slowly. Why we should be concerned is these types of changes take hundreds of years and they are happening in decades. I see little hope of people changing because there needs to be a radical change in how we live to correct the problem and there's been no significant change and a major resistence to any change. As contributions from China and developing countries to CO2 increase the problem will excellorate. I think when coastal property worldwide is devastated then people will wake up but not before. The problem is it'll be decades too late by then. What we are seeing now is nothing. Right now the environment is compensating for the worst effects but everyone seems to agree there's a limit we just don't know what that is. The temperature spike has been most dramatic in the last three to five years so we may have already passed that limit. If you aren't interested in the environment how about the money? The situation might be reversed by spending billions today, tomorrow it'll cost trillions. Not to reverse it because that won't be possible by then but trillions in lost property and droughts. The southern hemisphere won't be unaffected and actually ground zero on every model is Africa. The US is likely to be one of the least affected and I believe New Zealand will be somewhat safe but Europe and Australia will get slammed and much of China will go desert. Kind of surprised a Kiwii would be blowing off environmental issues. I was there during the Millenium rollover and skin cancer was near epidemic. I found I didn't get tanned but fifteen minutes in the sun and I'd get a burn. Think of this as the Ozone Layer on steriods if that helps you wrap your mind around it better.
I remember a quote about there would only be on average a significant nuclear accident every thousand years. The first accident occured before the first commercial plant was built, a small test reactor blew. Since then the safety record has been pretty miserable. The obvious ones have been Three Mile Island and Chernovyl but there have been lots of other nuclear accidents with one of the worst in this country the leaking waste water at the Hanford site which threatens a major river. In an ideal world it might be considered safe but humans aren't great at safety. In end the end companies cut corners and accidents happen. Often it's just outright human error. Coal can be burned cleanly but it's expensive so the companies don't do it. If you filter smoke and trap CO2 cheap coal power gets more expensive. Ultimately the issues are greed and human error and we aren't getting rid of either of those anytime soon.
Why is piracy so staunchly defended in the tech community? I know rationalizations like fair use are quoted but the truth is people want free movies and music. The piracy on this scale and technology are a recent thing. I know it was the stone age but when I was growing up people saved up for a record album, yes I mean vinyl records. If they couldn't aford it they just listened to the radio. There's nothing in the Constitution about free exchange of copyrighted material, if I record a song you don't own it I do. I know this is a troll post because it's not bashing copyright holders but at the core this is about people wanting to avoid paying for music and movies.
Mars is a bit further away than the local Chemist Shop. It's extremely difficult to get to Mars and much harder yet to land on it safely. NASA still has the best record at pulling off an nearly impossible task. If it wasn't for the shuttle program NASA has an excellent record. Name another country or agency with half it's accomplishments. Only the Russian program is in their league and they still haven't landed a person on the moon let alone done it repeatedly without loosing anyone inflight. NASA has had it's failures but they have to be given credit for all the accomplishments. The Hubble alone is a staggering achievement.
how many supposedly deomcratic governments hate and fear freedom. In the US Bush was yanking citizens rights as he was proclaiming the terrorist hate us for our freedom. I'm not as familiar with the British Constitution so I'm not sure about the legality of the all the big brother tactics. In the US the Constitution is quite specific about unreasonable search and seisure. Britian has taken the stance of zero privacy and the US is headed in that direction. Is the reason in the US to lock more people up? Our prisons are already over crowded. The dark side of the electronics boom is it's making it possible to micromanage peoples lives. Cheap cameras and powerful computers are giving the governments an unpresidented ability to look over our shoulders. Nothing to hide? Everyone forgets the McCarthy era when innocent lives were ruined for no reason. The true irony in that case was if they were Communists our Constitution allows them to preach it from the steps of the White House but the law was abused for personal gain. It's always about power and control.
I think the new servers made everyone take notice in the business world. Now with Vista getting routinely bashed even in the pro PC press it's made everyone take a second look at Macs. This is a trend that started even before Vista was released and the release of OSX and the hardware price drops made a lot of people notice Mac. Last year saw record sales for Mac and this year is likely to continue the trend. OSX Leopard is probably going to cause a spike because from all reports it delivers on it's promises. What has never been pointed out is Mac managed record sales in the middle of a massive transition. When they launched the Intel Macs very little software was compatible. By summer that had changed and now most software has been ported. The switch to Intel did make a lot of people take notice and Bootcamp was a big help but to manage record sales during a transition with the normal chaos is very impressive. I will say there was surprisingly little chaos for such a major shift. They seemed to have learned their lesson with the early OSX mess and made the tranisition to Intel as smooth as possible. This is an amazing window for Mac and they are positioned well to take advantage of it. One prediction is Microsoft really tries hard to dump Office for Mac. Expect more problems with the Mac version and Microsoft to try to make a case for it not being practical to continue support. Microsoft doesn't like competition and Mac is likely to gain a few points of market share. I'm not sure that it'll ever pass 10% of market but that's still a huge amount of growth. The lack of the majority of software not supporting Mac, mostly lower end but by volume most doesn't where as most high end does, and a lack of options for equipment. They have a nice selection but it's a tiny fraction compared to Windows. Ultimately it's third party support that's Windows strength. If that ever changes they may be in serious trouble. Doubt it ever will though.
how often third world countries embrace alternative sources where as we're told they are too expensive in the first world. There's a good reason many use alternative sources in these countries, the lack of an infastructure for delivering power.
Almost easier to make a worst of list since none of them are impressive. The worst experience I had was with Sprint. I was with them five years ago and found that in the San Fernado Valley, LA, half the valley wasn't covered. That's pretty miserable for service. Every service I've used has had holes in service and dropped calls. I'm often calling from one cell phone to another so it's tough to tell whose service is causing the lousy connection. Service has gotten cheaper but quality hasn't improved over the years. In some senses it's gotten worse. I think most people would prefer better service than more features.
The profit margins are very high on successful games. This isn't about profit as you mentioned it's about "extra" profit. This comes out of brainstorming sessions where execs are trying to figure out how to squeeze a bit more profit out of a game. It's the same logic as putting 49 olives in a jar instead of 50. It's nickell and diming to make money all the while screwing the customer. It's also like putting four or five trailers in front of DVDs. Generally they are from the same company so they are just taking advantage of free advertising. I paid for the DVD so why should I be subjected to their ads everytime I watch the DVD? The joke is with DVDs they aren't even selling the space they are annoying the hell out of me just to take advantage of a captive audience.
Funny how often the US gets to bear the brunt of development costs while the rest of the world gets deep discounts. It's not just software but drugs as well. Even Canada gets radically cheaper drug prices than the US. Part of it is government policies but the bulk is corporate america bleeding the US dry then discounting the rest of the world. Interesting that some drugs can be sold for a few dollars a dose at a profit overseas and yet sell for tens of dollars here. Microsoft can count on the US to pay for the development costs so the rest of the world is gravy. Europe doesn't see the software discounts generally but a lot of the world does. I'm sure Microsoft is claiming hundreds of millions to perhaps billions in developing Vista but we pay for that development in higher software prices. In this case we aren't getting much for our money. The added security seems to come with a high anoyance factor and the eye candie we can live without. Direct X10 sounds impressive but do we really need a whole new OS to run it? There are some definate improvements in memory limits and such but we pay for it in radically greater system requirements. The low end computer manufactures are likely going to be stuck with Linux since the system requirements are so high. Ironically that will come back to bite Microsoft because more and more entry level users will become in exposed to Linux. They may be trying to avoid that with the foreign markets because people are going to be less inclined to pay both the high OS and hardware costs. Give the students cheap OSs then hopefully they stay branded to Microsoft.
Don't you just need a pick and shovel and a mule to mine with? Okay it's going to be hard to stick a space helmet on one but it's got to be cheaper than all the fancy hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember back in the 70s the Three Stooges were banned from TV in a lot of areas due to violent content. The original Baretta show died when it was on top because the standard was one violent act per half hour and Robert Blake refused to limit the shows based on the standard, definate hindsight irony. Europe tends to be far more sensitive to violence and far less sensitive to sex. The US has been the opposite traditionally but of late both tend to be red flags.
Just imagine what they could do with two photons!
Youtube's business model has depended on copyrighted material for roughly half it's content. Their stance is tell us what you don't like and we'll take it down. Well they are effectively asking the copyright holders to police their site. Viacom will have to create an entire department just to police Youtube. Youtube benefits from the traffic while Viacom takes on the expense of tracking down copyrighted content. Let's say I start a TV network based on old TV shows. Half are in public domain and the other half are copyrighted. My policy is is you complain about a specific episode I'll stop broadcasting that episode. It's even worse with Youtube because it's like tens of thousands of TV stations running at the same time and even if they take down the episode some one can post it again minutes later. It's an impossible situation for Viacom. The only option other than fighting it is to let them run content for free. If they do that the advertisers will refuse to pay when large numbers watch commercial free postings. There's already been a drop in commerical revenues. The networks are facing a loosing battle and what it means is eventually little or no new content. In the old days just for primetime the networks would do three hours or more of content with even more non primetime content. Now nearly half of television is paid advertisements and a lot of the rest is reruns. The average for primetime content is less than two hours and dropping and a lot of that is reality TV. Network TV won't survive in the long run. People may not post and file share lesser shows but they will the popular ones and those are the profitable ones due to commercials. Take away the profit and TV goes away. The only other option is going to a BBC system where tax money is used for broadcast TV and the budgets of the average show is pocket change.
At exactly what point do we accept that change is happening? I hear more and more elaborate explainations for what is happening to try to discount Global Warming when the global warming model has been in place for years. This is hardly a new thing the media simply woke up a few years ago. There's been evidence since the 60s and compelling evidence since the 80s. Now even laymen are noticing. Exactly how many record years in a row do we have to have to make clear? All the models say the lower hemisphere will be less affected and New Zealand is very isolated with ocean temperatures creating most of the weather. Ocean temperatures have only risen one degree. At the poles it's been more like six or seven. If the change had happened in a single year there'd be panic but climates change slowly. Why we should be concerned is these types of changes take hundreds of years and they are happening in decades. I see little hope of people changing because there needs to be a radical change in how we live to correct the problem and there's been no significant change and a major resistence to any change. As contributions from China and developing countries to CO2 increase the problem will excellorate. I think when coastal property worldwide is devastated then people will wake up but not before. The problem is it'll be decades too late by then. What we are seeing now is nothing. Right now the environment is compensating for the worst effects but everyone seems to agree there's a limit we just don't know what that is. The temperature spike has been most dramatic in the last three to five years so we may have already passed that limit. If you aren't interested in the environment how about the money? The situation might be reversed by spending billions today, tomorrow it'll cost trillions. Not to reverse it because that won't be possible by then but trillions in lost property and droughts. The southern hemisphere won't be unaffected and actually ground zero on every model is Africa. The US is likely to be one of the least affected and I believe New Zealand will be somewhat safe but Europe and Australia will get slammed and much of China will go desert. Kind of surprised a Kiwii would be blowing off environmental issues. I was there during the Millenium rollover and skin cancer was near epidemic. I found I didn't get tanned but fifteen minutes in the sun and I'd get a burn. Think of this as the Ozone Layer on steriods if that helps you wrap your mind around it better.
I remember a quote about there would only be on average a significant nuclear accident every thousand years. The first accident occured before the first commercial plant was built, a small test reactor blew. Since then the safety record has been pretty miserable. The obvious ones have been Three Mile Island and Chernovyl but there have been lots of other nuclear accidents with one of the worst in this country the leaking waste water at the Hanford site which threatens a major river. In an ideal world it might be considered safe but humans aren't great at safety. In end the end companies cut corners and accidents happen. Often it's just outright human error. Coal can be burned cleanly but it's expensive so the companies don't do it. If you filter smoke and trap CO2 cheap coal power gets more expensive. Ultimately the issues are greed and human error and we aren't getting rid of either of those anytime soon.
Are you sure? Have you tried it out? This is science man and it requires exhaustive testing. Take your taser to a pool and let us know the results.
Why is piracy so staunchly defended in the tech community? I know rationalizations like fair use are quoted but the truth is people want free movies and music. The piracy on this scale and technology are a recent thing. I know it was the stone age but when I was growing up people saved up for a record album, yes I mean vinyl records. If they couldn't aford it they just listened to the radio. There's nothing in the Constitution about free exchange of copyrighted material, if I record a song you don't own it I do. I know this is a troll post because it's not bashing copyright holders but at the core this is about people wanting to avoid paying for music and movies.
Guess we all know what she got for Christmas.
Mars is a bit further away than the local Chemist Shop. It's extremely difficult to get to Mars and much harder yet to land on it safely. NASA still has the best record at pulling off an nearly impossible task. If it wasn't for the shuttle program NASA has an excellent record. Name another country or agency with half it's accomplishments. Only the Russian program is in their league and they still haven't landed a person on the moon let alone done it repeatedly without loosing anyone inflight. NASA has had it's failures but they have to be given credit for all the accomplishments. The Hubble alone is a staggering achievement.
Astronomers changed the definition of a State excluding New Mexico and reducing the number of states to 49.
how many supposedly deomcratic governments hate and fear freedom. In the US Bush was yanking citizens rights as he was proclaiming the terrorist hate us for our freedom. I'm not as familiar with the British Constitution so I'm not sure about the legality of the all the big brother tactics. In the US the Constitution is quite specific about unreasonable search and seisure. Britian has taken the stance of zero privacy and the US is headed in that direction. Is the reason in the US to lock more people up? Our prisons are already over crowded. The dark side of the electronics boom is it's making it possible to micromanage peoples lives. Cheap cameras and powerful computers are giving the governments an unpresidented ability to look over our shoulders. Nothing to hide? Everyone forgets the McCarthy era when innocent lives were ruined for no reason. The true irony in that case was if they were Communists our Constitution allows them to preach it from the steps of the White House but the law was abused for personal gain. It's always about power and control.
I think the new servers made everyone take notice in the business world. Now with Vista getting routinely bashed even in the pro PC press it's made everyone take a second look at Macs. This is a trend that started even before Vista was released and the release of OSX and the hardware price drops made a lot of people notice Mac. Last year saw record sales for Mac and this year is likely to continue the trend. OSX Leopard is probably going to cause a spike because from all reports it delivers on it's promises. What has never been pointed out is Mac managed record sales in the middle of a massive transition. When they launched the Intel Macs very little software was compatible. By summer that had changed and now most software has been ported. The switch to Intel did make a lot of people take notice and Bootcamp was a big help but to manage record sales during a transition with the normal chaos is very impressive. I will say there was surprisingly little chaos for such a major shift. They seemed to have learned their lesson with the early OSX mess and made the tranisition to Intel as smooth as possible. This is an amazing window for Mac and they are positioned well to take advantage of it. One prediction is Microsoft really tries hard to dump Office for Mac. Expect more problems with the Mac version and Microsoft to try to make a case for it not being practical to continue support. Microsoft doesn't like competition and Mac is likely to gain a few points of market share. I'm not sure that it'll ever pass 10% of market but that's still a huge amount of growth. The lack of the majority of software not supporting Mac, mostly lower end but by volume most doesn't where as most high end does, and a lack of options for equipment. They have a nice selection but it's a tiny fraction compared to Windows. Ultimately it's third party support that's Windows strength. If that ever changes they may be in serious trouble. Doubt it ever will though.
Sorry, I beat you to the punch I just emailed him my account information for the transfer. You can have the next 100 million.
how often third world countries embrace alternative sources where as we're told they are too expensive in the first world. There's a good reason many use alternative sources in these countries, the lack of an infastructure for delivering power.
Almost easier to make a worst of list since none of them are impressive. The worst experience I had was with Sprint. I was with them five years ago and found that in the San Fernado Valley, LA, half the valley wasn't covered. That's pretty miserable for service. Every service I've used has had holes in service and dropped calls. I'm often calling from one cell phone to another so it's tough to tell whose service is causing the lousy connection. Service has gotten cheaper but quality hasn't improved over the years. In some senses it's gotten worse. I think most people would prefer better service than more features.
Warp speed cancer treatment!
You're not trying to tell me he believes in evolution? I thought religious leaders discredited that whacky theory years ago?
The profit margins are very high on successful games. This isn't about profit as you mentioned it's about "extra" profit. This comes out of brainstorming sessions where execs are trying to figure out how to squeeze a bit more profit out of a game. It's the same logic as putting 49 olives in a jar instead of 50. It's nickell and diming to make money all the while screwing the customer. It's also like putting four or five trailers in front of DVDs. Generally they are from the same company so they are just taking advantage of free advertising. I paid for the DVD so why should I be subjected to their ads everytime I watch the DVD? The joke is with DVDs they aren't even selling the space they are annoying the hell out of me just to take advantage of a captive audience.
Funny how often the US gets to bear the brunt of development costs while the rest of the world gets deep discounts. It's not just software but drugs as well. Even Canada gets radically cheaper drug prices than the US. Part of it is government policies but the bulk is corporate america bleeding the US dry then discounting the rest of the world. Interesting that some drugs can be sold for a few dollars a dose at a profit overseas and yet sell for tens of dollars here. Microsoft can count on the US to pay for the development costs so the rest of the world is gravy. Europe doesn't see the software discounts generally but a lot of the world does. I'm sure Microsoft is claiming hundreds of millions to perhaps billions in developing Vista but we pay for that development in higher software prices. In this case we aren't getting much for our money. The added security seems to come with a high anoyance factor and the eye candie we can live without. Direct X10 sounds impressive but do we really need a whole new OS to run it? There are some definate improvements in memory limits and such but we pay for it in radically greater system requirements. The low end computer manufactures are likely going to be stuck with Linux since the system requirements are so high. Ironically that will come back to bite Microsoft because more and more entry level users will become in exposed to Linux. They may be trying to avoid that with the foreign markets because people are going to be less inclined to pay both the high OS and hardware costs. Give the students cheap OSs then hopefully they stay branded to Microsoft.
Has anyone asked her? Maybe she's been wearing them for years?
The smoking and burgers finally caught up with him. I guess he really was an american.
The hold up is it's being bundled with Duke Nuke 'Em Forever. Anyone's guess who is holding up who.
Finally a use for Ionic Breezes!
How is this going to affect the French S&M film industry? This could put thousands of paddle carrying leather clad french men and women out of work.
Don't you just need a pick and shovel and a mule to mine with? Okay it's going to be hard to stick a space helmet on one but it's got to be cheaper than all the fancy hardware.