There are still a few of us people that aren't in great signal areas, too. Even with a big signal booster the reception is pretty terrible on the three channels I can actually pick up at all for me, and ditto my mobile phone which has almost zero coverage. Cable is pretty much a godsend for me, although it's all the more painful for it when it does occasionally drop out.
How is that different to the situation in the mobile phone app market for the last decade? You're lucky if you can find an app that works reliably over more than a handful of current generation phones, start branching out with something older or something cutting edge and your chances drop still further, and the requirements for these things tend to be incredibly confusing to the end user (who generally doesn't even know what OS their phone is running).
You couldn't do it on a per chapter basis, this would just be an incentive for the author to string stories out longer and longer if they received enough subscriptions, or, like King, to just abandon it halfway if they receive too few, but giving your fan base something to make them feel special in return for them accepting your marketing emails/reserving early copies isn't a bad idea. Maybe some kind of loyalty bonus (if I've bought around 40 of your books you can afford to give me a little something back, I'm looking at you TP) which increases incrementally with each sale, that way you avoid people skipping books because they don't want to lose their incentive, you have a much more measurable baseline of subscribers to your scheme (so you can reasonably extrapolate X users will buy your book on launch) while the users get a discount, everyone wins.
Unfortunately he's more likely to be the King Canute in this instance, the solitary voice trying to hold back the tide of government jumping on big media's bandwagon. The best we can hope for is that it reaches the ears of enough of the populace that it becomes a differentiating factor between the two big parties at election time, at least then we'll have a choice. Unfortunately the populace are largely too busy watching I'm a Celebrity Fat Pet on Ice to bother about the erosion of their rights. Bread and circuses indeed.
You're right, the House of Lords gets a lot of negative press, and perhaps that's a legacy of what it used to be like with hereditary peerages and a lot of people deciding the laws of the country purely because of who their ancestors were, but yes it's changed a lot and is actually now a very useful legislative tool (along with its judicial function). It's great that people with a lifetime of skills and experience aren't simply discarded but have a real input into the way our laws are decided, and although its structure is partisan, the voting generally isn't, people generally vote with their conscience not just to bolster their party line.
A lot of the Lords' powers to block laws have been stripped away by the Parliament Acts unfortunately. As you mention certain legislation can bypass the Lords completely, I think this includes anything to do with finance and taxation, and on top of that no law can be delayed in the House of Lords for more than - IIRC - two parliamentary sessions, so while they used to be able to send laws back to "the other place" indefinitely, now they can only delay for effectively about a year. It's good that they can't hold up new laws forever, but at the same time a strong government can pretty much force through anything it wants now - as we've experienced in the last decade.
The difference is that, in this case, they can tailor the test to a specific patient. If they know his name, what his job was, his wife's name, kids ages, the name of his first school, etc etc, these are questions which the patient can respond to and to which we can say, statistically, the odds of returning false positives to are phenomally long. Of course it's still possible the test will miss a lot of people, but when it comes to proving that the ones it does flag up as being non-vegitative actually are, it's much simpler to demonstrate.
I wonder though if they chose patients who had a higher chance of responding to the measurement. I haven't RTFA (hey, this is/.) so I don't know if this is even possible, if statistically they can say patients who entered their current state due to a particular type of accident or illness have shown the best chance of eventually responding to stimuli so we'll try patients in this group first, or if it was just totally random. If it was the former, that might conceivably skew the results more favourably - I was similarly surprised at how high this was.
Well it could help with the recovery process, if having their friends and family support them aids the recovery process then it would be a big morale boost to those people to know their messages are getting through. It must be easy for the family of patients in such a state to get disheartened and give up hope. It's only a small crumb of comfort but it's better than we've been able to offer so far.
If you own the previous consoles, why does every new iteration have to have backward compatability with everything that was ever released for the whole line? You're just adding cost on top of cost to support 15 year (or by the time the PS4 arrives more likely 20+ year) old technology. I agree it's nice if the current generation are supported on the next generation, it at least eases the transition when you can still play your current favourite games, but anything beyond that which is likely to add to cost or hobble the new technology in any way I can live without. I'd even sacrifice compatability with current gen games, if I'm getting a much improved product as a result. As a corporation, it doesn't make much sense to increase your costs and hobble your technology just to appease a very small number of potential customers who don't want to switch out a cable to play their old games.
Backwards compatability is a nice to have, if you're really serious about this stuff you probably already have the consoles or you can pick them up used for next to nothing, it's definitely not a good enough reason to increase the cost to the customer or to put constraints on what developers can do with the technology, look at the mess MS got themselves into with the WIndows mantra that everything ever written for it had to be supported on the newer OS, while Apple took the approach of dropping a lot of support for old software so that they could make significant gains in the OS within a smaller time frame.
Well, possibly, but bear in mind he could probably subscribe for five years to this for the cost of just a decent graphics card (I know they've not announced prices yet, but I'm assuming they won't charge more than Live), and spread the payments, and it might buy a slightly better online experience into the bargain. There are many advantages of PC gaming over console gaming, but price has never been one of them, usually entirely the opposite.
I would guess if they charge it will be precisely so they can improve the service without financially crippling themselves. At that point I guess the choice is would you rather pay for a decent service or not play online with the PS3. It's obviously not scared away enough customers on the 360 to stop MS charging and the service they deliver generally seems reasonable, so there's no reason to think it couldn't work on the PS3. The big problem for Sony is that if you mess with your customers like that, selling a platform on the basis of a free service then charging once you've got the numbers, you're likely to make quite a few people much more angry than if you'd just been honest about all of this up front (call PSN a public beta that will incur a subscription charge should it prove successful, or something along those lines, so people feel privileged for getting it for free rather than pissed off for being charged). It's too late to do that now, only time will tell if it's a poor decision or not.
I'm not sure how much money MS make on live, gold subscriptions cost less than the price of a single new game and are only payable once per year per customer (not even counting all the customers who never use live, I'm not sure what the online:offline ratio is, this may or may not be a significant figure). I'd be surprised if they had much money left over after providing the service, selling content is where the big money is in this for them, and they can do that whether the service is free or paid. I think subscriptions for Live just help them provide a good service, which probably indirectly helps sales, this move is almost certainly going to be about not losing money rather than making money.
What, spreading the word that your service is free by telling people you plan to charge for it? Colour me dubious. Some people care about the cost of being online, some don't, and as far as I can tell the only affect this would have is to put off the people who were attracted to the free service because they know it can be yanked at any time.
Sure they might do another announcement that they considered all the options and decided to stay free, but what's the likelihood that it'll get anywhere near the coverage this will - we all know that bad news sells clicks or whatever it is big media's in the market for these days.
If anything, school days should be longer. When I was at school the days felt incredibly long, at college they crammed more into each day so we ended up doing 9-5 but that actually meant we got either two half days or a three day weekend depending on the subjects, much better - free time is much more useful in bigger chunks. Now I get to work just after 8, I generally work through lunch and if I get to leave before 6 I'm lucky, occasionally end up doing 8 til 8, my free week time is reserved for eating, sleeping and the various bathroom functions.
Well the issue is, one parent thinks... hmm, there's a very small chance that the link between autism and the vaccine is true, but there's almost a zero chance of contracting measles, mumps or rubella. Ipso facto, I don't immunise my kid and I'm doing them a favour. On the face of it, they're right. Of course, the problem is when the majority, or even a significant minority, of parents have the same idea. Mass vaccinations only work if everyone is on board. The people who don't get their offspring immunised are endangering everyone else's.
On the other hand, in countries where professional medical care is more advanced and/or more available to the general public, the mortality rates are much, much lower. According to this article, the mortality rate for acute (!) cases in the U.S. was about 0.25% - 0.28%. Between 1993-1999, there was only one reported death. Given that the complications of a measles infection can generally be handled when adequate medical care is available, and that autism is (as far as we know) "final", the decision isn't quite as clear-cut as you present it.
That still doesn't paint the full picture, because if there was no MMR vaccination, medical care would be overwhelmed, these diseases are ridiculously infectious, access to drugs and treatment would become much more costly (or else would be paid for at the expense of treatments for other illnesses) and as a result the mortality rate would increase, or unrelated health care would suffer.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still a few of us people that aren't in great signal areas, too. Even with a big signal booster the reception is pretty terrible on the three channels I can actually pick up at all for me, and ditto my mobile phone which has almost zero coverage. Cable is pretty much a godsend for me, although it's all the more painful for it when it does occasionally drop out.
Here are the searches from the commercial, in order:
[SNIP]
Ack, dude, spoiler warning, spoiler warning!
How is that different to the situation in the mobile phone app market for the last decade? You're lucky if you can find an app that works reliably over more than a handful of current generation phones, start branching out with something older or something cutting edge and your chances drop still further, and the requirements for these things tend to be incredibly confusing to the end user (who generally doesn't even know what OS their phone is running).
You couldn't do it on a per chapter basis, this would just be an incentive for the author to string stories out longer and longer if they received enough subscriptions, or, like King, to just abandon it halfway if they receive too few, but giving your fan base something to make them feel special in return for them accepting your marketing emails/reserving early copies isn't a bad idea. Maybe some kind of loyalty bonus (if I've bought around 40 of your books you can afford to give me a little something back, I'm looking at you TP) which increases incrementally with each sale, that way you avoid people skipping books because they don't want to lose their incentive, you have a much more measurable baseline of subscribers to your scheme (so you can reasonably extrapolate X users will buy your book on launch) while the users get a discount, everyone wins.
Unfortunately he's more likely to be the King Canute in this instance, the solitary voice trying to hold back the tide of government jumping on big media's bandwagon. The best we can hope for is that it reaches the ears of enough of the populace that it becomes a differentiating factor between the two big parties at election time, at least then we'll have a choice. Unfortunately the populace are largely too busy watching I'm a Celebrity Fat Pet on Ice to bother about the erosion of their rights. Bread and circuses indeed.
You're right, the House of Lords gets a lot of negative press, and perhaps that's a legacy of what it used to be like with hereditary peerages and a lot of people deciding the laws of the country purely because of who their ancestors were, but yes it's changed a lot and is actually now a very useful legislative tool (along with its judicial function). It's great that people with a lifetime of skills and experience aren't simply discarded but have a real input into the way our laws are decided, and although its structure is partisan, the voting generally isn't, people generally vote with their conscience not just to bolster their party line.
A lot of the Lords' powers to block laws have been stripped away by the Parliament Acts unfortunately. As you mention certain legislation can bypass the Lords completely, I think this includes anything to do with finance and taxation, and on top of that no law can be delayed in the House of Lords for more than - IIRC - two parliamentary sessions, so while they used to be able to send laws back to "the other place" indefinitely, now they can only delay for effectively about a year. It's good that they can't hold up new laws forever, but at the same time a strong government can pretty much force through anything it wants now - as we've experienced in the last decade.
The difference is that, in this case, they can tailor the test to a specific patient. If they know his name, what his job was, his wife's name, kids ages, the name of his first school, etc etc, these are questions which the patient can respond to and to which we can say, statistically, the odds of returning false positives to are phenomally long. Of course it's still possible the test will miss a lot of people, but when it comes to proving that the ones it does flag up as being non-vegitative actually are, it's much simpler to demonstrate.
I wonder though if they chose patients who had a higher chance of responding to the measurement. I haven't RTFA (hey, this is /.) so I don't know if this is even possible, if statistically they can say patients who entered their current state due to a particular type of accident or illness have shown the best chance of eventually responding to stimuli so we'll try patients in this group first, or if it was just totally random. If it was the former, that might conceivably skew the results more favourably - I was similarly surprised at how high this was.
Well they could tell you where they left the car keys, that would be helpful.
Well it could help with the recovery process, if having their friends and family support them aids the recovery process then it would be a big morale boost to those people to know their messages are getting through. It must be easy for the family of patients in such a state to get disheartened and give up hope. It's only a small crumb of comfort but it's better than we've been able to offer so far.
You don't have to answer. Of course, then they might turn the life support off, so not without it's drawbacks...
If you own the previous consoles, why does every new iteration have to have backward compatability with everything that was ever released for the whole line? You're just adding cost on top of cost to support 15 year (or by the time the PS4 arrives more likely 20+ year) old technology. I agree it's nice if the current generation are supported on the next generation, it at least eases the transition when you can still play your current favourite games, but anything beyond that which is likely to add to cost or hobble the new technology in any way I can live without. I'd even sacrifice compatability with current gen games, if I'm getting a much improved product as a result. As a corporation, it doesn't make much sense to increase your costs and hobble your technology just to appease a very small number of potential customers who don't want to switch out a cable to play their old games.
Backwards compatability is a nice to have, if you're really serious about this stuff you probably already have the consoles or you can pick them up used for next to nothing, it's definitely not a good enough reason to increase the cost to the customer or to put constraints on what developers can do with the technology, look at the mess MS got themselves into with the WIndows mantra that everything ever written for it had to be supported on the newer OS, while Apple took the approach of dropping a lot of support for old software so that they could make significant gains in the OS within a smaller time frame.
Well, possibly, but bear in mind he could probably subscribe for five years to this for the cost of just a decent graphics card (I know they've not announced prices yet, but I'm assuming they won't charge more than Live), and spread the payments, and it might buy a slightly better online experience into the bargain. There are many advantages of PC gaming over console gaming, but price has never been one of them, usually entirely the opposite.
I would guess if they charge it will be precisely so they can improve the service without financially crippling themselves. At that point I guess the choice is would you rather pay for a decent service or not play online with the PS3. It's obviously not scared away enough customers on the 360 to stop MS charging and the service they deliver generally seems reasonable, so there's no reason to think it couldn't work on the PS3. The big problem for Sony is that if you mess with your customers like that, selling a platform on the basis of a free service then charging once you've got the numbers, you're likely to make quite a few people much more angry than if you'd just been honest about all of this up front (call PSN a public beta that will incur a subscription charge should it prove successful, or something along those lines, so people feel privileged for getting it for free rather than pissed off for being charged). It's too late to do that now, only time will tell if it's a poor decision or not.
I'm not sure how much money MS make on live, gold subscriptions cost less than the price of a single new game and are only payable once per year per customer (not even counting all the customers who never use live, I'm not sure what the online:offline ratio is, this may or may not be a significant figure). I'd be surprised if they had much money left over after providing the service, selling content is where the big money is in this for them, and they can do that whether the service is free or paid. I think subscriptions for Live just help them provide a good service, which probably indirectly helps sales, this move is almost certainly going to be about not losing money rather than making money.
What, spreading the word that your service is free by telling people you plan to charge for it? Colour me dubious. Some people care about the cost of being online, some don't, and as far as I can tell the only affect this would have is to put off the people who were attracted to the free service because they know it can be yanked at any time.
Sure they might do another announcement that they considered all the options and decided to stay free, but what's the likelihood that it'll get anywhere near the coverage this will - we all know that bad news sells clicks or whatever it is big media's in the market for these days.
You must be new here. 12 hours late is like bleeding edge news to us :)
Well I got:
"... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ..." -- Dave Barry
So I'm guessing it's random :)
Be fair, maybe he's just being true to the ST:TNG script writing methodology and he's waiting for a consultant to fill in the technobbable later.
If anything, school days should be longer. When I was at school the days felt incredibly long, at college they crammed more into each day so we ended up doing 9-5 but that actually meant we got either two half days or a three day weekend depending on the subjects, much better - free time is much more useful in bigger chunks. Now I get to work just after 8, I generally work through lunch and if I get to leave before 6 I'm lucky, occasionally end up doing 8 til 8, my free week time is reserved for eating, sleeping and the various bathroom functions.
Then there was AIDS. This is why we spent our time programming C64 in assembler rather than fucking hippie or disco girls like in the 60's or 70's.
I've met some dellusional /.'s before, but this deserves a prize. Oh, erm, I mean yeah that's the reason, definitely ;)
I assume everyone participating managed to actually count, the test was one of estimating the passage of time, not basic arithmetic.
Well the issue is, one parent thinks... hmm, there's a very small chance that the link between autism and the vaccine is true, but there's almost a zero chance of contracting measles, mumps or rubella. Ipso facto, I don't immunise my kid and I'm doing them a favour. On the face of it, they're right. Of course, the problem is when the majority, or even a significant minority, of parents have the same idea. Mass vaccinations only work if everyone is on board. The people who don't get their offspring immunised are endangering everyone else's.
Even worse, there's no stupidity vaccine.
On the other hand, in countries where professional medical care is more advanced and/or more available to the general public, the mortality rates are much, much lower. According to this article, the mortality rate for acute (!) cases in the U.S. was about 0.25% - 0.28%. Between 1993-1999, there was only one reported death. Given that the complications of a measles infection can generally be handled when adequate medical care is available, and that autism is (as far as we know) "final", the decision isn't quite as clear-cut as you present it.
That still doesn't paint the full picture, because if there was no MMR vaccination, medical care would be overwhelmed, these diseases are ridiculously infectious, access to drugs and treatment would become much more costly (or else would be paid for at the expense of treatments for other illnesses) and as a result the mortality rate would increase, or unrelated health care would suffer.