Honestly, I have cable TV here in the UK and I don't even know why (actually I do, I have cable internet and the package I'm on practically gives me the cable TV for free) - 95% of what I watch is BBC, and a good chunk of the rest are just Simpsons reruns on Sky. Maybe I'm just lucky that there's sufficient viewing in the BBC's offering to keep me amused, or maybe it indicates that a license-fee model can actually be pretty effective, even if it sounds a bit communist (I'm sure all the people who never watch BBC but still have to pay the fee have a different opnion).
You might think that. You might also think that a sci-fi based channel should be showing sci-fi based shows. I guess they like to challenge popular conceptions.
They care in so far as they want you to buy their products or watch their shows, but a science fiction channel that doesn't care about science fiction fans is doomed to failure. Nobody but science fiction fans are likely to tune in in the first place (it's not really casual viewing for most people) so you don't want to alienate the few people who you can expect to tune in, that's just sheer idiocy.
This is the key thing - there's a huge gap between soap opera and human drama. Soap opera is repetitive human drama spread thin to fill episodes. Good human drama needs to be tightly scripted. A lot of UK shows do this very well, probably because they have very short runs (6-8 episodes in a season) so they don't need padding out. Give us something worth watching and we'll watch it but, by the same standard, garbage in space is still garbage.
Or, to put it another way, SyFy was the name the channel changed to when they decided to stop trying to please people who enjoy science fiction and instead adopted the "So Yeah, F-You" approach to scheduling.
Having said that, it's probably just as bad to jab yourself in the eye with a fork as it is with a knife. Although if we're looking for a silver lining, I guess he avoided the queues and the ridiculous popcorn prices and the anti-piracy adverts.
Your argument is assuming nobody's ever been wrongly accused. If this is not the case then it's certainly in all of our interests to put barriers in their way to prevent us being wrongly accused at some point (and having to spend time and money defending ourselves). I have no issue with them pursuing people who are clearly in breach of copyright and are identifiable (go after the people selling dodgy DVD rips or the website hosts all you want, for instance), but when you base a witch hunt on something as flimsy as an IP address, that's a potential threat to me directly (I use lots of dynamic IP addresses, there's a non-zero chance one of them might get scooped up in a **AA phishing exercise).
That still doesn't get around the issue that, technically, if it's the copyright owner who is offering you the movie for free they have the right to offer it to you for free and it's no longer a breach of copyright if you accept their offer. Either they don't have the right, in which case they're liable for the breach, or they do have the right, in which case there was no breach by anyone. I can't offer to give you my phone for free and then have you arrested for stealing my phone if you accept because I have the legal right to give it away.
Who decides what is "strictly necessary" for a service, though? "My website is funded entirely by advertising from advertisers who implement third part tracking, without this advertising there is no service, it's the very definition of strictly necessary" sounds like the first line of reasoning for a lot of people. Are we just creating a law that will make convenience cookies difficult to implement but has a huge loophole the advertisers can drive a truck through?
While I wholly agree with your sentiment, in reality I suspect the severity of the implementation may render this impossible to police. Limit it purely to tracking cookies and there's a chance you can get sites to comply, expand that to convenience cookies and you've just created a huge additional development bill. I suspect this will go the way of disability regulations - it exists but it's never been used because practically no site on the web complies. If you limit it to tracking and analysis cookies then generally you can rip them out of websites without them horribly breaking, so it's more likely to get picked up and implemented without some huge government enforcement operation (and let's face it, how would this even work? they can't force sites overseas to implement it, if they force it only on local sites they increase the cost of doing business locally and reap the economic repercussions).
The second every defaults that option to enabled, advertisers will simply create arrangements whereby all tracking is first party and the details are passed to them by a server side service. Same effect, slightly increased cost and complexity, less visibility.
The social problem exists to prevent the bigger social problem of how you track user state between different pages on the site or different sessions. Cookies are a convenience to avoid asking the user to reset all their preferences for every single page (or having an incredibly static web - which I know a lot of people will say they prefer, but millions of others enjoy the rich web experience), the real problem lies in the lack of distinction (or at the very least clarity of distinction) between a cookie that is purely for the user's convenience and one that is for tracking purposes. I'd be more than happy with a solution that allowed companies to set cookies that made my life easier so long as they had to get my permission to use them for any kind of tracking or analysis purposes.
The thing is, it benefits us as gamers. Undoubtedbly the games companies are also enjoying the benefit of funds sitting with them, but if you made it illegal, the cost of the smallest transactions would go up because of the credit card charges involved. Overall both the gamers and the games companies would lose out (I doubt the interest on the circa £10 I have slushing about in points at any time would be sufficient to make up for the extra cost of micro transactions if the system was banned), the ones who would stand to gain the most are the credit card companies.
They could mitigate it by allowing points or purchases to be transferred. That way if you want to leave the system you can sell the points on to a third party. The danger there is someone sets up a company allowing micro-transactions of less than the minimum points spend and they manage this by grouping payments up so the games company is only getting the amount of the purchase and doesn't have a slush of currency sitting in their account earning interest, for that reason I doubt we'll ever see this happen.
Not only that, MS also price their "Games on Demand" in real currency, not MS points (at least they do here in the UK, I assume it's the same everywhere), so they're already having to deal with currency variations and accepting payments in different currencies, so MS points does nothing to solve that. No, I think the OP has it right, this is about making people more comfortable with leaving their money in the accounts of these companies.
I think you're absolutely right, I have tried typing wrists down on a conventional keyboard (i.e. with hammers, not an electric typewriter) and it tires you out pretty quickly compared to a computer keyboard. Even without instruction you naturally raise your wrist a little to give you momentum to strike the keys. I suspect one of the other issues with PC typing is that, for most people, their time is no longer even close to 100% typing. You used to sit down knowing what you needed to do, type out a letter or some code or whetever then move away (or at least sit back). Now time is split between typing, browsing, reading, etc it's uncomfortable to have your hands poised in the air the whole time and awkward to keep changing posture based on your activity, so people go with what seems easier at the time, wrists down (of course, they might be storing up bigger problems for the future, but people tend to be short term in their thinking).
It's pretty typical of the CYA environment that runs in both big corporations and government departments. It's much easier for middle managers to attack other people's unsuccessful projects than it is to come up with successful projects of their own, subsequently there's little dividend in saving the company/department a few dollars by implementing an open source solution. Much better to pay some consultancy a huge sum of money to come up with the answer, then blame them if it fails to do as promised. I've seen this time and time again and it baffles me that nobody in a position to do anything about it sees how these things are set up to fail - it gives you a huge appreciation of what would be possible if someone with common sense was in charge (unfortunately that's a rarity).
Indeed, it seems a pretty clear cut "we're doing this for our good but we'll throw you a bone and some FUD about it being beneficial to you" exercise. There's nothing to stop them implementing the two things separately, they've deliberately bundled them together to add some marketing spin to their data gathering operation.
When it's enemy soil during a war there are strict rules of engagement that are internationally recognised. When it's the soil of someone who is ostensibly your ally and you do it without their knowledge or permission, it sets a very dangerous precedent. It's easy to say he was a monster so it doesn't matter, but the point with creating exceptions to defined rules is that they might not always work in your favour. What if it had been Julian Assange - plenty of people in the US were calling him a terrorist or a traitor (despite him not being from the US) and saying Wikileaks could cost lives, how do you think a secret military incursion into the UK to gun him down would have played out?
Well, I wonder at his motives. So far as I can see he wasn't doing what he was doing for political power, with his background, education and influence he could have had all the conventional power he wanted. He certainly wasn't doing it for personal gain, same applies and he already came from a wealthy background. That either leaves true belief in what he was saying ("doing god's work"), or a mad power trip - neither of which goes hand in hand with "okay, give me half my demands and I'll call it quits".
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Honestly, I have cable TV here in the UK and I don't even know why (actually I do, I have cable internet and the package I'm on practically gives me the cable TV for free) - 95% of what I watch is BBC, and a good chunk of the rest are just Simpsons reruns on Sky. Maybe I'm just lucky that there's sufficient viewing in the BBC's offering to keep me amused, or maybe it indicates that a license-fee model can actually be pretty effective, even if it sounds a bit communist (I'm sure all the people who never watch BBC but still have to pay the fee have a different opnion).
You might think that. You might also think that a sci-fi based channel should be showing sci-fi based shows. I guess they like to challenge popular conceptions.
They care in so far as they want you to buy their products or watch their shows, but a science fiction channel that doesn't care about science fiction fans is doomed to failure. Nobody but science fiction fans are likely to tune in in the first place (it's not really casual viewing for most people) so you don't want to alienate the few people who you can expect to tune in, that's just sheer idiocy.
There might not be any make up involved but it still costs a lot for him to "powder his nose".
This is the key thing - there's a huge gap between soap opera and human drama. Soap opera is repetitive human drama spread thin to fill episodes. Good human drama needs to be tightly scripted. A lot of UK shows do this very well, probably because they have very short runs (6-8 episodes in a season) so they don't need padding out. Give us something worth watching and we'll watch it but, by the same standard, garbage in space is still garbage.
The jocks push out the nerds, it has always been thus :(
Or, to put it another way, SyFy was the name the channel changed to when they decided to stop trying to please people who enjoy science fiction and instead adopted the "So Yeah, F- You" approach to scheduling.
Having said that, it's probably just as bad to jab yourself in the eye with a fork as it is with a knife. Although if we're looking for a silver lining, I guess he avoided the queues and the ridiculous popcorn prices and the anti-piracy adverts.
What we need is TNG where we get to vote who gets kicked out of the airlock every week. Adios, Wesley...
Your argument is assuming nobody's ever been wrongly accused. If this is not the case then it's certainly in all of our interests to put barriers in their way to prevent us being wrongly accused at some point (and having to spend time and money defending ourselves). I have no issue with them pursuing people who are clearly in breach of copyright and are identifiable (go after the people selling dodgy DVD rips or the website hosts all you want, for instance), but when you base a witch hunt on something as flimsy as an IP address, that's a potential threat to me directly (I use lots of dynamic IP addresses, there's a non-zero chance one of them might get scooped up in a **AA phishing exercise).
That still doesn't get around the issue that, technically, if it's the copyright owner who is offering you the movie for free they have the right to offer it to you for free and it's no longer a breach of copyright if you accept their offer. Either they don't have the right, in which case they're liable for the breach, or they do have the right, in which case there was no breach by anyone. I can't offer to give you my phone for free and then have you arrested for stealing my phone if you accept because I have the legal right to give it away.
Who decides what is "strictly necessary" for a service, though? "My website is funded entirely by advertising from advertisers who implement third part tracking, without this advertising there is no service, it's the very definition of strictly necessary" sounds like the first line of reasoning for a lot of people. Are we just creating a law that will make convenience cookies difficult to implement but has a huge loophole the advertisers can drive a truck through?
While I wholly agree with your sentiment, in reality I suspect the severity of the implementation may render this impossible to police. Limit it purely to tracking cookies and there's a chance you can get sites to comply, expand that to convenience cookies and you've just created a huge additional development bill. I suspect this will go the way of disability regulations - it exists but it's never been used because practically no site on the web complies. If you limit it to tracking and analysis cookies then generally you can rip them out of websites without them horribly breaking, so it's more likely to get picked up and implemented without some huge government enforcement operation (and let's face it, how would this even work? they can't force sites overseas to implement it, if they force it only on local sites they increase the cost of doing business locally and reap the economic repercussions).
The second every defaults that option to enabled, advertisers will simply create arrangements whereby all tracking is first party and the details are passed to them by a server side service. Same effect, slightly increased cost and complexity, less visibility.
The social problem exists to prevent the bigger social problem of how you track user state between different pages on the site or different sessions. Cookies are a convenience to avoid asking the user to reset all their preferences for every single page (or having an incredibly static web - which I know a lot of people will say they prefer, but millions of others enjoy the rich web experience), the real problem lies in the lack of distinction (or at the very least clarity of distinction) between a cookie that is purely for the user's convenience and one that is for tracking purposes. I'd be more than happy with a solution that allowed companies to set cookies that made my life easier so long as they had to get my permission to use them for any kind of tracking or analysis purposes.
The thing is, it benefits us as gamers. Undoubtedbly the games companies are also enjoying the benefit of funds sitting with them, but if you made it illegal, the cost of the smallest transactions would go up because of the credit card charges involved. Overall both the gamers and the games companies would lose out (I doubt the interest on the circa £10 I have slushing about in points at any time would be sufficient to make up for the extra cost of micro transactions if the system was banned), the ones who would stand to gain the most are the credit card companies.
They could mitigate it by allowing points or purchases to be transferred. That way if you want to leave the system you can sell the points on to a third party. The danger there is someone sets up a company allowing micro-transactions of less than the minimum points spend and they manage this by grouping payments up so the games company is only getting the amount of the purchase and doesn't have a slush of currency sitting in their account earning interest, for that reason I doubt we'll ever see this happen.
Not only that, MS also price their "Games on Demand" in real currency, not MS points (at least they do here in the UK, I assume it's the same everywhere), so they're already having to deal with currency variations and accepting payments in different currencies, so MS points does nothing to solve that. No, I think the OP has it right, this is about making people more comfortable with leaving their money in the accounts of these companies.
I think you're absolutely right, I have tried typing wrists down on a conventional keyboard (i.e. with hammers, not an electric typewriter) and it tires you out pretty quickly compared to a computer keyboard. Even without instruction you naturally raise your wrist a little to give you momentum to strike the keys. I suspect one of the other issues with PC typing is that, for most people, their time is no longer even close to 100% typing. You used to sit down knowing what you needed to do, type out a letter or some code or whetever then move away (or at least sit back). Now time is split between typing, browsing, reading, etc it's uncomfortable to have your hands poised in the air the whole time and awkward to keep changing posture based on your activity, so people go with what seems easier at the time, wrists down (of course, they might be storing up bigger problems for the future, but people tend to be short term in their thinking).
It's pretty typical of the CYA environment that runs in both big corporations and government departments. It's much easier for middle managers to attack other people's unsuccessful projects than it is to come up with successful projects of their own, subsequently there's little dividend in saving the company/department a few dollars by implementing an open source solution. Much better to pay some consultancy a huge sum of money to come up with the answer, then blame them if it fails to do as promised. I've seen this time and time again and it baffles me that nobody in a position to do anything about it sees how these things are set up to fail - it gives you a huge appreciation of what would be possible if someone with common sense was in charge (unfortunately that's a rarity).
Indeed, it seems a pretty clear cut "we're doing this for our good but we'll throw you a bone and some FUD about it being beneficial to you" exercise. There's nothing to stop them implementing the two things separately, they've deliberately bundled them together to add some marketing spin to their data gathering operation.
When it's enemy soil during a war there are strict rules of engagement that are internationally recognised. When it's the soil of someone who is ostensibly your ally and you do it without their knowledge or permission, it sets a very dangerous precedent. It's easy to say he was a monster so it doesn't matter, but the point with creating exceptions to defined rules is that they might not always work in your favour. What if it had been Julian Assange - plenty of people in the US were calling him a terrorist or a traitor (despite him not being from the US) and saying Wikileaks could cost lives, how do you think a secret military incursion into the UK to gun him down would have played out?
Well, I wonder at his motives. So far as I can see he wasn't doing what he was doing for political power, with his background, education and influence he could have had all the conventional power he wanted. He certainly wasn't doing it for personal gain, same applies and he already came from a wealthy background. That either leaves true belief in what he was saying ("doing god's work"), or a mad power trip - neither of which goes hand in hand with "okay, give me half my demands and I'll call it quits".
The case is closed. Everything was done in accordance with international law.
I guess you missed the whole unsanctioned-military-operation-within-the-border-of-a-country-that's-technically-an-ally part, then?
Well he certainly wouldn't complain about it.