to me anyway. I just got 45 minutes into a movie, paused it while I did something else for a bit, then came back and hit start. And it did.
At the beginning. With the unskippable FBI warning not to pirate. Which obviously I did not, as if I had, I’d not be watching the FBI warning. Because pirated versions of this movie don’t include this. It’s user punishment for honest people. Then the seven previews, four of which are for movies I’ve already seen, and the other three I don’t want to. These are unskippable also.
So after hitting FF and skip three times, while trying to fast forward back to where I was, and getting the “that operation is not supported during this section of the video”, I gave up and quit. That movie is ruined for me. I guess I just wasn’t that into watching Richard Gere kill his lover and get away with financial misdeeds. Rich people problems.
Blu-ray is largely ruined for me. From now on, I’m either streaming or finding alternative methods to watch movies I’m interested in. Buying the disks doesn’t seem to be an option, because I’m not signing up for more punishment.
If you punish your customers enough, if you make the honest people jump through hoops to use your product, how good is your business model? I guess the court-enforced monopoly thing works for a while. Til it doesn’t. But then it really doesn’t.
So Evil Megacorp bought a robotics company.
Clearly I’m not a mega-evil-genius (though I’m open to offers), but it seems to me that scary robots are something that pretty much anyone with a few million dollars can build. Patents are expired, the field is open to anyone. Boston Dynamics built some cool tech, but people have been doing that for at least two decades now [1].
But powering those robots? It’s the same problem everyone’s got. Chemistry only gives you so much power in a limited space. Batteries are heavy. Energy distribution systems are set up to deliver electricity and fossil fuels. Hydrogen costs more to make than it delivers – plus it blows up real good. And has a horrible carbon footprint. Physics has better energy density, but RTGs are low power, expensive, hard to make, and bring whole nother set of problems. Anytime you start packing lots of energy in a small space, the propensity to go boom (even if it’s other people stealing your materials to make things go boom) increases [2].
You have to make a better battery. That doesn’t blow up if it’s looked at funny. Better living through better chemistry. Well for robots anyway.
Figure out a better battery and you’ll own the world. Otherwise in the upcoming dystopian skynet future, those robots are going to be scattered metallic and CF carcasses, plundered for their copper and rare earths.
Plus then the iPhone battery would last more than a day. Which I’m sure will be important when I’m trying to hide from the aerial robotic autonomous drones. Wait. We already have those.
[1] and by “people”, I mean people paid by Your Government. Like rocket science, the internet, medicine, computers, and roads, this stuff only gets done if the government (“you”) pays for the unprofitable research for decades until it becomes profitable for the brilliant tycoons to adopt it wholesale and take credit for going the last mile.
Which is as it should be. It just bothers me that those same BTs are so often conservative or libertarian and would happily broast the golden goose, or at least donate campaign contributions to those building the fires. Not unlike the unemployed woman I heard on NPR yesterday who’s upset that her unemployment benefits are coming to an end. Yes, she’s a Republican. Always has been, always will be. Why do you ask?
[2] Gasoline turns out to be a pretty awesome energy source. Aside from the whole ruining the world by heating it up thing. One wonders what happens on a world that evolves intelligent life, but doesn’t go through the whole fossil-fuel-forming geologic eras, snowball earths, mass extinctions,etc. (IANAG). If you only had wood fuels, would you build an internet?
I get an insane number of emails, texts, and phone calls every day. Toss in notifications from calendars, applications, WWF, etc., and the desktop, laptop, tablet, and both phones would be ringing constantly and simultaneously if I let them. I got tired of that on about day two of the iPhone 3G.
And I'm an anti-social loser. Imagine if I had family or friend. Or if the dogs could text.
Yet here in cubicle land, there are still a few people who either can't figure out how to silence the notifications on more than one of their devices. Even in meetings. It doesn't take more than a few before the beeping is constant. Heck, they probably like it. But it's insane-making.
Turn your notifications to silent. It's rude. And get a set of headphones.
[ObJoeBob] I'm surprised I have to explain this to you.
Yeah, someone around here (or more than one) has their phone set to stun for every email they get. It got old for me on day one. I guess they'll never get tired of that noise.
Henry Ford realized this a long time ago, whatever his other faults. He both made the car cheap enough, and wages high enough, that his own employees could afford one.
Those days are gone, however, and we’re not talking about cars, we’re talking about food. Walmart employees aren’t paid enough to afford food at their place of employment.
The difference is that Ford couldn’t ship his products overseas. He had to keep his customer base able to buy. Corporations now don’t view the home market as important anymore. They can always get another customer somewhere else who will pay the price. So who cares if their own employees can’t be customers.
Aside from the minor orbital mechanics impossibilities and the Spielbergian dead kid tear-jerking, why did she keep taking off her helmet? If you were entering a spacecraft you had never been inside in the middle of a debris storm that had caused every one else to abandon ship, would you take your helmet off? I think I’d leave it on.
Of course the reason she took it off was because you don’t give Sandra Bullock 10 points of the gross and then hide her in a bulky spacesuit and helmet for 95 minutes. Same reason the pilots in BSG had helmet lights shining in their eyes – you couldn’t see their faces otherwise.
Does this make sense at all?
I’d also hunt around a couple of minutes for more oxygen before I cast off on an unplanned space walk, even if the ship were destroyed. Gotta be an oxygen bottle around here someplace.
I don’t care if you break the laws of physics, but logical people (doctors, astronauts, scientists) should be logical within your own movie. This is the same problem Prometheus had. Not science – character.
Anyway, it was an effective use of 3D (and one which didn’t give me a headache), except when it pulled me out to wonder why the dead kid [1] and why are supposedly smart people being stupid.
[1] Same as I cringe when I see a dog in a movie anymore – I know the dog is going to get it. Cats never get it, they just cause minor characters to get got.
There are two competing pro-NSA and anti-whistleblower [1] narratives out there. The most obvious one is that Snowden is a traitorous flake (pole-stripper girlfriend! bad employee review!) who’s just waiting for the highest bidder (China! Russia!) to sell the NSAs secrets, worse than Manning’s data-dump [2].
The second is, secrets?!? What secrets? Everyone knows we were spying on everyone. Everyone does it! It’s the Casablanca defense – I’m shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here.
The first has turned out to be false in every instance. It’s just throwing shit againt the wall knowing that it’ll keep stinking for a long time. And there are plenty of shills either paid for by the Deep State or useful idiots out there to keep spreading it around everytime it pops up [3].
But the second has been disproved by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-dancing market.
Cisco, and other American equipment and internet companies are losing contracts, and taking market hits as a result.
If “everyone knew,” the market would have priced this prior knowledge into the share price of these companies. The NASDAQ response would be a giant yawn. There would be no change, and no loss of overseas contracts. The all-knowing free-market is telling us everyone didn’t know, and the cost of NSA backdoor spying is now being marked to market. Also the cost of these companies meek acquiescence to the Deep State.
The free market has spoken.
Worse, this is much like the cases we find out about through the Innocence Project. Innocent man imprisoned, released on DNA evidence 20 years later. We all feel good, but truth is, the guilty man walked free for those 20 years, committing other crimes.
Here, the entire intelligence apparatus of the US is focused on finding out what Snowden did, and how to get him and punish him. But what one man did for patriotism, another did for money, and long before. Someone out there had access to the same data as Snowden. He just didn’t make it public, and took a huge cash payoff from the people they’re worried Snowden will sell us out to.
It’s already happened. They just didn’t know it.
They also didn’t know they were going to break the World-Wide Internet, though that is also going to be the end result of their actions.
[1] Not just Snowden, though he has received the lion’s share of attention. Also Binney, Tice, Drake, Klein, Tamm, Fellwock…
[2] Manning, of course, didn’t. The journalists he trusted (some of them with The Guardian) released a passphrase to the encrypted file.
[3] If you doubt this is true, Fox News has had their people doing this for years. Do not think the NSA/CIA/FBI has not been mounting the same sort of propaganda campaign as a cable news channel?
Tagged Deep State, NSA, SnowdenYou know, every morning when I wake, there are seven $0.99 apps on my phone telling me that they have updates. iOS gets large updates once a year, with many bugfixes and incremental updates. I’m told that Android gets regular updates, although not everyone gets to install them. OS X and Windows on my $3k laptop, $5k desktop, and $1.5k desktop update monthly if not weekly. No charge.
Yet the $Nk DSLR I bought from Nikon, along with god-help-me $$$ on lenses, got one firmware update in the six years I’ve been using it. And it didn’t fix anything commonly used, like auto-setting a minimum shutter speed based on ISO and zoom lens position, or making the settings banks useful.
Do they really think that I’m going to upgrade to another $Nk camera through the method of annoyance (“the new camera has the old bugs fixed so I’ll spend the same amount again even though this one works fine!”) rather than pleasure (“wow, they’re really good about giving me new useful features, so I think I’ll tie my whole $$$$ lens ecosystem into this manufacturer!”).
Or will I just use my smartphone for everything and wish it would give me RAW files?
Sorry, that’s a rhetorical question. The invisible hand of the market is fixing that one. Too bad, because there really are times when you need a better camera, but I wonder if there will be such a thing in a decade?
About 10 million deaths. About 65 million participants. The last died in 2012, at the age of 110. Soon enough, there will be no one on this planet who remembers the first Armistice Day.
The entire population of the planet, all seven billion and rising, turns over completely every 120 years. No exceptions, no reprieves.
When I was in grad school:
Marked to market
Putting more lie to the “shocked, shocked” meme.
Collaboration with the spies is being marked to market. Chickens are coming home to roost. Pick your metaphor.
I think it’s unlikely these will get very far in the courts, but it means I’m not the only one having these thoughts.
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