Cut to minimum TV service on Comcast, only kept that much, which I never watched except for weather emergencies, because it cost more for internet-only, and on U-Verse I don't even have any TV service. All the programs I watch either arrive on plastic discs (Netflix) or are downloaded (Pioneer One, anybody?). The commercials were bad enough, but when all channels became all-ads-all-the-time (those {censored} logos count, I simply cannot tolerate them} I left and am better off for it.
Before TV elected to cease to exist for me, I had not watched a real-time show for years. My primary use of the VCR was commercial-skipping. I would tape shows, then blow past the ads when watching them.
Every now and then I'll be visiting friends and see the horrible cesspit that TV has become. I expect that my current tube-display TV will never die because it gets so little use. The only reason I have a digital broadcast converter is for news and weather emergencies. I think I used it once last june when my U-Verse went out for an hour due to severe weather and I wanted to see how bad things were.
I simply do not put up with ads any more. I stopped listening to radio and now burn CDs for my car CD player (no easy way to interface an MP3 player, but the book lied when it said burned discs wouldn't work). I've let my various magazine subscriptions lapse. I've got Trueblock Plus installed (Adblock Plus went to the dark side in allowing "unobtrusive" ads, {no such thing} while you can change this, it is reset with each update, at least it was when I gave up on it), and I even have an ad-blocker installed on my Android phone.
I don't put up with the rubbish on DVDs, either. After some tinkering, I can skip anything, no matter what the disc wants.
Make things annoying and I'll work around the annoyance. Make it too hard to avoid the annoyance and I just stop dealing with the things entirely.
If you want my money, make it worth my while. I can always find somewhere else to spend it, or I can not spend at all in some categories.
Unless another company starts driving around cars with panoramic cameras on top, you won't see street view anywhere soon.
Provided that they could deal with the data traffic, OSM could crowdsource the streetview process. I could easily take pictures of both sides of the street that I am on, for the whole block, in about 10 minutes. The full panoramic process might not be manageable, but I could easily do a series of 8-compass-point shots of streets in my area.
How someone could stitch all this together, that I'm not sure about, but getting a reasonable amount of data should not be that difficult.
{Insert every internet meme in the spirit of 'The Stupid, it burns!' here}
I know that my GPS saves me a lot of aggravation on the roads. It is a Garmin, and updates two to three times a second in terms of position. In street-dense neighborhoods this frequent updating makes it fairly easy to turn on the right road without under-or-overshooting my target. While the screen is information-dense, I look for what I need. The overview lets me know the way the road ahead of me is going, this is very handy at night, as I have much more warning of sharp turns than your average sign gives.
The upper left corner has a button graphic that tells me the distance to my next turn and the direction I'll be going in. When I get with 2 or 3 miles, it changes to show which lane I need to be in. This gives me time to change lanes without risking cutting anyone off.
The whole thing can be voice-operated, once you get past the power-on-PIN. I can ask it to find things like hotels, gas and food without having to touch it.
I find that having a GPS beats the daylights out of the old AAA Triptik strip-map system and the bulky tour books. Those were very useful in their day, but that day is past. For information while traveling, having a GPS is like having AAA in a very small box.
Real-time traffic information is handy, I've been diverted around tie-ups a number of times, and if I hit a traffic problem in areas not covered by traffic service, I can ask the device for a detour instead of trying to guess my way around or just sit in the jam and fume.
From my perspective, a GPS is an anti-distraction, and those who argue against the usability of them are demonstrating that they themselves really do not belong on the road.
I don't really have any clue what TV is like these days. I went off of it thereabouts of 15 years ago. My reasons are different than most, however. I can't stand those idiotic logos that now infest nearly every channel. (This gleaned from what I see when I visit friends, or am wandering near a TV for whatever reason.)
I find the things so intolerable that there is no content good enough for me to watch if those ugly little "bugs" as some call them are present. If I am going to watch anything from TV, I basically have to get opinions from people whose TV tastes I trust, then wait for the show in question to hit DVD.
The only reason I still have broadcast receiving gear (old TV and a digital-to-analog converter) is for things like weather emergencies.
Just because the existing entities have declared that no new entities are allowed does not mean much. In the end, sovereignty is determined by having sufficient weaponry to defend your position, pretty much like all human arguments. Sometimes the weaponry is guns and bombs, other times building-sized packets of money. If someone can manage to get into space with enough of either, or better, both, they can be a sovereign power.
If anything, the gravity well makes for a great force multiplier. A space-dwelling entity has the ultimate high ground in a battle. They don't even need much in the way of explosives. As Robert Heinlein speculated, they can just drop rocks on their chosen targets.
When humanity is wiped out by a virulent plague that could have been stopped with a drug that nobody could afford, the pharmaceutical executives will be smugly counting their beans and congratulating themselves.
Or, we could create the new job classification of Telephone Sanitizer, and be safe from virulent plagues that manage to evade all that expensive research.
Actually, that is true. Everything with lungs on Earth breathes nitrogen, it just isn't used. The oxygen that is mixed in to all that nitrogen is another matter. That small percentage of the gas mix is vital.
Much the same could be said of the file mix on digital lockers, much may be of dubious legality, but the clearly legal stuff is much more important to the "intellectual respiration" of civilization.
Well, making a TARDIS requires considerable amounts of multidimensional mathematics, whereas ??AA logic involves non-rational hyperbolics.
Can you imagine how ugly it would get just trying to patent the mechanisms of a TARDIS? Can you file patent lawsuits across the entirety of time? Then, oh, the software. How many patents would be infringed on software that has to produce results before the program is started, let alone given data? Is there a patent on progression testing software that runs backwards? How do you even describe a program that may have to end, then start, and come to the middle where it's done with its job? East Texas might collapse into a black hole trying to sort that one out.
Dwolla, for one, Venmo is concentrating on person-to-person at the moment, but has plans to expand. Personally, I think that having a variety of players is a good idea, it might just push existing poorly-behaved incumbents to clean up their acts.
I am getting involved in a number of these alternative systems so that I have options. I am also encouraging merchants to look at these alternatives by letting them know that I do not regard PayPal as an option, and routing credit cards through them counts.
The major point here is that for alternatives to get going, people have to be willing to try them. My Android phone is accumulating all manner of money-transfer apps. Look into the options, and use them when you can. If you mention your options to others, they may look into these other systems. I'm making the effort to open things up. How about some of you join me?
Though I'm careful about it. I'll put some comment I find amusing in a QR Code and either print it on a sticky note or on a plain bit of paper and leave it somewhere. Using various bits of paper means that they can be tossed or recycled when someone decides to get rid of them, no permanent marking like regular graffiti leaves.
On the issue of automatic adding of information to your phone, I disabled all automatic actions in my scanner, it presents me with the results of the scan, and I decide what, if anything, gets done with it.
I've been looking to ditch AT&T over the insane price I'm being charged for just voice, this whole data thing is just Twilight-Zone stuff.
I'm looking into Republic Wireless. Apart from downloading apps, my data footprint is so small that none of the normal plans from the big carriers is justifiable.
For the people whose phone is the only computer they use, this whole situation looks too out-suck a black hole.
Since the time I first got a cell phone, I've used whatever handsfree abilities were available. My current phone in concert with my current GPS means that the only thing I can't do by voice command is answer the phone when a call comes in. And that is at least down to reaching out and tapping the answer button on the GPS screen. I can place calls without any use of hands by voice control. The GPS (a Garmin Nüvi) does all the voice processing for call handling. I can give it contacts from the phone book by name, and even dial arbitrary numbers just by speaking them into the unit. This makes it much easier to keep eyes on the road and still be able to handle calls.
And on the navigation front, apart from having to touch in the security code when I turn it on, the major navigation features are also voice controlled. A common use of this is requesting a detour when I can see a jam ahead, another is locating a gas station by means other than watching for signs.
Used with good sense (not common sense, common sense is codified stupidity, common sense gets people killed) these gadgets are actually safer than not having them around.
As for distraction, I actually cultivate a small amount of distraction when driving, it keeps my mind more focussed on the road, as odd as that sounds. This makes more sense when you allow for driving fugue. In the absence of distractions, I can lose awareness and start paying attention again in a different state than I started out in. The intervening time is just gone. I therefore tend to load my CD player (car is too old for MP3 hookup) with audio books and radio shows of various types to hold enough of my attention that there is some available for the road. This is only an issue on long drives, and when possible, I keep talking to my passenger when I have one or more.
I suspect that people who claim to pay full attention to the road at all times actually have no clue about how much their mind is doing. Remember that the human brain has this habit of creating dedicated systems to handle things you do repeatedly to "take the load off" of your mind. Driving is no different. Once the systems are in place, your conscious mind can be at loose ends while the dedicated system does its job. If you doubt this, try to imagine the incredibly complex chain of events that is walking. You have to start by tilting your body mass forward so your balance center shifts, then you swing a leg forward (a series of actions all by itself) to that it hits a place on the ground ahead of you such that your mass will be lifted by the lever action in concert with muscles to add force, then you have to repeat this action with the other leg, all while you have to shift your mass side-to-side because of your changing balance point, a process that usually involves your arms, but if they are full you have the additional complexity of adjusting your stride and swing to allow for not having the arms available as counterweights. And this incredibly complex chain of events is handled by most people while talking, eating, photographing, and a range of other tasks that in themselves are complex. And they give almost no thought to walking while doing it.
As a practical matter, I suspect that only humans with certain varieties of cognitive disorder can actually pay full attention to an extremely repetitive task indefinitely. The rest of us go on autopilot, and there is no way to change this, as it is part and parcel of being human. Trying to ban all distractions is pointless, as if nothing else, the mind will either wander off into mental processing to keep itself occupied, or it will go on hold and wait for a signal from a subsystem that something needs attention that the subsystem cannot supply.
When that major failure in the Northeast happened several years back, I remember early cries of terrorism. My reaction: "It has to be an accident, no government could have coordinated something this big without 50 years lead time and a staff large enough to populate a small nation. Forget about a group of terrorists doing it."
About the only way I could see a really large induced failure would be coordinated physical attacks on the major switching points. And even then the failure-to-take-out ratio would be so high that the results would be limited.
The film did not use a specific story adaptation, but the plot of the central computer system taking the first law to extremes was an adaptation of things that Dr. Asimov raised once in an early story, and increasingly in his later robot stories/novels. To that degree, they did explore a question that Asimov himself raised, except that the movie brought the thread to a conclusion, wheres Asimov himself had left the options open in the last work of his that I am aware of.
Also the police detective with a distrust of robots was taken from The Caves of Steel and later novels in the series, although the distrust was not as extreme in the books. Susan Calvins attitude towards robots was also reasonably consistent with her portrayal in print.
I know, off-topic, but credit where it's due. I'll even say nice things about Microsoft on those rare occasions when they deserve it.
Amazing how quickly some stories have practical examples provided...
Let's see. This story is relevant, as is this. About all the argument we need that we have to get technology training courses into the legal system.
I went off all forms of broadcast video years ago...
Cut to minimum TV service on Comcast, only kept that much, which I never watched except for weather emergencies, because it cost more for internet-only, and on U-Verse I don't even have any TV service. All the programs I watch either arrive on plastic discs (Netflix) or are downloaded (Pioneer One, anybody?). The commercials were bad enough, but when all channels became all-ads-all-the-time (those {censored} logos count, I simply cannot tolerate them} I left and am better off for it.
Before TV elected to cease to exist for me, I had not watched a real-time show for years. My primary use of the VCR was commercial-skipping. I would tape shows, then blow past the ads when watching them.
Every now and then I'll be visiting friends and see the horrible cesspit that TV has become. I expect that my current tube-display TV will never die because it gets so little use. The only reason I have a digital broadcast converter is for news and weather emergencies. I think I used it once last june when my U-Verse went out for an hour due to severe weather and I wanted to see how bad things were.
I simply do not put up with ads any more. I stopped listening to radio and now burn CDs for my car CD player (no easy way to interface an MP3 player, but the book lied when it said burned discs wouldn't work). I've let my various magazine subscriptions lapse. I've got Trueblock Plus installed (Adblock Plus went to the dark side in allowing "unobtrusive" ads, {no such thing} while you can change this, it is reset with each update, at least it was when I gave up on it), and I even have an ad-blocker installed on my Android phone.
I don't put up with the rubbish on DVDs, either. After some tinkering, I can skip anything, no matter what the disc wants.
Make things annoying and I'll work around the annoyance. Make it too hard to avoid the annoyance and I just stop dealing with the things entirely.
If you want my money, make it worth my while. I can always find somewhere else to spend it, or I can not spend at all in some categories.
Re: Streetview
Unless another company starts driving around cars with panoramic cameras on top, you won't see street view anywhere soon.
Provided that they could deal with the data traffic, OSM could crowdsource the streetview process. I could easily take pictures of both sides of the street that I am on, for the whole block, in about 10 minutes. The full panoramic process might not be manageable, but I could easily do a series of 8-compass-point shots of streets in my area.
How someone could stitch all this together, that I'm not sure about, but getting a reasonable amount of data should not be that difficult.
Math is hard, isn't it?
The script in question can be an absolute maximum of 46 years old, assuming it was pitched during the first season of the original Star Trek.
To be 60 years old, it would have to have been written 14 years before I was born, and I watched Star Trek in first run.
I just have to do this now...
I need to do something to lower my blood pressure. This will have to do.
D.A.R.R.Y.L.
Distressing
Aggravating
Really
Revolting
Yowling
Loser
Brain fried, core dumped.
{Insert every internet meme in the spirit of 'The Stupid, it burns!' here}
I know that my GPS saves me a lot of aggravation on the roads. It is a Garmin, and updates two to three times a second in terms of position. In street-dense neighborhoods this frequent updating makes it fairly easy to turn on the right road without under-or-overshooting my target. While the screen is information-dense, I look for what I need. The overview lets me know the way the road ahead of me is going, this is very handy at night, as I have much more warning of sharp turns than your average sign gives.
The upper left corner has a button graphic that tells me the distance to my next turn and the direction I'll be going in. When I get with 2 or 3 miles, it changes to show which lane I need to be in. This gives me time to change lanes without risking cutting anyone off.
The whole thing can be voice-operated, once you get past the power-on-PIN. I can ask it to find things like hotels, gas and food without having to touch it.
I find that having a GPS beats the daylights out of the old AAA Triptik strip-map system and the bulky tour books. Those were very useful in their day, but that day is past. For information while traveling, having a GPS is like having AAA in a very small box.
Real-time traffic information is handy, I've been diverted around tie-ups a number of times, and if I hit a traffic problem in areas not covered by traffic service, I can ask the device for a detour instead of trying to guess my way around or just sit in the jam and fume.
From my perspective, a GPS is an anti-distraction, and those who argue against the usability of them are demonstrating that they themselves really do not belong on the road.
Re: Abandoning TV
I don't really have any clue what TV is like these days. I went off of it thereabouts of 15 years ago. My reasons are different than most, however. I can't stand those idiotic logos that now infest nearly every channel. (This gleaned from what I see when I visit friends, or am wandering near a TV for whatever reason.)
I find the things so intolerable that there is no content good enough for me to watch if those ugly little "bugs" as some call them are present. If I am going to watch anything from TV, I basically have to get opinions from people whose TV tastes I trust, then wait for the show in question to hit DVD.
The only reason I still have broadcast receiving gear (old TV and a digital-to-analog converter) is for things like weather emergencies.
Sovereignty in space
Just because the existing entities have declared that no new entities are allowed does not mean much. In the end, sovereignty is determined by having sufficient weaponry to defend your position, pretty much like all human arguments. Sometimes the weaponry is guns and bombs, other times building-sized packets of money. If someone can manage to get into space with enough of either, or better, both, they can be a sovereign power.
If anything, the gravity well makes for a great force multiplier. A space-dwelling entity has the ultimate high ground in a battle. They don't even need much in the way of explosives. As Robert Heinlein speculated, they can just drop rocks on their chosen targets.
Being wiped out by a virulent plague...
Or, we could create the new job classification of Telephone Sanitizer, and be safe from virulent plagues that manage to evade all that expensive research.
Re: Air
Actually, that is true. Everything with lungs on Earth breathes nitrogen, it just isn't used. The oxygen that is mixed in to all that nitrogen is another matter. That small percentage of the gas mix is vital.
Much the same could be said of the file mix on digital lockers, much may be of dubious legality, but the clearly legal stuff is much more important to the "intellectual respiration" of civilization.
Re: Re: Re: A working TARDIS
Both, actually.
Re: A working TARDIS
Well, making a TARDIS requires considerable amounts of multidimensional mathematics, whereas ??AA logic involves non-rational hyperbolics.
Can you imagine how ugly it would get just trying to patent the mechanisms of a TARDIS? Can you file patent lawsuits across the entirety of time? Then, oh, the software. How many patents would be infringed on software that has to produce results before the program is started, let alone given data? Is there a patent on progression testing software that runs backwards? How do you even describe a program that may have to end, then start, and come to the middle where it's done with its job? East Texas might collapse into a black hole trying to sort that one out.
Alternative payment systems do exist.
Dwolla, for one, Venmo is concentrating on person-to-person at the moment, but has plans to expand. Personally, I think that having a variety of players is a good idea, it might just push existing poorly-behaved incumbents to clean up their acts.
I am getting involved in a number of these alternative systems so that I have options. I am also encouraging merchants to look at these alternatives by letting them know that I do not regard PayPal as an option, and routing credit cards through them counts.
The major point here is that for alternatives to get going, people have to be willing to try them. My Android phone is accumulating all manner of money-transfer apps. Look into the options, and use them when you can. If you mention your options to others, they may look into these other systems. I'm making the effort to open things up. How about some of you join me?
I've gotten into QR Code graffiti
Though I'm careful about it. I'll put some comment I find amusing in a QR Code and either print it on a sticky note or on a plain bit of paper and leave it somewhere. Using various bits of paper means that they can be tossed or recycled when someone decides to get rid of them, no permanent marking like regular graffiti leaves.
On the issue of automatic adding of information to your phone, I disabled all automatic actions in my scanner, it presents me with the results of the scan, and I decide what, if anything, gets done with it.
Re: Facts
If facts are incontinent, how can Dodd and his ilk fail to notice them soaking into the fabric of reality?
Looking to dump AT&T, and this helps
I've been looking to ditch AT&T over the insane price I'm being charged for just voice, this whole data thing is just Twilight-Zone stuff.
I'm looking into Republic Wireless. Apart from downloading apps, my data footprint is so small that none of the normal plans from the big carriers is justifiable.
For the people whose phone is the only computer they use, this whole situation looks too out-suck a black hole.
Phones in the car
Since the time I first got a cell phone, I've used whatever handsfree abilities were available. My current phone in concert with my current GPS means that the only thing I can't do by voice command is answer the phone when a call comes in. And that is at least down to reaching out and tapping the answer button on the GPS screen. I can place calls without any use of hands by voice control. The GPS (a Garmin Nüvi) does all the voice processing for call handling. I can give it contacts from the phone book by name, and even dial arbitrary numbers just by speaking them into the unit. This makes it much easier to keep eyes on the road and still be able to handle calls.
And on the navigation front, apart from having to touch in the security code when I turn it on, the major navigation features are also voice controlled. A common use of this is requesting a detour when I can see a jam ahead, another is locating a gas station by means other than watching for signs.
Used with good sense (not common sense, common sense is codified stupidity, common sense gets people killed) these gadgets are actually safer than not having them around.
As for distraction, I actually cultivate a small amount of distraction when driving, it keeps my mind more focussed on the road, as odd as that sounds. This makes more sense when you allow for driving fugue. In the absence of distractions, I can lose awareness and start paying attention again in a different state than I started out in. The intervening time is just gone. I therefore tend to load my CD player (car is too old for MP3 hookup) with audio books and radio shows of various types to hold enough of my attention that there is some available for the road. This is only an issue on long drives, and when possible, I keep talking to my passenger when I have one or more.
I suspect that people who claim to pay full attention to the road at all times actually have no clue about how much their mind is doing. Remember that the human brain has this habit of creating dedicated systems to handle things you do repeatedly to "take the load off" of your mind. Driving is no different. Once the systems are in place, your conscious mind can be at loose ends while the dedicated system does its job. If you doubt this, try to imagine the incredibly complex chain of events that is walking. You have to start by tilting your body mass forward so your balance center shifts, then you swing a leg forward (a series of actions all by itself) to that it hits a place on the ground ahead of you such that your mass will be lifted by the lever action in concert with muscles to add force, then you have to repeat this action with the other leg, all while you have to shift your mass side-to-side because of your changing balance point, a process that usually involves your arms, but if they are full you have the additional complexity of adjusting your stride and swing to allow for not having the arms available as counterweights. And this incredibly complex chain of events is handled by most people while talking, eating, photographing, and a range of other tasks that in themselves are complex. And they give almost no thought to walking while doing it.
As a practical matter, I suspect that only humans with certain varieties of cognitive disorder can actually pay full attention to an extremely repetitive task indefinitely. The rest of us go on autopilot, and there is no way to change this, as it is part and parcel of being human. Trying to ban all distractions is pointless, as if nothing else, the mind will either wander off into mental processing to keep itself occupied, or it will go on hold and wait for a signal from a subsystem that something needs attention that the subsystem cannot supply.
Power grids - unlikely stability.
When that major failure in the Northeast happened several years back, I remember early cries of terrorism. My reaction: "It has to be an accident, no government could have coordinated something this big without 50 years lead time and a staff large enough to populate a small nation. Forget about a group of terrorists doing it."
About the only way I could see a really large induced failure would be coordinated physical attacks on the major switching points. And even then the failure-to-take-out ratio would be so high that the results would be limited.
Filter Aggravations
I am currently unable to offer commentary on the value of pornographic filters as my pornograph is broken.
Actually, there was a connection.
The film did not use a specific story adaptation, but the plot of the central computer system taking the first law to extremes was an adaptation of things that Dr. Asimov raised once in an early story, and increasingly in his later robot stories/novels. To that degree, they did explore a question that Asimov himself raised, except that the movie brought the thread to a conclusion, wheres Asimov himself had left the options open in the last work of his that I am aware of.
Also the police detective with a distrust of robots was taken from The Caves of Steel and later novels in the series, although the distrust was not as extreme in the books. Susan Calvins attitude towards robots was also reasonably consistent with her portrayal in print.
I know, off-topic, but credit where it's due. I'll even say nice things about Microsoft on those rare occasions when they deserve it.