We need open source hardware designs that can be built locally (where ever your local might be). This black box hardware crap has to stop. Smart people who know how all this works need to dump all their knowledge in to a design and a process. Trade secrets are keeping us not only limited in choices but exposed to bad actors who can control a link in the supply chain.
You still have to put up plaster board (basically drywall) first before you float the surface with plaster. I can't imagine plasterers are putting up plaster slats in stud walls anymore.
FWIW my house in Palo Alto (total remodel 2001-2003) is lath and plaster throughout (indoor and out), all done by union plasterers. They are a specialist sub niche in moderately high demand around here.
Because Google doesn't come to your house, take you in for questioning and then pressuring you into confessing that you did something wrong which disturbed civil order.
You're absolutely right. We take people from other countries and put them in a facility on Cuba and deny them their rights. We treat our own citizens better, and enforce these same standards on China because we must Make America Great Again.
The fact that you bring up these essentially sovereign nation internal issues as if they are fundamental transgressions against human rights (which maybe they are) while ignoring rights violations under your own nose, shows that your perspective on these issues is highly underdeveloped.
China has many problems, and I'm sure forced confessions are probably a larger problem over there than in the US, but for the most part their citizens don't need armchair observers to fight for their rights. They don't need proselytizers, evangelists, or colonists either.
Isn't it nice how we can have TV shows that point out the problems in the US while also being filmed, financed and distributed within the US. John Oliver would have been deported if he did the same in China.
There's a massive difference. Complying with subpoenas is not the same as giving the government on-tap access to all data at their leisure. And for all the US's problems, the rule of law and respect for the rights of citizen's and responsibilities of the state toward them in the administration of justice is leaps and bounds better and more transparent in the United States.
He's not an engineer that I know of so his videos lean on the history side more, and I am fine with that. The context he puts into his videos really helps you understand the "whys" of the tech.
I don't mean to be glib, but is there a positive side? I mean, I know it is positive to the share holders, but what benefit does Mega-Disney have for the regular person? Regular-Disney got us the 95 year copyright, so the public doesn't need any more Disney power.
Yeah, I think the title is badly phrased and they just didn't want to write "it sucks". There hardly seems to be any other movie corporation so hellbent on domination (whereas the other studios seem to be happy enough to make money and cuddle with the MPAA...).
There's a personal positive side for me. I used to watch a lot of movies from more genres, but I haven't enjoyed a lot in the last years besides Marvel and Star Wars, so that's all I watched at the cinema as well. Would prefer they didn't dominate the market and act like assholes, but at least I have some movies I like...
This is not really accurate. The vast majority of movie/media conglomerates are massive and certainly "hellbent on domination" to borrow your phrasing. Some examples:
- Time Warner owns Warner Bros Pictures, DC Films, New Line Cinema, CNN, etc, etc.
- Comcast owns Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, Working Title Films, NBC, etc, etc.
Disney is actually behind Comcast in revenue. And of course Disney also got in on the whole 'buy a news company' agenda - they own ABC. This practice of these mega corporations merging and acquiring ever larger shares of the entire media (and news) industry is a large part of the reason that they are in the state that they are.
Sure, but at the same time I think you have to distinguish between entertainment and information. It doesn't really matter who's putting out the latest in Hollywood blockbusters, sitcoms, or whatever. It might mean a bit less diversity in what's offered, but it's junkfood any way you look at it.
By contrast, the fact that the news is in large part quite literally just a branch of these huge corporate conglomerates is certainly something that I think does matter. In many cases the interests of these corporate conglomerates and the average person can come into conflict, yet the average person then goes and consumes their information from the conglomerate. That's not really a great system.
I'd be interested in an answer from someone who knows better, but I suspect it's a shareholder thing - all corporate companies everywhere all seem to have to be seen to be growing.
Why, exactly I'm not sure ... because they're worried they'll themselves be taken over, if not?
If you’re not first, you’re last. Unless you have a natural moat like patents or very specific specialized skills, someone bigger is going to come along and undercut and kill you.
You are right of course, but I think I meant something else with domination. The other studios (per the original article) have those 2-week timespans and kind of agreed on some "major player industry standard" - and Disney is on the rise now (my reading) and enforcing these 4-week timespans and are trying to dominate the entertainment market in an unprecedented way.
I was not trying to say Time Warner etc are less focused on hypercapitalism, market share and so on. It feels less winner-takes-it-all.
Well, Disney power did get us not-unequivocably-bad Star Wars sequels, though I think there's an argument to be made there that a megacorporation was only needed for that because megacorporations had pushed the extension of copyright terms so far in the first place.
Disney kills the possibility of companies and individuals creating stories of the cultural content of their own youth.
Do you like "Monkey Island"? Copyright doesn't allow you to create your own content. (And I know that it is also owned by Disney)
Children grow with 100-year-old stories not because they are better or more relevant, but because it is the only legacy that they receive.
The people that got Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizzard of Oz, and other stories for free are the ones that allowed the next generation to be stolen of that privilege.
Copyright is designed so anyone that cares and will pay for content, is long dead before making anything public domain.
My opinion is that Disney got us rather simplistic and formulaic fan fiction sequels with overblown visual effects, while treading all over the real thing (the SW Expanded Universe).
While the stories from the EU were of varying quality, at least they were interesting. These Disney sequels are so predictable and uninteresting it's not even funny.
Fortunately, each of us gets to pick their own canon. For me, it will always be books by Timothy Zahn, and Disney can't do anything at all to the physical copies that I have on my shelf.
Maybe not in the individual plot elements, but the entire movie felt like they were checking off items from a list, and that they were fully aware that the movie is merely a fuel for the merchandise money machine . It was more or less just as naive and fairytale-y as the old Episode 4, and had exactly the right elements to make children go "ooooh" and "aaaaah" (and to pester their parents to buy them toys), and adults cringe.
Which by itself is fine, I guess, but there wasn't any depth in it beyond the effects' wow factor.
The positive side is that all this Hollywood abomination with rubber suit superheroes and space swords made of petrified light may drive itself to terminal absurdity. The medium of "feature films" as a whole is disgusting and deserves at least "disruption".
I deeply hate all this shitty culture: cinema theatres in shopping malls, popcorn, DVDs, bluerays, MPAAs, bearded actors' snouts all looking the same, posters all looking the same, obsession with rotten 50s scifi setting ad nauseam, sequels, prequels, triquels.
Of course I can’t back this up with any proof, but it might lead to some good content. I have a hard time seeing something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe happening if it wasn’t for Disney being as big as it is. It’s possible that Disney is the only reason Star Wars is back too. If they ever get around to making their own streaming service, having all the Disney properties in one would be amazing. Of course you could argue that these don’t outweigh the downsides of Disney having so much control but I think there some good aspects too it.
"Not only do we have to play it for four weeks straight, we have to play it four times a day," said Roper, adding that with only one screen available, it would be "very difficult" to play a single movie for a month without losing money due to lack of audience.
Sounds to me like the kind of business practices that is getting Google sued by the EU, and despite their necessarily being different rules for monopoly, the above is a case of applying blanket rules for a 50-screen cinema complex as for a single-screen independent cinema because Disney doesn't need to zoom in to that level of detail. Fine lines. The law is an ass.
Similar situation for a Disney-exclusive streaming service. That'd be similar to Disney buying up a chain of cinemas and only showing their <s>films</s> movies in those cinemas.
The flipside is that independent cinema's should make these sorts of anti-competitive behaviours known to their customers: "Sorry, we can't show Star Wars: The Last Jedi because Disney has enforced conditions that we, as a small, independent cinema, can't comply with whilst remaining profitable. We do, however, recommend the following great movies that we have the freedom to screen at our discretion..."
That last counter offensive approach won’t work in an industry where neutral third parties, aggregators in tech parlance, such as newspapers and movie phone In days of yore, and sites like IMDB these days, drive the majority of customers to a business.
The aggregator doesn’t care, it’s not their problem, in fact the only way it becomes the aggregator’s problem is when the companies who use the aggregator as part of their sales funnel, that means big movie studios pulling advertising revenue from aggregators that don’t do what they like.
If the cinema can get enough “organic traffic” then the rules are different but the majority of cinemas these days other than specialists, like Arthouse or foreign film focused theatres, seem increasingly beholden to the aggregator driven customers. But I’m not an industry expert so I could be wrong.
And the vast majority of people have stopped reading.
As a matter of fact, they didn't even begin reading. Because they looked up showtimes for what they wanted to see elsewhere and went to a theater that is showing what they want to see.
Here's the deep, dark secret you are ignoring: No one cares. And that's why the studios can pull these tactics. They have the product that people want. If a theater doesn't show it, the customer will just go to a theater that does. They don't want to see "a movie", they want to see "The Last Jedi".
John Roper is general manager of the Phoenix Theatre in Fort Nelson, which is home to about 4,000 people.
The 4,000 residents may not have other options, and small towns don't tend to like 'the big guys' stepping on the locals. It's really only a fringe of the fringe that may care enough to change their opinions (not even necessarily their behaviours), but that's still better than just rolling / bending over with no resistance at all.
In other words: Blah blah unrealistic idealistic blah blah. But it makes me feel better.
He's in an uncommon situation as he's a couple of hours away from anything. And still, "fans... have been taking an eight-hour round trip to Fort St. John".
I mean, Disney does have the power in this regard. They're the ones with the product. Theaters are just technically middle-men in this regard.
> I have a hard time seeing something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe happening if it wasn’t for Disney being as big as it is.
I have read the comics. The stories are better. But to maintain a big corporation, stories need to be dumbed down to appeal to as many people as possible.
Everybody gets to see a good movie, but nobody gets to see the movie they would like the best.
> It’s possible that Disney is the only reason Star Wars is back too.
Disney and extended copyright is the reason you don't see more Star Wars content. If Star Wars copyright had expired, you will see a lot more content about that fictional universe.
Star Wars is part of a lot of people youth. If Star Wars was free to use it will have one hundred times more content than an old book, even a very famous one, like "Alice in Wonderland".
> Disney and extended copyright is the reason you don't see more Star Wars content. If Star Wars copyright had expired, you will see a lot more content about that fictional universe.
When Disney acquired LucasFilms my first thought was that they will probably kill the Star Wars Extended Universe and in a sense they did. There was a tremendous amount of Star Wars comics from Dark Horse during the 90s and 00s that built upon the whole Star Wars mythology. The "Old Republic" series (including the games) is probably the most enjoyable Star Wars story I've ever encountered but alas everything was rendered non-canon when Disney worked their magic. Now everything Star Wars revolves around the original chronology rehashing the same things over and over again in a "panem et circences" manner with no hope of seeing any new stories of any kind.
Star Wars's copyright would have only expired if we were still under copyright law from before 1909. And even then, that would technically be only for the first movie. So the characters from that movie could be used, but not any characters in the later movies. You could have Han Solo, but not Lando. Obi-Wan, but not Yoda, etc.
And you'd likely also have to deal with trademark issues, which are separate from copyright.
And there is still plenty of Star Wars content out there and being made.
Copyright is as anti-capitalism as it gets. Copyright in its actual expression is part of corporativism. "Corporatism is the organization of a society by corporate groups and agricultural, labour, military or scientific syndicates and guilds on the basis of their common interests."
Copyright was extended to benefit a special interest group. It has nothing to do with improving market efficiency. If any, it damages market efficiency introducing an artificial monopoly enforced by the state.
The point is that even the best of "them" is still not helping the individual. Netflix isn't giving back to society, because we can't archive their works legally or lend them out at a public library.
Recording technology seems to have given us a collective case of viparinama dukkha with respect to popular culture. Perhaps it's OK for art to be ephemeral.
True, though certainly its employees are paying taxes. Netflix reported a profit of $558.9 million on 2017 and is on Pace to blow that out of the water this year. You're saying none of that was taxable? I get that there are plenty of ways to avoid paying taxes on profits, but really, they paid _nothing_?
It's all rather beside the point anyway. Saying that Netflix privdes no individual or societal benefit is just wrong.
Of all the FAANG companies, Netflix is certainly the one with the most benign societal impact. They provide entertainment. They don’t take a lot from the consumer to do it. It’s entirely reasonable to use a viewer’s watching history to show them things they might like. It’s less defensible to take someone’s web history to show them things they probably don’t want (ads), track people using facial recognition, turn a blind eye towards work conditions at Chinese suppliers, or treat workers like shit while crushing mom and pop retailers in their wake. Even worse is encouraging people to share things about their lives and using it to hypertarget ads.
Netflix isn't giving back to society, because we can't archive their works legally or lend them out at a public library.
This makes no sense to me. I can't archive a live theatre performance or lend it out either, but I still consider many enjoyable evenings I've spent watching a show to be worth the price of admission. I couldn't keep the video cassettes I used to rent so I could watch again later, but I still considered the fee worth paying so I could enjoy a film I otherwise hadn't seen.
Netflix also provides a temporary benefit, but in practice it almost always has enough new films or shows that I enjoy watching but wouldn't necessarily want to rewatch to justify the monthly membership fee. Given that my alternative way to watch that material would typically be buying it in a fixed format such as DVD/Blu-ray at a higher price, even though having a permanent copy offered me little extra benefit, clearly Netflix is providing a useful service that does, at least for me, offer reasonable value for money.
Wouldn't it have been nice to have a video of the first Shakespeare performances? Archiving isn't just for future enjoyment, but for understanding the past.
That sounds like a criticism of capitalism rather than a criticism of Netflix.
For me personally, Netflix makes enough good content (and hopefully pays artists well in the process) that the amount I pay is worth it. I want them to do little or no harm, but if I only patronized businesses that actively give back to society, I'd never be able to buy most classes of goods.
However, most of Stallman's post is, while accurate, a complaint of how we are being charged minimally by Netflix for a minimal access to media. If we could pay by cash in the post, on a player that didn't protect from ripping then it would cost more.
Calm down, the cultural significant works will make it to the libraries, sociaty is not at a huge loss that the libraries aren’t stocking the next season of game of thrones as its airing.
We are not afforded a free'er alternative that is legal so I believe he probably doesn't watch much TV. DRM IS everywhere. There is no copying of modern media that isn't illegal. We lost that war.
* It was over 20 years old by the time I started
* It was written in Fortran
* Variable names were single and double digits
* Each fortran program would run in isolation but had a shared memory process
* It was formally a terminal program but a weird Java frontend was created so everything looked like Windows GUI
* All program names were four letter acronyms
* All data was stored in fixed width binary "flat" files
* It previously was under CVS version control, but each install slowly drifted apart, so each site had it own unique features and bugs.
* I once had to move a significant feature from one install to another using only patch files generated from the work done on the original install.