Yep. I bought it right away when I saw it online the other day. I started watching it on my computer but transferred it to my PS3 for big screen entertainment. Im watching it right now.

Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was: it was early Sunday morning in England.

Strongest ever in Oklahoma. Headline says "its strongest-ever recorded quake." But the summary is wrong where it says early Sunday morning — it was about 10 p.m. I am in Wichita, Kansas (roughly 160 miles away from the epicenter) and felt the quake quite noticeably. It was like a train went past my house without making any noise. It rattled the walls.

The biggest difference is that Netflix can say, "Ah, but only X number of our subscribers watched your content." That is, they can probably look Starz right in the eye and say, "Only two million of our 22 million subscribers actually looked at your content." Which I think would be about right.

Cable makes some assumptions about how much various services get used. Netflix can point to actual data, not assumptions. It changes the negotiations quite a bit.

And I know that as a Netflix subscriber, when I see that something is from Starz, I tend to avoid it. It tends to be low quality. If I wanted low quality, I'd watch it on cable.

Well, it's more likely that Starz wants more money for its content than Netflix gets out of its subscribers. According to the article, Starz wanted $300 million a year for the rights to show the same content that four years ago it was passing along for $30 million a year. Netflix has 22 million subscribers. Stars wanted more than $10 per subscriber per year, which would probably be fine if Netflix _only_ had Starz content and no other significant expenses.

But for my $8/month streaming account, I can say without a doubt that I do not watch more than 10% of Starz content.

Netflix just signed a streaming deal with Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM for about $200 million a year — and those three have more and better content than Starz, which suddenly thinks its worth 1/3 more than those others. Not likely.

Netflix basically just said, "Meh, we'll take the money we were going to give to you and give it to someone else for their content." Starz is not the only game in town. It's not even the best game in town. And now everybody knows how much is too much. It's just hardball.

It depends on if you think the effect of such an attack from such a country would only affect the computer traffic passing through. That is, the attack in this case could actually spill over into the real world where you have serious political unrest and violence that could actually affect billions of people — and not just "oh, my computer got hacked," but actual "someone bombed my house, can I stay at yours?" type effects. Given the provocative and sensitive nature of the nation in question, people who don't have computers could feel the effect of this particular MITM attack. It's not likely, of course, but it _could_ affect them. Billions of them.

I mean, I have never tried to get a pilot's license, but apparently if you don't have good enough security in Florida then you can wind up teaching the wrong people how to fly. And then you take a few of those guys and you put them on sufficiently insecure planes. And even though I haven't flown in or out of New York or D.C. in 15 years, three flights that did nearly a decade ago managed to affect (and continue to affect) billions of people. The planes only held a few hundred people and only 10,000 or so were in the buildings, right? Only eight million people live in NYC. The security around a commercial pilot's license in Florida couldn't possibly affect billions of people, right? Again, it's not likely, but ... really, it could be billions.

See, now that's the smartassery I really enjoy. ;)

Actually, this is real news if presented properly. I don't fault mysidia for that, really, but I do fault timothy. I mean, you are talking about international fraud that could affect billions of people, but the article is presented in such a way that it is only instantly readable by a few hundred people. I've been reading Slashdot since 1996, so I'm totally used to the jargon. And I figured it out — so have thousands (or millions) of others ... but there is no real burden on the poster to spell out a few acronyms that make no sense to even a general audience (of nerds). This is more egregious than usual is all.

Ah, yet you fail to understand that the parent (and the post itself) obscure everything unnecessarily and that I mocked them accordingly. And I see why you posted anonymously. (Adverbs are big this time of night.)

So, besides more Californias (CAs) offering more martinis-in-the-morning (MITMs) to confuse more octogenarians/septuagenarians (OSs), what does the Chicago Public School System (CPS) have to do with anything? Or is this one of those "hacker" things I've heard so much about?

All I know is that if you put it on my computer, I'll have it filled in two years and have no idea what's actually on it.

Actually, Jesus has nothing to do with FSM. FSM is a parody of any god-and-creation myth. Yes, it is a ridiculous fiction. The only reductio ad absurdum with FSM is the original open letter to the Kansas school board that said, basically, if you're going to teach non-science creation, I'd humbly submit my own theory about creation for consideration. And what proceeded was a perfectly ridiculous (absurd) conclusion drawn from exactly the same arguments that support "Intelligent Design." Nothing about Jesus at all.

I don't think you are understanding what he is quoted as having said. To me, it reads as though he is saying it is a misuse of deductive reasoning. Given the ellipses and his own statements about how he was quoted, I'd say it's reasonable to conclude that the quote here is not a good or real accurate quote. But, regardless, it is faulty logic to say "object ergo creator." He never denies cause and effect, as you suggest. He says that it is faulty logic to say that there is an agent of change (a god) based on the presence of matter in the universe (stuff). Who put all this stuff here? No one. Or someone. But the mere presence of stuff does not allow one to make a deductive judgement.

And the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not "reductio ad absurdum." No doubt it is absurd, but it is simply a straight forward juxtaposition of religious dogma onto an obviously made up religion. It makes the dogma stand on its own for the ridiculous line of reasoning that it is. A great example of a reductio ad absurdum argument is the Ontological argument for the existence of God. "If we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist." That is straight up Jesus-on-a-stick talk, not Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM is just a mirror. If you think it is absurd ... well, good, it is supposed to be.

Yes, you can sue for that. That has been well established. TFA actually mentions such a case from 1994.

The misleading thing here is that when people read that a teacher "may not be sued for making hostile remarks about religion" one assumes that the remarks were actually hostile. The court basically said that the teacher has no reason to believe that what he said should be taken as hostile. The teacher, for his part, never mentioned a specific creationist theory, but rather said this:

Aristotle argued, you know, there sort of has to be a God. Of course that’s nonsense. ... That’s what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, ‘Well, if all this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.’ Faulty logic. Very faulty logic. The other possibility is, it’s always been there. Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic. All I’m saying is that, you know, the people who want to make the argument that God did it, there is as much evidence that God did it as there is that there is a giant spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it.

And one more graph from the article:

Corbett told his students that “real” scientists try to disprove the theory of evolution. “Contrast that with creationists,” he told his students. “They never try to disprove creationism. They’re all running around trying to prove it. That’s deduction. It’s not science. Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”

Keep in mind that this was an Advanced Placement European History class (that is to say, college level even though it was in high school). Even more interesting is a quote about the case from the defendant himself back in February:

james corbett | 12-February-2011 at 12:09 pm |
I’m Dr. Corbett. One thing readers should understand is that when my school-provided attorney made the decision to ask a judge rather than a judge decide the case, the law required that all the “facts” be considered in the light most favorable to the plaintiff (Chad). That meant that we could not challenge the validity of the recordings, which were heavily edited. It meant that we could not point out how each and every comment clearly related to the curriculum. I might add, Chad’s recording were in violation of California law.
This case was never about religion. It was about a whiny little boy who admitted he didn’t do his homework and who’s helicopter parents intervened so often in school and on the water polo team that other students called him “princess.” Neither Chad, his parents nor his lawyers, the so called “Advocates for Faith and Freedom,” ever made an attempt to even talk to me or attempt to resolve the issues prior to filing a lawsuit. It is my opinion that the “Advocates” were far more interested in having a case they could use for fundraising than they were in dealing with the issues. They are a textbook example of exactly what I commented on in class, that some people use the faith of others to line their pockets with gold or to gain political power. I believe such use of religion is vastly more offensive than calling Biblical creation “superstitious, religious nonsense,” which is obviously true.”