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Comment Re:And Nothing of Value was Included... (Score 1) 47

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Comment Re:Predictable. (Score 1) 47

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

Comment Re:Wont be suprised if the US goverment (Score 2) 182

"The only solution" is in fact, not the "only" solution.

The correct and LEGAL means for the police to gain access to the phone is to take it and seal it in a tamperproof container (aka electronic Faraday Evidence Bag), go to a court and ask for a warrant to search the contents.

We have established LAW and procedures for the state to gain access to the device. It is inconvenient ON PURPOSE. and serves as a checks and balance in legal proceedings.

Comment Re:it is destroying evidence like it or not (Score 3, Informative) 182

IF that is the case, seize the phone, get a Search Warrant.

The problem is, the state couldn't be bothered following ESTABLISHED law and procedures.

Simply accusing someone of some unspecified crime isn't a right the state has to just bypass Constitutional protections, namely the 4th and 5th Amendments.

Americans have rights, secured in our founding Constitution. I don't care what feelings one might have to the rest of the case. Rights exist, enshrined and we ought to defend them tirelessly forever.

Comment Re:If he is found guilty (Score 4, Insightful) 182

There is some established case law that says that one cannot be compelled to give up a Password, Pin or Pattern Unlock, as a violation of the 4th and 5th Amendment.

Those Amendments are key to a person's rights to be SECURE. Which is the key word here. He SECURED his rights, under duress, by refusing to comply.

THIS is separate from the police chasing him as a possible criminal for crimes I may or may not like.

Rights work by being the STARTING POINT, not an afterthought or worse, something the state can simply ignore in an attempt to prosecute people for potential criminal activity.

The state has legal remedies they ought to seek if they want access to secured personal property. We all know what that is. GET A WARRANT, which is almost always a rubber stamp (very easy bar to jump over). They couldn't even be bothered with that.

Everyone ought to understand, if we do not defend our rights, the state certainly won't.

Comment Re:From the regulatory point of view... (Score 3, Interesting) 23

by Jason Earl (#66249872) Attached to: Judge Pauses Paramount-Warner Bros Merger

There is no next move. Netfilx was buying them for their back catalog. The part of WB that people care about is the part that makes new movies and television, and that part is dead no matter who purchases WB.

If you haven't seen the tour of the Warner Brother's lot, you should do that now. They are still even filming some shows there. My guess is that, no matter who owns it they will probably keep something open there as a museum, but the days of it functioning as a working studio are quickly coming to an end. Heck, they are already living in the past. Most of what they talk about when you visit the studio is shows that they stopped filming over 20 years ago.

Still, it is very interesting to see how shows like "Friends" and "Gilmore Girls" was filmed before computers could be used to create whatever shot you needed.

Comment Fingerprinting (Score 3, Interesting) 55

by Archangel Michael (#66226980) Attached to: Microsoft Can Track Users Via a Windows Device ID

Its called fingerprinting, and it has been going on a very long time, using techniques that go back decades. This just makes it more persistent and spans attempts to obfuscate fingerprinting in easier ways.

If you want to avoid this, work from a non-persistent VM that is created and destroyed every online session, using no identifiable information (no-logins ever).

Security isn't convenient.

Submission + - Why have papers by one of history's most famous physicists been retracted? (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The link was too juicy not to click.

In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?

After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.

Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.

Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).

Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.

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Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.

Submission + - 'Stringy' universe could unravel the theory of the cosmos (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Like a vast bowl of spaghetti, the universe may be stringy on length scales far larger than cosmologists have long assumed. In a study published today in Nature, two researchers argue galaxies align in enormous filaments even on scales where the cosmos should appear smooth and uniform. If correct, the bold claim would upend the cosmological principle, the conceptual cornerstone of the standard cosmological model.

“This is serious,” says Subir Sarkar, a cosmologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the work. “If there is a real contradiction between what you expect and what you find, that would be progress, right?” Abandoning the cosmological principle could even eliminate the need for dark energy, the mysterious space-stretching stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, some cosmologists say. But others are skeptical of the new claim.

Submission + - After empty promises, string theory finds new uses (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For decades, string theory promised a “theory of everything” that described all particles and forces as tiny vibrating strings. Physicists hoped it could also solve one of the field’s deepest problems: reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity. But as string theory grew increasingly elaborate—and experimentally unreachable—many physicists lost hope.

Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, Clifford Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues lay out a small set of assumptions about the universe and show that they inevitably give rise to string theory. The work is part of a broader revival of the “bootstrap” philosophy that inspired string theory in the first place: building up explanations from a small set of consistent, general principles rather than deriving laws from a particular mechanistic framework. “It’s a trend away from a specific model that someone came down from the mountain with on two tablets,” Cheung says. “People are kind of going back to the basics.”

The approach does not prove string theory is correct. But, “It’s quite remarkable that with fairly minimal assumptions you are led to string theory,” says Andrew Tolley, a physicist at Imperial College London who works on an alternative model of gravity. Clarifying what assumptions underlie the theory could help limit the range of possible versions of string theory and its competitors, he adds. “It’s tremendously interesting to know what is allowed or not.”

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