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HBO Max Takes on Netflix With Human Curation Instead of Solely Relying on Algorithms (cnet.com) 28

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it-is-worth dept.
Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. From a report: The company's new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform -- the opposite of Netflix's strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people's homes and more platforms find their way to people's television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. CNET adds: Like rivals Netflix and Disney Plus, HBO Max has a sprawling catalog of hit shows and movies, plus a big-budget slate of exclusive originals packed with stars. But HBO Max is the most expensive of the bunch. New subscribers can sign up and pay a simple $15 a month subscription after a week-long free trial, the same price HBO already charges for its linear channel on most pay-TV providers and for its preexisting standalone streaming service, HBO Now. But if you're already paying for HBO in some form, the amount you'll have to pay for Max now, or whether you have to pay anything extra at all... well, it's complicated. "The question is: Does your provider have to deal with us for Max and do you move over? That answer will be fairly simple, and then beyond that it gets a little more complicated," Andy Forssell, the general manager of WarnerMedia's streaming operation, said in an interview last week. "We've got really broad distribution, and ... midnight next Tuesday we'll be where we are -- not that that's an end point, if there any discussions undone." To entice you to give it a try, HBO Max has padded itself with more content than you'll find on either the regular HBO channel or HBO Now.
United States

Ask Slashdot: Did Fear and Groupthink Drive Unnecessary Global Lockdowns? (realclearpolitics.com) 583

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader writes: There's an interesting analysis, which looks at several data points, to conclude that media may have flamed fears that drove the world to enforce lockdowns. From the story: "To put things in perspective, the virus is now known to have an infection fatality rate for most people under 65 that is no more dangerous than driving 13 to 101 miles per day. Even by conservative estimates, the odds of COVID-19 death are roughly in line with existing baseline odds of dying in any given year. Yet we put billions of young healthy people under house arrest, stopped cancer screenings, and sunk ourselves into the worst level of unemployment since the Great Depression. This from a virus that bears a survival rate of 99.99% if you are a healthy individual under 50 years old (1, 2).

"New York City reached over a 25% infection rate and yet 99.98% of all people in the city under 45 survived, making it comparable to death rates by normal accidents. But of course the whole linchpin of the lockdown argument is that it would have been even worse without such a step. Sweden never closed down borders, primary schools, restaurants, or businesses, and never mandated masks, yet 99.998% of all their people under 60 have survived and their hospitals were never overburdened. Why did we lock down the majority of the population who were never at significant risk? What will be the collateral damage? That is what this series will explore.

"In early February the World Health Organization said that travel bans were not necessary. On Feb. 17, just a month before the first U.S. lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that this new strain of coronavirus possessed "just minuscule" danger to the United States. In early March the U.S. surgeon general said that "masks are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching coronavirus." As late as March 9, the day Italy started its lockdown, Dr. Fauci did not encourage cancellation of "large gatherings in a place [even if] you have community spread," calling it "a judgment call." NBA games were still being played. So how did we go from such a measured tone to locking up 97% of Americans in their homes seemingly overnight?" There's an argument to be made that lockdowns was perhaps the most responsible action a government could have enforced. Additionally, some Silicon Vally tech executives have argued that the media downplayed the significance of the coronavirus pandemic early on.

Comment Re:Moral of the story... (Score 1) 135

If you want the exhaustive restrospective on this particular case, along with some very critical discussion on the topic of whether APIs are copyrightable (they aren't), and particularly on whether the APIs in question as implemented are infringing, you couldn't do much better than the following link: http://www.groklaw.net/staticp...

Comment Re:I would argue they gain money (Score 4, Insightful) 150

by drakaan (#59608082) Attached to: Streaming Services Reckon With Password-Sharing 'Havoc'

The people who are using these streaming services and not paying are (largely) relatives or close friends of people who are paying for the service.

Sure, you could crack down on password sharing and some small percentage of people would buy their own subscription, and then your streaming counts would go down, but the net gain, in terms of subscriber payments is going to be pretty close to nil

And, now, with the balkanization of digital content streaming over multiple services so that rightsholding conglomerates can try to more directly siphon money from people that want to watch shows online, the costs to people go up, and sharing becomes more likely to happen in order to offset that incremental cost.

This is stupid, pointless, and counterproductive, if the focus is on getting as many people as possible to see the value in paying for a streaming service. Either one service with almost everything on it (as Netflix had almost been) for a certain price, or a fraction of that price split up amongst different services makes sense as something lots of people would pay for. The same amount multiplied across multiple streaming services will just get you people sharing access to get a cost they can deal with.

Comment So what? (Score 1) 226

Weight is not an indicator of health. There are numerous people who are fat and healthy, and numerous people who are not fat and are unhealthy. I mean, I get it, we've been yammering for decades about an obesity epidemic that is largely not a problem, so it's hard to not just keep doing that, but *sheesh*.
Education

Public Libraries Drop Overdue Book Fines To Alleviate Inequity (npr.org) 279

Posted by EditorDavid from the amnesty-for-education dept.
The San Diego Public Library system just wiped out overdue fines for 130,000 people. It's part of a growing trend, reports NPR: The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of the library's patrons whose accounts were blocked as a result of late fees lived in two of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "I never realized it impacted them to that extent," said Misty Jones, the city's library director.

For decades, libraries have relied on fines to discourage patrons from returning books late. But a growing number of some of the country's biggest public library systems are ditching overdue fees after finding that the penalties drive away the people who stand to benefit the most from free library resources. From San Diego to Chicago to Boston, public libraries that have analyzed the effects of late fees on their cardholders have found that they disproportionately deter low-income residents and children. Acknowledging these consequences, the American Library Association passed a resolution in January in which it recognizes fines as "a form of social inequity" and calls on libraries nationwide to find a way to eliminate their fines....

Lifting fines has had a surprising dual effect: More patrons are returning to the library, with their late materials in hand. Chicago saw a 240% increase in return of materials within three weeks of implementing its fine-free policy last month. The library system also had 400 more card renewals compared with that time last year. "It became clear to us that there were families that couldn't afford to pay the fines and therefore couldn't return the materials, so then we just lost them as patrons altogether," said Andrea Telli, the city's library commissioner. "We wanted our materials back, and more importantly, we wanted our patrons back..."

in San Diego, officials calculated that it actually would be saving money if its librarians stopped tracking down patrons to recover books. The city had spent nearly $1 million to collect $675,000 in library fees each year.

Comment Re:Already in force (Score 1) 800

by drakaan (#59266726) Attached to: Stack Exchange Removes Moderator For Preferred Pronouns Policy
Actually, it was a pretty much perfect apology. They didn't do much wrong, aside from not having an official process in place to remove a mod. What, are they supposed to say "We are *sooo* sorry for removing this person who flat out told us they would not ever use a person's pronouns if they felt the person's choice was wrong"? What about a mod who refused to refer to someone's same-sex spouse as their spouse?

Comment Re:Uh oh (Score 1) 58

by drakaan (#59257528) Attached to: Appeals Court Upholds FCC's Cancelling of Net Neutrality Rules
Aside from the court being wrong about whether broadband is a telecommunications service or an information service, I agree. Google (the search page) is classified as an information service. Broadband is provisioning of a network connection for an internet peer, so...not the same thing, which shouldn't be hard for the courts to understand, but whatevah!

Comment Re:Does creditkarma count ? (Score 3, Interesting) 56

by drakaan (#59174910) Attached to: If You Asked Equifax For $125, You Need To Update Your Request
I don't understand why they weren't required to put $125 X number of claimants into an escrow account to cover claimants. Money left over after 4 years? Fine. Equifax can keep that, I guess. Either they are admitting that the monitoring service they are offering isn't worth anywhere remotely close to $125 over 4 years, or they are saying that they thought that nobody wold bother to file a claim for $125 from one of the three companies that completely control whether you can get credit, rent an apartment, or in some cases, even get a job, after said company failed to protect information that in the wrong hands could lead to problems with all of the above. The implementation of this settlement was complete horseshit.
Earth

Microscopic Fibers Are Falling From the Sky In Rocky Mountains (theguardian.com) 128

Posted by BeauHD from the raining-plastic dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee's mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. "I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles," said the U.S. Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers. The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled "It is raining plastic", raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth. Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution. "My results are purely accidental," he said, though they are consistent with another recent study that found microplastics in the Pyrenees, suggesting plastic particles could travel with the wind for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. Other studies have turned up microplastics in the deepest reaches of the ocean, in UK lakes and rivers and in U.S. groundwater.

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