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Comment Re: Netflix DVD is the best service out there (Score 3, Interesting) 78

Here is a list of the 100 best American films according to the AFI. Less than 5% of them are available to stream over Netflix, but over 95% are available through Netflix DVD. If you limit yourself to Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming, you are watching the results of the best ROI for production investment for their shareholders, not the best art. I'd rather get a great story than a cost effective one, even if it means I have to put in two minutes of physical effort every 90 minutes.

Comment Re:Netflix DVD is the best service out there (Score 1, Troll) 78

You are confused between two products: "Netflix" which is their streaming service with about 6,000 titles, and "Netflix DVD" which has over 100,000 titles.

Consider understanding what someone has stated before you dive into personal attacks. It makes you look ignorant and petty.

Comment Re: Netflix DVD is the best service out there (Score 3, Interesting) 78

Netflix DVD is the original version of the Netflix product. You get so many DVD/Blu-ray discs at a time, and drop them in the mail after you watch them. No lag/jitter problems and better audio/video quality across the board. It's not an option for people with phones and tablets only, but a much better experience if you have a TV with an HDMI input.

Comment Netflix DVD is the best service out there (Score 5, Interesting) 78

Every month I spend an hour or two looking for movie recommendations, and 10-15 minutes filling my queue. I rarely lose time scrolling through the endless, mostly bland choices on six different streaming services. I have seen more fantastic movies and television in the last six months than I have in the last five years of slogging through broken interfaces.

Submission + - WebKit introduces new tracking prevention policy (webkit.org)

AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions.

While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.

Education

Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.

The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.

"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

Submission + - AmigaOS 3.1.4 released for classic Amiga (hyperion-entertainment.com)

Mike Bouma writes:

The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9.

Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favourite classic AmigaOS — from bootmenu to datatypes.


Comment Re:How Many Paid Oil/Gas Industry Trolls Post Here (Score 2) 284

Just move on from Slashdot.

I gave up on fighting against the astroturfers here a few years back... wasn't worth the effort and stress anymore. I can still get good discussion about topics that matter to me at reddit -- just need to stay away from some of the subreddits there.

Every once in a while I come check on Slashdot, and remember anew why I left. The place went to shit once the sockpuppet accounts got critical mass on mod points.

Comment Re:Suicide by politician (Score 1) 1010

A key point here is it was wildly inappropriate for Comey to recommend no prosecution in this case on TV. It is totally not his decision. The prosecutors in the DOJ are the ones who get to decide if prosecution is warranted. The FBI's job was to investigate and generate a report to the DOJ. They do get to make a recommendation regarding prosecution but it is only a recommendation. Comey absolutely should not have announced the recommendation at a press conference before the DOJ has even started reviewing the final FBI report. It reeks of prejudicing the entire case since it places inappropriate pressure on the prosecutor in the DOJ to not prosecute when they may well be inclined to prosecute when they see all the evidence.

Comey s assertion that Clinton and her people had no intent to do harm by mishandling top secret compartmentalized information so they should not be prosecuted is also way over the line. The fact is they did mishandle top secret information, and it is unknowable if that mishandling resulted in the information being accessed by foreign powers or others who were not authorized to see it. You knowingly mishandle classified information in violation of the oath you signed there have to be consequences otherwise why should anyone bother to protect classified information. If Clinton is elected President how can she expect the millions of Federal employees working for her to protect classified information when she knowingly didn't and got away with it.

Thirdly mishandling email is only part of the case against the Clinton. A key reason Clinton may have been using this private server is there may have been email between her, foreign governments and affluent individuals who were donating large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State creating the appearance that she was soliciting bribes in return for favorable decisions from the State department on things like arms deals. Clinton is claiming these are personal emails so she withheld them from the FBI but they may be a trail pointing to public corruption.

It smacks of whitewash to suddenly short circuit these investigations so Clinton will have a clean path to the nomination at the convention which is just a few days away now.

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