Domain: allearsnet.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to allearsnet.com.
Comments · 6
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Disney beat them by years.
Disney beat them to it. There was pavement that played zip-a-dee-doo-dah.
http://www.allearsnet.com/aa/aa100807.htm#ques5 -
Re:Childhood Dreams, Bought And Paid ForThat's too true to be funny. It really bothers me that Disney tries to infiltrate its characters everywhere and anywhere — but not as much as the fact that people seem to welcome that infiltration. In the process, everything gets blanded to death.
Like many office buildings, the one in which I work gives its conference rooms names with a common theme. In this particular building, the theme is Disneyland Attractions, and the biggest conference room is name "Mickey's Toontown." Now, when Gary Wolf invented Toontown in his fantasy-noir Who Censored Roger Rabitt?, it was a nasty slum where the despised "toons" lived. Once Disney got ahold of it, Toontown got rebranded as a corny, soulless, and meaningless place.
I didn't actually care for Wolf's book, but I'm still depressed every time I walk past that conference room at another reminder of Disney's ability to suck the life out of everything they touch.
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Re:From out at the turnstiles...
You can ask out at the turnstiles at the parks, they'll be glad to answer questions [to the extent that they can, most of the front-line Cast Members don't have a thorough technical understanding of the things. That's what you get for putting a computer science student out there...] (note: it's best to ask when they're not swamped with people coming in - like towards the end of the day).
The long-standing article at AllEarsNet is perhaps the closest I can find to publicly available information on this that will verify what I'm saying.
I forgot one more detail - people often get confused when they realize they switched passes in their group and it still worked. Tickets bought in the same transaction are linked in the system, and if your biometrics match for another ticket in the group, it'll let you through (noting on the Cast-Member's display it's a [Different Person]. I believe the tolerances are a bit tighter for granting access in this manner, but it is what I consider a pretty nice feature.
And the score of 0 is what you get for being at work when the article is posted, so that you're late to the party combined with having to post anonymously because while nothing here is *secret* the Mouse isn't a fan of the internet... -
Re:Wrong.
Here's a page with some more information on the system used at Disney World. http://allearsnet.com/pl/fingerscan.htm
They have been doing this for years on Annual Passes. The apparent reason for the recent expansion of the system to include all tickets was the introduction of the ridiculously complicated "Magic Your Way" pricing structure last Januray, which makes it incredibly cheap to add extra days to a pass after the four-day mark (to encourage longer stays). It would seem Disney wants to keep people from spending the few extra dollars to add days only to sell the pass with days still remaining. So now every ticket gets tied with a biometric ID. The bottlenecks created from everyone having to fool with the scanners means they often disable them at peak entry periods.
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Re:Disney World and Child Exploitation
Whoops. Never mind. I should have investigated this as soon as I got back from the trip. Apparently, the finger "scans" instituted in January are not fingerprints. But this story doesn't jive with our experiences. We bought ALL single-day passes. No season tickets, no "park hoppers," so there was no reason to scan us and our tickets under the listed criteria. But I still hope it'll help scare the pervs away.
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Segway tours of Epcot
For a while now, you have been able to get a Segway tour of Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. They weren't available the last time the family went to WDW, but next time we're going to give this a try.