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Awesome; that's exactly right.

And let's be honest: even $200MM won't make the transition of Halo from gaming screen to big screen work. Its popularity is mostly do to online/live gameplay, which has nothing to do with the underlying plot of the Campaign. It's mostly just running around killing other players, which, while fun as hell, is not necessarily something I want to watch for 90 minutes without being able to play myself*. I say thank goodness. This film was destined for a double-kill, at the box office and with fans, only nobody wins.

*I admit, however, that gaming as a spectator sport is actually pretty fantastic. I guess I just don't want to see Brad Pitt as "The Chief", while some busty blonde gets thrown in for the obligatory love interest.

Both are true Both are true: the military invented it and it came from monkeys. One on the same.

Don't make me go all Librarian on your ass!

"AIDS can result from being infected with the HIV virus. And I don't think the military invented it. It's been recently shown to have definitely come from monkeys, probably in the 1930's."

Both are true: the military invented it and it came from monkeys. One on the same.

The studios have almost total control of ticket prices, since nearly 100% of the ticket sales go to them. The theatres have to purchase their screens and projectors and bulbs and THX certification somehow, so they charge $3 for a hot dog. I wouldn't mind so much if the experience was classier. One theatre I went to even had soda all over the screen!

Let There Be Lego

do you mean paul tatara?

i loved his reviews too.

here's a story on him.

In a world that has been shown to have people willing to cheat, the only way to have trust in any system is to have openness. Show me what you've got, don't expect me to believe somebody or thing I don't even know. Show me how it works. Let me take it to my experts, and have them check it for me.

I favor the paper ballot, as used here in Wisconsin. Here each voting station is just a small folding table with a curtain, and a magic marker. (Very cheap per station, never goes down, never needs a reboot.) You vote by completing a broken arrow to your choice with the magic marker. The ballot is verified by a testing box on the way out. If the ballot is readable, then it is accepted into a bin for later counting. If it is improperly marked, for example double voting for an office, it beeps and spits it back at you. You get a fresh ballot, and you can try again. The ballots can then be machine counted with knowledge that they will count right, and if human review is desired, you can manually go back through the ballots at any time. Cheep, effective, and reliable.

If all this is depressing you, check out Flak for a lift.

Just worry about what comes next..... =)

Exactly. I made a longer post below on this, but I can guarantee you that unless we have more information on users (and can thus eliminate annoying ads) we will see a lot more of these ads.

I run the internet department at an large asian ad agency, and we develop ads in what I consider to be a user-friendly manner.

We do produce campaigns with popup ads, particularly since these ads get a much higher response that banners. However, I refuse to bombard users like x10. We place these ads only on sites on which there is a strong correlation between user interest and the product/service being offered.

Most importantly, we use cookies to identify whether or not you have already seen the ad. If the ad has been served to you once, we stop and serve it again only after several days have passed, and you will see this ad a maximum number of times (3-5 over a couple weeks). We achieve very high success rates with this, and I am confident that we aren't annoying too many people. (hmmm... cookies do have a good side).

And before I get any knee jerk reaction to pop ups in general, please remember that ads pay for content. Need I remind us all of Suck, Feed, and Automatic Media?

I've been noodling on this for a while and it is disconcerting to me that these media outlets are shutting down or floundering.

The dearth of weblog content is an incredible outlet for relevant information on world events, often relayed by the very participants in the news. However, too often, the linking goes back to major media outlets or a subsidary of one a large corporation.

While even further "elite" discussion boards and content sites will flourish (uber, A List Apart and Flak spring to mind), they lack the resources to disseminate their clever and unabashed content.

Publishing tools like blogger make it easy for the non-technical user to publish their thoughts, witticism, and commentary to the web. It is only when these sites reach critical mass (Kottke.org, Zeldman.com) that it becomes hugely expense to continue relaying the message.

I see the future of independent content lying in the hands of smaller, more focused community sites (Metafilter, The Fray)

Despite their shortcomings, these sites are paving the way backwards to a smaller, more closely knit internet the way it was several years ago.

Suzie Homemaker and Joe Six-pack will continue to the media that's delivered to them, and the rest who desire the independent voice will seek it and should they not find it, they will create it as they always have.