Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

samzenpus writes "Every year companies are willing to dish out big bucks to reach tens of millions of consumers with their Super Bowl ads. With an average price tag of $4 million for a 30-second commercial, this year is no exception. We've seen: beer obsessed frogs, field goal kicking horses, celebrities drinking various beverages, explosions of all sizes, homages to 1984, and day trading babies in the past. Since talking about the commercials has become almost as popular as the game itself, here's a place to do just that. What have you liked and what do you think would have been better left on the cutting room floor."

Comments

Ads are toxic.

[Snufu]

The superbowl doesn't change that.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

The NFL is toxic.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[ozmanjusri]

What is this superbowl thing? I've seen a lot of references to it lately, but not a lot of explanation.

From the online chatter, it seems to be a celebration of TV adverts and (junk?) food, so I assume the super bowl being referred to is an oversized container for fried chicken wings etc. Is that correct?

I understand why the majority of Americans would be so wholeheartedly involved in such an event, but it seems a bit irresponsible to an outside observer. With all your obesity, diabetes and heart issues, I think it'd be better for your nation's health to steer these sort of events towards less sedentary pursuits.

Why not include a healthy sporting event in the day's activities, for example?

Re:Ads are toxic.

[epyT-R]

Originally, it was about football.. Now it's about rampant consumerism. Of course, europeans and aussies would know nothing about rabid obsession over soccer...

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

your feigned ignorance doesnt make you seem pretentious (which seems to be your goal), but rather just stupid.
people watching a football game on television is no more a seditary event than you posting on slashdot. at least they do it with other people and enjoy a party atmosphere. going to a party also has nothing to do with one's other interests, which in this case would likely lean towards participating in sports of some kind.

if something like the superbowl doesnt interest you, rather than be a dick that no one wants to invite to a party, ignore it and spend that extra time getting your head out of your ass.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

the NFL is undoubtedly an awful organization that hates its fans (who are masochists that will put up with the BS, myself included), however i will give them credit for not allowing corporate logos plastered all over the uniforms.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[ChunderDownunder]

aussies would know nothing about rabid obsession over soccer...

Damn straight. World cup notwithstanding, soccer is a summer curiosity here, watched mainly by migrants from Europe and their grandchildren.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Hamsterdan]

Well, we do have curling in Canada

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this superbowl thing? I've seen a lot of references to it lately, but not a lot of explanation.

From the online chatter, it seems to be a celebration of TV adverts and (junk?) food, so I assume the super bowl being referred to is an oversized container for fried chicken wings etc. Is that correct?

I understand why the majority of Americans would be so wholeheartedly involved in such an event, but it seems a bit irresponsible to an outside observer. With all your obesity, diabetes and heart issues, I think it'd be better for your nation's health to steer these sort of events towards less sedentary pursuits.

Why not include a healthy sporting event in the day's activities, for example?

My god, you've never heard of the super bowl? It's only the biggest Tupperware party of the year!

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

the NFL is undoubtedly an awful organization that hates its fans (who are masochists that will put up with the BS, myself included), however i will give them credit for not allowing corporate logos plastered all over the uniforms.

Uh, yeah, that's mainly because whichever mogul who bought out the uniform contract wouldn't allow such filth near their precious logo.

Just ask Nike.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Quasimodem]

And several of the girls, and all of their curling irons, are hot!

Re:Ads are toxic.

[c0lo]

the NFL is undoubtedly an awful organization that hates ...

What's NFL, precious? Nerds for life, somehow?

Re:Ads are toxic.

[diamondmagic]

I don't think "by definition" means what you think it means.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less. On a fundamental level, there's nothing wrong with it.

There are certainly issues with some ads, in terms of the products they sell, the stereotypes they reinforce, and in some cases the veracity of the claims that they make(though outside political advertising regulation keeps that sort of thing largely in check. There can also be issues with the tools advertisers use to reach us and in some ways the degree to which they manipulate us, but that's not the same as saying "Ads are toxic".

That kind of attitude is so pointlessly naive it's ridiculous. Are signs on shops toxic? Yellow pages advertisements? Websites for products or services? Review Sites? Slashdot Articles? All are a form of advertising.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

Because everyone else is doing so much better on the obesity front? India, Mexico, and China are all facing much larger obesity epidemics than anywhere in the west, including the US, and the rest of the West is actually no better than the US. Even places like Italy and Greece are facing problems as the demands of a modern lifestyle mean that families don't have time to cook traditional foods and the same convenience foods are doing the same thing there as everywhere else.

For all that America is the home of the most famous of fast food giants, they didn't invent fast food, or fried food, or sugary sweets. They didn't wire human beings to crave fat and sugar and they didn't create the environment where everyone works so much they have no time to cook properly. Walk your own streets, the chances are you have as many overweight and obese people as any US city you care to name.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[arkhan_jg]

aussies would know nothing about rabid obsession over soccer...

Damn straight. World cup notwithstanding, soccer is a summer curiosity here, watched mainly by migrants from Europe and their grandchildren.

Cricket, on the other hand...

Re: Ads are toxic.

[Spottywot]

On the other hand, it's possible to enjoy sport and have a sense of humour simultaneously.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[BlackPignouf]

Best explanation I've read so far :
http://theoatmeal.com/pl/worki...

Re:Ads are toxic.

[neiras]

What is this superbowl thing? I've seen a lot of references to it lately, but not a lot of explanation.

I for one welcome our superb owl overlords.

Whooo! Whoo-whooo!

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

Maybe my phrasing wasn't right.

What I meant to say was that with the exception of political advertising, which for first amendment reasons isn't regulated for truth, advertising regulation is fairly effective at keeping blatant falsehood in check. If a commercial advertiser blatantly lies you can complain and they almost certainly will be fined.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

They do that as well, but that's a particular type of advertising, not advertising as a whole.

My point is that if you eliminated all advertising in the kind of idiotically naive way implied by the phrase "ads are toxic" you'd have no idea where to go to find someone who could provide you with a good or service, whether anyone else would provide you with a good or service, or any information about said good or service. Every piece of information you receive about a product that you didn't explicitly go and ask the vendor about is advertising and for that matter, a good deal of the information they provide you with when you explicitly ask is also advertising. Eliminating it not only idiotically naive it would actually make life worse as you'd pretty much only know about the local vendor of crap whose shop you happened to stumble upon.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a European I've watched the superbowl a several times on television. The game itself looks a bit like chess. There are occasional bursts of activity, where a few of the players can be seen running. Most of the time players are walking about to take up new positions. On television, half of the time is spent on endless bla bla bla about strategy, and talking about all the rediculous statistics that are kept (number of times nose scratched with left hand, etc.). The other half is spent on ads for fast food, beer, sugar water and cars. The very few remaining moments is spent on the bousts of activity on the field.

This put together is American Culture, which non-Americans will never understand...

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Opportunist]

Please stay on topic. We're discussing sports here.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Opportunist]

Depends on who defines.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[CrimsonAvenger]

Which, sadly, points to the need to start regulating the contents and portion size of prepared and restaurant meals.

No worries. I can order two at a restaurant, or microwave two at home.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[camperdave]

Ah yes! The race for the the Clavet Cup, named after Archie Clavet, the greatest curler ever to come out of Dog River. Some people say Archie Clavet could slide a cup of coffee down the length of the ice, draw it dead to the button without spilling a drop.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[RivenAleem]

I'm sorry, but I have to chime in here. If we didn't have soccer, what would hooligans use as a focal point for rioting?

Re:Ads are toxic.

[RivenAleem]

If you rounded up all the criminals in the UK and shipped them off to an island penal colony, what do you think their descendants would say when you meet them many generations later?

"G'day Mate"

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

Banning adding sugar in any form to anything would essentially wipe out a huge number of foods, including a whole mess of relatively healthy traditional foods. Basically any desert is off the table, a whole variety of Asian foods, heck if you take "in any form" to its extreme you've just banned anything containing fruit or milk, as well as potatoes, any kind of grain, essentially you'd be left with meat and a few, though not many, vegetables.

To be honest, I don't think any amount of regulation is going to help. We're simply wired to love fat and sugar, some of us more than others. Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight our instincts and for the most part its an epic failure. We're simply not going to be moving back to a substantially more active or time balanced lifestyle any time soon and we'll find crap to eat so long as crap is available, which unless we start regulating the caloric intake of every individual, it always will be.

At this point I think our best hope is something scientific or medical that can either help us to better process our high fat high sugar diets or to control our cravings. In the last few years we're finally beginning to understand that it isn't just a matter of fat people being lazy or thin people being hard working, and that in a lot of cases, all the willpower in the world won't help you. I know it sounds like a cop out, but I honestly can't see any level of regulation which could possibly exist in our current legislative framework which could help. We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too, we're not going to go back to living the kind of Mediterranean lifestyle which kept this sort of thing at bay in Southern Europe because we're not going back to a society where mothers don't work and have all day to cook that food, even if people still knew how. Fresh food is still expensive, even in areas where it's plentiful and local, preparing it is still reasonably difficult, and we still crave fat, sugar, and salt.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[ultranova]

We're simply wired to love fat and sugar, some of us more than others. Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight our instincts and for the most part its an epic failure.

Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight billions of dollars of advertising by fast food firms and other death peddlers, not our instincts. The problem isn't that you're wired to love sugar, the problem is that greedy psychopaths add it to everything in otder to get you addicted and sell some more with no care for what the consequences will be.

Imagine if every food item came with added alcohol. Would you blame people's desire to get high as the reason for the resulting liver cirrhosis epidemic? It takes more effort to avoid foods with sugar, fat and salt added than to get them - that is the problem.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[ultranova]

No worries. I can order two at a restaurant, or microwave two at home.

That's okay. If the restaurant and shop charging you twice for two portions won't help, we'll just up the salt- sugar- and fat sin taxes until the majority of people can't afford to kill themselves with them anymore, thus curing the epidemic and the budget at the same time.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[MitchDev]

Like the US cares about NZ (well, Hollywood loves using your landscapes....) and what a few Kiwis think

Re:Ads are toxic.

[operagost]

The Broncos really need to draft defense and running backs.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[jimbolauski]

Free market had its chance and is hell-bent on selling food-labeled slow-acting suicide pills. Unhealthy food is a bigger health problem than cocaine nowadays, so it needs to be treated as or more seriously.

To start with, absolutely ban adding sugar in any form to anything.

Lets look at some what your short sighted sugar ban would eliminate, all breads as the yeast needs sugar to work or would honey be legal, pretty much all baked goods, beer, wine, liquor, all require adding sugar so the yeast can work. You won't just be eliminating sweets and soda which are not a problem, self control is.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[CrimsonAvenger]

So, basically you want WW2-style food rationing in the USA today? That'll go over well.

Do note, however, that your solution won't cure the "epidemic", nor will it cure the budget. Even if it could do the one, the two are mutually exclusive - either you get people to eat what you want them to eat, and thus not pay the sin taxes, or they eat what they want, and pay the sin taxes - one option fixes the budget, the other fixes the "epidemic".

That said, all you get with sin taxes is smuggling and a black market. Note that sugar was one of those things you bought "off the books" in WW2 if you didn't have enough ration cards to get what you needed.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[tompaulco]

you'd have no idea where to go to find someone who could provide you with a good or service, whether anyone else would provide you with a good or service, or any information about said good or service.

Well, we have the internet, and reviews.If I am interested in a product, including whether or not it exists, I go to the internet and research what other people use and the pluses and minuses of various products.

Every piece of information you receive about a product that you didn't explicitly go and ask the vendor about is advertising

I would agree with that. I would also add "and therefore suspect". Of COURSE the vendor is going to say their product is better than their competitors and of COURSE they are going to say it is awesome. That is why you can't make your purchasing decision based on the vendor's advertisement. They are hoping you will, of course. Advertising is one thing I take into account when I look at a product. If they are spending a lot more on advertisement than a competitor, then it probably costs more to make up for the advertisement, or it doesn't perform as well so they have to give it more market exposure.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[srmalloy]

Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less.

Bullshit. They are about stretching the truth to the point where a lawyer can't tell if your lying through your teeth to try to make your piece of crap look better than someone else's piece of crap while at the same time making damn sure you realize you simply cannot live without it.

From what I've seen, the vast majority of ads can be described as either "You are hideously careless with your health, nutrition, or hygeine if you do not use our product" or "You will become instantly more attractive to the opposite sex if you purchase/use our product", with the occasional "If you have enough money, you can avoid feeling as if you're just another sardine crammed into this aluminum cigar tube when you fly" ad, and the self-referential "Our retelling of this basic plot is better than the other 10,000 retellings of the same basic plot, because our retelling has better/more exposed skin/special effects/explosions/action/makeouts/big-name actors, whether or not any of that is relevant to the plot." ads to get you to watch movies or TV programs that themselves are vehicles to keep you in your seat to be exposed to more ads.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

But everything does come and always has come filled with sugar. Sure we add some artificial stuff, but every single fruit and seed in all of creation is full of one form of sugar or another. Carbohydrates, complex and simple are everywhere in all our food, the few foods which aren't full of carbohydrates are full of fat. If you think there's any diet on earth where you can escape sugar and survive you're insane. Even vegans are exposed to large amounts of sugar. We love sugar and fat and salt, WE NEED THOSE THINGS TO SURVIVE, we are hard wired to like sweet things, to like fatty things and to like salty things. So, to one extent or another is every species of life on this planet. Yes fast food vendors have something to answer for, but get off your high horse and stop pretending it's just something we can legislate away. You and I and everyone else aren't addicted to sugar because the big bad fast food companies made us that way, we're addicted to sugar because our bodies are still the same as they were a million years ago and we're all of us, every single one of us, wired to scarf down sugar and fat. Some of us more so than others, but all of us to one degree or another.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[jimbolauski]

using flour as the food for yeast will take 24-30 hours to rise as it has to break down the starches to sugar first where as adding sugar only takes 6-8.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

And how do you think the internet finds out about a product? Where does the seed for the great tree of pointless bitching which is your average review site come from? If I make the next video game, movie, car, and I'm not allowed to tell you about it, how do you know? How does anyone know? You have no idea how much of the information you get comes at least in part from advertising, even the review sites you go to are sponsored by it. Hell Slashdot, this website on which you and are I discussing this very issue is sponsored by advertisements.

I'm not suggesting that we don't need some further regulation of advertisement, we almost certainly do. I am suggesting that the idea that all advertisement is evil and must be expunged is idiotic. We couldn't even if we wanted to and if we could it would make things far worse than they are now. Stop thinking in black and white, it never works. Things simply aren't all good, or all evil, not even the things you wish were. Proposing impossible things doesn't fix the world, proposing possible ones does. Suggest some advertising reform that could actually happen, find or start a group pushing that agenda, lobby the government, speak to your community, get their support(yes, that's advertising too), get things changed.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

Well yes, but if you add flour to water is that not "adding sugar in any form"?

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Eskarel]

In this case yes, you are purely correct. I'm far from a libertarian, but the level of regulation and control required to make this work goes far beyond what I consider acceptable. The kind of regulation which would actually solve the obesity epidemic would be little different than mass slavery. We could pass a bunch of idiotic laws to make food more expensive, to ban certain kinds of restaurants, but none of that would actually work. Controlling everyone's daily intake and exercise would, but Jesus Christ that's a scary thought.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[amicusNYCL]

Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less. On a fundamental level, there's nothing wrong with it.

Exactly, and if I didn't watch the Super Bowl this year then I wouldn't have learned that Bud Light is a thing.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[cayenne8]

That's okay. If the restaurant and shop charging you twice for two portions won't help, we'll just up the salt- sugar- and fat sin taxes until the majority of people can't afford to kill themselves with them anymore, thus curing the epidemic and the budget at the same time.

There's more and more literature coming out showing that it isn't fat that is the problem of people getting fat....mostly that is it primarily SUGAR, or things that turn to sugar quickly in the bloodstream (flour, etc). So, don't lump everything in together in your list of "sin" foods.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Rakarra]

The Broncos really need to draft defense and running backs.

Even Joe Buck remarked that it was rare to see tackling that bad, and if he's criticizing the teams, then you're really REALLY in trouble.
That was not a playoff-caliber defense. Oi.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[Trogre]

Interesting. Do you pay a flat-rate subscription to all the web sites you visit, or do you prefer to get a monthly statement by the megabyte?

Re:Ads are toxic.

[DarwinSurvivor]

Ouch, I think I hit a nerve there. It sounds like you are talking about the concept of advertising whereas I am talking about the current state of advertising. Of course there are exceptions to the rules and some (usually very small businesses) are more honest than others. I don't think you could possibly truly believe advertising is being used the way you described it.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[cupantae]

No, the problem with the superbowl is that you have as much advertisement as you have sport. In any self-respecting sport, you should have at least half an hour of sport to every five minutes of ads.

45 min half, 3min ad break, 10min analysis, 3min ad break, 45min half
That's how a game of footie breaks down. It is perfectly acceptable. Most other sports are much the same. American football is different, and Americans have no one to blame but themselves.

Also, [rant] and all that, but the ads were shit .

Re:Ads are toxic.

[volmtech]

Does the number 666 mean anything to you? Every purchase scanned and uploaded to the national data base. When you reach your calorie allotment for the month you can't buy anymore.

Re:Ads are toxic.

[ozmanjusri]

There's some, but its not conclusive.

This is a good article:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Amorymeltzer]

Neither: Waste of Money.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Bite The Pillow]

Since I found comedians live tweeting the super bowl, my opinion has changed. Brands ill never buy setting up punchline after punchline, and since I have ota only, it costs no more than the internet connection I already have.

It's worth the price to the advertisers, and worth the price to me.

They wouldn't pay for it if it somehow didn't make sense. Budweiser and coca cola for example, they basically have to put in an appearance. They went with the feel good spots because they aren't going to be the talk of the town without something groundbreaking. And it is hard to do that every year. But they paid just to show up, because it is worth it to just be a part of the game.

Most of these are not the commercials that get you out shopping. They just want to be with you when you do.

Ever wonder why a single brand with over 50% market share advertises? Not to increase share or convert the remainder, necessarily. But it is still worth the cost.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[purpledinoz]

Isn't this question really only relevant to companies considering buying ad time? To the average Joe, who cares. It's just interesting how high price is. The price is determined by the market. If it really was a waste of money, then advertisers buy and the price would go down.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[zippthorne]

Now that you've laughed about them, in a couple weeks you're going to forget about the "never buy" part and just remember the "felt strongly" part. Then when you're buying the products, the "brand you'll never buy" will be the brand you vaguely remember, so that's the one you'll put in the basket.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[blackraven14250]

Considering neither Bud nor Coke has over 50% marketshare...

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Laxori666]

If it were such a waste of money then the price wouldn't be so ridiculously high. Maybe it's not the case that every ad exec who has paid for a superbowl ad is grossly incompetent, but rather, that it's worth the price for what it gives you.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[tompaulco]

Now that you've laughed about them, in a couple weeks you're going to forget about the "never buy" part and just remember the "felt strongly" part. Then when you're buying the products, the "brand you'll never buy" will be the brand you vaguely remember, so that's the one you'll put in the basket.

I hope my subconscious is better at remembering those things than my conscious. Because I'll often be telling coworkers about a funny commercial and the first words out of my mouth are always "I don't remember who the commercial was for, but...".

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[tompaulco]

They wouldn't pay for it if it somehow didn't make sense.

Sure they would. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be marketed to them as making sense. In other words, the marketing department has to sell to the company the idea that it will drive up profits. The marketing department is very good at marketing...themselves.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Your.Master]

A tax write-off doesn't make you money. It makes the spending you did cost a bit less, so it's at best a kind of discount on these Superbowl ads, but they are still really expensive.

A tax write-off is thus *almost never* the reason a business does something (there are some exceptions, eg. maybe for destroying inventory that you can't even sell for enough revenue to cover the tax on what it cost to make).

Advertising works, in aggregate. It might not work on you, but it does in aggregate, even though most people seem to think it doesn't work on them even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that it did. It might not be pleasant that it works, but it seems to empirically. And people literally watch the superbowl just for the ads, so you have guaranteed viewership.

Re:Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Rakarra]

I'll bet the viewership numbers for the Superbowl of non-Americans would skyrocket if the fellow from Bad British NFL Commentary could provide commentary for an entire game.

slashdot...

[TitusGroan8856]

slashdot news for nerds^H^H^H^H^H americans.

Re:slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot news for nerds^H^H^H^H^H americans.

I'm american and I don't watch the superbowl, neither do most people I know. The superbowl is the bread and circuses for the mindless sheep.

Re:slashdot...

[Andrewkov]

I don't get it. Same thing here in Canada, people complain they don't see the same ads as shown in the US. I hate commercials, I change the channel or pick up my phone when the commercials come on. It blows my mind that people get excited about them.

Re:slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

i think its because seeing a funny commercial once because you want to be entertained is different from being subjected to them repeatedly for months when you actually want to watch a television show.
we'll never see these commercials again.

Re:slashdot...

[gstoddart]

It blows my mind that people get excited about them.

Historically, there have been some pretty damned cool and clever commercials during Super Bowl.

And since I saw one Bud Light commercial, and one Budweiser commercial (because they cut to local ones) I can only assume there were a bunch of quite cool ones I missed.

This is one of the few things where you expect to see some good ones, but we never actually see them.

Re:slashdot...

[fdrebin]

It blows my mind that people get excited about them.

Not this year! :(

Re:slashdot...

[fdrebin]

I can only assume there were a bunch of quite cool ones I missed

Not this year! :(

Re:slashdot...

[tlhIngan]

I don't get it. Same thing here in Canada, people complain they don't see the same ads as shown in the US. I hate commercials, I change the channel or pick up my phone when the commercials come on. It blows my mind that people get excited about them.

That's because most ads are dull and boring and played to saturation.

But when ads cost $4M per 30 second slot, it tends to bring out the most creative because it's costing a LOT of money to run the ad, so using it to run a plain jane ad is stupid because you can buy timeslots for 1/40th the price every other day of the week.

So some of the best ads you see will be on during the superbowl, and that's it very few are run again, unless they're up for awards (in which case they have to run on regular TV).

Plus, it's all about ratings. The C3 numbers for the superbowl are huge (Commercial+3), which is how ad prices are set. Neilsen sells those numbers so stations can set ad rates. The "public" numbers of L, L+SD, and L+7 are "given away" to show how popular a show is. The difference is that the C numbers subtract out the non-commercial content from the ratings (i.e., the programming).

Sports is one of the highest rated shows on TV, and outside of sports, only TBBT really scores anything significant, but well short of sports. The superbowl pretty much feeds the idea - the sport brings in the audience which raises rates, the raised rates bring up the ante on what ads can do because no one wants to epend millions running the same old ad you can see everywhere else, so they run special ads. Which attracts more audience because the ads are new, novel and often only run that time.

In fact, TV stations say they care about TV show piracy, but they really don't. Because the C3 numbers they buy don't include the programming. All it means is the ratings go down, the show gets less money and it's either make do or get cancelled.

Or why they're more than happy to stream TV because the ads are unskippable.

Re:slashdot...

[similar_name]

I hate commercials, I change the channel or pick up my phone when the commercials come on.

I don't care for commercials but I don't get the active hate. Commercials are just basically 30 seconds of entertainment with product placement. Given so many shows and movies have product placement and tie-ins now, almost everything is one big commercial.

Re:slashdot...

[coofercat]

...and yet, it could have been a nerd story, if only they'd have given up a bit of bias. I don't eat from the super bowl, but I'm lead to believe that Goldieblox advertised on it: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

Surely engineering/tech toys for girls *is* news for nerds? Why on earth would you run a story about advertising on the super bowl without mentioning it, not least because it didn't cost them millions to put on.

#slashdotsucks

Re:slashdot...

[Rakarra]

I can only assume there were a bunch of quite cool ones I missed

Not this year! :(

Holy shit, no kidding. I can't think of a blander offering. The Scientology commercial (yes, there was one!) was even a repeat of what they'd already been showing earlier. The Superbowl isn't supposed to be a time for commercial reruns.

Re:slashdot...

[Rakarra]

It's easy for annoyance to start bordering on real dislike when you realize just how much of your time is spent on stupid commercials and how they interrupt, constantly, the flow of communication, whether it's breaks in sports (unavoidable), to interrupting a TV show, interrupting whatever it is that you're streaming, interrupting a discussion on the radio. It's only when you step back that you realize how insidious it is and how out of hand it is.

I'm done giving my time to advertising. No more commercial radio, DVRs to skip commercial TV, disc rentals and purchases otherwise.

Re:slashdot...

[Rakarra]

...and yet, it could have been a nerd story, if only they'd have given up a bit of bias. I don't eat from the super bowl, but I'm lead to believe that Goldieblox advertised on it: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

The amusing thing is that I found the ad, and the product, to be a bit sexist itself, even while it aims for more gender equality. Part of a big problem is the notion that many boys and girls toys need to be different in the first place, and that you have to color a "boy's toy" pink before it becomes a "girl's toy." It didn't used to be that way, it's only in the last few decades that toy stores have been segregating the genders. I heartily recommonend this article, and while I don't agree with everything, it makes some good points.

Commercials

[iamwhoiamtoday]

My take on Superbowl commercials is the exact same as the rest of the year. Namely, I avoid commercials wherever I can. Got rid of cable back in 2010, in favor of Netflix and other streaming options. Not looking back.

Re:Commercials

[antdude]

I am reversed for Super Bowls. I record and watch mostly for the commercials instead of the games. Yes, I can watch online, but I prefer OTA HD quality!

Also, this year's commercials were weaker than usual. I even made a poll about them: http://www.aqfl.net/node/10876 ...

Re:Commercials

[X10]

Commercials is what pays for the programs. The alternative is a TV station that charges per program or per month.

Re:Commercials

[GTRacer]

You mean, like subscription TV service, aka, cable or satellite? I vaguely remember when our house got hooked up for cable about 30-ish years ago and the promise* then was that the cable-based channels would be mostly ad-free since we were paying up front. That lasted more or less 10-15 years I'd say (if you give networks a pass on promos for their own lineups).

It's sad really. I want to cut the cord so badly but my wife hasn't been convinced yet. I need to build a slick PVR / HTPC thingy that handles streaming from the net seamlessly and will stream to our tabets / laptops etc. and maybe I can sell her on it...

*Promise in the sense of idealized hope, not contractual term.

Re:Commercials

[GTRacer]

Dear friend, I think you're confused. What does one's orientation have to do with femininity (as you're implying a straight man must be into other men to like Superb Owl ads as only women are "supposed" to)? I think the word you meant to use was transgender.

Though, TBH, you probably meant to say you're a closed-minded individual that sees the Vagisil body wash spot from the Grammys as a cautionary tale...

Re:Commercials

[KingSkippus]

You mean, like subscription TV service, aka, cable or satellite? I vaguely remember when our house got hooked up for cable about 30-ish years ago and the promise* then was that the cable-based channels would be mostly ad-free since we were paying up front. That lasted more or less 10-15 years I'd say (if you give networks a pass on promos for their own lineups).

Then you're misremembering. There's a huge difference between ad-free networks being mostly on cable (the actual historical situation) and cable being mostly ad-free networks (how many people incorrectly remember the "good ol' days" of cable). Cable television has always had advertisements, barring a few notable premium channels such as HBO and, of course, public television stations. Many channels were nothing but ads, such as home shopping channels and local access stations that ran infomercials for something like 20 out of 24 hours a day.

Originally, cable television was merely a way to get television into areas that were unable to receive broadcast signals, thanks to geography or other factors, and carried only the networks, which had ads. Eventually some "superstations" rose up that were only available via cable out-of-market, the first of which was Ted Turner's WTCG (later WTBS) and eventually stations like WGN and WOR, and all of those had ads. Later, almost all cable-only channels such as ESPN, MTV, and CNN have run ads since their inception.

What you're mostly likely remembering is the commercials for specific premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, and Disney (prior to 1997) that advertised that their channels were ad-free, but these were the exception and commanded extra fees in addition to your normal cable bill, not true of cable television in general.

Re:Commercials

[amicusNYCL]

Commercials is what pays for the programs.

Then where do my cable subscription fees go?

The alternative is a TV station that charges per program or per month.

Paying only for what I actually watch would be a fantastic service if it existed. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist.

Re:Commercials

[amicusNYCL]

Is there a decent option for watching live sports yet? That's the one thing holding me back, I even already have a HTPC built but still have cable.

Re:Commercials

[tompaulco]

Apparently your "good old days" of cable started in the 1990's. In the early 1980s, we had cable, and there was no Home Shopping Network (apparently HSN went national in 1985). There were no commercials on cable either, because almost everything on cable was a movie channel of some sort. The only thing with commercials was the local channels which were available also available over cable.

Re:Commercials

[KingSkippus]

WTBS went national on December 17, 1976. Nickelodeon dates back to December 1, 1977. ESPN started broadcasting September 7, 1979. USA Network was broadcasting nationally via satellite by the late 70s. CNN brought us the 24-hours news cycle on June 1, 1980. MTV told us that Video Killed the Radio Star on August 1, 1981. 1982 brought us CNN2 (later Headline News, on January 1), The Weather Channel (May 2), and a slew of other ad-supported channels.

While HBO was started in 1972, and Showtime in 1976, Cinemax started in 1980. The Disney Channel, originally a premium add-on channel, launched in 1983. Those were the only ad-free premium channels in the early 80s, as Starz didn't launch until 1994.

So I don't know what all of these "movie channels of some sort" you remember in the early 1980s, but there were only three mainstream ones out there, four if you count Disney's launch in '83. Meanwhile most other popular cable channels such as ESPN, CNN, MTV, and various "superstations" with advertising were staples of cable television line-ups by then, as well as the national broadcast networks, plus some local access channels that, as I said, broadcast almost nothing but commercials..

Now, I suppose you could argue that C-SPAN and maybe some local religious stations (many of which also ran ads) that no one watched were really what made the "good ol' days" of cable television the good ol' days, but even accounting for those, I still stand by my assertion that, with very few exceptions of possibly some small cable providers that didn't provide many national cable networks at any given time, cable television has always been predominantly ad-supported. Again, you are mixing "most ad-free channels were on cable" with "most channels on cable were ad-free." The former is true, but the latter, although a common misconception, is far from it--a fact that is easily verified by looking at any cable channel line-up from the 1970s or 1980s (or if you can find material back that far, even the 1960s). Insisting that it is only shows a very selective and inaccurate memory.

Re:Commercials

[tompaulco]

I can only speak for myself and the people I know (of course i will add your opinion), but our cable gave us the option of HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, VUE and local channels. We had only VUE and local channels.Most people I knew had HBO and local channels. I'm not aware of ESPN even being an option in my area, because my stepdad was big into football an we would have had it if it was available. We didn't have MTV available either, but the restaurant where I worked had it.

Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste of money now that getting a 'viral video' on youtube can get you much more bang for your not $4 million bucks.

Re:Waste

[viperidaenz]

Spending $4M gets you an ad during the superbowl. Uploading a video to youtube doesn't make it go viral.

Re:Waste

[M. Baranczak]

Remember: the primary job of advertisers is selling advertising, not selling the stuff that's being advertised. They put a lot of effort into convincing people that advertising is effective.

Re: Waste

[alen]

YouTube only became popular after they bought a Superbowl ad

This was the old pre Google YouTube

Re:Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, you've just admitted that advertising for advertising is effective. And there's no good reason to believe that only meta-advertising is effective.

Slashdot : Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of us who've suffered Slashdot for more than the last decade should be 100% embarrassed that we still come here with shit like this being posted.
 
Can anyone recommend good IT (systems) sites? I've already bypassed most of the science articles on Slashdot with PhysOrg.

Re:Slashdot : Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone recommend good IT (systems) sites? I've already bypassed most of the science articles on Slashdot with PhysOrg.

beta.slashdot.org

Re:Slashdot : Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[jedidiah]

> Those of us who've suffered Slashdot for more than the last decade should be 100% embarrassed that we still come here with shit like this being posted.

As someone who has actually been on here for more than a decade I find your pretense mildly amusing.

Re:Slashdot : Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?

[Eskarel]

Indeed, because Slashdot has always been such a bastion of informed journalism. If anything things are slightly better because only about 20% of the articles are rampant Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA hating click bait. Heck I think I've actually gone a full month without seeing anyone type Micro$oft. Slashdot has changed, mostly because those of us who have been reading this place for more than a decade are older now, and it's also not changed which can be frustrating because we all have. It's never been anything other than what it is though, though fire hose has made it a little less horribly biased.

Re:1984

[FuzzNugget]

NSA and GCHQ not doin' it for ya?

Re:1984

[Anonymous Coward]

The Radioshack one was...in a different way.

Re:1984

[54mc]

Good news! DHS has announced they'll have a spot this year!

Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[theodp]

The 80s called ... they want their store back

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[dubdays]

I want the Radio Shack of the 80s back. Really, anything would be better than the abomination it's been turned into.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[elbles]

I liked the ad's execution (especially Chucky and Alf), but I want the Radio Shack of the 80s back. You know, the one that helped bring Johnny Five back to life, not the one trying to be Best Buy Junior (or, soon enough, Crazy Eddie's, Nobody Beats The Wiz, etc.).

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[Hamsterdan]

That's probably one of the reasons they closed in Canada. Radio Shack used to be the place to go when you needed some components (which they stopped selling). the 200-1 electronic kits, the Armatron, I miss those kind of things...

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[Dachannien]

I can't figure out where Radio Shack is going to get the money to renovate all of their stores after they blew their wad on a Super Bowl ad.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[jeffb (2.718)]

Hey, guys -- THEY STILL SELL PARTS. They've just compacted them into a set of shallow drawers, rather than displaying them on pegboard. I haven't counted, but it seems to me that they've got a better selection of components than they did in the 80s. Besides the obvious (how many varieties of blue LEDs and microcontrollers did they carry in 1980?), they've still got fairly robust coverage of things like DC connectors and resistors/capacitors/other passive stuff.

I miss having the nerd stuff prominently displayed, but if they need to give more square footage to phones to stay afloat, I'm happy to pull out drawers instead of seeing it all disappear.

(Remember Lafayette Electronics, another chain that sold components? If so, you're old, too.)

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[cusco]

**Some** Radio Shack stores still sell parts, mostly the stand-alone stores. The ones in the malls are almost completely cellphones and junk R/C toys.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[sjames]

Some have a selection of components, some have none. Either way, unlike days past, nobody who works there has any idea what any of them are or how to use them. Ask for enameled wire and they show you monster cables.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[zippthorne]

Every radio shack still has a tool chest full of assorted IC's, gates and connectors. They have several antenna products (that.. I'm not sure are really all that great, but you can still get mag-mount antennas), two or three different breadboards including at least one solderless, small spools of solid wire, and a few various other tools, including the classic 15W soldering pen. The last time I was there they even had a very cheap-looking soldering gun.

They often only have one of anything any more, and the floor space is constantly shrinking, which is unfortunate, but you never had a Digikey-level selection at radio shack anyway. I'm pretty sure you can at least still get some variation of the old 200-in-1 springboard kits, and thanks to nascar they still offer a decent collection of handheld vhf scanners.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[operagost]

I assume that commercial announced they're not even going to bother to sell parts anymore.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[sjames]

That's not a question of education, it's more a problem of pathological personalities.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[orgelspieler]

Sure, a few of the stores still offer parts (although it looks like that's about to change). The problem is the employees; they only have PFYs selling cell phones. There's not a knowledgeable grey beard in sight. I find I'm better off just paying the shipping and ordering from Newark or Mouser.

When they said the 80's wanted their store back, I was hopeful for about 3 seconds that they meant they wanted to return to what it was when I was a kid. Oh well.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[jeffb (2.718)]

I've only got n=5 or so, but each of the stores I've gone into in the last year or two had the parts cabinets. Sometimes I had to ask where they were, but they were there.

Sure, there'll be a limited selection -- just like there was in the 70s and 80s. If you're expecting a double-wide strip-mall slot to hold inventory as broad as DigiKey, yeah, you're gonna be disappointed.

Also, I don't know where everybody was finding the stores staffed by knowledgeable greybeards back in the 80s, but I learned from the beginning not to ask technical questions of the folks behind the counter.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[tompaulco]

I remember one of the salespeople at Radio Shack when I was growing up had a Masters Degree. One could make the joke that he couldn't get a job, but in truth I think a salesperson at Radio Shack paid much better relative to society as a whole back in the 1980s than it does now.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[Trogre]

That is a very sad story. A pox on those sales people for crushing your enthusiasm for electronics.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[sjames]

It was a popular job for retired engineers and EE majors.

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[Yaztromo]

That's probably one of the reasons they closed in Canada. Radio Shack used to be the place to go when you needed some components (which they stopped selling). the 200-1 electronic kits, the Armatron, I miss those kind of things...

Nope -- technically, they have never really closed in Canada, but it's a strange story.

RadioShack was operated in Canada by a company called InterTAN. They weren't owned by the US RadioShack at all -- the stores were licensed under an agreement. In 2004, Circuit City in the US bought InterTAN, and one week later RadioShack sued in the US (claiming breech of agreement) to have the licensing agreement cancelled. All Canadian RadioShack stores were then rebranded as "The Source By Circuit City" (which IMO was always a terrible name).

But wait -- there's more. In 2006 RadioShack US then opened 9 stores in the Toronto area running under the "Radio Shack" name. After only a few months in business, they closed all of them down "to focus on core US business".

In January 2009, Circuit City in the US went out of business; however, as "The Source By Circuit City" in Canada wasn't doing too badly, instead of being shut down with the US stores the entire thing was sold to Bell Canada, who renamed the stores "The Source", and who continues to operate them to this day.

As such, many/most of the pre-2006 RadioShack stores haven't actually closed -- they were simply renamed, first to "The Source By Circuit City", ad then just "The Source", which still operates today. InterTAN didn't go out of business -- it's just been swallowed up.

Of course, the product selection has changed over the years -- you're probably not going there anymore to get your zener diodes. They still have some parts, but it's not like back in the heyday.

(Refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack#Operations_in_Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(retailer))

Yaz

Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far

[orgelspieler]

You're probably right. Maybe they just seemed smarter when I was a kid because I didn't have a clue what I was doing. :-)

Re:since NFL is a non-profit

[viperidaenz]

Yes, a donation to the TV network that airs them.

Supper what?

[pubwvj]

Supper bowl? Is that what I eat soup out of or what I feed the dog in? Both? Ads for it must be a waste of time...

Superbowl?

[nurb432]

What is that? It wasn't on my tv so at least in my case it was a waste of dollars.

Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no secret that Slashdot's traffic has been stagnant at best, if not decreasing. Alexa's and Compete's numbers don't paint a rosy picture. Their estimates aside, I think it's obvious that Slashdot's popularity and influence has been on a decline for some time now.

Shitty, irrelevant stories like these do not help. This story is purely about marketing. There's absolutely no technological aspect to it. Nor are science or math involved. This story does not belong on Slashdot, plain and simple.

This is the kind of crap we can find at reddit. We come here to Slashdot specifically because we don't want to see stories like these!

The new ultra-shitty beta site sure doesn't help the situation. Now we get to see irrelevant, unwanted stories displayed worse than they currently are, with discussion that's much harder to follow, and damn near impossible to participate in.

Slashdot likely won't ever regain the influential position it once had. Shitty stories like this and the shitty beta site will make that a certainty, though. They'll continue to drive away the few remaining users.

Ads are not sold by the second...

[hhawk]

Ads are not sold by the second, but rather by a price per thousand viewers, known as CPM or Cost Per Thousand. On a CPM basis the Super Bowl ads are equal or below the cost of regular ads... If you want to reach a lot of people they can be an effective part of a marketing mix.

Re:Ads are not sold by the second...

[Anonymous Coward]

CPM = Cost Per Thousand?
Good to know these marketeer types can spell.

Re:Ads are not sold by the second...

[Etherwalk]

CPM = Cost Per Thousand?
Good to know these marketeer types can spell.

Maybe they're spelling in latin.

Re:Ads are not sold by the second...

[codeButcher]

CPM = Cost Per Thousand? Good to know these marketeer types can spell.

Maybe they're spelling in latin.

You mean to say that acronym has been around since the days of the good ol Roman Empire?

Doberhuahua

[fahrbot-bot]

I think this Audi commercial is hilarious and hope the word "Doberhuahua" is now used for "something that sounds like a good idea, but would actually be very bad." Like, "That Unity interface is a Doberhuahua."

Re:Doberhuahua

[Etherwalk]

Audi and Volkswagen had the best commercials so far.

Re:Doberhuahua

[glavenoid]

"Man, that Slashdot beta was a real Doberhuahua"

Re:Doberhuahua

[emaname]

I have to agree that Audi and Volkswagen had the best commercials so +1.

I already posted so I can't give mod points.

Everything else was... disappointing.

Re:1984

[game kid]

Homages? How about a re-enactment with targeted cellphone ads if you go to Times Square (which is of course nowhere near the actual location of the Bowl*)?

*You can thank Cablevision in part for that.

Texans aint playing = I'm not watching

[ClassicASP]

I've long since quit drinking, I'm not buying any new technology gadgets or switching connectivity providers of any sort, and pretty much not spending money on anything because of tax season. I don't even care about the halftime show. Its a confirmed waste.

Re:Texans aint playing = I'm not watching

[3.5 stripes]

You're not going to be watching for quite a few years to come either.

Re:Texans aint playing = I'm not watching

[orgelspieler]

I, too, bemoan my beloved Texans. But... you really should have watched the halftime show. I had never heard of Bruno Mars (since I live under a rock, apparently), but it was quite the entertaining show. I was joking with my wife that the solo drummer kid wasn't half bad, but he's no Niel Peart. Had I known he was the singer, I might have cut him some more slack. His band is pretty awesome two watch, too. Not particularly hard music, but playing anything on a horn while prancing around like that is not easy. It was pretty jarring, though, when those topless old farts in tights crashed the party -- but at least Flea is still fun to watch. It felt like a classy modern act channeling the 40s got interrupted by the 80s. But he finished strong.

Re:Texans aint playing = I'm not watching

[Rakarra]

I had never heard of Bruno Mars (since I live under a rock, apparently), but it was quite the entertaining show. I was joking with my wife that the solo drummer kid wasn't half bad, but he's no Niel Peart.

You are correct, many people think the halftime show this year was better than the game or the commercials. That wasn't the case for a good portion of the last decade -- 10 years ago was the infamous Timberlake/Janet Jackson nipple slip, and since then the NFL had chosen only the safest, most boring, most past-their-prime and irrelevant acts for the halftime show. Finally it's starting to get decent again.

A singer who can play an instrument! How novel!
Amusingly, Justin Bieber is a decent drummer too, certainly better than as a singer.

Re: Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant tra

[epyT-R]

It hasn't reached reddit levels of stupid yet, but movement in that direction is a valid complaint. I guess it depends how you define 'success.'

Re:It would be nice if I could fucking watch them.

[oldhack]

It sucks to be a canuck, eh?

AdBlock

[rueger]

Until they get AdBlock for TV I'll continue to download the Superbowl from Pirate Bay so that I don't have to watch the ads.

Re:AdBlock

[Solandri]

Funny. I download the Super Bowl ads from the Pirate Bay so I don't have to watch the game.

ads should be a waste of money

[Chaneera]

I go to great lengths to avoid ads and I'm flabbergasted when people actually seek them out or discuss the latest in some mind-numbing conversation. But when one is forced upon me and I know that it's gonna pay for itself several times over because enough drones are falling for it my head is friggin about to explode!

Re:ads should be a waste of money

[afidel]

I generally avoid ads (I use comskip on my DVR and adblock + flashblock on my web browsers), but the superbowl brings out enough creativity that some of the spots are works of art. Take the Apple 1984 ad, it's a piece of short cinematic genius and is talked about 30 years later.

I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[ilikenwf]

...it and football as a whole, honestly. IMO a big majority of football culture is that of ignorant and/or dumb, brutish people.

Re: I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[Waterwatcher]

fnord...

Re:I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[HairyNevus]

What if I told you, there was a stats side to it (and all sports games), that let's your create spreadsheets and work with numbers. There's also a fantasy side to it, albeit sans goblins and wizards. Central point here being: there are sports nerds.

Re:I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, there is all that, but basically it's about making book and cleaning up the windfall from your latest haul.

Re:I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[fatphil]

The only time I've been to (or even seen at all, to be honest) one of the big US games was a RedSox match at Fenway Park, and we were accompanied by what I can only now term a "stats nerd". He was utterly normal in every other way, but once inside the stadium, about 80% of what came out of his mouth contained a decimal number between 0 and 1. When we made him aware of this, he claimed that he's barely into the stats, some take it a lot more seriously than him. Scary.

Re:I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[LoRdTAW]

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but....
Way to be a dick. I am not a sports fan and I had no idea what the hell was going on half the time. But its still fun to sit with friends and family, have a beer and relax.

I went to my brothers place and all of us are nerds/geeks. None of us are football fans (or sports fans in general) and don't follow the game. In fact I am so ignorant of the game the in-joke was every time I asked what was happening the reply was "that team did better at sports than the other". The only person who really knew the game was my brothers friend who gave us the details.

I will say that the game was painful to watch. That bad snap right in the beginning was an omen. After that it looked like the Broncos had no idea what was going on. If it was a total shutout I was going to send them a funeral flower arrangement and my condolences.

Re:I Think the Super Bowl is A Waste of Time

[Rakarra]

...it and football as a whole, honestly. IMO a big majority of football culture is that of ignorant and/or dumb, brutish people.

I've met enough dim nerds to say that culture isn't much better.

Waste of Time

[jennatalia]

It would be nice if we had two columns for this: for and against. It's a great example of capitalism at its best, but purely based on American necessity for buying shit we don't need. I record the damn game just so I can fast forward through it to ensure I don't get to see some of the commercials online. Companies spend more on this game than they would toward a generous cause to help humanity. Too bad helping humanity isn't profitable...

More interested in the billboards near the stadium

[Ellis D. Tripp]

than the crap being spewed over the air during the game...

http://blog.seattlepi.com/mari...

Radio Shack still okay

[Etherwalk]

the one you could buy a soldering iron at. now, its like you described. just another consumer electronics store trying to be Best Buy

I bought a soldering iron at one a few months ago. Used it to fix a truck's instrument panel.

It was kind of a mess, but they still sold what I needed.

Re:It would be nice if I could fucking watch them.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess he'll just have to make do with free health care unlike Americans who are privileged enough to see ~$500m worth of commercials. Sheesh...when are those crazy eh-sayers going to get their priorities straight???

My Fav, Budwiswer Beer commercial

[Trax3001BBS]

Open road and a motorcycle starts off down it, all you hear is the noise of the bike as the gears are shifted.
Buuuuuud - Wissssssssss - Eeeeeeerrrrr - Beeeerrrrrrrr.

Re:My Fav, Budwiswer Beer commercial

[Nkwe]

Sure you don't mean Rainer Beer?

Re:My Fav, Budwiswer Beer commercial

[some old guy]

It was Rainier beer.

The Olympia running gag about "them Artesians" was funnier.

I seen 'em!

Re:My Fav, Budwiswer Beer commercial

[Trax3001BBS]

Sure you don't mean Rainer Beer?

I didn't even need to look at the video. Getting ready for bed; that time you have to think about the day, I thought cr@p it wasn't Budwiser beer but Rainier. -maybe nobody will of noticed :}

Yes it was Rainier Beer which was heard as the gears shifted, even flows better; It didn't sound right typing it out but thought well it did then.
The one more people seemed to like around the same time was the swamp and the frogs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I have a trait if you take the time to notice of messing up something in a post. Not a one is as it was meant to be :} in this case pushing the wrong beer, not only did it play better, I'm from Washington state where Rainier was proud to be from.

Checking Wikipedia Rainier is now a memory - I did look at the video, though it was posted in 2012 it's much older than that, Rainier quit in 1999 and I figure the commercial crated some 10 years earlier, but I've been known to be wrong before :}

Rainier Beer had a lot of memorable commercials I'd forgotten bout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re:My Fav, Budwiswer Beer commercial

[tompaulco]

Sure you don't mean Rainer Beer?

Another real world example of the effectiveness of those $4 million commercials.

Re:It would be nice if I could fucking watch them.

[JeffAtl]

Sounds like things are tough all over

Worth it?

[MasseKid]

Absolutely. It's the ONLY time of the year you can buy a commercial and if it's moderately funny have people actually go out and LOOK for your commercial to see it again. Where else can you get your commercial to be talk around the water cooler? We're still talking about 1984 30 years later....

Re:Worth it?

[Opportunist]

You know what? You don't need to blow 4 mil on it. We even have shows dedicated to funny, entertaining commercials, and I'm pretty sure so do a lot of other countries. Yes, believe it or not, a whole show where they show NOTHING but ads and yes, they have rather good ratings, even. Why? Because these ads are actually entertaining!

I know it's a completely outlandish concept for most advertisers, even some companies, but if you give people what they WANT they will more readily accept getting it. If you cram down my throat a commercial that looks like shit and is annoying at best, is it too surprising that I'll take that time you spend to show it to me to take a dump?

To give you an example of what I mean, a local maker of alcoholic beverages ran a commercial campaign where they would spin a story around a murder mystery that revolved around their drink. But they actually had a pretty good set of writers, actors, etc, the whole deal was done with quite some effort. Every couple weeks they'd rotate in the next 30 seconds of their "series", and they'd hide some "clues" in the spots so people would want to watch them again and again to find those clues so they could guess the culprit, and of course win the prize.

Believe it or not, people tuned in to shows they didn't give a shit about because they knew that the next 30 seconds spot would be in there somewhere.

And IMO, that's the pinnacle, the holy grail of advertising: People tuning in to a show because they WANT to see YOUR ad, not the show!

Re:Worth it?

[Overzeetop]

I'm sorry, which product was it that was the basis for being RickRolled?

Re:Worth it?

[WilyCoder]

Vinyl record pressings of Rick Astley's song "Never Gonna Give You Up", duh.

blast from the past, from 2K

[plopez]

Just before DotCom became "DotBomb".

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[Anonymous Coward]

It's completely irrelevant. Dice was completely clueless when they acquired slashdot. They've turned it into a corporate-loving, irrelevant, average, mediocre, wannabe-like-everyone-else site. Slashdot has a unique audience and which Dice has completely ignored, and they've directed this place like every other millenial-driven ADHD twitter clone.

Money kills good things. Dice are fucking idiots. Thanks for fucking this one up guys.

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[Dan East]

Yeah, because it's not like Slashdot had stories about the Superbowl during its heyday.

CPM -- cost per thousand

[satch89450]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Look up "M" in the table. In the dim dark past, probably before you were born, printers were using "M" to mean "thousand". And I too have been on Slashdot for a fair amount of time, for what it's worth.

Censorship!

[atari2600a]

They could have chosen the Constitution for that one long-ass commercial that preceded the Super Bowl, but no, they use the declaration of independence. Then, get this, they cut out all the bits about the 'savage indians' & expect no one to notice. I'm no fan of centuries-old racism, but I kinda feel like they're treating a centuries-old document like a photo of Stalin & his ghost friends. Stalin has ghost friends right?

Re:Censorship!

[Opportunist]

Grandfather Stalin has no ghost friends, comrade. Please stop by at the Lubyanka on your way home for a friendly chat and an exchange of ideas (read: we need to exchange that idea for something more agreeable).

ZOMG!,!! Puppies!!!,,!

[aaarrrgggh]

Well, I think I was less offended by my least favorite registrar's ad this year, but still moving my business away from them.

Don't think Sonos ad worked too well; owning several, I understood, but it was a bit of a leap.

Other than that... Did you see the cuuuute little puppies...

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[Anonymous Coward]

It's completely irrelevant. Dice was completely clueless when they acquired slashdot. They've turned it into a corporate-loving, irrelevant, average, mediocre, wannabe-like-everyone-else site. Slashdot has a unique audience and which Dice has completely ignored, and they've directed this place like every other millenial-driven ADHD twitter clone.

Money kills good things. Dice are fucking idiots. Thanks for fucking this one up guys.

When can we begin to copy/past funny cat pictures and link to recipes and "life hacks"?

Microsoft ad less than the sum of its parts

[theodp]

Microsoft stitched together a short Super Bowl ad that (IMO) was less than the sum of its longer individual films, most of which would get you to tear up.

Re:Microsoft ad less than the sum of its parts

[sconeu]

Because of my personal history, the Steve Gleason one got to me. Surface or not.

Waste of time?

[fustakrakich]

No... Money laundering. How else can you wash 4 mil every 30 seconds?

Re:Waste of time?

[Opportunist]

I know a casino where you could do that easily, even with a (slim, admittedly) chance to actually get any of your money back.

Re:Waste of time?

[fustakrakich]

You can't write off gambling losses...

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[stoborrobots]

It's no secret that Slashdot's traffic has been stagnant at best, if not decreasing. Alexa's and Compete's numbers don't paint a rosy picture...

Sure, but does Netcraft confirm it???

Re:1984

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Say what?

Can you sayApple App Store and iTunes?

Re:1984

[David_W]

Yeah, speaking of the Radio Shack one, I was hoping it was going to turn into them going back to what they were in the 80s... a nerd can dream...

Re: Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant tra

[glavenoid]

Yep, and they seem to be banking on this SlashCloud and SlashBI, etc. SlashBullShit as of late so I bet they're going in the "original content" with minimal user interaction/minimal community direction. I bet the slashdot.org domain will be up for cheap in a couple years when DICE has finished looting the last corpse here so if someone still has an installation of SlashCode laying around we could probably get the site back up to speed pretty quickly in that eventuality.

It must suck to be Malda and see your website baby all grown up to be a junkie whore like this.

Re:1984

[fizzer06]

If I need a 33k ohm 1/4 watt 10% tolerance resistor FAST, or need to test the tubes in my Zenith TV. Radio Shack!

Re:1984

[noh8rz10]

what's wrong with the app store and iTunes? do they spam you or try to sell you? uhhhhhno.

This year's ads were disappointing

[damn_registrars]

Most of the ads that had celebrities in them ended up being for products I don't want. I can't really think of any that were interesting and for products that I have any interest in purchasing.

Re:This year's ads were disappointing

[Opportunist]

It's worse for me, even. Most of them had celebrities I don't want.

What Super Bowl?

[emaname]

I thought this was all about "The Biggest Concert of the Year" where some remarkably mediocre musicians are promoted as though they actually have talent.

Oh, and BTW... there might be a football game between some over-rated commercials.

This event has become nothing but an enormous amount of hype.

Re:What Super Bowl?

[Opportunist]

You mean, like, say, pretty much EVERYTHING?

Take whatever "main event" or "festival" or "special holiday" and tell me it didn't get turned into an overhyped consumerist crapfest.

Cutting room floor

[swillden]

What would have been better left on the cutting room floor? Denver's offensive line.

Re:Cutting room floor

[wonkey_monkey]

Denver's offensive line.

Yeah, the original version of Take Me Home Country Roads is an f-bomb fest.

Re:Commercials vs. The Game

[billstewart]

Friends of mine do a party where we do record it, watch the commercials, and fast-forward over the game, occasionally stopping if the football's interesting.

Since I'm writing this afterwards, it's not a spoiler, but while this year's commercials were below average, they were a lot better than the game.

Re:Commercials vs. The Game

[antdude]

Agreed. Even better than half-time show even though I didn't like that music genre. In fact, last year's power outage made the game better and interesting!!

Re:1984

[DarwinSurvivor]

Why would you specify a 10% tolerance? That's about as bad as you can get!

The ads cost me nothing..

[greggster]

Ads or not, it's the one game we watch as a family. This year I watched with more interest than in the past - and it was the first one I recall watching with just the wife and our two kids (not at a friends house, etc). It was fun, made a pizza and chips run at halftime (we were gonna go to a friends house, but wife kinda sick so we stayed home). Watched on OTA in HD - the picture looked great. Being a captive audience, the price was paid whether ads were lousy or not. Not my money :) Had fun explaining some of the rules to wifey (4 attempts to go 10 yrds, e.g. 3rd & 13, 2 point conversion). When I first turned on the game and saw 26 players my first thought was 26! (factorial) and my ADHD was overwhlemed!! But oh yeah - 13*2 players - that is a lot of variables, but this is 2 teams... Reduce that to a few basic tactics (QB run, QB throw long|short, QB hand ball to another player, etc) and I enjoyed watching the tactical part of it. Now to watch a game every Sunday - not sure I am willing to give up fixing/building/study time for that.

ads == money laundering

[Dr Herbert West]

you would think that the money involved would bring creativity, but it's quite the opposite. Keep in mind ad agencies are slaves to their clients (the days of renegade "mad men" are long gone, and I suspect their gonzo reputation of yesteryear was a fabrication) and as a result the typical creative process is:

--Look at the ad trade magazines from last year.
--See which ads "did the best" which really means, which ads all the other advertisers ranked the highest.
--Do exactly that same ad, but tweak it for whatever pop culture thing is hitting as of six months ago.
--The metric ad agencies give to their clients is not how much product got moved-- it's what "rating" their superbowl ad got.

The superbowl is a money laundering scheme for advertisers-- it's very incestuous and the only real beneficiaries of the superbowl are the ad agencies. Certainly not football fans.

Re:ads == money laundering

[fatphil]

Who do you think was behind the joint coke/pepsi add at halloween? It was the same picture (a pepsi can wearing a coke cloak), but the two companies had different slogans. Do you think that idea was pepsi's and coke's, or an ad agency exec trying to be brave (and thereby get his hands into two honeypots)? The latter seems more likely.

It worked on you, didn't it?

[wonkey_monkey]

Since talking about the commercials has become almost as popular as the game itself, here's a place to do just that.

Exactly what the advertisers want.

Re:It worked on you, didn't it?

[nicholasjay]

Since talking about the commercials has become almost as popular as the game itself, here's a place to do just that.

Exactly what the advertisers want.

Meh. Doing anything isn't usually in your interests exclusively. Increasing the value of your home helps the home centers (through sales), local governments (taxes), and neighbors (property values).

If I can't do something I want to do just because it might tangentially benefit someone else I wouldn't be able to do anything.

Re:1984

[mirix]

It wasn't always. 20% used to be standard in the cave era.

(which is probably the last time a radio shack was decently stocked around here... christ).

Re:1984

[Opportunist]

You remind me of the people who complain there ain't enough sports on TV when there are whole networks dedicated to it.

If you want more references to 1984, watch C-SPAN.

Re:1984

[Opportunist]

Well, admittedly it's now, but back when RadioShack carried them, you should spec 10% if you didn't want 20%...

Superbowl ads help you decide for products

[Opportunist]

Or rather, against them.

With ads being so expensive, it tells me that the product they are trying to advertise are overpriced since they can afford those ads.

Re:Live sports

[Opportunist]

And guess what, I still taped it (sorry, but your prime time is like 3am for us Euros) and am skipping happily past ads as I write.

Re:FTFY

[Opportunist]

Well, that invisible hand seems to be in our pockets now.

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[MMC Monster]

Absolutely. Slashdot is the worst social news site (where people actually discuss the stories).

Except, of course, all the others.

Re:1984

[tripleevenfall]

In Soviet Russia, DHS spots YOU!

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[AmiMoJo]

I suppose the key difference was that back then that wasn't the only content. These days about half the stories are just some regurgitated press release or clickbait bullshit. I do try to vote it down, but you can't vote up non-existent stories.

Maybe the internet itself has changed. There is still good technical info out there, but somehow it seems harder to find. You would think that search engines would make it easier now, but a lot of it has migrated to forums and social networking where it is lost in a sea of floaters and used condoms that spew out of effluent pipes labelled "content". Everything on the internet used to be relevant to nerds, now most of it isn't.

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[AmiMoJo]

According to Alexa Slashdot is most popular in India. Is that really true? Most people here seem to be American.

Re:1984

[zippthorne]

Cablevision wasn't the problem.

The public financing was the real problem. Cablevision was just the hero with big enough pockets to get it cancelled.

I fail to understand why people who aren't interested in sports should be required to support an extremely profitable private business catering to people who are.

Re: Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant tra

[umafuckit]

Fork it.

GoldieBlox Scores Big

[GTRacer]

How is it a legendary nerd news site missed this? I practically *squeed* when a new ad for GoldieBlox came on (complete with another great song parody). I know they won their ticket into the big Superb Owl ad frenzy courtesy of Intuit, but it was so awesome to see them get this level of exposure.

Also, their spot was spot-on and very well done!

Re:GoldieBlox Scores Big

[Anti-Social Network]

the big Superb Owl ad frenzy

One thing's for sure: it's not Cheep.

Watching Super Bowl ads online

[tepples]

we'll never see these commercials again.

Why not? I was under the impression that the advertisers either A. made them available to watch through the Internet, or B. ordered their legal teams to tolerate fans doing so. Super Bowl ads are like movie trailers in this respect.

Re:1984

[BvirzaAurellya]

infomative

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[csumpi]

It's no secret that Slashdot's traffic has been stagnant at best, if not decreasing.

I wouldn't be surprised. Ever since timothy took over, the posts, both for writing and content, went the way of the shitter. You need an editor who knows about technology, not some wanna be nerd who doesn't understand the summaries he/she writes. No wit, no humor, no knowledge, awesome recipe for a site editor. Not.

Also, people are not stupid. They know an article from an advertisement. Not tagging slashvertisements as ads is an asshole thing.

.

Not after the first half.

[wcrowe]

I'm not sure they were worth the expense on THIS superbowl. Most of the people, at the party where I was, stopped watching after the halftime show. Many started going home midway through the third quarter. This year, advertisers definitely were not reaching as many people as they would have liked.

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[operagost]

But has Netcraft confirmed it?

How to escape "The Pleasure Trap"

[Paul Fernhout]

https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
    Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Also, advice to eat home-made food:
http://www.thersa.org/events/r...
http://www.thersa.org/events/v...

"We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too,"

Sadly, so true... Yet we in the USA so often ironically claim somehow we are "rich". As Iain Banks said in the Culture series: "Money is a sign of poverty".

Here is some advice on building a healthier and happier society from cultures that achieved that: http://www.bluezones.com/

Yet, adapting that for a world of "pleasure traps" or "supernornal stimuli" or "the acceleration of addictiveness" in the 21st century is a huge challenge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...

I think regulations and politics can help with that, but it has to probably be of a deeper more thoughtful form than much of what passes as mainstream politics today. Things like a basic income, an expanded gift economy, internet-empowered democratic decision making, rethinking education to move beyond "compulsory schooling", reconstructing our dwellings and towns and cities to be more walkable and human-friendly and sustainable and healthy, and so on...

Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap"

[Eskarel]

The few weeks of discipline crap has been disproved, both scientifically and by human experience over and over again. If all it took was to stop eating sweet crap for 90 days fat farms would have 100% success rate, they don't, not even close.

It's nice to talk about things like "restructuring our dwellings and towns", but it's a god damned fantasy, nor do I see how any of your other suggestions would really help at all. In the modern era we have freed women from the household. There has been a cost to that in terms of the amount of time that is available for common household tasks, but short of either imprisoning someone in the home again or a radical shift in the way our society functions to something that makes those hippy communes of the 70's look like hard line free market societies, I don't really see how you're going to get it back.

This is part of the true problem of the modern age. For better or worse the old ways are dead, and can never be resurrected. The average family will never again have a member(s) whose sole duty it is to cook, we will never be primarily agrarian, we will never be largely manual labourers. In many ways that's a good thing, but it came at a price, not least to our health. We can sit here trying to turn back time for the next century and failing, or we can move forward. To what, who the hell knows, hopefully to something better than what we have today, but we can't go back, not even to the past that actually existed, let alone the fantasy.

Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap"

[Paul Fernhout]

"The few weeks of discipline crap has been disproved, both scientifically and by human experience over and over again"

Citations needed... Examples where it can work:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/hea...
http://www.heartattackproof.co...
http://www.healthpromoting.com...

I would agree that it can be a difficult path to walk sometimes in our society -- especially when the entire family does not make the change at once, and so essentially keeps re-infecting each other with bad eating habits by bringing junk food into the house. The battle of the "bulge" is generally lost or won in the supermarket, since food brought in to the home is pretty much guaranteed to be eaten in reverse order of healthfulness. As Paul Graham said in his essay:
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...
"Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

How can talking about better urban planning be a "fantasy"? Communities can improve themselves. See for example, Albert Lea, MN:
http://www.bluezones.com/progr...
"Our team of experts Dan Burden, Dr. Brian Wansink, and Dr. Leslie Lytle, empowered the community to make a few small lifestyle and environmental changes. Citizens improved in four areas: eating better, becoming more active, connecting with one another and finding a greater sense of purpose, and reaped the positive benefits of revitalizing their bodies, their spirits and their town. The community made a variety of changes including adding workplace wellness policies, revised restaurant menu and vending machine offerings, community gardens, walking clubs, walking school buses and new hiking trails.
Community Successes
* Life expectancy increased an average of 3.1 years
* Participants lost a collective 12,000 pounds
* An average 21% drop in absenteeism by key employers
* City employees showed a 40% decrease in health care costs"

Many cities in Europe have zoning policies that encourage walk-ability and discourage sprawl that leads to automobile dependency.

Also, for your other comments, it sounds to me like you're mostly just being pessimistic without really looking at alternatives such as I've outlined. We may lack the political will to improve ourselves, but for the most part, we collectively know how if we wanted to. Much of the stuff I've outlined is about moving forward. For example, with dish washing machines, high-powered blending machines, ceramic knives, improved heating devices and pots, home grocery delivery in many areas, YouTube example videos, and so on, home cooking is probably a lot easier than it has even been. And that is even before talking about the potential for home gardening robots and home cooking robots. Or even purchased prepared meals that are just prepared *better*.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

As for women specifically, compared to a basic income, how is it "freeing" an individual to for her to separate her from her young children she cares about and move her from a position of great autonomy in the household and part of a distributed network of peers to one where she is statistically a bottom-ranked person on a hierarchy who has a boss staring at her back all the time and is subject to other degrading regulations (like when she can go to the bathroom)? And for the most part ultimately for little economic gain after paying for child-care expenses, a business wardrobe, more purchased meals, and a second car?

Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap"

[Eskarel]

Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck "As seen on CNN" on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions. Then you have an opinion piece by a computer programmer. A very clever computer programmer, but none the less someone with absolutely zero qualifications in the area they are asserting. Again, I know it's popular to claim that with willpower everything could be solved, because then we don't actually have to fix anything.

As to your comments on women, you're cherry picking statistics and reading articles which also do so. In addition to Dutch women(who do work by the way, just not on average full time) being happier than American women, so are women in most of the rest of Europe including countries where women often do work full time even after being married or having kids, and for that matter a whole mess of countries where women don't work. The men in these countries are often happier(though the correlation isn't quite as clear) as well. This includes a whole mess of former Soviet Block countries which would appear to be barely functioning. These countries have a social safety net supporting women and families where the US most definitively does not. Oddly enough from what I remember the UK, despite having something of a safety net, is actually more generally miserable than the rest of Europe both among men and women, read into that what you will.

In terms of the 60's vs today. No one said freedom made you happy, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. On top of that women in the early 60's were expected to be happy with their lives whether they were or not and the people conducting the survey also expected and wanted them to be happy in their lives, take the results with a grain of salt.

I'm not suggesting we be inactive, I'm suggesting that pretending that if we just regulate something or if people would just try harder the problem will go away is idiotic and unhelpful action. Your evidence for there even being a "pleasure trap" let alone one that is easily "wrestled with" or "escaped" is thin at best. It's virtually impossible to effectively regulate food because all the things that you're trying to regulate are also things that people need to live, you can't just ban sugar, fat, and salt, so you need to somehow regulate the level of consumption of those things, which is impossible without some seriously draconian legislation.

Re:How to escape "The Pleasure Trap"

[Paul Fernhout]

"Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck 'As seen on CNN' on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions."

Considering how much of what many cardiologists do is essentially a scam, I guess the bar for medical practice is pretty low, whoever you call a "quack".
http://www.healthleadersmedia....
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

And even some oncologists, too:
http://nation.time.com/2013/08...

That said, let us look as the site you dismiss based on it saying the related doctor (Dr. Esselsytn) has been on CNN:
http://www.heartattackproof.co...
"Former President Bill Clinton on CNN credits Dr. Esselstyn with helping him regain his health."

Another quack? Bill Clinton is an example of how improvement is possible by changing what we eat.

I think you've also missed my point that we try to regulate the wrong things. For example, if everyone has a basic income (social security from birth) people would have more time for home cooking. Or, if we subsidized fruits and vegetables instead of meat, dairy, and grains, again we might have a much healthier populace. See:
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

Also, if US Americans got European-length vacations, they might get more outdoor activity in the sunshine, which might improve their health by exercise and vitamin D. As well as being less stressed and have more time for learning about cooking and health and doing gardening.

Anyway, good luck in your own continuing researches into improving health. You make a good point on how surveys on happiness across the decades might be biased by social expectations; I can hope you are right in this case!

Re:It's the opposite

[Wootery]

Apple's mobile devices are awful from a software-freedom perspective.

That Google's products are also awful has absolutely no bearing on this.

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[0137]

yeah for those that are new, slashdot superbowl ad threads are an annual tradition that was codified in 2000 during the dot com bubble, featuring big-ticket flashes in the pan such as pets.com.

Re: Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant tra

[hodet]

I am going to cut AC some slack on this one. Without trying to sound like the old man yelling at a cloud, there was a time when reading the headline alone on this site exposed you to new things. I remember thinking that I had no clue what the headline was referrring to which would entice me to read on and broaden my understanding. Now it is littered with crap like this and oooh Iphone this and and Android that. Oooooh shiny, happy happy. You still get a nugget of good stuff here once in a while and the discussions are still leaps and bounds better then anything I have seen on reddit, but overall this site has taken a dive and is getting more reddit like every year.

Re:1984

[Forbo]

I honestly don't understand why Apple is on this list. They're pretty much the final computer company that will just sell you a computer, and not tie it into a million services that track your identity, and try to spam you/sell you.

Setting up Mavericks:
- "Oh, hey, sign in with your AppleID for everything iCloud!" No, shut up, I don't need your crap.
- "You really should turn on location services so we know where you are at any given time!" No, shut up, you don't need that.
- "Hey, in order to update the applications that come with the OS by default, you're going to need an AppleID with a credit card attached." No, shut up.

Please, tell me again how Apple isn't trying to tie me into a million services that track me.

Re:1984

[davydagger]

got it, we just need your name, address and phone number...

but I'm paying cash, 33 cent part.

want your transistor or not?

Re:Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant traf

[tompaulco]

Maybe the internet itself has changed. There is still good technical info out there, but somehow it seems harder to find.

Yep. My dad had the same theory about television. Back in the day, there were three channels of content. There is still the same amount of information being broadcast, but it is spread somewhere amongst the 700 channels available.
Back in the day, you could find what you wanted on the internet without having to use google. These days, you have to use google and you have to hope that the site with the content you want is better at promoting their content than the redirectors are at promoting their lack of content.

Re:It would be nice if I could fucking watch them.

[tompaulco]

Canadians don't have free health care any more than you get a free Big Mac after you paid at the register.

Re:psssssssstttttt

[tompaulco]

They paid for it so they could pad their expenses. You know, HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTING, and all that.

Unless there are kickbacks for $4 million dollar ads, what is the point? Money spent is money spent.

Re:beta sucks, yes, but another problem is

[Rakarra]

Good job on ignoring the "account post gets down modded, AC post doesn't" part of my comment.

I'll bet a lot of people probably browse at the default +1.
Worse, they might be using Slashdot's ultra-shitty beta site now and not know how to view the entire article discussion, something the new Slash site seems take pains in hiding.

Re:1984

[fizzer06]

This.

Re:1984

[vandamme]

I built a lot of Heathkits using 20% resistors. And all of them worked, after some ...well, a lot of tweaking,.

Nomination for worst ad

[vandamme]

GoDaddy.

Well, at least it wasn't stupid like last year.

Huh?

[bbsalem]

Like many people, I left the Superb Owl at the beginning of the third quarter. I didn't even see the Budwisser Ad, although I saw it later. That was a cat video like you's see on You Tube only staring puppies and horses.

I kept saying "Huh?" to most of the ads I saw. Many of them just didn't make sense to me, and of course they seemed full of nonsequitors. Maybe they were too ambitious and most of their message was lost on the editing floor. I know my metaphor is now anachronistic, so maybe the content was catted to /dev/null instead. But it seemed to me that they were trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into 5 lib bags.

I would say that they wasted their money on two accounts, one is trying to do too much with too little and the other is that the Super Bowl is often a mismatch that reults in a boring football game that many viewers leave before it is done, so the advertisers lose. I'm not too sad for them since I dislike the marketed and propagandised media we now have, anyway. Death to Marketing!