I rarely post here, but this is so stupid I can't help myself.
I would love to see what percentage of participants were over the age of 50 twenty-five years ago. Not only that, but maybe those 37 percent were not only over 50 yrs old, but also reported boredom since having been a civil servant for many years.
And I could be way off, but my guess is you could survey 7524 people in that age group about ANYTHING and find that about that same percentage of them had died over that kind of time span.
How many died in accidents or by unrelated disease? What percentage reported boredom in the first place? And finally, how many died in murder-suicide pacts? After all, we are talking about civil servants here, they are ALL bored.
This article would mean more to me if it included more specific data supporting this claim.
How many test subjects where there?
What percentage of subjects playing which version displayed better ad recall? ETC
Without any specific data in the article it seems kind of meaningless. For all I know they may have had a very low number of test subjects, and those who played the bloody version just happened to have better attention to detail than those who played the clean version.
"Ortiz estimates that his bill would raise $50 million in revenue which would in turn be used to fund programs designed to counter childhood obesity."
What exactly is a program designed to counter childhood obesity? Would this involve slapping around the parents of fat kids?
I'm not sure a $50 million dollar program is going to make parents any more likely to limit their kid's tv/game time or stop feeding them fast food.
Perhaps a better way would be to have parents take their kids down to the Secretary of State and have them registered like cars, and pay a fee based on weight class.
I have to agree with the idea that this is a case of people confusing better with familiar. At the same time, I wonder how much effect different recording techniques have on this argument. For example, early CDs were basically an analog recording converted to digital, whereas I think most music today is taken straight to digital in the studio.
I think it would be interesting to present these same test subjects with two versions of the same song, one with an original source from vinyl, converted to digital and compressed to MP3, the other from a remastered recording on CD and compressed to the same bitrate MP3, removing the compression variable from the argument.
I have to think they would not sound the same, even though both were of the same compressed digital format in the end.
Then again, I mostly just listen to talk radio, so I'd be happy if they could just make AM stations sound better.
... I am the one who took the bait and signed up for the gold membership. Classmate.com emails were already going to my spam folder, but I look that over before I empty it, and their's claimed that I had "2 New Guestbook Entries!" or something like that. At that point I decided to see if anyone I knew had recently added themselves to the list, and sure enough, and old friend had not very long ago.
Suspecting that this person may have left me a guestbook entry, I bought the gold membership, instead of just tracking down his phone number. Upon logging in with my new gold status, I was rewarded by finding two guestbook entries from names I had never heard of and not from my school.
In my defense, I am usually smarter than this. However, the good news was that when I emailed support asking to have any and all of my information removed, they complied without complaint in a timely manner, and even refunded my payment. I was shocked.
The moral here is, if you get caught in a moment of weakness and stupidity like I did, send them an email demanding to have your info removed immediately, and maybe you will get a refund too.
What about the heat index? Or the wind chill? Arent they going to tell us how cold that "feels" like my TV weatherman does? I prefer my weather forcast in subjective terms I can understand.
I agree that short hardware cycles are largely due to ignorance and/or laziness. People's PCs will become loaded with spyware and other crapware, but people will also load store bought or downloaded software with reckless abandon, ultimately having everything loading at startup and 50 precesses running before they even open their browser. It seems like every application wants to be first in line in the boot process, never asking the user if they want this app to run at startup. I've fixed computers with as many as ten icons jammed into the system tray, and thats just the ones that show an icon there.
I've had this same PC since 2000. It's a P3 900mhz, 512 pc133 machine. This year I spent 80 dollars on a lightscribe DVD burner, $80 on an external hard drive, $50 for 256m of ram (to bring it up to 512) and $15 on a used 32 meg graphics card. I installed free versions of Zone Alarm, AVG, Spybot and AdAware, so I spent nothing on new software. I transferred my files to the external, wiped the hard drive, clean installed XP, re-installed software and it runs perfect. I mean flawlessly with XP SP2. And I often run several applications at once.
I expect this machine to last for another year or so without problem, till Vista has been out for a while and then I will upgrade to a new machine. The point is, for most people who don't know or care to learn how to do these things, it's just cheaper and easier to go buy a new PC for three hundred bucks with two or three times the power and capacity. Computers are so cheap now that you almost can't buy an underpowered machine, at least for the non-gamer.
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I rarely post here, but this is so stupid I can't help myself.
I would love to see what percentage of participants were over the age of 50 twenty-five years ago. Not only that, but maybe those 37 percent were not only over 50 yrs old, but also reported boredom since having been a civil servant for many years.
And I could be way off, but my guess is you could survey 7524 people in that age group about ANYTHING and find that about that same percentage of them had died over that kind of time span.
How many died in accidents or by unrelated disease? What percentage reported boredom in the first place? And finally, how many died in murder-suicide pacts? After all, we are talking about civil servants here, they are ALL bored.
This article would mean more to me if it included more specific data supporting this claim.
How many test subjects where there?
What percentage of subjects playing which version displayed better ad recall? ETC
Without any specific data in the article it seems kind of meaningless. For all I know they may have had a very low number of test subjects, and those who played the bloody version just happened to have better attention to detail than those who played the clean version.
What exactly is a program designed to counter childhood obesity? Would this involve slapping around the parents of fat kids?
I'm not sure a $50 million dollar program is going to make parents any more likely to limit their kid's tv/game time or stop feeding them fast food.
Perhaps a better way would be to have parents take their kids down to the Secretary of State and have them registered like cars, and pay a fee based on weight class.
I have to agree with the idea that this is a case of people confusing better with familiar. At the same time, I wonder how much effect different recording techniques have on this argument. For example, early CDs were basically an analog recording converted to digital, whereas I think most music today is taken straight to digital in the studio.
I think it would be interesting to present these same test subjects with two versions of the same song, one with an original source from vinyl, converted to digital and compressed to MP3, the other from a remastered recording on CD and compressed to the same bitrate MP3, removing the compression variable from the argument.
I have to think they would not sound the same, even though both were of the same compressed digital format in the end.
Then again, I mostly just listen to talk radio, so I'd be happy if they could just make AM stations sound better.
... I am the one who took the bait and signed up for the gold membership. Classmate.com emails were already going to my spam folder, but I look that over before I empty it, and their's claimed that I had "2 New Guestbook Entries!" or something like that. At that point I decided to see if anyone I knew had recently added themselves to the list, and sure enough, and old friend had not very long ago.
Suspecting that this person may have left me a guestbook entry, I bought the gold membership, instead of just tracking down his phone number. Upon logging in with my new gold status, I was rewarded by finding two guestbook entries from names I had never heard of and not from my school.
In my defense, I am usually smarter than this. However, the good news was that when I emailed support asking to have any and all of my information removed, they complied without complaint in a timely manner, and even refunded my payment. I was shocked.
The moral here is, if you get caught in a moment of weakness and stupidity like I did, send them an email demanding to have your info removed immediately, and maybe you will get a refund too.
What about the heat index? Or the wind chill? Arent they going to tell us how cold that "feels" like my TV weatherman does? I prefer my weather forcast in subjective terms I can understand.
I agree that short hardware cycles are largely due to ignorance and/or laziness. People's PCs will become loaded with spyware and other crapware, but people will also load store bought or downloaded software with reckless abandon, ultimately having everything loading at startup and 50 precesses running before they even open their browser. It seems like every application wants to be first in line in the boot process, never asking the user if they want this app to run at startup. I've fixed computers with as many as ten icons jammed into the system tray, and thats just the ones that show an icon there.
I've had this same PC since 2000. It's a P3 900mhz, 512 pc133 machine. This year I spent 80 dollars on a lightscribe DVD burner, $80 on an external hard drive, $50 for 256m of ram (to bring it up to 512) and $15 on a used 32 meg graphics card. I installed free versions of Zone Alarm, AVG, Spybot and AdAware, so I spent nothing on new software. I transferred my files to the external, wiped the hard drive, clean installed XP, re-installed software and it runs perfect. I mean flawlessly with XP SP2. And I often run several applications at once.
I expect this machine to last for another year or so without problem, till Vista has been out for a while and then I will upgrade to a new machine. The point is, for most people who don't know or care to learn how to do these things, it's just cheaper and easier to go buy a new PC for three hundred bucks with two or three times the power and capacity. Computers are so cheap now that you almost can't buy an underpowered machine, at least for the non-gamer.