They probably think we need to know what channel we are on just like whenever a band does a live spot on a radio station they have to introduce them as "Atlantic recording artist..." or "Warner Brothers recording artist..." because we all know that record stores are divided up into labels aren't they? "Please show me to your Atlantic section. I only buy Atlantic records." I'm sure that the same logic applies to television executives. Because its all about branding, remember!
But how can we be less aware of the channel we watch? They all have those damn things in teh corner with their logos so it's imposible NOT to know (unless you are blind I suppose...)
...but I'm doing research on gaming and flow, which seems to me to be what this study is discussing. From what I gather, Flow is very big in the sports psychology field (that's not why I use the concept I stubled upon it from a colegue who uses it in his work) and it is one of the keys to becoming good at most computer games as well. If you are interested you can go here to see the two papers I have written on the subject. They are for an academic and non-gaming audience so there is a bit of "This is what a First-Person Shooter is, this is what they look like" kind of hand-holding stuff, but I think that they are pretty good anyway.
I believe that the mental state they refer to is similar/related to (if not the same as) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow states as first outlined in his book, Beyond Bordom and Anxiety.
In my own work, I have used this concept and have concluded that gaming is similar to athletics (and other activities) in that participants are active and get into this flow state. We have all "been in the zone" at one point or another where we play the game and tune out everything else and do not have to deliberate over the best move, but can tell almost instincively what do do next. This is a couple of the criteria for what is called the flow state.
The book Beyond Bordom and Anxiety is an interesting read if one is interested in such things.
I love looking at cool places that sell old junk. I always feel like I might get a deal. Reminds me of American Science & Surplus. I used to get thier catalogs all the time. I love thier hand drawn pictures. You would think they would have gotten a surplus digital camera to take pictures of stuff by now, but no, they still have drawings of the products. Coll!
There is a certain point where this is corect that annoying ads can get people to click them, but only if they aren't too annoying.
I mean, come on, we've all shocked that damn monkey at least once right? That is an annoying ad, but, like TV comercials, it stays within the bounds of the expectations. It doesn't pop up, and it doesn't make noise.
(One of the reasons why)Pop ups are so annoying because they go outside the bounds of the web page. People don't expect things to pop, and they don't like it.
Similarly, have you seen that banner ad for moulon rougue? (I'm probably spelling it wrong) It plays sound clips! I'm sitting here in our little computer lab and that comes blaring out of the speakers. Sure I gets my attention, by being annoying, but there is no way I am going to clack that damn thing now. If the ad is that bad, just imagine how bad the site must be!!
Ball State did this a couple of years ago.... Retroactively yet. I got a letter in the mail saying I could use my Ball State acount again. I don't but its nice to have the opprotunity.
Imagine media as a whole seems to be goin under
on
DailyRadar.com Closes
·
· Score: 2
First they send me a notice asking me to subscribe to Total Movie for 2 years (luckily I didn't) then the last issue of Total Movie says they are going monthly. Then they take down www.total-movie.com and I have to do a search on google to find out the magazine is canceled. They still owe me money!
Meanwhile, I suscribe to Maximum PC back in Feb. I still have yet to recieve an issue. I emailed them last week and even though their web site promices replies within 48 hours, I have yet to get a responce. They owe me money for that too!
So I think the whole damn company is in trouble.
Last night I saw an old 80s horror movie called Black Roses. It could easilly be updated to fit with today's moral panic. Black Roses is about this evil heavy metal band that turns kids into killers and they kill their parents. Luckilly, the "hip" English teacher isn't fooled by them and can see how evil they are.
Substitute video games for heavy metal and you got yourself a blockbuster hit movie!
As an interesting counterpoint, one of Clarke's earlier novels, Childhood's End, says that man won't land on the moon untill sometime in the 1980's (it gives a specific year but its been a decade since I've read it).
While not typically a slashdot topic, I thought I'd share.
There was a comic book company during the 70 and early 80s called Warren. They published black and white magazine sized comic books for a more adult audience (they had boobies!) There was a character called the Rook the appeared in one of their comics called Eerie. After a while he got his own comic (creatively called the Rook) after 14 issues it was canceled and he went back to Eerie.
I have spent hours trying to find a site that lists all the issues of Eerie that the Rook appeared in and found nothing. I've resorted to buying issue of Eerie around the issues I am sure about to see if he was in that issue but just not featured on the cover. That pretty well sucks and is getting expensive. Eerie and the whole company went out of business a year or so after the Rook went back to Eerie and I can't even find out for 100% certainty what the last issue was.
Most of the seed corn farmers buy now is sterile. Two different types of corn are cross polinated and the resultant seed, while able to produce corn, grows into a sterile corn stalk. That's why seed companies hire kids in rural areas to detassle corn every summer. The kids take the tassle (where the pollen is) out of corn type x and corn type y next to it ends up fertilizing corn type x.
Its similar to the way that a horse and an ass can mate to make a donkey but the donkey is sterile (I've actualy heard that very rarely they aren't and I may have the ass and donkey reversed here, but that is the essential idea).
Just because more and more things are marketed, doesn't mean that we aren't allowed to make up our own minds or that we can't have opinions. There is resistance. We can say no. It may be harder and harder to say no, but we still can (actually I don't think that it is harder to say no, but I digress) That fact that such a large percentage of media ventures fair (some stats I've seen say 70%, some say 90%) despite agressive marketing campains only shows that we the people do still have the final say.
As far as these web sites go, I wonder what the effectiveness will be? They have to get hits to be effective. If they don't advertise them, then the only hits they will get are for people already interested in the films and who are already therefore interested in the movies and likely to go see them anyway.
It is an interesting phenomenon though and it will be interesting to see where it goes.
He has been around since the early 80's. Although if it is true, it may be a case of he being the first to trademark the name, as he was solo first and had sting t-shirts and other merchandice while sting was still in the police and thus only had police merchandice. Or the wrestler could have been lying.
Actually, I recall the wrestler Steve Bordon who goes by the name Sting saying that HE owned the name and that the musician Sting had to pay him for use of the name. Of course we just have his word to go on, but that's the story I heard.
alienmole said: You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
Before I start, let me just say that I have not had the time to read the entirty of your post, but let me respond to the above quoted statement. What we in the west consider to be valid evidence, logic, and tests is socially constructed. As I have said elsewhere, this does not mean that anythings goes, but it should be realized that the evidence, logic, and tests that we have are an outgrowth of our culture. Just to give a brief hypothetical example, the selection of tests to be run on a given topic are in part pased on experience, but they are also based on economics. If all evidence points to a certain assumption but another test has been theoried to invalidate that assumption, but it will be extremely expensive to conduct and will take a long time to conduct (say years or even decades) then in the vast majority such a test will not be conducted.
You cite my use of the earth centerd universe and suggest that such a notion was based more on belief than evidnece. I counter that it was based on the evidence and understanding of the universe available to then at that time. They interpreted the available evidence and believed the result.
This is exactly what modern science does. The majority of the people responding to my original post have such a hard time with a refutation of science as the TRUTH, that it in many ways proves my point that belief in science has replaced in belief in religion.
I am not saying that we should then quit believing in science or that we should believe anything but that we must simply be aware that this is not fact, but simply another type of belief.
That the process has been in place for a few thousand years does not deney that the simple assumptions of science and our society are based on specific biased notions of what is valid and what is valued and what is not. As I've said elsewhere, what we say and do and think and THE WAYS we say think and do things are codified and locked in by these assumptions. Now while there are those who would throw everything out because of this, I am not one of them and I have not personally met any of these people.
You also say that postmodernists have not taken the time to understand "it.'" I personally received my undergraduate dergee in mathematics (and English) and one of the professors in my current graduate school department is a former engineer, so while the two of us may not have as firm an understanding of concpts as perhaps some do, I think that most peopel would agree that we have a better understanding than most.
Again let me call attention to the fact that in my original post I made a distinction between truths and TRUTH. Respondants to my post seem to have a problem understanding that simply because I refute that a current commpnly held conception of the physical world is not the only one that may be correct, that I imply that the currently held conception is therefore wrong and I don't believe in it. Perhaps this is my fault, and if so i appologize. There is a difference between saying that the current explanation is not the only valid explanation and saying that the current explatino is invalid.
As you admit that even within the scientific community we are simply close to 100% certainty and not at 100%, let us refer back to the concept of a limit. I posit that we may within the scientific community come ever closer to that magical 100% but never actually in reality meet it. Thus even those within the community would say that while many do consider something to be a TRUTH that designation is not technically correct and thus, by my conception it is one of many truths.
As I said I have not read your entire post and thus if I have misrepresented any of your staments I apologize.
MrGrendel said: But this does not mean that an explanation of gravity (or quantum mechanics) in terms of the social relationships and emotions of humans is just as valid as a description based on careful experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis.
No, of course not. I don't think that I or anyone was implying that. It is just that the ways that we think and the ways that we see the world are influenced to such a great extent by culture that it is virtually impossible to create a theory that is not influenced by culture. The very things that we find worthy of study and the things that we deem unworthy of study is an example. Experimentation, mathematics and certainly observation are all influenced (some would say dictated) by what our society and therfore influence (dictate?) what we find.
I think that your use of the word validity is a good one and that perhaps we should be more concerned with validity than truth.
Postmodernism does not (at least in my understanding [which is of course influenced by my culture]) say that since there is no TRUTH, then anything goes. It just tells us that the ways we see the world aren't nessessarilly the only way. Now what other ways of seeing the world would look like is virtually impossible as we are so trapped in hegemony (as my peers are fond of saying, "There is no outside to hegemony!") that any attempt to construct an alternative to our society would in all likelyhood be reactionary and only end up in some way being a product of the dominant social system and thus inneffectual.
The beauty of postmodernity is that it includes modernity. We do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because there is no TRUTH (although there are certainly those who want to do that). I am perfectly happy with lots of little truths.
>>>Would the works of such great literary minds as Shakespere or Mark Twain have had the same impact on our society if they had been strings of ones and zeros on magnetic media.
Well, first off, Shakespeare's plays were written to be performed, not read. That is an example of changing the form or something and how it has survived, if not thrived, in the face of transfered form.
The transition to e-books will be gradual. Remember that when typewriters first became wide spread, many authors refused to use them for many of the same (or similar) reasons to those you list. But today the vast majority of authors have made the transition. In fact many have never written longhand. From my teaching experience a lot of today's students would rather type an essay than write one by hand.
The transition to e-books will be in much the same ways. When the advantages become sufficient enough people will switch. There will always be holdouts, but as they become cheaper and more durable, they will come into greater use. It will probably start in schools where students will have just one thing the size of a spiral bound notebook to carry around for all their classes thereby eliminating heavy textbooks. Then these same students will be assigned to read, for example, Shakespeare, and one of them will find out about the guttenburg project and download it.
I am sure that if we could travel back in time we could find people saying, "Why are you making these books? I will never give up my scrolls!"
When (or if) it becomes more economicable and more advantageous, the shift will occur. There will of course be those who prefer paper books, and they are entitled to their opinion, but as people begin to grow up with the new way, they will take that as the normal way, just as we take reading paper to be the normal way.
I don't object to junk mail on its own. What I object to is my credit card company putting a bunch of crud in my billing statement. Thinks like knives and checks and infomercial crap. They even have this flap on the return enverlope (which is NOT postage paid) that you have to tear off before you can lick the envelope. I have just tore the crap up and put it back in the eveplope along with my bill, but last moth the bill had twice as much crap in it! Then last week some telemarketer called "on behalf" of my credit card company. What the hell? I've only lived in this town since August and they have gotten my new phone number, and sold it to someone already?
I completely agree. I like getting junk snail mail. If I didn't get junk mail I wouldn't get very much mail at all! There is nothing worse than ging out to the mail box and seeing that its empty! And I only check my box 2-3 times a week! Spam and telemarketers are totally different as you don't know who is calling you and spam is virtually free, so there is no acountability.
Maybe things are different in Canada, but the last time computer I bought, I couldn't get anyone to take my money. I knew exactly which one I wanted. I could see it sitting on top of the shelves, all they had to do was climb the ladder and get it down. But no. I talked to three differnt people and they all said they couldn't help me because they weren't in that department. The guy who was supposedly in that department, was too damn busy talking to people to help me. He helped two people who had gotten there after I did and then I went off on the next guy who walked by. Its amazing what people will do to help you if you get pissed off enough. And even though it wasn't his department, he didn't strain a muscle climbing that damn ladder or anything .
I'm sure there is a reason, but why can't they just raise their prices so high that people, especially companies, get the bill say, "Goddamn! Turn that light off!" That way people will be highly encouraged to do their own "blackout" to reduce their bills. Like, I said, I'm sure there's a reason, but our wonderfull news never seems to explain what the reason is, they just say there is an energy crisis.
The point is that altough it fits the theory of how matter should behave around a black hole, this does not preclude some unknown phenomenon from being the cause. The best they can say is that this fits the model really well. Astronomers still encounter unexpected and unusual things. It could be that it isn't a black hole, but something much more exotic.
The main reason, as I understand it, that audio CD's still are only about 45 minutes is that the music industry is set up so that regardless of the number of songs you release on a CD (unless perhaps you are some major established group like the Rolling Stones or something) they only pay the song writing royalty equivelent of 10 songs. So to put a signifigantly larger number than that on a CD would hurt your, as the performer, profit. Thus is seems that 12 songs is the most often seen number, just slightly over that 10 song limit. If anyone else has better details about this, please do tell. I'm going off memory of a article I read in a guitar magazine about 5 years ago.
The point is, however, that the cirumstances are different here. On CD's yes it can be said to be a ploy to get people to convert as it cost the artists money to put those extras out. If the extras on DVDs are a ploy, I dont't think they will go away for similar reasons. It won't cost the performers anymore to put things on the disk.
Some time around this time last year, I remember seeing on the Daily Show an old man advocating a calendar in which every month had 30 days except February which had 35. That seems much more sensible than this 13 month thingy. Of course I always thought that it would be cool to make the yeap day a free day where it wasn't given a name and no one had to work. It's only every 4 years, why not celebrate?
Slashdot Mirror
They probably think we need to know what channel we are on just like whenever a band does a live spot on a radio station they have to introduce them as "Atlantic recording artist..." or "Warner Brothers recording artist..." because we all know that record stores are divided up into labels aren't they? "Please show me to your Atlantic section. I only buy Atlantic records." I'm sure that the same logic applies to television executives. Because its all about branding, remember!
But how can we be less aware of the channel we watch? They all have those damn things in teh corner with their logos so it's imposible NOT to know (unless you are blind I suppose...)
...but I'm doing research on gaming and flow, which seems to me to be what this study is discussing. From what I gather, Flow is very big in the sports psychology field (that's not why I use the concept I stubled upon it from a colegue who uses it in his work) and it is one of the keys to becoming good at most computer games as well. If you are interested you can go here to see the two papers I have written on the subject. They are for an academic and non-gaming audience so there is a bit of "This is what a First-Person Shooter is, this is what they look like" kind of hand-holding stuff, but I think that they are pretty good anyway.
I believe that the mental state they refer to is similar/related to (if not the same as) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow states as first outlined in his book, Beyond Bordom and Anxiety.
In my own work, I have used this concept and have concluded that gaming is similar to athletics (and other activities) in that participants are active and get into this flow state. We have all "been in the zone" at one point or another where we play the game and tune out everything else and do not have to deliberate over the best move, but can tell almost instincively what do do next. This is a couple of the criteria for what is called the flow state.
The book Beyond Bordom and Anxiety is an interesting read if one is interested in such things.
I love looking at cool places that sell old junk. I always feel like I might get a deal. Reminds me of American Science & Surplus. I used to get thier catalogs all the time. I love thier hand drawn pictures. You would think they would have gotten a surplus digital camera to take pictures of stuff by now, but no, they still have drawings of the products. Coll!
There is a certain point where this is corect that annoying ads can get people to click them, but only if they aren't too annoying.
I mean, come on, we've all shocked that damn monkey at least once right? That is an annoying ad, but, like TV comercials, it stays within the bounds of the expectations. It doesn't pop up, and it doesn't make noise.
(One of the reasons why)Pop ups are so annoying because they go outside the bounds of the web page. People don't expect things to pop, and they don't like it.
Similarly, have you seen that banner ad for moulon rougue? (I'm probably spelling it wrong) It plays sound clips! I'm sitting here in our little computer lab and that comes blaring out of the speakers. Sure I gets my attention, by being annoying, but there is no way I am going to clack that damn thing now. If the ad is that bad, just imagine how bad the site must be!!
Ball State did this a couple of years ago.... Retroactively yet. I got a letter in the mail saying I could use my Ball State acount again. I don't but its nice to have the opprotunity.
First they send me a notice asking me to subscribe to Total Movie for 2 years (luckily I didn't) then the last issue of Total Movie says they are going monthly. Then they take down www.total-movie.com and I have to do a search on google to find out the magazine is canceled. They still owe me money!
Meanwhile, I suscribe to Maximum PC back in Feb. I still have yet to recieve an issue. I emailed them last week and even though their web site promices replies within 48 hours, I have yet to get a responce. They owe me money for that too!
So I think the whole damn company is in trouble.
Last night I saw an old 80s horror movie called Black Roses. It could easilly be updated to fit with today's moral panic. Black Roses is about this evil heavy metal band that turns kids into killers and they kill their parents. Luckilly, the "hip" English teacher isn't fooled by them and can see how evil they are.
Substitute video games for heavy metal and you got yourself a blockbuster hit movie!
It's amazing that I submitted this same story yesterday and it got rejected.
As an interesting counterpoint, one of Clarke's earlier novels, Childhood's End, says that man won't land on the moon untill sometime in the 1980's (it gives a specific year but its been a decade since I've read it).
While not typically a slashdot topic, I thought I'd share.
There was a comic book company during the 70 and early 80s called Warren. They published black and white magazine sized comic books for a more adult audience (they had boobies!) There was a character called the Rook the appeared in one of their comics called Eerie. After a while he got his own comic (creatively called the Rook) after 14 issues it was canceled and he went back to Eerie.
I have spent hours trying to find a site that lists all the issues of Eerie that the Rook appeared in and found nothing. I've resorted to buying issue of Eerie around the issues I am sure about to see if he was in that issue but just not featured on the cover. That pretty well sucks and is getting expensive. Eerie and the whole company went out of business a year or so after the Rook went back to Eerie and I can't even find out for 100% certainty what the last issue was.
Most of the seed corn farmers buy now is sterile. Two different types of corn are cross polinated and the resultant seed, while able to produce corn, grows into a sterile corn stalk. That's why seed companies hire kids in rural areas to detassle corn every summer. The kids take the tassle (where the pollen is) out of corn type x and corn type y next to it ends up fertilizing corn type x.
Its similar to the way that a horse and an ass can mate to make a donkey but the donkey is sterile (I've actualy heard that very rarely they aren't and I may have the ass and donkey reversed here, but that is the essential idea).
Just because more and more things are marketed, doesn't mean that we aren't allowed to make up our own minds or that we can't have opinions. There is resistance. We can say no. It may be harder and harder to say no, but we still can (actually I don't think that it is harder to say no, but I digress) That fact that such a large percentage of media ventures fair (some stats I've seen say 70%, some say 90%) despite agressive marketing campains only shows that we the people do still have the final say.
As far as these web sites go, I wonder what the effectiveness will be? They have to get hits to be effective. If they don't advertise them, then the only hits they will get are for people already interested in the films and who are already therefore interested in the movies and likely to go see them anyway.
It is an interesting phenomenon though and it will be interesting to see where it goes.
He has been around since the early 80's. Although if it is true, it may be a case of he being the first to trademark the name, as he was solo first and had sting t-shirts and other merchandice while sting was still in the police and thus only had police merchandice. Or the wrestler could have been lying.
Actually, I recall the wrestler Steve Bordon who goes by the name Sting saying that HE owned the name and that the musician Sting had to pay him for use of the name. Of course we just have his word to go on, but that's the story I heard.
alienmole said: You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
Before I start, let me just say that I have not had the time to read the entirty of your post, but let me respond to the above quoted statement. What we in the west consider to be valid evidence, logic, and tests is socially constructed. As I have said elsewhere, this does not mean that anythings goes, but it should be realized that the evidence, logic, and tests that we have are an outgrowth of our culture. Just to give a brief hypothetical example, the selection of tests to be run on a given topic are in part pased on experience, but they are also based on economics. If all evidence points to a certain assumption but another test has been theoried to invalidate that assumption, but it will be extremely expensive to conduct and will take a long time to conduct (say years or even decades) then in the vast majority such a test will not be conducted.
You cite my use of the earth centerd universe and suggest that such a notion was based more on belief than evidnece. I counter that it was based on the evidence and understanding of the universe available to then at that time. They interpreted the available evidence and believed the result.
This is exactly what modern science does. The majority of the people responding to my original post have such a hard time with a refutation of science as the TRUTH, that it in many ways proves my point that belief in science has replaced in belief in religion.
I am not saying that we should then quit believing in science or that we should believe anything but that we must simply be aware that this is not fact, but simply another type of belief.
That the process has been in place for a few thousand years does not deney that the simple assumptions of science and our society are based on specific biased notions of what is valid and what is valued and what is not. As I've said elsewhere, what we say and do and think and THE WAYS we say think and do things are codified and locked in by these assumptions. Now while there are those who would throw everything out because of this, I am not one of them and I have not personally met any of these people.
You also say that postmodernists have not taken the time to understand "it.'" I personally received my undergraduate dergee in mathematics (and English) and one of the professors in my current graduate school department is a former engineer, so while the two of us may not have as firm an understanding of concpts as perhaps some do, I think that most peopel would agree that we have a better understanding than most.
Again let me call attention to the fact that in my original post I made a distinction between truths and TRUTH. Respondants to my post seem to have a problem understanding that simply because I refute that a current commpnly held conception of the physical world is not the only one that may be correct, that I imply that the currently held conception is therefore wrong and I don't believe in it. Perhaps this is my fault, and if so i appologize. There is a difference between saying that the current explanation is not the only valid explanation and saying that the current explatino is invalid.
As you admit that even within the scientific community we are simply close to 100% certainty and not at 100%, let us refer back to the concept of a limit. I posit that we may within the scientific community come ever closer to that magical 100% but never actually in reality meet it. Thus even those within the community would say that while many do consider something to be a TRUTH that designation is not technically correct and thus, by my conception it is one of many truths.
As I said I have not read your entire post and thus if I have misrepresented any of your staments I apologize.
MrGrendel said: But this does not mean that an explanation of gravity (or quantum mechanics) in terms of the social relationships and emotions of humans is just as valid as a description based on careful experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis.
No, of course not. I don't think that I or anyone was implying that. It is just that the ways that we think and the ways that we see the world are influenced to such a great extent by culture that it is virtually impossible to create a theory that is not influenced by culture. The very things that we find worthy of study and the things that we deem unworthy of study is an example. Experimentation, mathematics and certainly observation are all influenced (some would say dictated) by what our society and therfore influence (dictate?) what we find.
I think that your use of the word validity is a good one and that perhaps we should be more concerned with validity than truth.
Postmodernism does not (at least in my understanding [which is of course influenced by my culture]) say that since there is no TRUTH, then anything goes. It just tells us that the ways we see the world aren't nessessarilly the only way. Now what other ways of seeing the world would look like is virtually impossible as we are so trapped in hegemony (as my peers are fond of saying, "There is no outside to hegemony!") that any attempt to construct an alternative to our society would in all likelyhood be reactionary and only end up in some way being a product of the dominant social system and thus inneffectual.
The beauty of postmodernity is that it includes modernity. We do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because there is no TRUTH (although there are certainly those who want to do that). I am perfectly happy with lots of little truths.
>>>Would the works of such great literary minds as Shakespere or Mark Twain have had the same impact on our society if they had been strings of ones and zeros on magnetic media.
Well, first off, Shakespeare's plays were written to be performed, not read. That is an example of changing the form or something and how it has survived, if not thrived, in the face of transfered form.
The transition to e-books will be gradual. Remember that when typewriters first became wide spread, many authors refused to use them for many of the same (or similar) reasons to those you list. But today the vast majority of authors have made the transition. In fact many have never written longhand. From my teaching experience a lot of today's students would rather type an essay than write one by hand.
The transition to e-books will be in much the same ways. When the advantages become sufficient enough people will switch. There will always be holdouts, but as they become cheaper and more durable, they will come into greater use. It will probably start in schools where students will have just one thing the size of a spiral bound notebook to carry around for all their classes thereby eliminating heavy textbooks. Then these same students will be assigned to read, for example, Shakespeare, and one of them will find out about the guttenburg project and download it.
I am sure that if we could travel back in time we could find people saying, "Why are you making these books? I will never give up my scrolls!"
When (or if) it becomes more economicable and more advantageous, the shift will occur. There will of course be those who prefer paper books, and they are entitled to their opinion, but as people begin to grow up with the new way, they will take that as the normal way, just as we take reading paper to be the normal way.
I don't object to junk mail on its own. What I object to is my credit card company putting a bunch of crud in my billing statement. Thinks like knives and checks and infomercial crap. They even have this flap on the return enverlope (which is NOT postage paid) that you have to tear off before you can lick the envelope. I have just tore the crap up and put it back in the eveplope along with my bill, but last moth the bill had twice as much crap in it! Then last week some telemarketer called "on behalf" of my credit card company. What the hell? I've only lived in this town since August and they have gotten my new phone number, and sold it to someone already?
I completely agree. I like getting junk snail mail. If I didn't get junk mail I wouldn't get very much mail at all! There is nothing worse than ging out to the mail box and seeing that its empty! And I only check my box 2-3 times a week! Spam and telemarketers are totally different as you don't know who is calling you and spam is virtually free, so there is no acountability.
Maybe things are different in Canada, but the last time computer I bought, I couldn't get anyone to take my money. I knew exactly which one I wanted. I could see it sitting on top of the shelves, all they had to do was climb the ladder and get it down. But no. I talked to three differnt people and they all said they couldn't help me because they weren't in that department. The guy who was supposedly in that department, was too damn busy talking to people to help me. He helped two people who had gotten there after I did and then I went off on the next guy who walked by. Its amazing what people will do to help you if you get pissed off enough. And even though it wasn't his department, he didn't strain a muscle climbing that damn ladder or anything .
I'm sure there is a reason, but why can't they just raise their prices so high that people, especially companies, get the bill say, "Goddamn! Turn that light off!" That way people will be highly encouraged to do their own "blackout" to reduce their bills. Like, I said, I'm sure there's a reason, but our wonderfull news never seems to explain what the reason is, they just say there is an energy crisis.
The point is that altough it fits the theory of how matter should behave around a black hole, this does not preclude some unknown phenomenon from being the cause. The best they can say is that this fits the model really well. Astronomers still encounter unexpected and unusual things. It could be that it isn't a black hole, but something much more exotic.
The main reason, as I understand it, that audio CD's still are only about 45 minutes is that the music industry is set up so that regardless of the number of songs you release on a CD (unless perhaps you are some major established group like the Rolling Stones or something) they only pay the song writing royalty equivelent of 10 songs. So to put a signifigantly larger number than that on a CD would hurt your, as the performer, profit. Thus is seems that 12 songs is the most often seen number, just slightly over that 10 song limit. If anyone else has better details about this, please do tell. I'm going off memory of a article I read in a guitar magazine about 5 years ago.
The point is, however, that the cirumstances are different here. On CD's yes it can be said to be a ploy to get people to convert as it cost the artists money to put those extras out. If the extras on DVDs are a ploy, I dont't think they will go away for similar reasons. It won't cost the performers anymore to put things on the disk.
Some time around this time last year, I remember seeing on the Daily Show an old man advocating a calendar in which every month had 30 days except February which had 35. That seems much more sensible than this 13 month thingy. Of course I always thought that it would be cool to make the yeap day a free day where it wasn't given a name and no one had to work. It's only every 4 years, why not celebrate?