Honestly, most years I watch the superbowl for the commercials (unless a team I care about actually made it.)
When the content is fresh and entertaining then yes, people will want to watch some ads. The most recent one for me that comes to mind is the Axe Clean Your Balls commercial. Sure if you've seen it before, you may want to skip it, but that and similar ones (Bud, Miller Light, Geico, or other firms with good ad concepts) with fresh content may be pretty good at attracting attention.
P.S. - as a disclaimer, I'd like to mention that I don't use or represent Axe and think it's overpriced, but their ads are pretty good.
Actually, your initial suggestion has a valid point buried within it. I think the 5 second adds are what companies should be aiming for in the current market
I don't think companies seeking or publishing advertising realize how diluted the ad experience gets when there's so many ads with so much content to each.
For example, the current TV ad saturation is 22 minutes of program to 8 minutes of ads for a 30 minute slot or over 25% of the total time. For some online videos it's even worse - for example I've been subjected to a 30 second commercial in return for viewing a 45 second clip (thanks to CNN.com.) With that type of trade-off, instead of the viewing experience being enjoyable, the onslaught of ads begin to make the viewing experience a chore and overall the ads become less memorable.
I actually applaud Youtube for this implementation because 5 seconds is enough to get a rudimentary message across. If that message annoys the viewer it can easily be skipped over so companies that don't advertise with fresh or entertaining content and are viewed as an annoyance can be skipped easily. Good trade-off for everyone.
Besides the simple fact that there currently isn't a good way to implement an opt-out database (yet) and doing so on a national level between several websites would be a nearly impossible nightmare, you also have to consider the fact that:
1) There is no good way to enforce this as the legal boundaries end at our borders. There wouldn't be much to stop offshore data collection.
2) The most harmful types of data collection are those people that do it for malicious purposes like phishing. I really don't think a US law is going to stop them anyways.
-also-
3) What constitutes "tracking?" There are web aps and addons that track your usage of a page for simple things like counting the number of visitors, or much more complex things like demographic account collection to tune web ads to best suit you. There are also versions that do this that don't permanently record your information and just go on a session-by-session basis. If you even have the capability of differentiating what tracking is occurring (which is nearly impossible in the first place) where does the line get drawn?
The problem is if you hold the USPTO liable, the net result is that the profits dwindle within a government organization. And yes - the USPTO is the one government department that is net profitable (besides the IRS of course.)
If you let that happen, sure the USPTO will "pay" for it, but it will pay for it by sending less money to other branches of the government... which WILL get that money from somewhere - let's face it.
If that's the case you'll end up with either more government debt or higher taxes.
I'm not saying that would necessarily be all bad and that may provide some incentive, but as part of a huge government organization, it will mean very little.
What I don't understand is how when something goes wrong on the part of the gamer, the Casino can treat the transaction between the slot machine and gambler as a binding contract, yet when something goes wrong because of a fault on their end they can say "oops, we goofed - let's call it off"
I've heard of a couple of jackpots a while back called off because a user entering the coin, or pulling the lever, or even present while someone they knew gambeled was under the legal gambling age at the time and the jackpot was called off.
It seems only fair then that a goof on their end should not be able to nulify the standing "contract."
It should be the responsibility of the casino to test their equipment (or buy from only the most reliable sources which are well tested.) If there was a glitch in the machine itself, the casino should be responsible to pay out and able to sue the company that made the slot machine.
*Disclaimer - I do work for the USPTO, I do not represent them publicly and I do not know all of the details about the new system. Hopefully this will give some insight to the intent of the fee change as I understand it*
The new fee system is designed to reduce backlog not by reducing the number of applicants, but by reducing the time frame in which they're examined. I believe the initial filing fee either will not be raised, or will be raised very little. The fees for RCE (Requests for Continued Examination) are what is being raised the most. At the same time the USPTO is giving additional credit to examiners who do work well and get it done quickly. One of the known abuses of the patent system is dragging out prosecution to "wear down" the examiner and bury them in paperwork. Many times, the examiner will simply "give in" and make a marginal allowance. (We've seen some of those results posted on Slashdot before.)
By making it harder for attorneys to obtain RCEs, they must become more proactive in their prosecution. This makes it nearly impossible to "wear down" the examiner. Because the examiner is also being rewarded for doing work quickly, both parties are put into a system where it's beneficial to work together instead of against each other. The backlog isn't being reduced by making it harder and more expensive to apply - it's being reduced by making sure everything is done faster and more efficiently by making examiners and attorneys play nice.
9/11 also seemed to flare up a lot of deep-seeded racial profiling urges in a lot of people. Honestly I think we may be in a self-fulfilling prophecy scenario here.
Extremist groups of terrorists attack the country ->
The US gets very hard nosed to these terrorist groups creating an extremist backlash ->
Extremists groups of the US start treating anyone from a "threat country" as a second-class citizen ->
More citizens of that country at large become hostile towards the US in response ->
Extremist terrorist groups abroad grow in response.
Would you be particularly friendly to a foreign nation coming in and telling you how to run your government? Just curious.
This is a server processor - one of the biggest concerns is performance per watt.
I'm assuming you're referring to one of Intel's dual cores (but even if you look at dual core AMD offerings the wattage is a significant increase)
First you're ignoring pipeline utilization. Generally speaking, slower and newer processors make better use of their pipelines. Of course older procs don't have all of the design improvements that increase throughput, but the factor that's ignored is that a lot of "high-end" ultra-fast cpus had to have their pipeline dumbed-down a bit to achieve those marks. Guess what - that's the actual marketing ploy here.
Even if you ignore pipeline utilization, the 3.2GHz Processors I found weigh in anywhere from 35 Watts (kind of - it's AMD's rating of 3600+ and not a clock speed on the FX 64) to 130 Watts on the Intel Xeon.
When you're paying for the electricity on a server room with hundreds to even tens-of-thousands of these processors - this may become the standard in where to go.
I understand the concern of unnecessary use of a few seconds per phone call 5 or 10 years ago, but lately with the advent of VOIP I'd contend this concern has slowly been fading out.
Flashback to 1995 when cellphone bills and long distance calls were by the minute and rather expensive. Only landline local calls were exempt from by-minute charges, and phone companies had a lot of opportunities to increase revenue by lengthening phone calls just a little bit.
Compare that to today when most cellphone users have free night and weekend minutes plus anytime minutes, most landlines have free long distance and some users with unlimited cell plans are immune from these charges. The only people affected are those making international calls or using cellphones during the day while over their minutes. This is an increasingly small demographic.
Compound that with the fact that data is where most of the cellphone money is and you quickly see that keeping people connected via cell tower may prevent more business / data users from connecting who really have the high paying plans. It's actually in cellphone companies' best interest now to keep those lines as clear as possible to support good service to as many new / existing customers as possible instead of keeping the airwaves as busy as possible.
If you have one of the plans which makes you fit into the demographic affected by a 15 second delay, then I can understand your desire to shorten the time to when you can leave a message or leave none at all, but I personally am a fan of voice mail intros as it lets me know I didn't accidentally dial a wrong number. My advice for you is to learn the quick-keys on various carriers that bring you to the voice mailbox immediately (like # on T-mobile and Sprint.) I wouldn't disagree to going to a per-second billing like the EU did, but I promise you can take off your tinfoil hats - there is no conspiracy to make you use more minutes anymore and removing voice mailbox introductions would actually be removing something valuable for some people.
You know, I really don't have a problem with this as long as Google doesn't mind if someone takes one of their books, copies it straight out of the book and distributes it also. Regardless if it's more expensive, less expensive, free, etc. Google needs to remember that they do not own this public domain information and they are only a intermediary making this information more available. If they're ok with playing that role then more power to them.
If they ever lift a finger to say that someone "copied" their work though, I would love to donate to the lawsuit against them.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, most years I watch the superbowl for the commercials (unless a team I care about actually made it.)
When the content is fresh and entertaining then yes, people will want to watch some ads. The most recent one for me that comes to mind is the Axe Clean Your Balls commercial. Sure if you've seen it before, you may want to skip it, but that and similar ones (Bud, Miller Light, Geico, or other firms with good ad concepts) with fresh content may be pretty good at attracting attention.
P.S. - as a disclaimer, I'd like to mention that I don't use or represent Axe and think it's overpriced, but their ads are pretty good.
Actually, your initial suggestion has a valid point buried within it. I think the 5 second adds are what companies should be aiming for in the current market
I don't think companies seeking or publishing advertising realize how diluted the ad experience gets when there's so many ads with so much content to each.
For example, the current TV ad saturation is 22 minutes of program to 8 minutes of ads for a 30 minute slot or over 25% of the total time. For some online videos it's even worse - for example I've been subjected to a 30 second commercial in return for viewing a 45 second clip (thanks to CNN.com.) With that type of trade-off, instead of the viewing experience being enjoyable, the onslaught of ads begin to make the viewing experience a chore and overall the ads become less memorable.
I actually applaud Youtube for this implementation because 5 seconds is enough to get a rudimentary message across. If that message annoys the viewer it can easily be skipped over so companies that don't advertise with fresh or entertaining content and are viewed as an annoyance can be skipped easily. Good trade-off for everyone.
P.S. - the short version of this story should be:
"Politicians with little knowledge of computers are talking about the internet again."
Besides the simple fact that there currently isn't a good way to implement an opt-out database (yet) and doing so on a national level between several websites would be a nearly impossible nightmare, you also have to consider the fact that:
1) There is no good way to enforce this as the legal boundaries end at our borders. There wouldn't be much to stop offshore data collection.
2) The most harmful types of data collection are those people that do it for malicious purposes like phishing. I really don't think a US law is going to stop them anyways.
-also-
3) What constitutes "tracking?" There are web aps and addons that track your usage of a page for simple things like counting the number of visitors, or much more complex things like demographic account collection to tune web ads to best suit you. There are also versions that do this that don't permanently record your information and just go on a session-by-session basis. If you even have the capability of differentiating what tracking is occurring (which is nearly impossible in the first place) where does the line get drawn?
...Voila no more copper thefts!
...until the robots take over.
*CaptainPatent likes this*
So everyone remember that as your mother serves you pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving in two days.
Paging Dr. Freud, you have a patient to see you now. O_o
When I say it 5 times quickly, I begin think I'm on Fark! O_o
Technically it's more Ironic than Oxymoronic.
/grammar Nazism
Generally Irony applies to (but is not limited to) a cause-and-effect sequence while an Oxymoron applies to a single noun-clause.
The problem is if you hold the USPTO liable, the net result is that the profits dwindle within a government organization. And yes - the USPTO is the one government department that is net profitable (besides the IRS of course.)
If you let that happen, sure the USPTO will "pay" for it, but it will pay for it by sending less money to other branches of the government... which WILL get that money from somewhere - let's face it.
If that's the case you'll end up with either more government debt or higher taxes.
I'm not saying that would necessarily be all bad and that may provide some incentive, but as part of a huge government organization, it will mean very little.
What I don't understand is how when something goes wrong on the part of the gamer, the Casino can treat the transaction between the slot machine and gambler as a binding contract, yet when something goes wrong because of a fault on their end they can say "oops, we goofed - let's call it off"
I've heard of a couple of jackpots a while back called off because a user entering the coin, or pulling the lever, or even present while someone they knew gambeled was under the legal gambling age at the time and the jackpot was called off.
It seems only fair then that a goof on their end should not be able to nulify the standing "contract."
It should be the responsibility of the casino to test their equipment (or buy from only the most reliable sources which are well tested.) If there was a glitch in the machine itself, the casino should be responsible to pay out and able to sue the company that made the slot machine.
Dear friends,
The aliens of our galaxy have had a hard life. Please send donations to the buy-a-Jupiter-for-the-aliens fund. Your help is greatly appreciated.
I hope everybody understands the gravity of the situation.
There is also an Easter egg for those who want to recall one of the first multi-player games, but you'll have to RTFA to find it.
aww man, so nobody on Slashdot will ever know what the Easter egg is!
*Disclaimer - I do work for the USPTO, I do not represent them publicly and I do not know all of the details about the new system. Hopefully this will give some insight to the intent of the fee change as I understand it*
The new fee system is designed to reduce backlog not by reducing the number of applicants, but by reducing the time frame in which they're examined. I believe the initial filing fee either will not be raised, or will be raised very little. The fees for RCE (Requests for Continued Examination) are what is being raised the most. At the same time the USPTO is giving additional credit to examiners who do work well and get it done quickly. One of the known abuses of the patent system is dragging out prosecution to "wear down" the examiner and bury them in paperwork. Many times, the examiner will simply "give in" and make a marginal allowance. (We've seen some of those results posted on Slashdot before.)
By making it harder for attorneys to obtain RCEs, they must become more proactive in their prosecution. This makes it nearly impossible to "wear down" the examiner. Because the examiner is also being rewarded for doing work quickly, both parties are put into a system where it's beneficial to work together instead of against each other. The backlog isn't being reduced by making it harder and more expensive to apply - it's being reduced by making sure everything is done faster and more efficiently by making examiners and attorneys play nice.
Man, if I had mod points I'd love to mod this up
9/11 also seemed to flare up a lot of deep-seeded racial profiling urges in a lot of people. Honestly I think we may be in a self-fulfilling prophecy scenario here.
Extremist groups of terrorists attack the country ->
The US gets very hard nosed to these terrorist groups creating an extremist backlash ->
Extremists groups of the US start treating anyone from a "threat country" as a second-class citizen ->
More citizens of that country at large become hostile towards the US in response ->
Extremist terrorist groups abroad grow in response.
Would you be particularly friendly to a foreign nation coming in and telling you how to run your government? Just curious.
I think I heard something about a pill that will extend the range of your hardware...
There was some drawback about a doctor and four hours though.
Slashdot readers never bother reading the article.
fixed that for both of you.
You're just trying to precipitate a fight.
Well you're being a catalyst!
By "no solution", you mean that the readout is completely crystallized? Ba-dump-bump!
Stop being an acetate. Ba-dump-bump!
"the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD"
I always knew those programmers over at Microsoft were Stooges but did you have to be so blunt?!
Oh... that's not what you were trying to imply??
This is a server processor - one of the biggest concerns is performance per watt. I'm assuming you're referring to one of Intel's dual cores (but even if you look at dual core AMD offerings the wattage is a significant increase) First you're ignoring pipeline utilization. Generally speaking, slower and newer processors make better use of their pipelines. Of course older procs don't have all of the design improvements that increase throughput, but the factor that's ignored is that a lot of "high-end" ultra-fast cpus had to have their pipeline dumbed-down a bit to achieve those marks. Guess what - that's the actual marketing ploy here. Even if you ignore pipeline utilization, the 3.2GHz Processors I found weigh in anywhere from 35 Watts (kind of - it's AMD's rating of 3600+ and not a clock speed on the FX 64) to 130 Watts on the Intel Xeon. When you're paying for the electricity on a server room with hundreds to even tens-of-thousands of these processors - this may become the standard in where to go.
Wait - Change from Spider Man 3?
I thought that was a scene-by-scene recap.
I understand the concern of unnecessary use of a few seconds per phone call 5 or 10 years ago, but lately with the advent of VOIP I'd contend this concern has slowly been fading out.
Flashback to 1995 when cellphone bills and long distance calls were by the minute and rather expensive. Only landline local calls were exempt from by-minute charges, and phone companies had a lot of opportunities to increase revenue by lengthening phone calls just a little bit.
Compare that to today when most cellphone users have free night and weekend minutes plus anytime minutes, most landlines have free long distance and some users with unlimited cell plans are immune from these charges. The only people affected are those making international calls or using cellphones during the day while over their minutes. This is an increasingly small demographic.
Compound that with the fact that data is where most of the cellphone money is and you quickly see that keeping people connected via cell tower may prevent more business / data users from connecting who really have the high paying plans. It's actually in cellphone companies' best interest now to keep those lines as clear as possible to support good service to as many new / existing customers as possible instead of keeping the airwaves as busy as possible.
If you have one of the plans which makes you fit into the demographic affected by a 15 second delay, then I can understand your desire to shorten the time to when you can leave a message or leave none at all, but I personally am a fan of voice mail intros as it lets me know I didn't accidentally dial a wrong number. My advice for you is to learn the quick-keys on various carriers that bring you to the voice mailbox immediately (like # on T-mobile and Sprint.) I wouldn't disagree to going to a per-second billing like the EU did, but I promise you can take off your tinfoil hats - there is no conspiracy to make you use more minutes anymore and removing voice mailbox introductions would actually be removing something valuable for some people.
You know, I really don't have a problem with this as long as Google doesn't mind if someone takes one of their books, copies it straight out of the book and distributes it also. Regardless if it's more expensive, less expensive, free, etc. Google needs to remember that they do not own this public domain information and they are only a intermediary making this information more available. If they're ok with playing that role then more power to them.
If they ever lift a finger to say that someone "copied" their work though, I would love to donate to the lawsuit against them.
We would be working with Zoidberg and be drinking Slurm.
Grunka-lunka keekret smengredient
You should not ask about the secret ingredient.