It seems that the logical conclusion of your argument is as follows:
They, being the rich or super-rich or whatever term describes "they", own everything. So no matter what you do to hurt them, they'll turn it around and make it cost the poor and middle-class even more. Hence, we probably live in a plutocracy, as a result of a plutonomy.
My personal extension of this conclusion is: If they hold all the cards, the only option we have left is to give 'em a black eye and take the cards back.
No, I had all sorts of exciting fun in high school chemistry. I recall mixing sugar and...something to make a big black carbon...excrement looking thing. We also got to investigate a "murder scene" and figure out who "killed" our teacher. We did all sorts of tests and even got to go tour a local crime lab. I credit my high school science department with making the number of careers I was considering and interested in unfortunately high.
It's just that in America, at least, unless you are an awesome chemist, you don't end up doing cool stuff like that. You end up bored int he corner of a lab doing the same thing over and over again. However, studying chemistry is fun, at least to me. So eventually, I want to go back and pick up a B.S. or what not in Chemistry.
However, teaching looks like a fun "retirement" job, since true retirement doesn't exist anymore. So I might go back to school to get a Masters in Education and try to be a science teacher, eventually.
In the same vein, my home town had a well funded Computer Science department at a state university. There are two major employers who exploit my home town for cheap programming labor. (We're talking COBOL programmers, with a 2 year Associates, and 6 years of experience making only $40,000 USD, $50,000 USD tops.) They threatened to leave if the town didn't do something about the shortage of trained work. My town put together a 2 year certification at said university. By the time I finally got the motivation to get an education, military contractors and previously mentioned employers had driven enough money back into the department that it had several 4 year Bachelors of Science tracks.
I got my degree and my loan burden was just at $35,000 USD. The only reason it was that large was that I passed up a decent paying part-time retail job to take on Tutoring in the Computer Science lab and doing undergraduate research for pennies. However, having the tutoring job, research, and ACM presenter awards on my resume definitely landed me several job offers before my graduation in December of 2009.
Since January of 2010, I've actually changed employers once and ended up at about $75,000 USD a year. If I hadn't been a complete idiot and bought a new car (as opposed to a used one under $10,000), I would be paying my loans down at twice the rate of my standard 10 year repayment.
My point is, it isn't that bad. It just like the GP said, people are allowing themselves to be fooled into this false idea that this is how the world works. Probably the best bet is people should take 2-3 years off after High School. That's what I did. (Actually, I dropped out my Senior year due to complications of being openly gay and attending a rural school, but that's another post entirely.)
Then I remembered this is/. and we go off the deep end several times a year somewhere about cable prices and Monster Cable. So I'm guessing you were just being snarky.;-)
I read this comment and started frothing at the mouth over $99 HDMI cables. I even clicked the reply to this button already composing a smack down of why Monster Cable is such a massive scam.
Then I remembered this is/. and we go off the deep end several years somewhere about cable prices and Monster Cable. So I'm guessing you were just being snarky.;-)
My mom has that remote and I would KILL to have that for my Xbox 360. So far, I've yet to find a decent 2.4 Ghz controller shaped like a remote with a slide out keyboard.
I fail to understand what's wrong with that. Management is generally incompetent and sometimes you have to leverage some outside-the-box thinking to prevent really bad things from happening. You know, stuff like setting timelines for projects that are delusional and set the team up for failure. Sh** rolls down hill, so the best defense is to prevent it from hitting the fan in the first place, by any means necessary.
Cisco IP Communicator for working remote and still having my desk line, generic VoIP products do not integrate with Cisco Unified Communications according to my IT desk. I haven't had tome to dig into it further to be sure they just aren't lying. But this is going away to be totally replaced by the VoIP infrastructure known as...
Microsoft Lync 2010. At this point, only conferences and meetings are held, so I could viably replace it by attending via a web browser. However, there is no replacement for the presence/IM and for starting meetings, which I'm required to do regularly. Even worse, they will move everything, including our phone lines into this resource hog of doom. There is no Linux replacement at that point, because Lync doesn't do generic SIP.
Microsoft Office for document interchange. Let's be honest, Word compatibility is nice in Open/Libre Office, but Power Point and Excel remain a disaster and my boss seems to think that all things in the world are best expressed in a set of slides or a spreadsheet attached to an email.
Microsoft Outlook for exchange integration. My employer will not turn up IMAP or POP3, and OWA for Exchange 2007 and beyond is still broken last I tried. Furthermore, I never could figure out how to get the LDAP/Exchange Global Address Book settings work.
At this point, I've clung to my principals and mostly use Firefox. But I still pull up Internet Explorer 8* for Share Point. The fact it passes through my domain credentials and things are just a tad more auto-magical saves me a lot of time.
We are on track for Windows 7/Office 2010 by end of 2012. That's encouraging, because I enjoy working in Windows 7 and Office 2010 more than XP and 2003. At the end though, I miss the ease of working on Linux from Linux. It's just so much easier and seamless, I've yet to figure out why I'm hired as a Linux Administrator and required to run Windows at my cubicle.
* Or it may be 7. I do know it's not 6, which is an order of magnitude more progress than other employers I've dealt with.
We call them Administrative Assistants this side of the pond, but yeah, I see your point. I always make it a point to take the Admin Assistant closest to me in the organization chart out to lunch my first week on a job. I guess I've just never had to go out of my way to befriend them because A) they're normally women and B) I'm gay, so we talk shopping and I get all the office scandal I can use to get my way with the bosses.:-)
I guess I could see that. My job is essentially to step in when IT type things go insanely wrong, chastise people politely, sort out the issue, fix it, and write up a nice document detailing how it was all just a big misunderstanding and how it will be prevented in the future by modifying process. So, in essence, my job is literally to save people's necks. Hence, I guess politics are just skewed in my direction anyway.
So seriously, just stop. Xenophobia and over-the-top patriotism is indicative of a people wallowing in fear prodded by power hungry governments distracting their own citizens with an "us versus them" construct. It's visible and present in every culture on the planet because other cultures are the easiest scape goat to lay your problems upon.
I find that in the workforce, three classes became invaluable to me that I would not have normally taken.
My second English class (102 at most universities, 1102 at mine) was critical in really pushing me to flex my muscles when it came to writing. It also helped that my state has a standard writing exam that you can exempt with an appropriate SAT score and a B or better in ENGL 1102. The last two assignments were actually set by the department your major was at, not by the professor. They were generic enough the professor could easily help and grade them, but geared towards your chosen field. I had to write an explanatory and persuasive essay, with the explanatory topic having something of a technical bend. I also got mad props for my literary analysis of the resurrection of Jesus when compared to common Roman ghost stories of the period. (It's a very fun topic, angry how-dare-you bigots aside, and well written about if you actually go out looking for it.) Because of this class, I am the go to guy at work for writing emails explaining to others why something is their fault, how they should prevent doing it again, and somehow they feel all fuzzy and warm inside after having a new arse hole ripped in Corporatese.:-)
The next class was public speaking. I'm sure I don't need to go into the reasons this class applies so well to life in general. At work, I'm also the go to guy for running conference calls. Everyone feels the love and gets to speak, but we somehow always stay on topic despite a few bad actors. We finish perfectly on time, if not early, when I'm presenting.
The final class was Philosophy, whose lessons in logic and arguing were later leveraged into my mathematics courses and serves me well in design and planning meetings. Often times, when troubleshooting and debugging software, I'm stunned by what appears to be random guessing and button mashing, with no regard for using process of elimination. Even more so, just hearing Descarte's argument for the existence of God, while I didn't buy it, made me more aware and careful about how negation of a concept can fall very short of defining it's opposite. (I.E. Infinity can't really be best defined, conceptually, as "not finite".) Hearing St. Anslem's version of the ontological argument and Guanilo's response brought home that sometimes, logic that makes perfect sense step by step can lead you on wild goose chases that only a rabid schizophrenic could believe. Because of that, I always try to keep the big picture in mind as I go down any sort of logical construction.
I think that General Education classes and the concept of 'well roundedness' do make sense. However, I disagree that these sorts of courses belong in our current mandatory education system. I think we really need a shift where we go back to College or Technical preparatory programs in high school. You take lots of shop and trade classes so you know what you want to get certified in at Technical School, or you start delving into some high level academics in preparation for College. Of course, the reason this whole paradigm went away was because of the shift to College For Everyone by parents.
In its current incarnation, the compulsory education can't handle this sort of diversification. Especially with the hammer the square pegs into round holes style of devolution imposed by NCLB. Your kid may not know how to read when he or she graduates, but god damn it he or she will know how to bubble in their name and student ID number!
With the exception of a video card replacement and a monitor upgrade, I've been running a Core 2 Duo E7xxxx with 8 gigs on a ASUS motherboard. The motherboard bit some dust and I sent it in for an RMA. They "repaired" it by disabling one of the 2 sets of RAM channels. But I never really saw a drop in performance. The computer is rapidly approaching 4 years old and I will likely stick with it till whatever comes after the Core i3/5/7 stuff in a few years.
I'm guilty of phone hopping a little too much, but that's just a result of the shitty mobile provider situation here in the US. My first employer had Verizon, so I bought a Droid myself because it was buy my own or get a BlackBerry. After I left my employer, I got a Nexus 4G because my new employer said that they had Sprint and would let me use any Sprint phone I wanted. When I started, they changed their minds and left me with a Sprint bill of about $95/month in the cheapest arrangement. So, I paid my Early Termination Fee* and jumped onto Virgin Mobile and hacked CM7.1 onto an Optimus V. That said, I will run this phone into the ground before I buy another. It's phenomenal for what I use it for.
* In an aside, has anyone else noticed that the increasing monthly fees with post-paid smart phone plans makes it easy to justify paying an ETF? I mean, at $35/month that's $60 a month. That means in 5 months I've made back my ETF, 2 more months and I've made back the cost of the phone, and by the time I'm 1 year in I'm net $300 in savings. Seriously? Does no one else realize this shit?
I shouldn't have to be admin on my computer at my job. In fact, they took those rights away from me once. The conversation at 2 a.m. was pretty awesome:
"I can't log on to the VPN from here."
"Well they took away my admin rights and the Juniper VPN plug-in won't run."
Yeah, I'd love to come into the office, but I'm in Florida for the weekend. Atlanta's a bit far away, and I'm on my third vodka and tonic."
"I don't have enough money in my checking account to cover a plane ticket that you'll reimburse me for next month. It'd be a few days to get it transferred from my savings account at another bank."
"I guess you'll just have to find someone who can work on it. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Is it definitely plugged in?"
"You've SEEN THAT SHOW?!?! I love you. Oh hold on, people are getting naked in the pool, ciao!"
While I wouldn't jump down the GP's throat, I agree with you. I tend to hate night time driving and do my best to avoid it. Night time driving and rain make it nearly impossible for anyone to see the street stripes around here. If I do end up driving home late, I do take my time and stick to the 35-40 mph speed limits in my area. The streets in my neighborhood in Atlanta are really narrow and curvy, even if they're 4 lanes. I just stick to the right and happily let everyone pass until I get where I'm going.
Also, I always slow down when some SUV with those F&$%^*#! shaky blue halogen lights pulls up beside me. Please take your strobe-light looking crap, pass me, and the the hell out of my mirror.
or I actually buy movies, in order to support artists who's income depends on it. Even better, you can go see something in the theater!
I can't convince myself to drop $20 for any movies in recent memory. The last DVD I bought was Repo: The Genetic Opera. I bought the DVD and soundtrack off Amazon brand new. That was like...a year ago. But I have bought Dr. Who off of Zune.
Every time I go to the theater, it's like $40 and I end up getting to the end and saying, "I really would've just liked to watch this at home." People have no respect for the movie watching experience. I've been kicked out for chucking popcorn at some ass hat narrating the movie over his cell phone.
I don't know what it's like in other areas, but here in NC there's plenty of theaters that show movies a little bit later than others and charge between $1.50 and $3 per person per showing.
There are no cheap theaters around Atlanta I know of. There are a few "artsy" theaters, but I can't convince my partner to watch anything subtitled or without explosions.:-P
I'd rather rent new movies than stream old ones. Redbox never has anything I haven't all ready watched. Sometimes I stream random B horror movies and foreign ones on Netflix, but even then the selection is pretty limited.
I beg to differ. I love some old movies and I think a bottle of wine, some friends, and a horrible 70's grind house flick is an awesome time with friends. It takes all strokes for different folks, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that the logical conclusion of your argument is as follows:
They, being the rich or super-rich or whatever term describes "they", own everything. So no matter what you do to hurt them, they'll turn it around and make it cost the poor and middle-class even more. Hence, we probably live in a plutocracy, as a result of a plutonomy.
My personal extension of this conclusion is: If they hold all the cards, the only option we have left is to give 'em a black eye and take the cards back.
Luckily that hasn't been a problem for me for years now. (Hope I didn't just jinx it.)
You just summed up so much of what is wrong with the current way of life on this planet in such an astoundingly simple statement.
No, I had all sorts of exciting fun in high school chemistry. I recall mixing sugar and...something to make a big black carbon...excrement looking thing. We also got to investigate a "murder scene" and figure out who "killed" our teacher. We did all sorts of tests and even got to go tour a local crime lab. I credit my high school science department with making the number of careers I was considering and interested in unfortunately high.
It's just that in America, at least, unless you are an awesome chemist, you don't end up doing cool stuff like that. You end up bored int he corner of a lab doing the same thing over and over again. However, studying chemistry is fun, at least to me. So eventually, I want to go back and pick up a B.S. or what not in Chemistry.
However, teaching looks like a fun "retirement" job, since true retirement doesn't exist anymore. So I might go back to school to get a Masters in Education and try to be a science teacher, eventually.
In the same vein, my home town had a well funded Computer Science department at a state university. There are two major employers who exploit my home town for cheap programming labor. (We're talking COBOL programmers, with a 2 year Associates, and 6 years of experience making only $40,000 USD, $50,000 USD tops.) They threatened to leave if the town didn't do something about the shortage of trained work. My town put together a 2 year certification at said university. By the time I finally got the motivation to get an education, military contractors and previously mentioned employers had driven enough money back into the department that it had several 4 year Bachelors of Science tracks.
I got my degree and my loan burden was just at $35,000 USD. The only reason it was that large was that I passed up a decent paying part-time retail job to take on Tutoring in the Computer Science lab and doing undergraduate research for pennies. However, having the tutoring job, research, and ACM presenter awards on my resume definitely landed me several job offers before my graduation in December of 2009.
Since January of 2010, I've actually changed employers once and ended up at about $75,000 USD a year. If I hadn't been a complete idiot and bought a new car (as opposed to a used one under $10,000), I would be paying my loans down at twice the rate of my standard 10 year repayment.
My point is, it isn't that bad. It just like the GP said, people are allowing themselves to be fooled into this false idea that this is how the world works. Probably the best bet is people should take 2-3 years off after High School. That's what I did. (Actually, I dropped out my Senior year due to complications of being openly gay and attending a rural school, but that's another post entirely.)
This is the sort of stuff that makes me want to go back to college and follow through on a Chemistry degree at least to the Masters level.
Perhaps in 8 years when I finish my loan repayments from the B.S. in Comp Sci.
Need sarcasm or "I'm actually serious" punctuation, please. :-P
If only I could mod you to +10 with all five of my mod points. Best first EVER.
Then I remembered this is /. and we go off the deep end several times a year somewhere about cable prices and Monster Cable. So I'm guessing you were just being snarky. ;-)
FTFMyself
I read this comment and started frothing at the mouth over $99 HDMI cables. I even clicked the reply to this button already composing a smack down of why Monster Cable is such a massive scam.
Then I remembered this is /. and we go off the deep end several years somewhere about cable prices and Monster Cable. So I'm guessing you were just being snarky. ;-)
My mom has that remote and I would KILL to have that for my Xbox 360. So far, I've yet to find a decent 2.4 Ghz controller shaped like a remote with a slide out keyboard.
I fail to understand what's wrong with that. Management is generally incompetent and sometimes you have to leverage some outside-the-box thinking to prevent really bad things from happening. You know, stuff like setting timelines for projects that are delusional and set the team up for failure. Sh** rolls down hill, so the best defense is to prevent it from hitting the fan in the first place, by any means necessary.
Cisco IP Communicator for working remote and still having my desk line, generic VoIP products do not integrate with Cisco Unified Communications according to my IT desk. I haven't had tome to dig into it further to be sure they just aren't lying. But this is going away to be totally replaced by the VoIP infrastructure known as...
Microsoft Lync 2010. At this point, only conferences and meetings are held, so I could viably replace it by attending via a web browser. However, there is no replacement for the presence/IM and for starting meetings, which I'm required to do regularly. Even worse, they will move everything, including our phone lines into this resource hog of doom. There is no Linux replacement at that point, because Lync doesn't do generic SIP.
Microsoft Office for document interchange. Let's be honest, Word compatibility is nice in Open/Libre Office, but Power Point and Excel remain a disaster and my boss seems to think that all things in the world are best expressed in a set of slides or a spreadsheet attached to an email.
Microsoft Outlook for exchange integration. My employer will not turn up IMAP or POP3, and OWA for Exchange 2007 and beyond is still broken last I tried. Furthermore, I never could figure out how to get the LDAP/Exchange Global Address Book settings work.
At this point, I've clung to my principals and mostly use Firefox. But I still pull up Internet Explorer 8* for Share Point. The fact it passes through my domain credentials and things are just a tad more auto-magical saves me a lot of time.
We are on track for Windows 7/Office 2010 by end of 2012. That's encouraging, because I enjoy working in Windows 7 and Office 2010 more than XP and 2003. At the end though, I miss the ease of working on Linux from Linux. It's just so much easier and seamless, I've yet to figure out why I'm hired as a Linux Administrator and required to run Windows at my cubicle.
* Or it may be 7. I do know it's not 6, which is an order of magnitude more progress than other employers I've dealt with.
We call them Administrative Assistants this side of the pond, but yeah, I see your point. I always make it a point to take the Admin Assistant closest to me in the organization chart out to lunch my first week on a job. I guess I've just never had to go out of my way to befriend them because A) they're normally women and B) I'm gay, so we talk shopping and I get all the office scandal I can use to get my way with the bosses. :-)
I guess I could see that. My job is essentially to step in when IT type things go insanely wrong, chastise people politely, sort out the issue, fix it, and write up a nice document detailing how it was all just a big misunderstanding and how it will be prevented in the future by modifying process. So, in essence, my job is literally to save people's necks. Hence, I guess politics are just skewed in my direction anyway.
Why do Europeans always hold us up as the poster child for rampant xenophobia?
The UK rhetoric sounds a lot like some of the commentary coming out of Arizona, United States. Italy's Northern League is doing the same thing.
So seriously, just stop. Xenophobia and over-the-top patriotism is indicative of a people wallowing in fear prodded by power hungry governments distracting their own citizens with an "us versus them" construct. It's visible and present in every culture on the planet because other cultures are the easiest scape goat to lay your problems upon.
Find a job at a company with a proper corporate culture built around merit and skill, not politics.
I find that in the workforce, three classes became invaluable to me that I would not have normally taken.
My second English class (102 at most universities, 1102 at mine) was critical in really pushing me to flex my muscles when it came to writing. It also helped that my state has a standard writing exam that you can exempt with an appropriate SAT score and a B or better in ENGL 1102. The last two assignments were actually set by the department your major was at, not by the professor. They were generic enough the professor could easily help and grade them, but geared towards your chosen field. I had to write an explanatory and persuasive essay, with the explanatory topic having something of a technical bend. I also got mad props for my literary analysis of the resurrection of Jesus when compared to common Roman ghost stories of the period. (It's a very fun topic, angry how-dare-you bigots aside, and well written about if you actually go out looking for it.) Because of this class, I am the go to guy at work for writing emails explaining to others why something is their fault, how they should prevent doing it again, and somehow they feel all fuzzy and warm inside after having a new arse hole ripped in Corporatese. :-)
The next class was public speaking. I'm sure I don't need to go into the reasons this class applies so well to life in general. At work, I'm also the go to guy for running conference calls. Everyone feels the love and gets to speak, but we somehow always stay on topic despite a few bad actors. We finish perfectly on time, if not early, when I'm presenting.
The final class was Philosophy, whose lessons in logic and arguing were later leveraged into my mathematics courses and serves me well in design and planning meetings. Often times, when troubleshooting and debugging software, I'm stunned by what appears to be random guessing and button mashing, with no regard for using process of elimination. Even more so, just hearing Descarte's argument for the existence of God, while I didn't buy it, made me more aware and careful about how negation of a concept can fall very short of defining it's opposite. (I.E. Infinity can't really be best defined, conceptually, as "not finite".) Hearing St. Anslem's version of the ontological argument and Guanilo's response brought home that sometimes, logic that makes perfect sense step by step can lead you on wild goose chases that only a rabid schizophrenic could believe. Because of that, I always try to keep the big picture in mind as I go down any sort of logical construction.
I think that General Education classes and the concept of 'well roundedness' do make sense. However, I disagree that these sorts of courses belong in our current mandatory education system. I think we really need a shift where we go back to College or Technical preparatory programs in high school. You take lots of shop and trade classes so you know what you want to get certified in at Technical School, or you start delving into some high level academics in preparation for College. Of course, the reason this whole paradigm went away was because of the shift to College For Everyone by parents.
In its current incarnation, the compulsory education can't handle this sort of diversification. Especially with the hammer the square pegs into round holes style of devolution imposed by NCLB. Your kid may not know how to read when he or she graduates, but god damn it he or she will know how to bubble in their name and student ID number!
With the exception of a video card replacement and a monitor upgrade, I've been running a Core 2 Duo E7xxxx with 8 gigs on a ASUS motherboard. The motherboard bit some dust and I sent it in for an RMA. They "repaired" it by disabling one of the 2 sets of RAM channels. But I never really saw a drop in performance. The computer is rapidly approaching 4 years old and I will likely stick with it till whatever comes after the Core i3/5/7 stuff in a few years.
I'm guilty of phone hopping a little too much, but that's just a result of the shitty mobile provider situation here in the US. My first employer had Verizon, so I bought a Droid myself because it was buy my own or get a BlackBerry. After I left my employer, I got a Nexus 4G because my new employer said that they had Sprint and would let me use any Sprint phone I wanted. When I started, they changed their minds and left me with a Sprint bill of about $95/month in the cheapest arrangement. So, I paid my Early Termination Fee* and jumped onto Virgin Mobile and hacked CM7.1 onto an Optimus V. That said, I will run this phone into the ground before I buy another. It's phenomenal for what I use it for.
* In an aside, has anyone else noticed that the increasing monthly fees with post-paid smart phone plans makes it easy to justify paying an ETF? I mean, at $35/month that's $60 a month. That means in 5 months I've made back my ETF, 2 more months and I've made back the cost of the phone, and by the time I'm 1 year in I'm net $300 in savings. Seriously? Does no one else realize this shit?
<3
I've bought the 2nd half of the latest Dr. Who season off Zune. However, that was only because:
Anyway, I don't knock Zune TV. It's not all bad. Just need to fix that damn "Rental" bull. HD rentals for $1.00 would work much better.
I shouldn't have to be admin on my computer at my job. In fact, they took those rights away from me once. The conversation at 2 a.m. was pretty awesome:
"I can't log on to the VPN from here."
"Well they took away my admin rights and the Juniper VPN plug-in won't run."
Yeah, I'd love to come into the office, but I'm in Florida for the weekend. Atlanta's a bit far away, and I'm on my third vodka and tonic."
"I don't have enough money in my checking account to cover a plane ticket that you'll reimburse me for next month. It'd be a few days to get it transferred from my savings account at another bank."
"I guess you'll just have to find someone who can work on it. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Is it definitely plugged in?"
"You've SEEN THAT SHOW?!?! I love you. Oh hold on, people are getting naked in the pool, ciao!"
[sarcasm]But, I love that stretch of 75. It's so much fun to park there at 5:30 in the evening.[/sarcasm]
Also, I always slow down when some SUV with those F&$%^*#! shaky blue halogen lights pulls up behind me.
Word fail corrected. :-(
While I wouldn't jump down the GP's throat, I agree with you. I tend to hate night time driving and do my best to avoid it. Night time driving and rain make it nearly impossible for anyone to see the street stripes around here. If I do end up driving home late, I do take my time and stick to the 35-40 mph speed limits in my area. The streets in my neighborhood in Atlanta are really narrow and curvy, even if they're 4 lanes. I just stick to the right and happily let everyone pass until I get where I'm going.
Also, I always slow down when some SUV with those F&$%^*#! shaky blue halogen lights pulls up beside me. Please take your strobe-light looking crap, pass me, and the the hell out of my mirror.
or I actually buy movies, in order to support artists who's income depends on it. Even better, you can go see something in the theater!
I can't convince myself to drop $20 for any movies in recent memory. The last DVD I bought was Repo: The Genetic Opera. I bought the DVD and soundtrack off Amazon brand new. That was like...a year ago. But I have bought Dr. Who off of Zune.
Every time I go to the theater, it's like $40 and I end up getting to the end and saying, "I really would've just liked to watch this at home." People have no respect for the movie watching experience. I've been kicked out for chucking popcorn at some ass hat narrating the movie over his cell phone.
I don't know what it's like in other areas, but here in NC there's plenty of theaters that show movies a little bit later than others and charge between $1.50 and $3 per person per showing.
There are no cheap theaters around Atlanta I know of. There are a few "artsy" theaters, but I can't convince my partner to watch anything subtitled or without explosions. :-P
I'd rather rent new movies than stream old ones. Redbox never has anything I haven't all ready watched. Sometimes I stream random B horror movies and foreign ones on Netflix, but even then the selection is pretty limited.
I beg to differ. I love some old movies and I think a bottle of wine, some friends, and a horrible 70's grind house flick is an awesome time with friends. It takes all strokes for different folks, I guess.