Fists can be lethal, too. Fists might just have some negative effects.
Captain Obvious laughs at you. Strict rules are followed when using physical force, and officers only employ it when necessary, due to risk of "police brutality charges". Electrocuting someone for several minutes, however, escapes that kind of regulation.
I'm curious. What do you suggest police use? Here is your criteria:
No, you're not curious. You're a troll, and you made that list up.
So, what exists for a police to use that is capable of immobilizing a suspect (let's assume he's dangerous and he's running around a crowd of people and they need to immobilize him *now* to prevent harm to innocent bystanders). Guns work well, but that's significantly more lethal than a taser.
Guns have lots of policies governing their use, and most officers go their entire career without ever discharging their firearm in the line of duty. And it (rightly) scares the crap out of them when they have to. But thanks to a lot of training and an understanding that "hey, this could kill someone" -- a combination of morality and training prevents adrenaline from compromising their judgement at the critical time. And most people who are shot survive (little known fact). a 9mm doesn't have a lot of stopping power. Tasers, on the other hand -- officers are trained to pull them out at the first sign of resistance. People get Tasered for merely asking questions, which on the police report is listed as "Did not follow police orders". It's an abuse of power, plain and simple -- weapons are used for the safety of both the officer and the citizentry. They should never be employed because a person is verbally abusive or confrontational unless there's the clear and present threat of physical violence or immediate escalation to. But that line of thinking never makes it into policy guides because Taser tells them "Hey, no lasting effects, instant compliance guaranteed."
Tasers appear to work quite well, but there is a chance of killing the person (less of a chance with a gun though).
And in your entire diatribe, this is the point you miss: Tasers can kill, but the policies governing their use do not take this into account. This is due to the marketing and intentional manipulation of evidence by the Taser Corporation -- and it's only been very recently that they've started to change their tune ever so subtlety from "non-lethal" to "less-lethal", but they're not about to advocate policy changes that would reduce the use of their product -- even when they know their product can kill. Another kind of corporation did this once -- Cigarette manufacturers. And it took more than forty years before people were able to bust them on it. Taser might never have to face the music if private citizens and special interest groups don't continually hound them.
The foyer is like a fortress, with giant steel doors and biometric identification systems...
Security like that for a business like theirs is just for show. It's there for all the "foreign dignitaries" with their big pocket books. Which makes me think of other elements of their corporate identity. These people market "non-lethal" weapons and then cover up the research that says that blasting tens of thousand of volts through the human nervous system might just have some negative effects. Not that there isn't a ton of historical evidence saying that when you science and law enforcement meet, a conspiracy usually results. Taser's products are not "non-lethal", they are "less lethal"... But the police and people who buy their equipment love to watch people scream and fall over because they smarted off to them, and for this, Taser Corporation delivers. And although their products could easily be designed to be more humanitarian, curiously these changes never make it to market.
Yeah, a controller chip that can't be reverse-engineered thanks to the DMCA and for which a licensing fee is being charged-- and without the chip the ipod shuffle will not function because it requires in-line controls. But you're right, if the EFF says it's not DRM then even if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it's really a platypus.
After getting modded -1, Troll, I'm going to repost this again and keep reposting until you guys notice it.
An authentication chip is indeed present in the ipod headphones. It's not a troll. It's not an attempt to smear apple by claiming it's DRM... Although since only headphones with the chip can work with the new ipod shuffle because it has inline controls, it sure looks and smells like DRM. Well, have at it fanboys. I've got karma to burn.
Why do people care extra-special about swine flu? It's already everywhere. It also doesn't have a mortality rate much higher than the average flu. And with prompt medical attention should respiratory symptoms develop, there's a minimal risk of mortality. I'd be more worried about that guy weaving in the SUV next to you with a greasy burger in one hand and a cell phone covered in ketchup in the other. A lot more.
It seems that Apple has made a well-timed and completely innovative and ground-breaking...
These aren't features that are somehow innovative, since they were around five years ago on competing products. In other news, were you paid to make that post?
"Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."
A pity that most of management aren't geeks and thus the only thing you're really hurting is your own reputation and your coworkers by acting that way. You'll be ten times more effective at getting the right thing to happen if you can put a little bit of sugar on your requests. Also, since IT is a support role in most organizations, being able to talk to them without making them feel stupid for doing so is a definite plus when you'll need their approval.
Sure, but compare the number of people impacted by every civilian radiation accident, and the fact that nuclear power plants produce less than 1% of what's released by a coal power plant.
I'd say it's you that's failing to understand this. At current usage rates we have about 40 years worth. We can get more, a lot more, but only at dramatically increased prices. Nuclear power is already too expensive, driving up fuel costs will make it worse.
They say the same thing about oil, and yet reserves keep turning up. And as far as being "too expensive", they're so low right now that people aren't even considering opening new mines, let alone doing surveys for them. The price is so low that the market is in danger of driving producers of it out of business! The fuel cost of a nuclear reactor is less than half of the cost of coal by weight alone. The main reason nuclear power is more expensive than coal is regulatory and decommissioning costs -- not a fault of the technology but the political environment.
The rise in price over the last couple of years has already resulted in plants being scaled back and expansion plans ending all over the place.
False. There's a price slump in the market right now.
I'm sure the Ukrainians would dispute that "fact".
They tend to dispute a lot of things. That doesn't make them right.
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, in general. You're whitewashing of its very real problems, and your willingness to demonize and simply write off its opponents, does nothing for your argument. "hysterical opponents"? Really now.
You're quite right -- they're not hysterical opponents, they're uneducated as you've just proven.
The problem isn't that businesses litigate over patent disputes. The problem isn't even so-called "patent trolls". It's the legal framework that creates it; The deeper judicial and legal principles. Patents were meant to cover an applied technological advancement; Not a theoretical one, or to intangibles like a process. But the patent system has been expanded to cover these, and it was done in a haphazard fashion by people who didn't fully understand the implications of doing so.
The net result is that the patent system is being used to protect intangibles -- markets, processes, and "intellectual property". This was never the intend of the patent system. Even worse, the time limit of 7 to 14 years was needed due to slow business processes of the pre-computer era when it would take years to develop something and bring it to market. Now, development to market time can be weeks or months. While this was originally designed so that the inventor (an individual) could profit from his invention while safely making available details of how it worked to the public (thus advancing the state of the art), it nowadays functions as an impetiment to invention because of the long life of the patent and the nearly endless variations that are possible to keep basic inventions protected in perpetuity.
What's needed is a radical rethink of business process and economics, and the removal of the extreme reliance upon the legal system to protect it.
It's not Spyware. You agreed to install it. "This agreement may be modified at any time without notice to you and you agree to be bound by its terms. Suck it. Sincerely, Your EULA." As to it phoning home every day, well duh. But what did you expect?
This is Microsoft's official position, afterall -- You're all a bunch of filthy criminals. You can't be trusted. That's why we hide everything in hidden dialog boxes and pop up a dozen warnings in order to delete Internet Explorer from the desktop. You're too stupid to even understand what "delete" means, so we're going to go out on a limb and guess you're pretty trusting of anything that says WARNING! CAUTION! ARE YOU SURE? REALLY? HONESTLY? We're not convinced. Action cancelled. Don't you want to buy an upgrade every year? We want to move to a licensing model that sends us cash yearly. Don't you want to support American business? I mean, what if the Iranians develop an operating system! When you don't install WGA, you're supporting terrorism.
People who go to jail aren't exactly of the "mega-bucks" variety. They're usually of the "I was too poor to buy myself a get out of jail free card."
Oh, and if you tell your lawyer where you got the goods, it will trigger HIS ethical obligations.
Yeah, he'll tell you he can't use it in a civil case. If it were a criminal case, however, he'd present it to the police as a "reasonable suspicion" and get a warrant to get the evidence legally.
Yes, lawyers have ethical obligations, even those with no ethics.
In the case of lawyers without ethics, you can be assured they will state their ethical obligations can be waived for a fee.
But maybe these different patterns relate to the fact that I am male?
More likely it's that girls have a lot more aqaintances and casual contacts than men do... And that we gossip so that people who know of us extends beyond a few close friends and coworkers but into the friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-friend's boyfriend scope. That, and most guys just want to be done with the drama and suffer in silence when it ends. Girls don't usually skip the part of the process that entails great amounts of fire and brimstone. Of course, in the end it's all a tempest in a teapot, but that doesn't stop them from beating a path to my door and getting Lecture #46.
Simply do like most client systems and put in big red bold: "someone tried to connect to your account 32 times from w.x.y.z...", and keep something like a 30 days log of connection history browsable somewhere.
Yeah, because the average person is going to know what subnet or network they're coming in from. And they'll remember that time they logged in from the coffee house. No -- the information is useless to the average person because they don't know how to interpret it. It'd be like me telling you that the R0 of variola vera is about 6.5. Meaningless to you in this context.
Yeah, well I'd say it's a big reason why I get phone calls. I hung my shingle out a long time ago about being a computer geek. People usually come to me for one of three reasons: First, their computer's suddenly running slow. "But I've tried everything." Malware is the main reason. Second is "It won't turn on anymore." Coffee spill on laptop, or HDD failure without error message. And the third most common reason: "I want to ruin someone's life! You're a hacker, right?"
Of course, these are my friends, not strangers. I usually oblige them by asking if they knew what common passwords their ex used, any websites they frequented, the full spelling of their name, date of birth, and social security number. And the strange part is: They usually know all of these things. You know what I do then? Nothing. Not a damn thing. I sit down and have a long talk with them about personal security and how just like we don't go out alone at night (I'm a girl. Most of my friends are girls -- I know most of you are dudes and don't think about it much), we also need to take precautions online! This is usually said while saying what a bastard the guy was. And I give them a pat on the head, some candy I keep around for this purpose, and send them on their way.
I'm a white hat (eh, most of the time). But a lot of people just like me know this about others because they've hung their shingle out too and announced they're a geek. And not all of them are going to have an ethical hangup about sucking up all your personal data, hacking your accounts, and leaving "I have a small penis" written to all your friends. Because really... The average person if you do go through all the effort to get them access just sits there feeling all powerful for a minute and then does something incredibly juvenile that'll make you wish you'd done your laundry instead of wasted two hours at the keyboard.
My advice to you people: Love your partner. But do not give them the root password!
P.S. Only once ever have I done a spot of sleuthing that I felt was worth it -- when I discovered a friend-of-a-friend was dating a terrorist. No, I don't mean the fluffy-bunny kind that the media portrays either (everything is terrorism these days). No, I mean the guy came overseas, setup shop over here, and was doing serious criminal enterprise and had cases open with a half-dozen agencies. A few days later, a police officer informed her that if she valued her life, she should cease contact with him immediately. Fun times. Everything else though? Boring as shit.
OK, so what basis do you possibly have to think that consumerism has decreased, or for that matter, marketing-driven spending?
Well, there's this recession going on... not that it's related, but I'd definately call it a decrease in "consumerism" and "marketing-driven spending".
I suppose if your intent is to work for a nonprofit that might be legitimate, but I don't think that's the idea running through most marketing majors' heads.
Most people who go into marketing do it for the same reason as anyone else who goes to college: They want to make money. And if you are good at it, you can make a LOT of money. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, and there's nothing wrong with marketing per-se. Afterall, people need to know about your business to get their business, right? The problem is... there's so much of it that there's been a loss of impact. This loss of impact has caused people to seek out ever more vulgar ways of recapturing people's attention. And as more flashy ways of capturing our attention are invented, attention itself begins to suffer -- everything starts to become bland, and our attention spans are shrinking fast. Commercials are getting louder, employ more cut scenes, unnaturally vibrant colors, and every second is packed with attention-grabbing action.
At some point, it just won't matter anymore: There'll be so much of it flooding every available channel, space, and medium, that people will start to abandon them in their entirety. Marketing is starving on its own excesses: It simply cannot control the amount it spews out and it competes with itself. And in its death throes, its killing our attention spans, our entertainment, communications, and perhaps damaging our culture in the process.
Say what? Marketing is doing just fine... probably better than ever.
Which explains why the most popular addon for Firefox is "Adblock Plus" and number 5 is "NoScript". A strange coincidence that Firefox' popularity went through the roof after this was released. Also, have you noticed how many people have switched to Netflix and dropped their cable TV subscription? Yet strangely, what are the top-rented items on Netflix? TV shows... on DVD. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be because they can skip the 20 minutes of advertisements per hour and the annoying popups every 3 minutes during the actual broadcast? It just might. It's also curious that marketers have been working hard to integrate marketing in-line with content online -- since the click-thru rates have been steadily dropping for banner ads. And let's not forget a BIG reason for gmail's popularity: Their renowned spam filters. And what was this about a national "Do Not Call" registry? You've heard of it, I take it? For those people who still have landlines, most sign up for it within a week of getting the phone. Usually because they're sick of it ringing every hour from 9am to 9pm monday through saturday. And how about that junk mail!
Yes. Marketing is flourishing. It's filling up our landfills, sucking up bandwidth online, and clogging the arteries of our cultural experience in a desperate attempt to be noticed. And year after year, it becomes less effective, leading to an ever-larger crap-flood as people scramble to find channels and mediums still clean of it.
What if that happens? Uhhh... it shows and ad for tampons or makeup. Hardly the end of the word. What is this dreamy football captain and his companions doing looking at the advertisement, anyway? Surely there's sodomy to be had, which is a greater priority than some electronic billboard.
Yeah. Well, they're never content with just a display device. It'll have sound too. And if that doesn't work, it'll vibrate and have smoke come out of it too. Marketing is fighting a losing battle and so it is becoming ever-more aggressive in how it infiltrates our lives and tries to distinguish itself from all the other marketing. And the close proximity of these things means that after the average person passes them a few times, they'll be aware of the fact that they're being targeted specifically, because as soon as they come in range the thing changes display. Even at a walking pace, it has less than 10 seconds to capture your attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Fists can be lethal, too. Fists might just have some negative effects.
Captain Obvious laughs at you. Strict rules are followed when using physical force, and officers only employ it when necessary, due to risk of "police brutality charges". Electrocuting someone for several minutes, however, escapes that kind of regulation.
I'm curious. What do you suggest police use? Here is your criteria:
No, you're not curious. You're a troll, and you made that list up.
So, what exists for a police to use that is capable of immobilizing a suspect (let's assume he's dangerous and he's running around a crowd of people and they need to immobilize him *now* to prevent harm to innocent bystanders). Guns work well, but that's significantly more lethal than a taser.
Guns have lots of policies governing their use, and most officers go their entire career without ever discharging their firearm in the line of duty. And it (rightly) scares the crap out of them when they have to. But thanks to a lot of training and an understanding that "hey, this could kill someone" -- a combination of morality and training prevents adrenaline from compromising their judgement at the critical time. And most people who are shot survive (little known fact). a 9mm doesn't have a lot of stopping power. Tasers, on the other hand -- officers are trained to pull them out at the first sign of resistance. People get Tasered for merely asking questions, which on the police report is listed as "Did not follow police orders". It's an abuse of power, plain and simple -- weapons are used for the safety of both the officer and the citizentry. They should never be employed because a person is verbally abusive or confrontational unless there's the clear and present threat of physical violence or immediate escalation to. But that line of thinking never makes it into policy guides because Taser tells them "Hey, no lasting effects, instant compliance guaranteed."
Tasers appear to work quite well, but there is a chance of killing the person (less of a chance with a gun though).
And in your entire diatribe, this is the point you miss: Tasers can kill, but the policies governing their use do not take this into account. This is due to the marketing and intentional manipulation of evidence by the Taser Corporation -- and it's only been very recently that they've started to change their tune ever so subtlety from "non-lethal" to "less-lethal", but they're not about to advocate policy changes that would reduce the use of their product -- even when they know their product can kill. Another kind of corporation did this once -- Cigarette manufacturers. And it took more than forty years before people were able to bust them on it. Taser might never have to face the music if private citizens and special interest groups don't continually hound them.
The foyer is like a fortress, with giant steel doors and biometric identification systems...
Security like that for a business like theirs is just for show. It's there for all the "foreign dignitaries" with their big pocket books. Which makes me think of other elements of their corporate identity. These people market "non-lethal" weapons and then cover up the research that says that blasting tens of thousand of volts through the human nervous system might just have some negative effects. Not that there isn't a ton of historical evidence saying that when you science and law enforcement meet, a conspiracy usually results. Taser's products are not "non-lethal", they are "less lethal"... But the police and people who buy their equipment love to watch people scream and fall over because they smarted off to them, and for this, Taser Corporation delivers. And although their products could easily be designed to be more humanitarian, curiously these changes never make it to market.
Yeah, a controller chip that can't be reverse-engineered thanks to the DMCA and for which a licensing fee is being charged-- and without the chip the ipod shuffle will not function because it requires in-line controls. But you're right, if the EFF says it's not DRM then even if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it's really a platypus.
Modding me down won't make you right.
After getting modded -1, Troll, I'm going to repost this again and keep reposting until you guys notice it.
An authentication chip is indeed present in the ipod headphones. It's not a troll. It's not an attempt to smear apple by claiming it's DRM... Although since only headphones with the chip can work with the new ipod shuffle because it has inline controls, it sure looks and smells like DRM. Well, have at it fanboys. I've got karma to burn.
It's not trolling if people make a legitimate mistake. :P
Why do people care extra-special about swine flu? It's already everywhere. It also doesn't have a mortality rate much higher than the average flu. And with prompt medical attention should respiratory symptoms develop, there's a minimal risk of mortality. I'd be more worried about that guy weaving in the SUV next to you with a greasy burger in one hand and a cell phone covered in ketchup in the other. A lot more.
It seems that Apple has made a well-timed and completely innovative and ground-breaking...
These aren't features that are somehow innovative, since they were around five years ago on competing products. In other news, were you paid to make that post?
P.S. Headphones that aren't iPod certified will now sound like crap because of DRM. We hope you enjoy the difference as much as we will.
"Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."
A pity that most of management aren't geeks and thus the only thing you're really hurting is your own reputation and your coworkers by acting that way. You'll be ten times more effective at getting the right thing to happen if you can put a little bit of sugar on your requests. Also, since IT is a support role in most organizations, being able to talk to them without making them feel stupid for doing so is a definite plus when you'll need their approval.
It escapes into the environment all the time.
Sure, but compare the number of people impacted by every civilian radiation accident, and the fact that nuclear power plants produce less than 1% of what's released by a coal power plant.
I'd say it's you that's failing to understand this. At current usage rates we have about 40 years worth. We can get more, a lot more, but only at dramatically increased prices. Nuclear power is already too expensive, driving up fuel costs will make it worse.
They say the same thing about oil, and yet reserves keep turning up. And as far as being "too expensive", they're so low right now that people aren't even considering opening new mines, let alone doing surveys for them. The price is so low that the market is in danger of driving producers of it out of business! The fuel cost of a nuclear reactor is less than half of the cost of coal by weight alone. The main reason nuclear power is more expensive than coal is regulatory and decommissioning costs -- not a fault of the technology but the political environment.
The rise in price over the last couple of years has already resulted in plants being scaled back and expansion plans ending all over the place.
False. There's a price slump in the market right now.
I'm sure the Ukrainians would dispute that "fact".
They tend to dispute a lot of things. That doesn't make them right.
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, in general. You're whitewashing of its very real problems, and your willingness to demonize and simply write off its opponents, does nothing for your argument. "hysterical opponents"? Really now.
You're quite right -- they're not hysterical opponents, they're uneducated as you've just proven.
The problem isn't that businesses litigate over patent disputes. The problem isn't even so-called "patent trolls". It's the legal framework that creates it; The deeper judicial and legal principles. Patents were meant to cover an applied technological advancement; Not a theoretical one, or to intangibles like a process. But the patent system has been expanded to cover these, and it was done in a haphazard fashion by people who didn't fully understand the implications of doing so.
The net result is that the patent system is being used to protect intangibles -- markets, processes, and "intellectual property". This was never the intend of the patent system. Even worse, the time limit of 7 to 14 years was needed due to slow business processes of the pre-computer era when it would take years to develop something and bring it to market. Now, development to market time can be weeks or months. While this was originally designed so that the inventor (an individual) could profit from his invention while safely making available details of how it worked to the public (thus advancing the state of the art), it nowadays functions as an impetiment to invention because of the long life of the patent and the nearly endless variations that are possible to keep basic inventions protected in perpetuity.
What's needed is a radical rethink of business process and economics, and the removal of the extreme reliance upon the legal system to protect it.
It's not Spyware. You agreed to install it. "This agreement may be modified at any time without notice to you and you agree to be bound by its terms. Suck it. Sincerely, Your EULA." As to it phoning home every day, well duh. But what did you expect?
This is Microsoft's official position, afterall -- You're all a bunch of filthy criminals. You can't be trusted. That's why we hide everything in hidden dialog boxes and pop up a dozen warnings in order to delete Internet Explorer from the desktop. You're too stupid to even understand what "delete" means, so we're going to go out on a limb and guess you're pretty trusting of anything that says WARNING! CAUTION! ARE YOU SURE? REALLY? HONESTLY? We're not convinced. Action cancelled. Don't you want to buy an upgrade every year? We want to move to a licensing model that sends us cash yearly. Don't you want to support American business? I mean, what if the Iranians develop an operating system! When you don't install WGA, you're supporting terrorism.
To sign away your rights, click next.
(hey, don't look at me, I'd love to see female engineers and scientists just as much as you do).
Then stop treating them as sex objects when they show up for work!
So, what you're telling me is Lego sold out. And for the Harrison Ford retirement fund--I mean, movie, no less.
So what's to prevent someone's hydrophones from picking this up and realizing that there's a submarine within audible range of the communication?
People who go to jail aren't exactly of the "mega-bucks" variety. They're usually of the "I was too poor to buy myself a get out of jail free card."
Oh, and if you tell your lawyer where you got the goods, it will trigger HIS ethical obligations.
Yeah, he'll tell you he can't use it in a civil case. If it were a criminal case, however, he'd present it to the police as a "reasonable suspicion" and get a warrant to get the evidence legally.
Yes, lawyers have ethical obligations, even those with no ethics.
In the case of lawyers without ethics, you can be assured they will state their ethical obligations can be waived for a fee.
But maybe these different patterns relate to the fact that I am male?
More likely it's that girls have a lot more aqaintances and casual contacts than men do... And that we gossip so that people who know of us extends beyond a few close friends and coworkers but into the friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-friend's boyfriend scope. That, and most guys just want to be done with the drama and suffer in silence when it ends. Girls don't usually skip the part of the process that entails great amounts of fire and brimstone. Of course, in the end it's all a tempest in a teapot, but that doesn't stop them from beating a path to my door and getting Lecture #46.
Simply do like most client systems and put in big red bold: "someone tried to connect to your account 32 times from w.x.y.z ...", and keep something like a 30 days log of connection history browsable somewhere.
Yeah, because the average person is going to know what subnet or network they're coming in from. And they'll remember that time they logged in from the coffee house. No -- the information is useless to the average person because they don't know how to interpret it. It'd be like me telling you that the R0 of variola vera is about 6.5. Meaningless to you in this context.
Yeah, well I'd say it's a big reason why I get phone calls. I hung my shingle out a long time ago about being a computer geek. People usually come to me for one of three reasons: First, their computer's suddenly running slow. "But I've tried everything." Malware is the main reason. Second is "It won't turn on anymore." Coffee spill on laptop, or HDD failure without error message. And the third most common reason: "I want to ruin someone's life! You're a hacker, right?"
Of course, these are my friends, not strangers. I usually oblige them by asking if they knew what common passwords their ex used, any websites they frequented, the full spelling of their name, date of birth, and social security number. And the strange part is: They usually know all of these things. You know what I do then? Nothing. Not a damn thing. I sit down and have a long talk with them about personal security and how just like we don't go out alone at night (I'm a girl. Most of my friends are girls -- I know most of you are dudes and don't think about it much), we also need to take precautions online! This is usually said while saying what a bastard the guy was. And I give them a pat on the head, some candy I keep around for this purpose, and send them on their way.
I'm a white hat (eh, most of the time). But a lot of people just like me know this about others because they've hung their shingle out too and announced they're a geek. And not all of them are going to have an ethical hangup about sucking up all your personal data, hacking your accounts, and leaving "I have a small penis" written to all your friends. Because really... The average person if you do go through all the effort to get them access just sits there feeling all powerful for a minute and then does something incredibly juvenile that'll make you wish you'd done your laundry instead of wasted two hours at the keyboard.
My advice to you people: Love your partner. But do not give them the root password!
P.S. Only once ever have I done a spot of sleuthing that I felt was worth it -- when I discovered a friend-of-a-friend was dating a terrorist. No, I don't mean the fluffy-bunny kind that the media portrays either (everything is terrorism these days). No, I mean the guy came overseas, setup shop over here, and was doing serious criminal enterprise and had cases open with a half-dozen agencies. A few days later, a police officer informed her that if she valued her life, she should cease contact with him immediately. Fun times. Everything else though? Boring as shit.
OK, so what basis do you possibly have to think that consumerism has decreased, or for that matter, marketing-driven spending?
Well, there's this recession going on... not that it's related, but I'd definately call it a decrease in "consumerism" and "marketing-driven spending".
Society seems more consumer driven and "brand aware" than ever.
Bullshit: It melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
I suppose if your intent is to work for a nonprofit that might be legitimate, but I don't think that's the idea running through most marketing majors' heads.
Most people who go into marketing do it for the same reason as anyone else who goes to college: They want to make money. And if you are good at it, you can make a LOT of money. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, and there's nothing wrong with marketing per-se. Afterall, people need to know about your business to get their business, right? The problem is... there's so much of it that there's been a loss of impact. This loss of impact has caused people to seek out ever more vulgar ways of recapturing people's attention. And as more flashy ways of capturing our attention are invented, attention itself begins to suffer -- everything starts to become bland, and our attention spans are shrinking fast. Commercials are getting louder, employ more cut scenes, unnaturally vibrant colors, and every second is packed with attention-grabbing action.
At some point, it just won't matter anymore: There'll be so much of it flooding every available channel, space, and medium, that people will start to abandon them in their entirety. Marketing is starving on its own excesses: It simply cannot control the amount it spews out and it competes with itself. And in its death throes, its killing our attention spans, our entertainment, communications, and perhaps damaging our culture in the process.
Say what? Marketing is doing just fine... probably better than ever.
Which explains why the most popular addon for Firefox is "Adblock Plus" and number 5 is "NoScript". A strange coincidence that Firefox' popularity went through the roof after this was released. Also, have you noticed how many people have switched to Netflix and dropped their cable TV subscription? Yet strangely, what are the top-rented items on Netflix? TV shows... on DVD. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be because they can skip the 20 minutes of advertisements per hour and the annoying popups every 3 minutes during the actual broadcast? It just might. It's also curious that marketers have been working hard to integrate marketing in-line with content online -- since the click-thru rates have been steadily dropping for banner ads. And let's not forget a BIG reason for gmail's popularity: Their renowned spam filters. And what was this about a national "Do Not Call" registry? You've heard of it, I take it? For those people who still have landlines, most sign up for it within a week of getting the phone. Usually because they're sick of it ringing every hour from 9am to 9pm monday through saturday. And how about that junk mail!
Yes. Marketing is flourishing. It's filling up our landfills, sucking up bandwidth online, and clogging the arteries of our cultural experience in a desperate attempt to be noticed. And year after year, it becomes less effective, leading to an ever-larger crap-flood as people scramble to find channels and mediums still clean of it.
What if that happens? Uhhh... it shows and ad for tampons or makeup. Hardly the end of the word. What is this dreamy football captain and his companions doing looking at the advertisement, anyway? Surely there's sodomy to be had, which is a greater priority than some electronic billboard.
Yeah. Well, they're never content with just a display device. It'll have sound too. And if that doesn't work, it'll vibrate and have smoke come out of it too. Marketing is fighting a losing battle and so it is becoming ever-more aggressive in how it infiltrates our lives and tries to distinguish itself from all the other marketing. And the close proximity of these things means that after the average person passes them a few times, they'll be aware of the fact that they're being targeted specifically, because as soon as they come in range the thing changes display. Even at a walking pace, it has less than 10 seconds to capture your attention.