Leaving aside racial stereotypes, is this more of a regional or cultural problem? In San Diego, I virtually never see people texting/during/ a movie, and I don't think I've heard a cell phone go off (eg, ring) during a showing any time in the last five years. About the worst thing that happens is people (myself included, occasionally) leaving a phone on but silent (no vibrate).... A flicker of a bright screen might show up if they have their phone facing outwards in a thin pocket or something, but that's it. Anyone who actually talked during a show would be told to stfu by the movie-goers, no doubt...
FWIW, I'm normally just going to the local AMC20 or 18; nothing fancy or unusual, so I have to assume my observations are typical for this area.
Is San Diego just a nice town, or are other places like this too?
It's against FCC violations to keep transmitting regular programming during a Presidential EAN alert. An un-blockable system message that "Oh, btw, the Russians just nuked us" is not that big a deal.
It's against FCC regulations for *any* broadcaster to continue broadcasting during a Presidential alert... If they can't simulcast to transmit it, they're supposed to either go dark or transmit a message advising people to tune to the L1 or L2 transmission station in their area. It's been like than since the founding after the Cuban Missile Crisis... If you have a problem, take it up with President Kennedy.
Extending that principle, or non-ability to block messages, to other communications mediums is fine by me.
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this. The EAS (and its predecessor, the EBS) has been around for almost 50 years and is a necessary, though at times potentially ineffective, capability to have. From the mid-90s into the late 2000's there was concern that the "traditional" methods of activation would be come less and less effective.
Every single broadcast TV and radio station has a manual right in the control room and there's an out-of-band method for heirarchical distribution of messages from local relays to cut in at a moment's notice.
The problems were that people nowadays were spending more and more time away from live, regulated broadcasts, and with cell phones instead of land lines (for reverse 911 calls in the event of an evacuation).
Extending these regulations to "channels where people are actually spending their time" is an important part of keeping the system relevant. Cable systems have been doing text overlays (scrolling text for EAS tests or NWS alerts) for a while, but that now cuts through into your cable-provided DVR if you have one. Netflix and other streaming providers have ways of injecting data into the feed. Hell, at a game company I used to work for there was talk of using zip code subscriber data to forward NWS alerts to users *within the game* to ensure that someone didn't miss a tornado warning if they were spending the evening with their favorite MMORPG and the radio off.
Extending this to cell phone towers and multicast paging simply makes sense. It's not nefarious, it's just good public policy.
(And this is coming from someone definitely of the libertarian-conservative mindset, and no fan of the current President.)
Maybe you live in CA or something, where that approach seems acceptable, but throughout most of the US, there is consistency in things like...
Caltrans for the win!
No, but seriously... we like being different. I haven't run into a single native San Diegan who uses, acknowledges, or even mentions exit numbers... Conformity blasted onto us by (recalled!) former Governor Davis and CT head Jeff Morales when the populace doesn't want it is the kind of thing that metrification would remind us of. No thanks.
(And yes, in this era of massive budget deficits and spend-crazy Democrats, a metrification program at the Federal level would be just as much a waste as it was in the '70s. Republicans and fiscal conservatives in the heartland would have a field day.)
Yes. There is a real world outside of your room. People socialize.
Yes, there is a real world out there. As opposed to Facebook, which you mostly access from your room.
Yes, people socialize. Have meals together, go dance, study together, play and sing, and much more. But it happens in "the real world outside of your room".
Sure, you can use Facebook to facilitate much of that, but you can do that with a phone or a car or e-mail too. Yet that doesn't make people think that the phone or car or mail server is the venue.
You mostly access Facebook from your room? ("In Korea, only old people use email...") I access Facebook from my car, from the office, from the park, from a bar, waiting in line at the DMV, via text, etc...
It's a forum for electronic communication. Sure it's possible to primarily use it purely for random connections, but well over 90% of my Facebook friends I know (or have at least met) in person.
If you're asking "Why Facebook them when I could just text them*?", you're doing social media wrong.
Minutes after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on Slashdot Friday, and all through the weekend, I got a steady stream of e-mail from middle and high school kids all over the country -- especially from self-described oddballs. They were in trouble, or saw themselves that way to one degree or another in the hysteria sweeping the country after the shootings in Colorado.
Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was to be dangerous.
Seriously... in a world where many titles are now completely downloadable -- and content creators are designing their products to resist the second-hand market (one-time use product keys, etc..) -- Gamestop is still surviving, even in cities where bandwidth isn't a problem at all.
Why? Events, employee knowledge, various rental policies, buy-backs, reasons to pre-order/frequent the location, etc. Whatever they're doing, try to duplicate it at your movie shop. Make it a "go-to place" for your community and provide the best, most custom service you can.
Millions of fans stood in line for Breaking Dawn, Part 2 this weekend when many could either wait for streaming soon, or pirate it the same day if they were technically inclined. Why? There's a shared experience in a midnight showing. Find a way for your rural location to provide something similar and you might be able to buck the trend.
Yeah, Vudu seems to have gotten a more complete back catalog in some segments... (Random live action Disney movie from the 60's? It's probably on there.)
Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu, and CinemaNow, there's a lot out there...
"a customer list, knowledge of movies and location" sounds like a perfect mixture of what you need.
A lot of suggestions on here are emphasizing the physical connection and shared experience, but I'd shy away from the "become the NPR book club experience for indie movies" direction. People still go to movie theatres after all, and not just the art-house ones. Keep your focus on the mainstream local customer market.
My thoughts?
1) Make it very easy to browse. Apple spent a b unch of money working on "Album Cover" browse mode, and Netflix tries to micro-genre target for you.. try to come up with a happy medium in physicality. 2) Emphasize the human connection -- events, specials, etc. I don't know what the location is like, but if there's a restaurant next door, come up with a dinner-and-a-movie cross promotion with them. 3) A web-browsable catalog is nice, but you know what's faster than tapping in a name on your PS3 Netflix controller? Calling a number (assuming you're staffing your phones). Make it super easy to reach a live person, preferably one who might know you by name when you walk in. Hire movie nerds just like Gamestop hires game nerds. 4) Use location cell services (Foursquare, Google Local or whatever they call it) heavily... Specials, deals, mayorships, etc... 5) As someone else said... if you can't beat em, join em. Get high speed internet and wireless (protected, with daily changing keys that are on the receipt or something) and set up some areas for people to deal with streaming services. Maybe get a Red Box and stick it *inside* your store -- I have no idea on pricing, but see if you can set the price for it somewhere above the default. 6) Upsell with food/drinks just like Blockbuster did. 7) Don't try to undercut yourself out of business by lowering price, but offer meaningful loyalty rewards. It's more important to *keep customers coming back* than to make high profits off each one.
"Basically, a BP network — the one that will the Interplanetary Internet possible — moves data packets in bursts from node to node, so that it can check when the next node is available or up."
A 2500lb prius-C is rated at 46/53mpg. Granted, the 53mpg is during city driving, but that's where most people do most of their day-to-day driving.
Well, if they live in the city >.
Actually, I live in San Diego (city of...) and I spend the bulk of my time and distance on freeways instead of arterials... but that's because we have a sane freeway system down here:)
"Okay then, if you want to make that distinction, if you're not alive then you don't need health insurance. Okay?"
The Supreme Court recently had something so say about the retardedness of that logic. States are different from the Government, and regulating an optional activity (you can live w/o a car) and a non-optional activity (you can't live w/o living) are two different things.
"Agree that it'll be better once we get rid of the health insurance companies altogether."
Why? I don't want government-provided healthcare any more than I want to eat in a government-provided cafeteria.
I pay for my own health care (HSA + out of pocket until I hit a deductable). I buy insurance for the same reason ANYONE buys ANY KIND of insurance: evaluating the risk, financial coverage for catastrophic incidents is more valuable to me than the average financial loss I'm expecting to take (by paying into a pool regardless of use). I expect the insurance company to come out ahead because I expect my insurance company to be solvent enough to pay for my needs under the policy if/when I need it to.
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
We keep asking for more intelligent and/or rational application of Copyright laws, including people bitching about draconian use of lawsuits, etc.
The alternative is something like this. IT'S NOT YOUTUBE'S FAULT. Youtube discovers someone else has uploaded this music and (presumably) claimed copyright over it. Someone "else" uploads it, and their software catches it. Good job, Youtube. The "original" artists should work things out with the other group, and/or sue someone.
Hell, even Verizon has basically abandoned their efforts at uniform restriction. It doesn't work out well for them: they try to sell it as a bonus, but in the end it's a restriction when advancement occurs elsewhere.
I'm not sure who their supplier is, but the Verizon Navigator driving directions are far and away superior to Google Maps here in San Diego (and a lot of CA, it seemed this summer). More than worth the $10/month fee for me. YMMV.
Yes it covers her but barely. If the doctor does not take tricare like most of the better ones, you are stuck with the cheapies that dont want to do crap and only spend 5 minutes with you.
Way the bury the lede there.... If "most of the better" doctors don't take tricare, shouldn't that tell you something about socialized medicine?
What I'd really like to see is a merging of the capabilities of system level and interface level scripting languages. The interface guys are all in AJAX-y Javascript land, while system-level scripting (at least on a Mac) is through AppleScript -- HyperTalk for the OS -- and well-formed apps. Reintegration would be awesome.
App Store and iPhone locking notwithstanding, I don't think it's a nefarious user-cannot-be-developer intent (though I'm sure many Slashdotters will disagree), I think it's simply where the market went and Apple's over-extension got the better of it.
Some day in the far future, there *will* be a Domino's Pizza (or it's corporate successor, or some other popular food chain) on the moon, just like you could get decent KFC on base in Iraq even during the height of the war/insurgency.
Virtually all projects large enough become defined, constrained, and shaped by their logistics instead of their preferred policy or plan. Right now, if you wanted to get it built up there, it would be expensive. I could see bored teams at Halliburton/KBR coming up with spec sheets for this kind of stuff as an exercise on off-days when the number of contracts coming in is low.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving aside racial stereotypes, is this more of a regional or cultural problem? In San Diego, I virtually never see people texting /during/ a movie, and I don't think I've heard a cell phone go off (eg, ring) during a showing any time in the last five years. About the worst thing that happens is people (myself included, occasionally) leaving a phone on but silent (no vibrate).... A flicker of a bright screen might show up if they have their phone facing outwards in a thin pocket or something, but that's it. Anyone who actually talked during a show would be told to stfu by the movie-goers, no doubt...
FWIW, I'm normally just going to the local AMC20 or 18; nothing fancy or unusual, so I have to assume my observations are typical for this area.
Is San Diego just a nice town, or are other places like this too?
I would advise you to check the FCC Rule 15 Part B disclaimer in the legal section of your cell phone's manual.
It's against FCC violations to keep transmitting regular programming during a Presidential EAN alert. An un-blockable system message that "Oh, btw, the Russians just nuked us" is not that big a deal.
It's against FCC regulations for *any* broadcaster to continue broadcasting during a Presidential alert... If they can't simulcast to transmit it, they're supposed to either go dark or transmit a message advising people to tune to the L1 or L2 transmission station in their area. It's been like than since the founding after the Cuban Missile Crisis... If you have a problem, take it up with President Kennedy.
Extending that principle, or non-ability to block messages, to other communications mediums is fine by me.
You're an idiot if you're complaining about this. The EAS (and its predecessor, the EBS) has been around for almost 50 years and is a necessary, though at times potentially ineffective, capability to have. From the mid-90s into the late 2000's there was concern that the "traditional" methods of activation would be come less and less effective.
Every single broadcast TV and radio station has a manual right in the control room and there's an out-of-band method for heirarchical distribution of messages from local relays to cut in at a moment's notice.
The problems were that people nowadays were spending more and more time away from live, regulated broadcasts, and with cell phones instead of land lines (for reverse 911 calls in the event of an evacuation).
Extending these regulations to "channels where people are actually spending their time" is an important part of keeping the system relevant. Cable systems have been doing text overlays (scrolling text for EAS tests or NWS alerts) for a while, but that now cuts through into your cable-provided DVR if you have one. Netflix and other streaming providers have ways of injecting data into the feed. Hell, at a game company I used to work for there was talk of using zip code subscriber data to forward NWS alerts to users *within the game* to ensure that someone didn't miss a tornado warning if they were spending the evening with their favorite MMORPG and the radio off.
Extending this to cell phone towers and multicast paging simply makes sense. It's not nefarious, it's just good public policy.
(And this is coming from someone definitely of the libertarian-conservative mindset, and no fan of the current President.)
Yep. First thing I thought was that this was a natural progression for compartmentalization of shipping to take. 53' trailers are pretty heavy though!
Caltrans for the win!
No, but seriously... we like being different. I haven't run into a single native San Diegan who uses, acknowledges, or even mentions exit numbers... Conformity blasted onto us by (recalled!) former Governor Davis and CT head Jeff Morales when the populace doesn't want it is the kind of thing that metrification would remind us of. No thanks.
(And yes, in this era of massive budget deficits and spend-crazy Democrats, a metrification program at the Federal level would be just as much a waste as it was in the '70s. Republicans and fiscal conservatives in the heartland would have a field day.)
If it's good enough for the root zone of DNS, it's good enough for my friends list.
Yes. There is a real world outside of your room. People socialize.
Yes, there is a real world out there. As opposed to Facebook, which you mostly access from your room.
Yes, people socialize. Have meals together, go dance, study together, play and sing, and much more. But it happens in "the real world outside of your room".
Sure, you can use Facebook to facilitate much of that, but you can do that with a phone or a car or e-mail too. Yet that doesn't make people think that the phone or car or mail server is the venue.
You mostly access Facebook from your room? ("In Korea, only old people use email...") I access Facebook from my car, from the office, from the park, from a bar, waiting in line at the DMV, via text, etc...
It's a forum for electronic communication. Sure it's possible to primarily use it purely for random connections, but well over 90% of my Facebook friends I know (or have at least met) in person.
If you're asking "Why Facebook them when I could just text them*?", you're doing social media wrong.
*(outside of a disaster situation)
Alright, I'll do it... it's right there in the Hall of Fame:
Voices From The Hellmouth - Slashdot - Posted by JonKatz on Mon Apr 26, '99 08:26 AM from the Geek-Profiling dept.
Seriously... in a world where many titles are now completely downloadable -- and content creators are designing their products to resist the second-hand market (one-time use product keys, etc..) -- Gamestop is still surviving, even in cities where bandwidth isn't a problem at all.
Why? Events, employee knowledge, various rental policies, buy-backs, reasons to pre-order/frequent the location, etc. Whatever they're doing, try to duplicate it at your movie shop. Make it a "go-to place" for your community and provide the best, most custom service you can.
Millions of fans stood in line for Breaking Dawn, Part 2 this weekend when many could either wait for streaming soon, or pirate it the same day if they were technically inclined. Why? There's a shared experience in a midnight showing. Find a way for your rural location to provide something similar and you might be able to buck the trend.
Yeah, Vudu seems to have gotten a more complete back catalog in some segments... (Random live action Disney movie from the 60's? It's probably on there.)
Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu, and CinemaNow, there's a lot out there...
"a customer list, knowledge of movies and location" sounds like a perfect mixture of what you need.
A lot of suggestions on here are emphasizing the physical connection and shared experience, but I'd shy away from the "become the NPR book club experience for indie movies" direction. People still go to movie theatres after all, and not just the art-house ones. Keep your focus on the mainstream local customer market.
My thoughts?
1) Make it very easy to browse. Apple spent a b unch of money working on "Album Cover" browse mode, and Netflix tries to micro-genre target for you .. try to come up with a happy medium in physicality.
2) Emphasize the human connection -- events, specials, etc. I don't know what the location is like, but if there's a restaurant next door, come up with a dinner-and-a-movie cross promotion with them.
3) A web-browsable catalog is nice, but you know what's faster than tapping in a name on your PS3 Netflix controller? Calling a number (assuming you're staffing your phones). Make it super easy to reach a live person, preferably one who might know you by name when you walk in. Hire movie nerds just like Gamestop hires game nerds.
4) Use location cell services (Foursquare, Google Local or whatever they call it) heavily... Specials, deals, mayorships, etc...
5) As someone else said... if you can't beat em, join em. Get high speed internet and wireless (protected, with daily changing keys that are on the receipt or something) and set up some areas for people to deal with streaming services. Maybe get a Red Box and stick it *inside* your store -- I have no idea on pricing, but see if you can set the price for it somewhere above the default.
6) Upsell with food/drinks just like Blockbuster did.
7) Don't try to undercut yourself out of business by lowering price, but offer meaningful loyalty rewards. It's more important to *keep customers coming back* than to make high profits off each one.
Good luck!
"Basically, a BP network — the one that will the Interplanetary Internet possible — moves data packets in bursts from node to node, so that it can check when the next node is available or up."
Err... didn't this used to be called FidoNet?
A 2500lb prius-C is rated at 46/53mpg. Granted, the 53mpg is during city driving, but that's where most people do most of their day-to-day driving.
Well, if they live in the city >.
Actually, I live in San Diego (city of...) and I spend the bulk of my time and distance on freeways instead of arterials... but that's because we have a sane freeway system down here :)
"Okay then, if you want to make that distinction, if you're not alive then you don't need health insurance. Okay?"
The Supreme Court recently had something so say about the retardedness of that logic. States are different from the Government, and regulating an optional activity (you can live w/o a car) and a non-optional activity (you can't live w/o living) are two different things.
"Agree that it'll be better once we get rid of the health insurance companies altogether."
Why? I don't want government-provided healthcare any more than I want to eat in a government-provided cafeteria.
I pay for my own health care (HSA + out of pocket until I hit a deductable). I buy insurance for the same reason ANYONE buys ANY KIND of insurance: evaluating the risk, financial coverage for catastrophic incidents is more valuable to me than the average financial loss I'm expecting to take (by paying into a pool regardless of use). I expect the insurance company to come out ahead because I expect my insurance company to be solvent enough to pay for my needs under the policy if/when I need it to.
Given that there's no such thing as a free lunch, while you "Guess what, paid nothing", who did pay for it?
All I can say is: Cosby had it right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFY0HBkUm8o
What kind of moron takes something that "look[s] like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding" onto an airplane?
Pshhh. Remember Apple's ImageWriter LQ? 216dpi baby...
We keep asking for more intelligent and/or rational application of Copyright laws, including people bitching about draconian use of lawsuits, etc.
The alternative is something like this. IT'S NOT YOUTUBE'S FAULT. Youtube discovers someone else has uploaded this music and (presumably) claimed copyright over it. Someone "else" uploads it, and their software catches it. Good job, Youtube. The "original" artists should work things out with the other group, and/or sue someone.
Just not Youtube.
Hell, even Verizon has basically abandoned their efforts at uniform restriction. It doesn't work out well for them: they try to sell it as a bonus, but in the end it's a restriction when advancement occurs elsewhere.
I'm not sure who their supplier is, but the Verizon Navigator driving directions are far and away superior to Google Maps here in San Diego (and a lot of CA, it seemed this summer). More than worth the $10/month fee for me. YMMV.
Yes it covers her but barely. If the doctor does not take tricare like most of the better ones, you are stuck with the cheapies that dont want to do crap and only spend 5 minutes with you.
Way the bury the lede there.... If "most of the better" doctors don't take tricare, shouldn't that tell you something about socialized medicine?
What I'd really like to see is a merging of the capabilities of system level and interface level scripting languages. The interface guys are all in AJAX-y Javascript land, while system-level scripting (at least on a Mac) is through AppleScript -- HyperTalk for the OS -- and well-formed apps. Reintegration would be awesome.
Remember this? http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/
App Store and iPhone locking notwithstanding, I don't think it's a nefarious user-cannot-be-developer intent (though I'm sure many Slashdotters will disagree), I think it's simply where the market went and Apple's over-extension got the better of it.
Gedankenexperiment... lol.
Some day in the far future, there *will* be a Domino's Pizza (or it's corporate successor, or some other popular food chain) on the moon, just like you could get decent KFC on base in Iraq even during the height of the war/insurgency.
Virtually all projects large enough become defined, constrained, and shaped by their logistics instead of their preferred policy or plan. Right now, if you wanted to get it built up there, it would be expensive. I could see bored teams at Halliburton/KBR coming up with spec sheets for this kind of stuff as an exercise on off-days when the number of contracts coming in is low.