The commentary tracks of Kevin Smith movies are usually pretty fun too, especially the one for his big box-office bomb, "Mallrats." Worth at least a rental.
Joss Whedon provided good commentary on several of the "Buffy" and "Firefly" disks, too.
The commentaries I hate are the ones where the director doesn't talk about the film itself or the creative decisions at all, and instead says things like "we had a terrible time getting enough light to shoot this scene," or talking about how a bad case of the flu was going around among the crew during filming. Nobody cares!!!
By having this huge economic powerhouse operate in foriegn locales, they basically become the entire job market.
I think you mean the entire "manufacturing commodity goods" job market, which was never a career path that got you rich, or even provided much of a life for a family. And let's be honest here: people were buying overseas-made clothes long before Wal-Mart came along.
(why would someone want to open a store next to a Walmart?)
Spill-over traffic. If you have a specialty boutique which sells something Wal-Mart doesn't have (antique furniture, plus-size shoes, DIY computer parts, formalwear, etc.) you will get a lot more customers if you are next to a high-traffic store like Wal-Mart that you would otherwise, because people like to get their shopping done in one trip.
Restaurants, beauty salons, dry-cleaners, and other service-oriented businesses could even benifit from abutting the Wal-Mart parking lot, allowing people to enter their establishments without even moving their cars.
Oh, no, we don't want those types. They might ruin the property values. Gotta keep 'em out.
Well done! I think you just nailed what this guy is really saying. He stopped just short of acknowledging that they have "natural rhythm" or fretting about intermarriage diluting their genes. Had I not already been involved in this thread, I would mod you up as insightful.
You won't win, you know. If you have government funding, you are "wasting money in space when children are starving here on Earth". If we do what you want, the same people will turn around and whine "you've seen to it that the New Frontier will only be a playground for the idle rich and corporate overlords".
The idle rich are going to have expensive playgrounds no matter what. That's the whole point of being idle and rich. Might as well let it be in high orbit, and use the money they spend on it fund advancements in space travel. Early (rich) adopters of any new technology or trend are the only way to make anything affordable. Let that sort of thing go on for a few decades, and a trip to the moon in 2034 might become nearly as cheap as a trip to Antarctica is today.
The problem is that they DO destroy small towns. Go to any small town in the South or Midwest. They are all identical, bland wastelands of concrete and Wal-Mart shopping drones.
Unlike the "good old days", when each and every one of those towns had a Wolworth's, a Dairy Queen, two churches (one Catholic, one Protestant), and three bars?
Give me a break. Wal-Mart's arrival might have been bad news for the handful of people in town who owned corner drug stores (which were often Snyder franchises, even if they called themselves "Punytown Drug"), and small shops who were exploiting the monopoly of being the only place within 200 miles who sold hex-key screwdrivers, but it certainly didn't hurt the real hearts of small towns: The antique stores, the bait shops, the upscale boutiques, and the mom-and-pop restaurants. I pass through small towns all the time, and all that stuff is still there... in fact, the small-ish downtowns which have Wal-Marts nearby are often doing better than the ones that don't, because people are driving in from all the one-horse townships to do their shopping, and the towns with Wal-Marts have a lot more to offer.
I would be pissed if I bought an album at Wal-mart and came home to find that it wasn't *really* the ablum but some modified version.
I was under the impression that "modified" or "radio-friendly" versions of albums are usually labeled rather clearly as being edited versions of the original. Not just at Wal-Mart, but anywhere.
Which town is it? I would bet you that your claim is not true. Everywhere Wal-Mart goes in over the objections of tiny mindless activist groups, the customers and workers flock there, proving it is wanted and that the so-called community activists were lying all along. If it really isn't wanted, why not let it open? You'd prove a great point as this unwanted store closes within 5 months (...but you and I know it would be quite popular, and your town would love it)
You exactly the sort of AC poster who keeps me reading/. at a zero threshold. Well said!
Yes, the web is covered with anti- WalMart material, as you say, but almost none of the criticism I've seen is valid.
If they negotiate better prices than smaller chains (or "mom-and-pop" stores) can, that's terrific news for the consumer. Cheaper good for us all.
If there are villians in such stories, it would not be Wal-Mart for "strong-arming" a lower (but still profitable, or they wouldn't offer it) price from the manufacturers, but the manufacturers, for overcharging the smaller stores.
Why does a store that I hate have to go and do something that smacks of coolness?
Wal-Mart also sells a good-quality, extremely easy-to-hack DVD player with digital sound output and S-Video out... for $30.
I don't get all this hatred of Wal-Mart. Sure, some of what they sell is cheap crap, but for the most part they seem to be pretty much the same as any discount retail chain. (And though it pains me to say so as a Minnesotan, their prices are usually better than Target's.)
Is it the stigma of it being a chain that grew out of the rural midwest and South? Is it the result of people buying into the "OMG, they're killing the small-towns" nonsense? What's the problem? Seriously.
The more attention NASA can get, the more funding it's likely to retain.
How about take $20 Million endowments from rich people who want to tag along for the ride, and spare ourselves the humiliation of putting on dog-and-pony shows to keep up interest for the sake of public funding? Get enough clients like this, and NASA could actually operate in the black with no taxpayer funding at all!
Government spending on space exploration was one thing, when Sputnik was beeping along overhead and scaring the bejeezus out of Americans, but now that the space program is no longer part of an arms race, it's much more difficult to justify the expense to taxpayers, especially in tough times like the recession we just went through. Instead of putting Ohio Senators in space, let's collect cash from as many of Sam Walton's heirs as we can in exchange for letting them ride the roman candle for a few days each... and let's do it before we completely run out of current-generation space shuttles.
If you haven't owned a TV in nearly 10 years, how do you know that "there is truly nothing on the brain-eraser" that you would "consider even remotely intelligent."
Did you see "Triumph of the Nerds," Cringeley's very entertaining history of the PC revolution? How about "The Sopranos," a brilliant examination of the modern man (and the modern family) through the lense of a mafia story? "Made In Canada," (known in the US market as "The Industry", rebroadcast on PBS) the biting black comedy about evil corporate politics? I guess not.
I mean, 10 years without a TV... You are probably blissfully unaware of just how the unlikely candidate "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" became one of the best-written shows in television history, because you gave up on the medium before that show even came along.
Instead of being embarrassed for your peers, be embarrassed about your own uninformed rambling. Walking by a TV that's showing a "Cheers" rerun every once in a blue moon does not qualify you as an expert critic.
That said, I probaly watch a small fraction of the ammount of TV that I used to. "Reality Shows" pushed most of the good dramas off the air, and sit-coms have all been going downhill since the early seasons of The Simpsons and Drew Carey.
I'm with you. I used to watch a heck of a lot of broadcast TV as little as three years ago (I would even go out of my way to be home every Tuesday for the Buffy/Angel line-up.) Now I mostly think of my television set as a monitor for my DVD player and X-Box. With the DVD re-releases of TV shows, I can watch "Kung Fu", "The Sopranos", or "Alias" on my own schedule, and never miss an episode while watching them in order.
Beyond that, even when I have some free time by myself in the evening, I'd much rather spend an hour playing Grand Theft Auto than watching that Donald Trump show.
Here in Minnesota, we've got the opposite problem of the "not in my backyard" syndrome.
Our largest nuclear plant is at a place called Prairie Island, right smack dab in the middle of the Twin Cities metro area. Storage of spent materials is all done on site. That's right, we are storing our nuclear waste right here at home and on a river island. The waste site on Prairie Island is filling quickly, and will run out of capacity before long.
Every couple years, a proposal is raised to ship all that crap to a solid-rock mountain cave out west (in a whole other state) is brought up. There are facilities in the Rocky Mountains which not only have the capacity to store radioactive waste for most of the nation, but do so where there are no people living nearby, and very low risk of natural disasters wrecking the site.
Every time it comes up, it gets shot down by left-wing groups who are hoping that Prairie Island will just give up and shut down if they run out of places to dump their waste, and the state of Minnesota will turn to cleaner alternatives. (Like burning more coal at places like the Black Dog power plant, I s'pose.) They spread all kind of FUD to shift public opinion away from the wisdom of storing nuclear waste off-site ("There could be trucks hauling spent nuclear rods on the very same highway as you!!!") and so far it's worked.
Sounds to me like your experience with satelite TV service in upstate New York is very different than that which many of us have enjoyed in the midwest.
Setting that asside, you really only served to prove my main point: There is market competition for premium TV service. You chose cable for the above reasons.
Would Time/Warner's service have matched your needs as well if they did not have competition from the satelite services to compete against? I seriously doubt it.
D) They have already recovered all their development costs, and everything they make now is pure gravey. E) The parts that go into the X-Box have steeply dropped in cost over the past three years. F) All of the above. G) D and E only.
Good lord, do you work for the cable company or something? You are wrong four ways:
1. You can always get local channels for free with a roof antenna. If they don't come in, they ain't local channels, bub.
2. The reason satelite services didn't initially carry broadcast stations was because the cable companied lobbied the FCC to prevent it.
3. It is no longer the case that local channels are not reboradcast on satelite TV services.
4. Time Warner doesn't do squat to "give back" to the majority of the communities they serve, and proportionately to share of the market, employs no more local people than a dish company does.
Why? Because if you want to get TV there is no other choice now the way the market operates right now.
That's not true. I watch plenty of TV and do not pay anything to the cable company. I use a roof antenna. If I wanted more stations than my local market provides, I would still have options, thanks to satelite TV. Since satelite TV is available in every market where cable is available, there is a free market of competition between at least two choices for premium TV channel providers where you live. Go with whichever provider gives you a bundle closer to what you want, at the price you are most happy with. That's how markets work.
Also, hasn't Hubbard Broadcasting's introduction of Satelite TV already broken up the so-called cable monopoly? Sure, the cable companies own the wires, but now you can get the same channels with a small dish for close to the same price. How is that not competition in the market?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. Go figure.
The commentary tracks of Kevin Smith movies are usually pretty fun too, especially the one for his big box-office bomb, "Mallrats." Worth at least a rental.
Joss Whedon provided good commentary on several of the "Buffy" and "Firefly" disks, too.
The commentaries I hate are the ones where the director doesn't talk about the film itself or the creative decisions at all, and instead says things like "we had a terrible time getting enough light to shoot this scene," or talking about how a bad case of the flu was going around among the crew during filming. Nobody cares!!!
I think you mean the entire "manufacturing commodity goods" job market, which was never a career path that got you rich, or even provided much of a life for a family. And let's be honest here: people were buying overseas-made clothes long before Wal-Mart came along.
By pointing that out, you pre-empted what was going to be my second joke. :)
Spill-over traffic. If you have a specialty boutique which sells something Wal-Mart doesn't have (antique furniture, plus-size shoes, DIY computer parts, formalwear, etc.) you will get a lot more customers if you are next to a high-traffic store like Wal-Mart that you would otherwise, because people like to get their shopping done in one trip.
Restaurants, beauty salons, dry-cleaners, and other service-oriented businesses could even benifit from abutting the Wal-Mart parking lot, allowing people to enter their establishments without even moving their cars.
Well done! I think you just nailed what this guy is really saying. He stopped just short of acknowledging that they have "natural rhythm" or fretting about intermarriage diluting their genes. Had I not already been involved in this thread, I would mod you up as insightful.
So, are you saying this broken link is somehow Wal-Mart's fault?
The idle rich are going to have expensive playgrounds no matter what. That's the whole point of being idle and rich. Might as well let it be in high orbit, and use the money they spend on it fund advancements in space travel. Early (rich) adopters of any new technology or trend are the only way to make anything affordable. Let that sort of thing go on for a few decades, and a trip to the moon in 2034 might become nearly as cheap as a trip to Antarctica is today.
Unlike the "good old days", when each and every one of those towns had a Wolworth's, a Dairy Queen, two churches (one Catholic, one Protestant), and three bars?
Give me a break. Wal-Mart's arrival might have been bad news for the handful of people in town who owned corner drug stores (which were often Snyder franchises, even if they called themselves "Punytown Drug"), and small shops who were exploiting the monopoly of being the only place within 200 miles who sold hex-key screwdrivers, but it certainly didn't hurt the real hearts of small towns: The antique stores, the bait shops, the upscale boutiques, and the mom-and-pop restaurants. I pass through small towns all the time, and all that stuff is still there... in fact, the small-ish downtowns which have Wal-Marts nearby are often doing better than the ones that don't, because people are driving in from all the one-horse townships to do their shopping, and the towns with Wal-Marts have a lot more to offer.
I was under the impression that "modified" or "radio-friendly" versions of albums are usually labeled rather clearly as being edited versions of the original. Not just at Wal-Mart, but anywhere.
You exactly the sort of AC poster who keeps me reading /. at a zero threshold. Well said!
How do you equate Wal-Mart haggling for better prices with Marxism!? If anything, it's the opposite.
If they negotiate better prices than smaller chains (or "mom-and-pop" stores) can, that's terrific news for the consumer. Cheaper good for us all.
If there are villians in such stories, it would not be Wal-Mart for "strong-arming" a lower (but still profitable, or they wouldn't offer it) price from the manufacturers, but the manufacturers, for overcharging the smaller stores.
Wal-Mart also sells a good-quality, extremely easy-to-hack DVD player with digital sound output and S-Video out... for $30.
I don't get all this hatred of Wal-Mart. Sure, some of what they sell is cheap crap, but for the most part they seem to be pretty much the same as any discount retail chain. (And though it pains me to say so as a Minnesotan, their prices are usually better than Target's.)
Is it the stigma of it being a chain that grew out of the rural midwest and South? Is it the result of people buying into the "OMG, they're killing the small-towns" nonsense? What's the problem? Seriously.
How about take $20 Million endowments from rich people who want to tag along for the ride, and spare ourselves the humiliation of putting on dog-and-pony shows to keep up interest for the sake of public funding? Get enough clients like this, and NASA could actually operate in the black with no taxpayer funding at all!
Government spending on space exploration was one thing, when Sputnik was beeping along overhead and scaring the bejeezus out of Americans, but now that the space program is no longer part of an arms race, it's much more difficult to justify the expense to taxpayers, especially in tough times like the recession we just went through. Instead of putting Ohio Senators in space, let's collect cash from as many of Sam Walton's heirs as we can in exchange for letting them ride the roman candle for a few days each... and let's do it before we completely run out of current-generation space shuttles.
Did you see "Triumph of the Nerds," Cringeley's very entertaining history of the PC revolution? How about "The Sopranos," a brilliant examination of the modern man (and the modern family) through the lense of a mafia story? "Made In Canada," (known in the US market as "The Industry", rebroadcast on PBS) the biting black comedy about evil corporate politics? I guess not.
I mean, 10 years without a TV... You are probably blissfully unaware of just how the unlikely candidate "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" became one of the best-written shows in television history, because you gave up on the medium before that show even came along.
Instead of being embarrassed for your peers, be embarrassed about your own uninformed rambling. Walking by a TV that's showing a "Cheers" rerun every once in a blue moon does not qualify you as an expert critic.
That said, I probaly watch a small fraction of the ammount of TV that I used to. "Reality Shows" pushed most of the good dramas off the air, and sit-coms have all been going downhill since the early seasons of The Simpsons and Drew Carey.
Beyond that, even when I have some free time by myself in the evening, I'd much rather spend an hour playing Grand Theft Auto than watching that Donald Trump show.
Our largest nuclear plant is at a place called Prairie Island, right smack dab in the middle of the Twin Cities metro area. Storage of spent materials is all done on site. That's right, we are storing our nuclear waste right here at home and on a river island. The waste site on Prairie Island is filling quickly, and will run out of capacity before long.
Every couple years, a proposal is raised to ship all that crap to a solid-rock mountain cave out west (in a whole other state) is brought up. There are facilities in the Rocky Mountains which not only have the capacity to store radioactive waste for most of the nation, but do so where there are no people living nearby, and very low risk of natural disasters wrecking the site.
Every time it comes up, it gets shot down by left-wing groups who are hoping that Prairie Island will just give up and shut down if they run out of places to dump their waste, and the state of Minnesota will turn to cleaner alternatives. (Like burning more coal at places like the Black Dog power plant, I s'pose.) They spread all kind of FUD to shift public opinion away from the wisdom of storing nuclear waste off-site ("There could be trucks hauling spent nuclear rods on the very same highway as you!!!") and so far it's worked.
$750 of Microsoft software for a $2500 computer didn't seem like all that much to most people back in the 1990s, but the times, they are a-changin'.
Setting that asside, you really only served to prove my main point: There is market competition for premium TV service. You chose cable for the above reasons.
Would Time/Warner's service have matched your needs as well if they did not have competition from the satelite services to compete against? I seriously doubt it.
That sounds like it would hurt.
E) The parts that go into the X-Box have steeply dropped in cost over the past three years.
F) All of the above.
G) D and E only.
Answer: G
1. You can always get local channels for free with a roof antenna. If they don't come in, they ain't local channels, bub.
2. The reason satelite services didn't initially carry broadcast stations was because the cable companied lobbied the FCC to prevent it.
3. It is no longer the case that local channels are not reboradcast on satelite TV services.
4. Time Warner doesn't do squat to "give back" to the majority of the communities they serve, and proportionately to share of the market, employs no more local people than a dish company does.
That's not true. I watch plenty of TV and do not pay anything to the cable company. I use a roof antenna. If I wanted more stations than my local market provides, I would still have options, thanks to satelite TV. Since satelite TV is available in every market where cable is available, there is a free market of competition between at least two choices for premium TV channel providers where you live. Go with whichever provider gives you a bundle closer to what you want, at the price you are most happy with. That's how markets work.
Also, hasn't Hubbard Broadcasting's introduction of Satelite TV already broken up the so-called cable monopoly? Sure, the cable companies own the wires, but now you can get the same channels with a small dish for close to the same price. How is that not competition in the market?