Actually, since his statistics say that 18.6% of people 25-34 play videogames
Actually, no they don't. They say that 18.6% of people who play video games are 25-34. That does not tell you how many 25-34 year-olds play video games, only that those who do make up slightly less than 20% of the gaming population.
Make sure you are not the one who is mistaken before you go calling somebody a dumbass.
Ads are not in of themselves bad; the ads on Slashdot haven't made one bit of difference in my reading habits here.
The funny thing is, just about everybody who reads that, and just about everybody posting here, shares that opinion. Those who hate seeing ads enough to stop reading Slashdot because of this issue have stopped reading Slashdot. The rest of us either put up with them, or route the requests to 127.0.0.0 in our hosts files.
Therefore we can expect all conversations concerning ads to have a slight bias towards apathy about the issue from now on.:)
While that's quaint and all, it's not why I watch Buffy. I don't watch a show about girls who kill daemons (heh) for the "very special episodes" I watch it for the ass-kicking, super-slam spectacular, damnit!
Except Buffy was never simply about the ass-kicking. Buffy is a show for people who actually want an interesting story.
If all you want to watch is sexy girls in fights with no plot, there's always Dark Angel, Sheena, VIP, Relic Hunter, or any of a dozen other shitty programs which will appeal to your hormone-driven sensibilities. Clearly you are not part of the target audience for Buffy. Go watch Xena re-runs, and leave us alone.
You misunderstand. Radically. When I say that the education is 100% the parents responsibility, I mean it would be their responsibility to place the kid in a school. Feeding the kid is their responsibility, but we don't expect all parents to be farmers.
How would AFDC help? By granting money to the parent which would be used for tuition.
1. I agree that most state constitutions would need to be amended before educaiton could be privitized (there is nothing in the US Constitution that insists the schools be publicly run, however.)
2. Privaite school does not necessarilly mean religious school. In fact, were there no public schools, the vast majority of private ones taking up the slack in out culture would probably not be religious. The only reason most private schools are religious now is because most of the parents pulling their kids out of public schools are doing so for religious reasons.
3. Yes, this would be an additional financial burden on families, to the tune of about $3000 - $8000 per year per child. Of course, it would also mean that taxes would plummet (especially state and local taxes, the bulk of which are spent on education).
4. Extremely poor families are still expected to feed and clothe their own kids, are they not? Education is also a basic need, which parents have a responsibility to provide. The dirtly little secret that a lot of libertarians who support this sort of move don't like to talk about is that it would require that we expand the welfare state, giving out education money via AFDC to those families who need aid in order to send their kids to school.
4. Universities are not becoming impossible to attend if you are not rich or gifted. Pell grants still exist, as do low-interest student loans. That asside, I was not holding up Universities as an example of how to manage costs (most colleges are directly subsidized by the states, so being wasteful is an easy trap for them). The reason I brought up Universities is their system of acrediting programs assures that a degree from a major university means something, and High Schools could use a similar system for validating the worth of their diplomas.
The various Arthur Anderson accounting scandals had nothing to do with a lack of precious metals standards.
What Enron and others did was shift and re-define their debts & costs to make the company look stronger than it was, in order to deceive shareholders.
The first Arthur Anderson client to be busted like this was Waste Management, Inc. They depreciated their trucks and dumpsters over longer periods than the actual lives of the equipment in order to make their expenses seem less.
There are a some good arguments for using a gold standard, but cleaning up corporate accounting is not one of them.
Not really. The court did not find it unconstitutional to include the words "Under God" in the Pledge. They simply found it unconstitutional to ask students in a public school to recite an oath that mentions duty to God.
Personally, I happen to believe the court is right on this one. A school is a government institution, and government ought not establish religion. Therefore, all religious expression, including study of religious texts (beyond examinations of comparative religions for history and sociology purposes) should be banned from the public school.
It therefore follows that public (re: government-run) schools are not suitable institutions for education, because forces external to educators (and families of students) are restricting freedom of speech and expression. The time has come to do away with the public education system. The education of children, like the feeding of children, should be 100% the responsibility of the parents anyway. Parents who fail to provide an education for their children should be found guilty of neglect. Education funding for impoverished families should be handled via AFDC and charity, rather than through a department of education. Quality control of schools could be handled just like the universities are regulated today, only acredited schools could award valid diplomas.
Under the alternative I'm suggesting, all parents would be able to decide for themselves whether to send their kids to a school that insists on the Pledge or not.
Re:Not everything has changed in the last 50 years
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 1
It didn't help much that the producer assholes showed us almost all 20 of the final 20 minutes of Cast Away in their previews. I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if I didn't know absolutely everything about how it would be resolved when I was going in.
I used to love watching the teaser/trailers while waiting for a movie to start. Now I do all I can to avoid them.
I've never been able to do it any faster than the Rapid Oil Change station by my house. I drive in on my way home from work, a guy under the floor drains the oil while another guy checks my other fluids and then pulls the filter. I don't even get out of the car.
10 minutes in-and-out, as an absolute maximum (the can usually do it faster than that), and I can spend that ten minutes balancing my checkbook or reading an O'Rielly book or something, while you spend your 10 minutes doing the actual task of changing the oil. Which of us is losing more time again?
I know how to do all that, but the point is that for a few bucks, I don't have to. I work hard for a healthy wage when I work, and I want my free time to be just that: free.
For me, changing my oil costs about $15 for oil + filter. (I use ordinary 10W30, not the fancy stuff.) It takes about 15 minutes (I'm not as fast at it as you, obviously), and leaves me with a bucket to waste oil that I must dispose of properly according to Minnesota laws (which is a pain in the ass). That means a 10 minute drive to the nearest garage willing to take my waste oil without charging me. Of course, taking off the nut to drain the oil means getting it all over my hands, so I need to spend 5 minutes scrubbing black, tarry oil off my fingers. Plus, I had to run out and buy the oil and filter from an auto parts store, which takes another 10 minutes. So we are talking about a good 40 minutes between running around town crawling under my car, and cleaning up.
On the other hand, for about $25-$30 (depending on cupons), I can drive onto one of those quick-stop oil-change places (eg: Valvoline Rapid Oil Change, Jiffy Lube, etc. In my case, I go to Valvoline), and have it all taken care of while I sit and listen to the radio for 10 minutes. While they are at it, they top off all my other fluids for free (washer, break, etc), give the whole car a once-over for maintenence issues, and check their database against the milage on my car for any routine maintenence reccomended by the manufacturer.
Yes, they do try to sell me their over-priced air filters and PCV joints. Everybody knows that this is where they make their money. However, that small annoyance is a small price to pay for all the time and effort they save me, and having somebody remind me when it's time to chance belts and shit. I spent $20K on my vehicle, so I don't mind an extra fifteen bucks now and then to keep it running well for at least the next decade.
You can keep reviving your pc for a couple hundred bucks every two years....they can stay alive just as long as a mac can. Except a quick browse through eBay will confirm that the resale values of Macs are so high, you can sell your old Mac and buy new every two years, and end up spending the same or less as the PC owner who keeps replacing their motherboard (and let's face it, a full motherboard upgrade is usually the only PC upgrade that makes sense these days, because CPU slot and memory standards keep changing).
Personally, I seldom bother putting money into my old PC's. I either give them away, or turn 'em into Linux servers and shove them into my closet.
I just bought a copy of XP for my dad's PC for $92, and that was after shipping. For all PC needs, go to pricewatch, not Amazon.
That asside, if I could have talked my dad into buying a Mac, I would have. He just has too many legacy PC apps that he won't let go of, because he feels he's too old to learn anything new.
Too bad you are the only person in America who bothered to watch Game 4 of the Laker Corronation... er... I mean NBA finals.
The Nets were so hopelessly out-matched that most people actually cared more about the USA soccer team in the World Cup this week... and none of us have ever cared about soccer before (except for that plucky women's team, obviously).
One way to foul them up to use non-typcial number substitutions (like using "15" for "b", because b is the 15th number of the alphabet after you ROT13.)
While you are at it, use a number as a number instead of a letter substitution. If your random words are "book" and "the", then throw your lucky number into the middle of it: "book42the" then when you do the letter-for-number subs, some typical some not, and mix the case just a smidge, you get "15o0K427h3", which your friend John the Ripper would not get to very quickly (even on a BSD system, which only looks at the first 8 digits: "15o0K427").
How often has this worked for other companies? I can't think of a single one at the moment. I'm not talking about computers, either. Any company. The most 'real' person that's been effective recently on the airwaves was Dave Thomas, and, well, he owned the place.
You must be too young to remember the "Pepsi Challenge" commercials of the 80's.
You see, if you just drink small sips of each pop in a double-blind taste test, the sweeter taste of Pepsi (Coke has a more bitter bite to it) leads the vast majority of people to say they like Pepsi's taste better. (2 out of 3, according the the marketroids who ran the test.)
With this knowledge in hand, Pepsi held taste tests of this sort in Supermarkets all over the country, and ran TV ads showing "real people" (including many lifetime Coke drinkers) express their astonishment at having chosen Pepsi.
The campaign was so wildly successful that it lead to a panic-inspired decision by the Coca-Cola company... when the patent on the formula for the original Coke ended they abandoned their well-known flavor and introduced "New Coke", a formula that tasted almost exactly like Pepsi. We all know what a disaster that turned out to be. Pepsi drinkers did not really feel any particular desire to switch to the new Coke, and Coke drinkers just wanted "the old Coke" back (and eventually got it, as "Coca-Cola Classic"). See, the thing is, people who drink a lot of Cola on a regular basis don't like the heavy, sticky sweetness of Pepsi. They like the crisp bitterness of Coke. So even when Pepsi more customers, Coke customers consume more product, which is why Coke has mostly remained the #1 seller (by a narrow margin) all these years.
Still, nobody can argue that the Pepsi Challenge ads were anything short of a triumph. In an industry where most people just drink whatever is loaded in their local bar's tap, and everybody else sticks with their favorite brand like a religion, the vast majoirty of Cola ads are for brand image alone. The ads don't sell cola, they keep stock values up. The Pepsi Challenge campaign, by putting "regular people" on TV stands alone as the only cola TV ads that actually got a few people to switch brands.
The irony of Apple ads targeted to MS users on MSNBC is just soooo good. I bet Bill is pissed.
No, Bill is probably thrilled. MS makes most of their money selling MSOffice, to both Mac and PC users. Bill Gates does not give two shits about what computer you use, as long as you need Word and Excel installed to share documents with 99% of the world. These ads are just more revenue for MSNBC as far as he is concerned.
The Dell dude and Gateway's singing cow are whimsical and quirky.
The Dell dude only makes me want to buy a Dell if it ships with a device for murdering the Dell dude. He's the most annoying presence on a TV ad presence since "Mikey" was shilling for Life. And no, I did not forget about that fucking Taco Bell dog... that was bad, but the Dell dude is worse.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, ".NET" is also a really, really stupid name.
Actually, no they don't. They say that 18.6% of people who play video games are 25-34. That does not tell you how many 25-34 year-olds play video games, only that those who do make up slightly less than 20% of the gaming population.
Make sure you are not the one who is mistaken before you go calling somebody a dumbass.
The funny thing is, just about everybody who reads that, and just about everybody posting here, shares that opinion. Those who hate seeing ads enough to stop reading Slashdot because of this issue have stopped reading Slashdot. The rest of us either put up with them, or route the requests to 127.0.0.0 in our hosts files.
Therefore we can expect all conversations concerning ads to have a slight bias towards apathy about the issue from now on. :)
Except Buffy was never simply about the ass-kicking. Buffy is a show for people who actually want an interesting story.
If all you want to watch is sexy girls in fights with no plot, there's always Dark Angel, Sheena, VIP, Relic Hunter, or any of a dozen other shitty programs which will appeal to your hormone-driven sensibilities. Clearly you are not part of the target audience for Buffy. Go watch Xena re-runs, and leave us alone.
And nobody ever suddenly discovers a huge new mine that sends the price of gold into a spiral.
How would AFDC help? By granting money to the parent which would be used for tuition.
Yet another shining example of what a good, solid public education can do for you. :)
2. Privaite school does not necessarilly mean religious school. In fact, were there no public schools, the vast majority of private ones taking up the slack in out culture would probably not be religious. The only reason most private schools are religious now is because most of the parents pulling their kids out of public schools are doing so for religious reasons.
3. Yes, this would be an additional financial burden on families, to the tune of about $3000 - $8000 per year per child. Of course, it would also mean that taxes would plummet (especially state and local taxes, the bulk of which are spent on education).
4. Extremely poor families are still expected to feed and clothe their own kids, are they not? Education is also a basic need, which parents have a responsibility to provide. The dirtly little secret that a lot of libertarians who support this sort of move don't like to talk about is that it would require that we expand the welfare state, giving out education money via AFDC to those families who need aid in order to send their kids to school.
4. Universities are not becoming impossible to attend if you are not rich or gifted. Pell grants still exist, as do low-interest student loans. That asside, I was not holding up Universities as an example of how to manage costs (most colleges are directly subsidized by the states, so being wasteful is an easy trap for them). The reason I brought up Universities is their system of acrediting programs assures that a degree from a major university means something, and High Schools could use a similar system for validating the worth of their diplomas.
What Enron and others did was shift and re-define their debts & costs to make the company look stronger than it was, in order to deceive shareholders.
The first Arthur Anderson client to be busted like this was Waste Management, Inc. They depreciated their trucks and dumpsters over longer periods than the actual lives of the equipment in order to make their expenses seem less.
There are a some good arguments for using a gold standard, but cleaning up corporate accounting is not one of them.
Personally, I happen to believe the court is right on this one. A school is a government institution, and government ought not establish religion. Therefore, all religious expression, including study of religious texts (beyond examinations of comparative religions for history and sociology purposes) should be banned from the public school.
It therefore follows that public (re: government-run) schools are not suitable institutions for education, because forces external to educators (and families of students) are restricting freedom of speech and expression. The time has come to do away with the public education system. The education of children, like the feeding of children, should be 100% the responsibility of the parents anyway. Parents who fail to provide an education for their children should be found guilty of neglect. Education funding for impoverished families should be handled via AFDC and charity, rather than through a department of education. Quality control of schools could be handled just like the universities are regulated today, only acredited schools could award valid diplomas.
Under the alternative I'm suggesting, all parents would be able to decide for themselves whether to send their kids to a school that insists on the Pledge or not.
I used to love watching the teaser/trailers while waiting for a movie to start. Now I do all I can to avoid them.
The anti-aliasing has gotten worse rather than better. Fonts now look fuzzier than they did with 5.1
Yes, it does set MSN as the home page, but changing the home page is an easy thing to do.
I think I will try it out for a couple weeks before I pass judgement.
10 minutes in-and-out, as an absolute maximum (the can usually do it faster than that), and I can spend that ten minutes balancing my checkbook or reading an O'Rielly book or something, while you spend your 10 minutes doing the actual task of changing the oil. Which of us is losing more time again?
All of it. Duh.
I know how to do all that, but the point is that for a few bucks, I don't have to. I work hard for a healthy wage when I work, and I want my free time to be just that: free.
On the other hand, for about $25-$30 (depending on cupons), I can drive onto one of those quick-stop oil-change places (eg: Valvoline Rapid Oil Change, Jiffy Lube, etc. In my case, I go to Valvoline), and have it all taken care of while I sit and listen to the radio for 10 minutes. While they are at it, they top off all my other fluids for free (washer, break, etc), give the whole car a once-over for maintenence issues, and check their database against the milage on my car for any routine maintenence reccomended by the manufacturer.
Yes, they do try to sell me their over-priced air filters and PCV joints. Everybody knows that this is where they make their money. However, that small annoyance is a small price to pay for all the time and effort they save me, and having somebody remind me when it's time to chance belts and shit. I spent $20K on my vehicle, so I don't mind an extra fifteen bucks now and then to keep it running well for at least the next decade.
Personally, I seldom bother putting money into my old PC's. I either give them away, or turn 'em into Linux servers and shove them into my closet.
That asside, if I could have talked my dad into buying a Mac, I would have. He just has too many legacy PC apps that he won't let go of, because he feels he's too old to learn anything new.
The Nets were so hopelessly out-matched that most people actually cared more about the USA soccer team in the World Cup this week... and none of us have ever cared about soccer before (except for that plucky women's team, obviously).
While you are at it, use a number as a number instead of a letter substitution. If your random words are "book" and "the", then throw your lucky number into the middle of it: "book42the" then when you do the letter-for-number subs, some typical some not, and mix the case just a smidge, you get "15o0K427h3", which your friend John the Ripper would not get to very quickly (even on a BSD system, which only looks at the first 8 digits: "15o0K427").
There's an opportunity to make a lot of cash in that idea, somewhere, I'm sure of it.
You must be too young to remember the "Pepsi Challenge" commercials of the 80's.
You see, if you just drink small sips of each pop in a double-blind taste test, the sweeter taste of Pepsi (Coke has a more bitter bite to it) leads the vast majority of people to say they like Pepsi's taste better. (2 out of 3, according the the marketroids who ran the test.)
With this knowledge in hand, Pepsi held taste tests of this sort in Supermarkets all over the country, and ran TV ads showing "real people" (including many lifetime Coke drinkers) express their astonishment at having chosen Pepsi.
The campaign was so wildly successful that it lead to a panic-inspired decision by the Coca-Cola company... when the patent on the formula for the original Coke ended they abandoned their well-known flavor and introduced "New Coke", a formula that tasted almost exactly like Pepsi. We all know what a disaster that turned out to be. Pepsi drinkers did not really feel any particular desire to switch to the new Coke, and Coke drinkers just wanted "the old Coke" back (and eventually got it, as "Coca-Cola Classic"). See, the thing is, people who drink a lot of Cola on a regular basis don't like the heavy, sticky sweetness of Pepsi. They like the crisp bitterness of Coke. So even when Pepsi more customers, Coke customers consume more product, which is why Coke has mostly remained the #1 seller (by a narrow margin) all these years.
Still, nobody can argue that the Pepsi Challenge ads were anything short of a triumph. In an industry where most people just drink whatever is loaded in their local bar's tap, and everybody else sticks with their favorite brand like a religion, the vast majoirty of Cola ads are for brand image alone. The ads don't sell cola, they keep stock values up. The Pepsi Challenge campaign, by putting "regular people" on TV stands alone as the only cola TV ads that actually got a few people to switch brands.
No, Bill is probably thrilled. MS makes most of their money selling MSOffice, to both Mac and PC users. Bill Gates does not give two shits about what computer you use, as long as you need Word and Excel installed to share documents with 99% of the world. These ads are just more revenue for MSNBC as far as he is concerned.
Eww, nice grammar. In spite of insisting that "next time" I will preview and proof-read my posts. It never seems to happen. Oh well, you get the jist.
The Dell dude only makes me want to buy a Dell if it ships with a device for murdering the Dell dude. He's the most annoying presence on a TV ad presence since "Mikey" was shilling for Life. And no, I did not forget about that fucking Taco Bell dog... that was bad, but the Dell dude is worse.