Holy shit, the one joke I crack in the entire post, and nearly every reply focuses in on jumping all over me for daring to say anything bad about Gmail.
Okay. You are cool for having a Gmail account. I'm so jealous that I now wish I had accepted one of the fifty-bajillion invites that crapflooded my inbox a few months ago. Oh, woe is me, that I must suffer along with my local e-mail client.
There, happy now?
Shit, it's like walking on egg shells with you people sometimes.
Face it Googles only meaningful competition at this stage is MSFT and...
You can pretty much stop right there. The corporate graveyard is stacked with companies who considered themselves competitors to Microsoft. As soon as the boys in Redmond agree that you are competing with them, they will pour billions of dollars into assuring your destruction.
In your effort to make a case for a rosy future for Google, you just made the best argument I've seen yet for their inevitable doom.
Maybe, in the sense that a person who plays slot machines and a blackjack player who counts cards are both gambling, but the ones who rely on random luck should not expect to do as well as the ones who put themselves in a position of advantage.
What is so hard to understand? Google, in a relatively short time, has been able to come to market with some amazing pieces of software that are stable, useful, and free even in their "Beta" stages.
That third thing is what has people so puzzled. Google's most popular offerings are "free as in beer." Yes, their search tools are so popular that they are getting embedded into operating systems and browsers, but another company could come along any day now with something better and displace them just as quickly as they displaced Yahoo. For that matter, an OS company (Microsoft or Apple) or a browser team (Mozilla, Opera) might just decide that they are better off putting out their very own superior search tools as a way to set their product apart from the competiion, and the right innovation for filtering out sites who cheat their way up the Google rankings could easilly result in stealing a lot of market share away. It's hard to lock "customers" in to a free product.
Gmail seemed like a really cool idea for about 10 minutes, until everybody suddenly remembered that we don't care about web-based e-mail.
I look at Google and ask myself, "how are they actually going to be making money in ten years?" It's hard to come up with any kind of solid answer.
I could totally see wanting to invest short-term in Google, simply because the waves of hype are probably going to keep their price going up for a while, allowing you to play the "greater fool" game for fun and profit. But long term? Meh. I like a lot of things about the company, but I wouldn't bet my Roth IRA on it.
The case brought up was about gratuitous nudity (Jennifer Connoly nekkid, as you said).
There was nothing gratuitous about the nudity in that film. The first time we see her naked (checking herself out in the mirror), the director is clearly making a point about self-image (including body image) and the impact which her heroin addiction had on her perceptions.
Later, when she is performing sex acts with another stripper as a way of earning her heroin fix, the specific timing of that scene is absolutely critical to complete understanding of what the director was trying to say with the whole goddamned movie. Every frame taken out of that scene diminishes the artistic impact of the film.
While I would not show Requiem to a young teen in my care, it's most certainly not pornographic. In fact, it's one of the best examples I can think of where explicit "sexual" content is not at all gratuitous or exploitative. It is a fascinating work which really deserves to be presented to thoughtful adults without the ham-fisted molestations of our Blockbuster overlords.
Since Blockbuster held a near-monopoly on video rentals for the brief span between when they pushed out all the mom-and-pop video places and when Netflix hit the scene, the reality of the industry was that if Blockbuster told you your film had to be edited, your choices were to either edit the film or give up on the rental market entirely.
Oh yea, and NC-17 was created by the MPAA specifically to distinguish adult-only motion pictures of artistic merit from X-rated porography. NC-17 movies are not porn, unless you are the sort of person who thinks Michelangelo's "David" should be fully clothed whenever displayed in public museums.
As the guest list indicates (Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy? Where's Alan Turing?)
Um. Let me put this in terms a nerd can understand.
Alan Turing has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. His interview is delayed until such a time as he masters the ability to "come back from The Force."
Blockbuster's censorship is this: For all NC-17 movies, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video *do* distrubute them, but only by strong-arming the studios to create an "alternate" R-rated version of the DVD.
So, if you were to walk into a Blockbuster and rent "Requiem for a Dream", you would, in fact, be renting an edited for Blockbuster version of this brilliant film masterpiece.
If you wanted to see it as it really came out in the theaters, you would have to go down the road to Best Buy and actually purchase it.
(The hillarious thing about this specific example is that this is no longer quite true. The producers of Requiem have since released an unrated "Director's Cut" DVD, which includes all of the removed scenes and then some... and since that new version, chock full of filthy, filthy porn, was never saddled with the dreaded "NC-17" rating by the MPAA, Blockbuster had no reservations whatsoever about putting it up on their shelves.)
Given that most new TV sets, especially the budget models, are only built to last a few years these days, and given that many TV makers are dumping inventory to get out of the NTSC market in favor of shitty plasma screens and what-not, It seems reasonable to assume that by 2009, a lot people will already be watching a different TV set than they have right now, and that different set will already be capable of tuning in the digital band.
So for a lot of people, this will be a simple matter of throwing away the rabbit ears and buying a UHF antenna.
That said, they look good enough on my 119" screen that I've come around to agree with the 720p zealots. A progressive-scan image at 3/4 High-Def is in many ways better than the interlaced "true" HDTV of 1080i which is being put out by NBC and CBS.
Until the processing beef to put out 1080p becomes affordable to the average home-theater junkie, I think 720p is the better way to go, and applaud FOX and ESPN for pimping it.
I keep hearing about them but I've never seen one.
That's because nobody needs them yet. If you can already get native-resolution broadcasts which look good on your favorite shows using the TV's built-in tuner, why would you even spend $20 on a box which tunes in a 720p or 1080i signal which then needs to be scaled down for your set?
As long as the analog feed is live, there's zero demand for cheap digital tuners. Once you actually need one to watch TV on the 25" screen which you stole from the last hotel you stayed in, then a market will pop up to meet the demand, and they are not terribly expensive to manufacture.
With already eye-gouging cable prices... I've already opted out of broadcast.
That can't possibly be what you meant, as it's just about the dumbest thing I've heard all week.
Cable: Too exensive Broadcast TV: Free free free!
Solution: Opt out of broadcast.
WTF?
Actually, you topped it with something even more stupid right after that. With Netflix being well-known and well-established as a great DVD-by-mail subscription method, you opted to go with the "Netflix-killer" plan from Blockbuster, a company who censors movies.
Are you a fan of artistic censorship, who thinks the world will end if too many people get to see Jenifer Connoly get all nekkid in "Requiem for a Dream", or are you just oblivious/apathetic about the fact that you are helping their cause?
These are the same dread-lords from the '97 UO era
1997 is an "era" now?
Shit, I feel old. When I was a young gamer, "on line" meant you had a good, secure seal on your accoustic coupler, allowing you to enjoy an "RPG-by-mail" type game at the breakneck pace of your 300 baud connection to your favorite local BBS.
I've been through this with my music (punk) and my hobbies (skateboarding and tagging) before, and it's no fun at all.
Poser.
The Sex Pistols and Ramones did not suddenly stop being cool just because Hot Topic started selling black fishnets and plaid to 14-year old girls who listen to Greenday on their iPods.
Punk rock, to the (very) limited extent that it was ever cool at all, was cool because it embraced the idea of not giving a fuck what other people thought of you. If you were embarrased that valley girls were now aping the style which you so were aping first, you completely missed the entire point. It sounds to me like are every bit a phoney as the members of Offspring which you are so quick to dismiss.
You want to be a true punk? A true non-conformist? Go downtown with a boom-box and listen to Britney Spears in a public square. Not her new simi-sexy "Toxic" stuff... her old "Hit me baby" crap that everybody is fucking sick to death of. Crank it up. Sing along. Dance to it. Naked.
Then you will be truly worthy of the awe and adulation of your co-workers at Starbucks. You can show off the inexplicable tatoos of Heinz Ketuchup bottles and Teletubbies which you got ON YOUR FACE while in jail for lewd behavior.
Until you are ready to go that far to break the mold and be a real bat-shit loco non-conformist, shut the fuck up and accept the fact that you are no better (or worse) than those kids at the mall who you seem to think are ruining it all for you.
Although I realize you mean documents, Walmart lets you upload photos for printing and pick them up at the store. It's pretty slick.
Being able to upload documents to a store's printer to pick up later is a great idea... but better still, if you have a printer/fax, then you would not even need to go pick them up, because they could fax them to you and save you the trip!:P
At the video store in my neighborhood they have one of those huge gum ball machines. The kind with those big 1" diameter gum balls. Along with the pieced of gum, there was also a single plastic ball with a $20 bill stuffed inside it, so you have something like a 1-in-300 chance of winning twenty bucks.
A cute little girl came in, put in her quarter for a gum ball, and won the $20 ball instead.
She cried.
It suddenly became obvious to everybody in the store that the folks who own the gum ball machine didn't really think their clever marketing strategy all the way through.
So, in 2006, the analog broadcast signals go dark, prompting millions of people to splurge on HDTV systems, and then Nintendo will finally release their new console... the only new system which does not support HDTV.
War, Social Security, and Medicare issues are what are absolutely KILLING the Republicans
If being "KILLED" means re-electing a hard line ideologue of your party plank as President and retaining (and expanding) your control of both houses of Congress, I'm sure the Republicans are going to do everything they can to make sure these issues keep KILLING them.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that Kaylee is the hottest of the bunch, but as for Inara being high-maintenance...
You know, a Fiat takes a hell of a lot more maintenance than a new Honda Civic, but it's also a hell of lot more fun to drive when it's working.
Holy shit, the one joke I crack in the entire post, and nearly every reply focuses in on jumping all over me for daring to say anything bad about Gmail.
Okay. You are cool for having a Gmail account. I'm so jealous that I now wish I had accepted one of the fifty-bajillion invites that crapflooded my inbox a few months ago. Oh, woe is me, that I must suffer along with my local e-mail client.
There, happy now?
Shit, it's like walking on egg shells with you people sometimes.
Face it Googles only meaningful competition at this stage is MSFT and...
You can pretty much stop right there. The corporate graveyard is stacked with companies who considered themselves competitors to Microsoft. As soon as the boys in Redmond agree that you are competing with them, they will pour billions of dollars into assuring your destruction.
In your effort to make a case for a rosy future for Google, you just made the best argument I've seen yet for their inevitable doom.
Actually, I agree with that one. Did you see Natalie Portman in III? Yeeuck!
I'll take the cast of Serenity for the new female sci-fi hotness, thanks. Natalie Portman is (well... still kinda young) and busted.
Maybe, in the sense that a person who plays slot machines and a blackjack player who counts cards are both gambling, but the ones who rely on random luck should not expect to do as well as the ones who put themselves in a position of advantage.
What is so hard to understand? Google, in a relatively short time, has been able to come to market with some amazing pieces of software that are stable, useful, and free even in their "Beta" stages.
That third thing is what has people so puzzled. Google's most popular offerings are "free as in beer." Yes, their search tools are so popular that they are getting embedded into operating systems and browsers, but another company could come along any day now with something better and displace them just as quickly as they displaced Yahoo. For that matter, an OS company (Microsoft or Apple) or a browser team (Mozilla, Opera) might just decide that they are better off putting out their very own superior search tools as a way to set their product apart from the competiion, and the right innovation for filtering out sites who cheat their way up the Google rankings could easilly result in stealing a lot of market share away. It's hard to lock "customers" in to a free product.
Gmail seemed like a really cool idea for about 10 minutes, until everybody suddenly remembered that we don't care about web-based e-mail.
I look at Google and ask myself, "how are they actually going to be making money in ten years?" It's hard to come up with any kind of solid answer.
I could totally see wanting to invest short-term in Google, simply because the waves of hype are probably going to keep their price going up for a while, allowing you to play the "greater fool" game for fun and profit. But long term? Meh. I like a lot of things about the company, but I wouldn't bet my Roth IRA on it.
The case brought up was about gratuitous nudity (Jennifer Connoly nekkid, as you said).
There was nothing gratuitous about the nudity in that film. The first time we see her naked (checking herself out in the mirror), the director is clearly making a point about self-image (including body image) and the impact which her heroin addiction had on her perceptions.
Later, when she is performing sex acts with another stripper as a way of earning her heroin fix, the specific timing of that scene is absolutely critical to complete understanding of what the director was trying to say with the whole goddamned movie. Every frame taken out of that scene diminishes the artistic impact of the film.
While I would not show Requiem to a young teen in my care, it's most certainly not pornographic. In fact, it's one of the best examples I can think of where explicit "sexual" content is not at all gratuitous or exploitative. It is a fascinating work which really deserves to be presented to thoughtful adults without the ham-fisted molestations of our Blockbuster overlords.
Since Blockbuster held a near-monopoly on video rentals for the brief span between when they pushed out all the mom-and-pop video places and when Netflix hit the scene, the reality of the industry was that if Blockbuster told you your film had to be edited, your choices were to either edit the film or give up on the rental market entirely.
Oh yea, and NC-17 was created by the MPAA specifically to distinguish adult-only motion pictures of artistic merit from X-rated porography. NC-17 movies are not porn, unless you are the sort of person who thinks Michelangelo's "David" should be fully clothed whenever displayed in public museums.
As the guest list indicates (Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy? Where's Alan Turing?)
Um. Let me put this in terms a nerd can understand.
Alan Turing has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. His interview is delayed until such a time as he masters the ability to "come back from The Force."
Blockbuster's censorship is this: For all NC-17 movies, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video *do* distrubute them, but only by strong-arming the studios to create an "alternate" R-rated version of the DVD.
So, if you were to walk into a Blockbuster and rent "Requiem for a Dream", you would, in fact, be renting an edited for Blockbuster version of this brilliant film masterpiece.
If you wanted to see it as it really came out in the theaters, you would have to go down the road to Best Buy and actually purchase it.
(The hillarious thing about this specific example is that this is no longer quite true. The producers of Requiem have since released an unrated "Director's Cut" DVD, which includes all of the removed scenes and then some... and since that new version, chock full of filthy, filthy porn, was never saddled with the dreaded "NC-17" rating by the MPAA, Blockbuster had no reservations whatsoever about putting it up on their shelves.)
Given that most new TV sets, especially the budget models, are only built to last a few years these days, and given that many TV makers are dumping inventory to get out of the NTSC market in favor of shitty plasma screens and what-not, It seems reasonable to assume that by 2009, a lot people will already be watching a different TV set than they have right now, and that different set will already be capable of tuning in the digital band.
So for a lot of people, this will be a simple matter of throwing away the rabbit ears and buying a UHF antenna.
DVD's are not HD either. They are 450p.
That said, they look good enough on my 119" screen that I've come around to agree with the 720p zealots. A progressive-scan image at 3/4 High-Def is in many ways better than the interlaced "true" HDTV of 1080i which is being put out by NBC and CBS.
Until the processing beef to put out 1080p becomes affordable to the average home-theater junkie, I think 720p is the better way to go, and applaud FOX and ESPN for pimping it.
I keep hearing about them but I've never seen one.
That's because nobody needs them yet. If you can already get native-resolution broadcasts which look good on your favorite shows using the TV's built-in tuner, why would you even spend $20 on a box which tunes in a 720p or 1080i signal which then needs to be scaled down for your set?
As long as the analog feed is live, there's zero demand for cheap digital tuners. Once you actually need one to watch TV on the 25" screen which you stole from the last hotel you stayed in, then a market will pop up to meet the demand, and they are not terribly expensive to manufacture.
With already eye-gouging cable prices... I've already opted out of broadcast.
That can't possibly be what you meant, as it's just about the dumbest thing I've heard all week.
Cable: Too exensive
Broadcast TV: Free free free!
Solution: Opt out of broadcast.
WTF?
Actually, you topped it with something even more stupid right after that. With Netflix being well-known and well-established as a great DVD-by-mail subscription method, you opted to go with the "Netflix-killer" plan from Blockbuster, a company who censors movies.
Are you a fan of artistic censorship, who thinks the world will end if too many people get to see Jenifer Connoly get all nekkid in "Requiem for a Dream", or are you just oblivious/apathetic about the fact that you are helping their cause?
These are the same dread-lords from the '97 UO era
1997 is an "era" now?
Shit, I feel old. When I was a young gamer, "on line" meant you had a good, secure seal on your accoustic coupler, allowing you to enjoy an "RPG-by-mail" type game at the breakneck pace of your 300 baud connection to your favorite local BBS.
Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
I've been through this with my music (punk) and my hobbies (skateboarding and tagging) before, and it's no fun at all.
Poser.
The Sex Pistols and Ramones did not suddenly stop being cool just because Hot Topic started selling black fishnets and plaid to 14-year old girls who listen to Greenday on their iPods.
Punk rock, to the (very) limited extent that it was ever cool at all, was cool because it embraced the idea of not giving a fuck what other people thought of you. If you were embarrased that valley girls were now aping the style which you so were aping first, you completely missed the entire point. It sounds to me like are every bit a phoney as the members of Offspring which you are so quick to dismiss.
You want to be a true punk? A true non-conformist? Go downtown with a boom-box and listen to Britney Spears in a public square. Not her new simi-sexy "Toxic" stuff... her old "Hit me baby" crap that everybody is fucking sick to death of. Crank it up. Sing along. Dance to it. Naked.
Then you will be truly worthy of the awe and adulation of your co-workers at Starbucks. You can show off the inexplicable tatoos of Heinz Ketuchup bottles and Teletubbies which you got ON YOUR FACE while in jail for lewd behavior.
Until you are ready to go that far to break the mold and be a real bat-shit loco non-conformist, shut the fuck up and accept the fact that you are no better (or worse) than those kids at the mall who you seem to think are ruining it all for you.
...new opportunities to use your printer... even tattoos.
Dude, if you can fit your arm through the line-feeder of a typical inkjet printer, you seriously need to hit the gym.
(I keed, I keed!)
Let's just pretend somebody already linked to the oblig. "Area Man Can't Shut Up About Not Owning TV" Onion story and move on with life, shall we?
Although I realize you mean documents, Walmart lets you upload photos for printing and pick them up at the store. It's pretty slick.
:P
Being able to upload documents to a store's printer to pick up later is a great idea... but better still, if you have a printer/fax, then you would not even need to go pick them up, because they could fax them to you and save you the trip!
At the video store in my neighborhood they have one of those huge gum ball machines. The kind with those big 1" diameter gum balls. Along with the pieced of gum, there was also a single plastic ball with a $20 bill stuffed inside it, so you have something like a 1-in-300 chance of winning twenty bucks.
A cute little girl came in, put in her quarter for a gum ball, and won the $20 ball instead.
She cried.
It suddenly became obvious to everybody in the store that the folks who own the gum ball machine didn't really think their clever marketing strategy all the way through.
Or perhaps, "ten iPods, fine... but can't *any* of them play my OGG files!?"
If I end up being customer 500,000, you can have my four, too.
Coldplay was a much better band in their early years.
You know, back when they were called "U2."
So you're posting as part of group "b" then. :)
So, in 2006, the analog broadcast signals go dark, prompting millions of people to splurge on HDTV systems, and then Nintendo will finally release their new console... the only new system which does not support HDTV.
Sounds like a hell of a strategy there.
War, Social Security, and Medicare issues are what are absolutely KILLING the Republicans
If being "KILLED" means re-electing a hard line ideologue of your party plank as President and retaining (and expanding) your control of both houses of Congress, I'm sure the Republicans are going to do everything they can to make sure these issues keep KILLING them.