Only if you subscribe to the distinctly American notion that somebody with a house, a family car, three TV sets, electricity and central air to be "poor."
In most of the world, "poor" means you have nothing, and no way of getting anything.
In America, "poor" means you live in a bad neighborhood where your $100 Starter jacket might get stolen, and you can only afford to have two or three games for your PS2.
The folks who are genuinely down-and-out in America most certainly do not outnumber the inherited-wealth millionaires.
The nitpick here is, the government's right to compelling you to sell them your property is limited to "public use."
This ruling, which was a terrible mistake, declared that bringing in a private business which the government deems good for the location counts as "public use."
It basically means that if you are a big-time real estate developer in a backwater county, just bribe enough government officials and you can have any land you want (and always at zero dollars above the appraisal value), Constitutional property rights be damned. It's an awful ruling which expands a law that should have been much more limited than it now is, and we need to put heat on legislators of both parties to correct this new state of affairs.
The SCOTUS appointments is 90% of the reason why the religous wing of the GOP went out in droves to vote for GWB. If he does not appoint social conservatives, the "Dixiecrats" will either go home to the Democratic Party, or completely melt down... either way would leave us with one-party rule from the Democrats for a good 20 years or so.
Odds are, three branches of Republicanism will probably inspire enough "broken glass" Democrat voting to turn a lot of red states blue next time around, so it's far from a permanent arrangement.
The problem with the Democrats right now is that their core constituency resides on the far ends of the economic bell-curve: The dirt-poor and the "old money" rich.
The vast majority of salary-earning, 401K-owning, mortgage-holding, middle class folk seemed to like Clinton fine, because riding that bubble sure was a lot of fun, but the rise of the "Deaniacs" has kind of alienated a lot of those people, to the point that they are even willing to put up with the things they don't like about Bush and his Country Club buddies.
The Democrats, if they want to survive as a viable party, desperately need a way that they can talk to somebody who's currently making $50,000 a year (and hopes to be making over $100,000 within the next five), and get that person to think the Democrats have their best interests at heart. Whining about the "gap" in the already-too-expensive medicare drug benifits ain't going to do it, and neither is constant harping on the war issues.
Were I in charge of the DNC, I would be making overtures to the libertarians. Become the anti-PATRIOT Act party, the anti-RICO party, the anti-"War on Drugs" party. Let the hard-core socialists run off with the Greens, and establish Clinton-style triangulation on budget issues (wiping out the GOP's second-biggest vote-getter) while becoming the ultimate champions of individual liberty. Stealing the entire middle ground would be a piece of cake.
The Democrats, unfortunately, are moving in the opposite direction. They seem to be systematically purging the Clintonistas of the party, and rallying around the most shrill and bitter voices in their party.
I firmly believe there's going to be a huge political realignment within this generation. The Democrats are either going to radically evolve, or else present the Greens, Libertarians, and even the remnants of the Reform Party with a golden opportunity to become America's main Republican opposition.
She wrote an absolutely furious minority opinion on the recent eminent domain ruling. She felt very strongly that it was a bullshit ruling, but it passed 5-4 anyway. Oddly enough, it was mainly the so-called "progressives" on the court who voted to give the Big Bad Corporate World the legal means to get governments to push you out of your homes by promising to deliver better tax revenues with the land.
Now we probably need to talk about a new Amendment to the Constitution to protect property rights the way the 5th Amendment was supposed to, according to anybody who gives a fuck about the intentions of the Founding Fathers.
Although she was a Reagan appointee, she's generally regarded as a "swing" vote on a lot of the high-visibility social issues. A lot of 5-4 decisions over the years came down to 4 conservatives, 4 liberals, and Sandra Day O'Connor breaking the tie one way or the other.
Disclaimer: IANAUSSCJ (I Am Not A United States Supreme Court Justice)
If you have to save up for something like that, then perhaps a fancy digital TV isn't something you should be spending your money on.
More accurately, many people I know have to save up because they are doing more important things with their money. If you have a house and a couple of kids, you don't just whip out the VISA when you want a new toy... you budget for it, with things like furnishing a second kid bedroom and putting away for college funds coming way ahead of it on the priority list.
As for turning off the analogue signal, I think it's disgusting that the government is mandating something in order to cost us all money for something we don't want or need, just to make money for big business.
Okay, let's sell off the bandwidth to the highest bidder to do with it whatever they like, and charge them a special "broadcast tax" to fund an enforcement agency which protects those new property rights. It's a wonderful libertarian dream, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of people won't like what would be done with all that bandwidth if the government wasn't regulating it. It's one of those trade-offs which most people have come around to grudgingly accept.
I'm also a big fan of the shorter-run programs. A thirteen-episode series has no time for re-cap episodes (Wolf's Rain ran 4 in a row in the middle of their 26-episode season!), gratuitous use of flashbacks (Noir), constant re-use of transformation & "power up" sequences (Voltron, Sailor Moon), and other meaningless filler.
Some of the best 12 or 13 episode series out there, all of which are shows which probably could not have come from anywhere else:
Serial Experiments Lain
Yes, every anime otaku on the whole fucking Internet insists you should see it. They are all correct. When you watch the entire run (especially in Japanese) it's amazing.
Kino's Jorney
The old "Kung Fu" TV series meets the novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." A masterpiece.
Haibane Renmei
Holy. Fucking. Shit. A series which really sneaks up on you. At first glance, it seems like some kind of light & pretty piece of fluff, but right out of the gate it drops hints of deeper themes and foreboding of a hard look at realities of life... and it delivers them. Possibly the best 13-episode series I've ever seen.
Gunslinger Girl
Not being a big fansub-downloader, I've only seen the first of 3 DVD's of this series, but it's a shockingly dark story about a shadowy government agency which brainwashes children to become cyborg assassins. The focus of the series is the almost-but-not-quite paternal relationship between the young assassins and their adult handlers. Spooky stuff.
but Im sick of the anime nerd's japan is better in every way mentality, because its just not true.
I never said it's better in every way, ass. Don't put words in my mouth.
I'm not going to go on an anti-Japanese rant to establish my "non-fanboy cred" with you, but suffice it to say that I'm more than well aware of some of the shortcomings of Japanese society. Can't we talk about culture and entertainment without being overly judgmental?
I said that they are more open to enjoy entertainment from foreign cultures, and that much is definitely true.
Your theory that our movies are more popular with them than theirs are with us because we are just so fucking amazing that everybody in the world loves the smell of our shit completely breaks up when you consider that Japanese anime is huge in many countries in Europe... so maybe, just maybe, it's not their cultural myopia which keeps anime from catching on here, but ours.
I was just thinking the same thing... Look at the cover of Maxim magazine on any given month. If you are out of college, odds are their cover girl is way too young for you to flirt with in person without feeling like a total perv. Youth is worshipped in America.
Look at how many adults go to teen sex comedies like "Porkies" and "American Pie"... or that first Britney Spears video... and tell me American pop culture is not obsessed with youth.
In Japan, the lives of High Schoolers are extremely rigid, so the middle-school years are the "golden years" of freedom that they look back on the way we look back on our Senior year of high school. It was the last time in their life when the pressures of adulthood didn't really apply to them.
Hense, a lot of their stories, particularilly stories involving fantasy or romance, revolve around that age. They had to grow up a little faster than us.
Dude, I'm not sure I'd show the non-cleaned up version to that group.
They do in Japan. There's nothing in Sailor Moon you couldn't let a pre-teen girl see... unless your family is kind of prudish about alternative-lifestyle villains.
(Two of the "bad guys" on Sailor Moon are a couple. In the US dub, they made it appear that the more effeminate of the two was a woman.)
Hell, I've watched several episodes of Inuyasha and I still have no idea what it's about... I assume a handsome fox-eared demon-hunter
The ears are easier to understand if you know that "inu" is Japanese for "dog."
As for the story... well, it's a mythical story which spanned something like 27 bajillion episodes, so I doubt I could explain it to you in a brief summary to the satisfaction of fans of the show.
Either there's something fundamentally more universal about our culture or there's something fundamentally more universal about our movies.
Or, far more likely, the Japanese are more open to other cultures than Americans are.
That's not intended as flame. Most of us who live in America grew up in a country with entire oceans separating us from anybody who's all that cultrually different from us. Canada? Mexico? I defy you to tell Northern Minnesota from Southern Ontario without looking closely at the street signs and money. Ditto South Texas vs. Mexico.
Apart from immigration (mostly by people trying to get the fuck away from whatever culture they came from) we don't really get exposed to much outside of our provincial and isolated chunk of the globe.
Japan, on the other hand, is almost within swimming distance of both China and... er.. um... whatever the fuck the former Soviet territory on that side of Asia is calling itself. It's Kamchatka on my Risk board, so I'll call it that. (What do I know about it!? I'm American!)
The reason why everybody watches our movies is that we are pretty good at making movies (or used to be, anyway), and people in a lot of other countries don't mind watching something "foreign" to them.
The reason we don't watch everybody else's movies is because if it's not aimed squarely at the only culture we really understand, we must struggle to "get it."
Anime is a terrific example of this. American animation has some very specific and uniquely American quirks that we don't notice because we are used to them. Nearly every major American animated move release follows the basic structure of a Broadway musical.
In Japan, they don't have broadway musicals. Their animation obviously shows some American influence, but their animated movies often feel a lot more like Asian opera. Everything is very broad and melodramatic. The "huge eyes" serve this purpose perfectly, because drawing expression in the eyes is a very usefull method for showing emotions on a simple line-drawing of a face, and over time they've mastered the technique over there.
"Trigun" is a great example. It's the American Western seen through the eyes of Japanese and then, of course, re-imported back to it's culture of origin for me to watch. It makes me wonder how "Samurai Jack" plays in the land of the rising sun.
Then again, some of the best cowboy movies ever made, which Trigun draws from, were American & Italian adaptations of Akira Kurasawa's samurai movies, so it's all one big delicious pot of stew when you get right down to it.
(For those who missed the reference: "The Magnificent Seven" was remake of "Seven Samurai", and "A Fist Full of Dollars" was a remake of "Yojimbo.")
Oh, and Kurasawa himself often returned the favor. "Ran" was a samurai remake of "King Lear."
I wasn't saying all that to bash your favorite razor. I was just point out that the "lose on the razor, make it back on the blades" model doesn't really work.
The Mach 3 lines of razors actually became a lot more popular when they jacked up the cost of the handle and cut the price of the blade carts. When you give away the handle, it creates the perception in people's minds that the handle must not be worth all that much, and since your competition is also giving away handles, it actually makes it easier for people to switch back and forth between brands, resulting in very much the opposite of vendor lock-in. Customers end up going with the better blade (if they are picky) or the cheaper one (if they are not.)
Since a lot of guys are not all that picky about their razors and choose on price, blade prices are quickly driven down to commodity levels, and suddenly you can't afford to lose money on the handle anymore.
Except that's not really the model they use anymore.
The "Mach 3" and "Mach 3 Turbo" cartriges are sometimes cheaper than Bic disposables, depending on where you shop, while the cheezy plastic handle for them is something like eight bucks.
Schick's offerings are priced along similar lines.
I think the "lose on the razor, make it back on the blades" model fell apart when people who already owned the razor handles started buying twin-blade disposables anyway, leaving their fancy handles in the back of a bathroom drawer.
Then they suddenly learned that "vendor lock-in" requires a lot more than a shiny chrome handle to actually compell people to stick with your product.
Every time somebody says that Nintendo doesn't need to bother with HDTV because "nobody" has it right now, it sounds to me almost exactly like the apocryphal "640k should be enough for anybody" line.
HDTV is not in a lot of family rooms today, but that will change fast.
Using the tiny data set of "people I know", I'd say maybe 10% of them have some kind of HDTV as their main TV set... but of the other 90%, almost all of them expect that they will be buying one within the next two years.
Usually all it takes is for them to watch a movie or football game at a friends house on a big wide-screen set to get them saying, "I think I should start saving up for one of those."
Nintendo is making a huge mistake. Unless their console is somehow significantly cheaper than the PS3 and X-Box360 (and by that, I mean in the $200 range on day 1, with lower-costing games as well), they are in for a really bumpy ride.
But to say that MS has practically gone nowhere (especially when they've gone leaps and bounds in some areas) in ten years is ignorant at best.
Good thing none of us said that, then.
Holy shit, why not try addressing my actual point (about Steve Balmer's selective memory) rather than go on a tirade about all the horrible things which you imagined me saying about Microsoft itself?
Nothing you just said contradicts anything I said. I said nothing to specifically bash MS-SQL, IIS, or.NET, so I don't know where the fuck you are getting all this.
My point remains the same.
Pull up a Lexus/Nexis on his comments around the launch of.NET and things will sound very familiar...
Better still, go get your hands on the original broadcast of Cringely's PBS special, "Triumph of the Nerds" and you get to see a clip of Steve Balmer in his pre-CEO days making essentially the same "in the immediate future, we will not suck anymore" comments that he is now making about what he was promising back then.
Go back even further if you like. As surely as "no more GPF's" meant "BSOD", and as surely as "no more BSOD" actually means "RSOD", Balmer has been singing this same song for almost thirty years now.
If anybody is trolling, it's you. Hearing somebody describe Outlook as "rock solid" almost makes me want to weep for the future of America... but then I remember that there's a good chance, given Microsoft's past history of "astroturfing" on Internet discussion groups, that you could well be a paid shill for all I know.
I've got news for you: Your TV set already is a worthless box of glass and lead. The only thing which gives it value is the promise that somebody will be providing content for it, and there is by no means a guarantee that this will be the case forever.
One thing several people posting here seem to have overlooked is that they are not saying that 12% of TV watchers have analog TV. If I had to guess, I would say more than half of current cable subscribers are on analog.
They are saying 12% of TV sets are used for watching free over-the-air commercial TV.
I am part of that 12%. With a powerful UHF antenna and a high-def tuner (the EyeTV 500 connected via a Mac mini, to be exact), I watch 100% digital TV on my main television set.
Those with "analog" TV sets which are big enough to be worth keeping will just buy external digital tuners when the analog signal goes dark.
Others will decide they are better off buying a low-end digital TV set.
But it looks like 88% won't give a fuck, because they don't take advantage of free TV anyway. Sounds like a reasonable time to change.
(Note: I have a couple of smaller sets which will be going to the dump when this happens, and a basemet rec-room TV which will need a new tuner, so it's not like my ox is not getting gored here along with everybody else's. I'm just being realistic. Digital SDTV is cheaper to broadcast than analog, and digital HDTV is a great marketing tool, so the only real surprise about the full digital conversion is that it hasn't already happened.)
This has always been Balmer's M.O. He's played this game a hundred times.
"Aw, shucks... There's no point in denying that the horse crap we shoved out the door last year stunk to high heaven. What a big screw up! But look out, because this year we are going to really dazzle you with some great products!"
He's spent his whole career acknowleging that MS has made poor software "in the past" while promising the moon and the stars Real Soon Now.
He's gotta be giddy with laughter over the fact that it still works after all these years.
I'll go one further and speculate that they reached the point where adding it to the low-end model was probably cheaper than keeping the B&W screens around.
This way, they have one stock display part going into all full-sized iPods. Less inventory management is usually a good thing.
I think one of the neatest things about Watchmen is that it's the first story I've ever seen in a comic book which simply could not have been told any other way.
Every time I hear about a Watchmen movie project, even if it's by a great director who says he really loves the original, I sincerely hope will not be made.
Terry Gilliam once considered doing it, and backed out after concluding that the book is "unfilmable."
Now if The Terry Gilliam says it can't be done, then it can't be done, folks!
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you subscribe to the distinctly American notion that somebody with a house, a family car, three TV sets, electricity and central air to be "poor."
In most of the world, "poor" means you have nothing, and no way of getting anything.
In America, "poor" means you live in a bad neighborhood where your $100 Starter jacket might get stolen, and you can only afford to have two or three games for your PS2.
The folks who are genuinely down-and-out in America most certainly do not outnumber the inherited-wealth millionaires.
Sandra Day O'Connor's position was that they ruled on the law incorrectly. Three justices agreed with her, but it was not enough.
The nitpick here is, the government's right to compelling you to sell them your property is limited to "public use."
This ruling, which was a terrible mistake, declared that bringing in a private business which the government deems good for the location counts as "public use."
It basically means that if you are a big-time real estate developer in a backwater county, just bribe enough government officials and you can have any land you want (and always at zero dollars above the appraisal value), Constitutional property rights be damned. It's an awful ruling which expands a law that should have been much more limited than it now is, and we need to put heat on legislators of both parties to correct this new state of affairs.
7 of 9 being appointed by Republicans means nothing.
I, for one, fully endorse the idea of appointing 7 of 9 to the SCOTUS. She's a bit of a head-case, but a major cyborg hottie!
The SCOTUS appointments is 90% of the reason why the religous wing of the GOP went out in droves to vote for GWB. If he does not appoint social conservatives, the "Dixiecrats" will either go home to the Democratic Party, or completely melt down... either way would leave us with one-party rule from the Democrats for a good 20 years or so.
Odds are, three branches of Republicanism will probably inspire enough "broken glass" Democrat voting to turn a lot of red states blue next time around, so it's far from a permanent arrangement.
The problem with the Democrats right now is that their core constituency resides on the far ends of the economic bell-curve: The dirt-poor and the "old money" rich.
The vast majority of salary-earning, 401K-owning, mortgage-holding, middle class folk seemed to like Clinton fine, because riding that bubble sure was a lot of fun, but the rise of the "Deaniacs" has kind of alienated a lot of those people, to the point that they are even willing to put up with the things they don't like about Bush and his Country Club buddies.
The Democrats, if they want to survive as a viable party, desperately need a way that they can talk to somebody who's currently making $50,000 a year (and hopes to be making over $100,000 within the next five), and get that person to think the Democrats have their best interests at heart. Whining about the "gap" in the already-too-expensive medicare drug benifits ain't going to do it, and neither is constant harping on the war issues.
Were I in charge of the DNC, I would be making overtures to the libertarians. Become the anti-PATRIOT Act party, the anti-RICO party, the anti-"War on Drugs" party. Let the hard-core socialists run off with the Greens, and establish Clinton-style triangulation on budget issues (wiping out the GOP's second-biggest vote-getter) while becoming the ultimate champions of individual liberty. Stealing the entire middle ground would be a piece of cake.
The Democrats, unfortunately, are moving in the opposite direction. They seem to be systematically purging the Clintonistas of the party, and rallying around the most shrill and bitter voices in their party.
I firmly believe there's going to be a huge political realignment within this generation. The Democrats are either going to radically evolve, or else present the Greens, Libertarians, and even the remnants of the Reform Party with a golden opportunity to become America's main Republican opposition.
She wrote an absolutely furious minority opinion on the recent eminent domain ruling. She felt very strongly that it was a bullshit ruling, but it passed 5-4 anyway. Oddly enough, it was mainly the so-called "progressives" on the court who voted to give the Big Bad Corporate World the legal means to get governments to push you out of your homes by promising to deliver better tax revenues with the land.
Now we probably need to talk about a new Amendment to the Constitution to protect property rights the way the 5th Amendment was supposed to, according to anybody who gives a fuck about the intentions of the Founding Fathers.
Although she was a Reagan appointee, she's generally regarded as a "swing" vote on a lot of the high-visibility social issues. A lot of 5-4 decisions over the years came down to 4 conservatives, 4 liberals, and Sandra Day O'Connor breaking the tie one way or the other.
Disclaimer: IANAUSSCJ (I Am Not A United States Supreme Court Justice)
Mac OS uses a BSD kernel too, right?
Wrong. Close... but still wrong.
OS X uses a Mach microkernel with a BSD compatability layer.
Which, as far as most users are concerned, is pretty much the same as saying "it's BSD," but under the hood that's not exactly true.
If you have to save up for something like that, then perhaps a fancy digital TV isn't something you should be spending your money on.
More accurately, many people I know have to save up because they are doing more important things with their money. If you have a house and a couple of kids, you don't just whip out the VISA when you want a new toy... you budget for it, with things like furnishing a second kid bedroom and putting away for college funds coming way ahead of it on the priority list.
As for turning off the analogue signal, I think it's disgusting that the government is mandating something in order to cost us all money for something we don't want or need, just to make money for big business.
Okay, let's sell off the bandwidth to the highest bidder to do with it whatever they like, and charge them a special "broadcast tax" to fund an enforcement agency which protects those new property rights. It's a wonderful libertarian dream, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of people won't like what would be done with all that bandwidth if the government wasn't regulating it. It's one of those trade-offs which most people have come around to grudgingly accept.
I'm also a big fan of the shorter-run programs. A thirteen-episode series has no time for re-cap episodes (Wolf's Rain ran 4 in a row in the middle of their 26-episode season!), gratuitous use of flashbacks (Noir), constant re-use of transformation & "power up" sequences (Voltron, Sailor Moon), and other meaningless filler.
Some of the best 12 or 13 episode series out there, all of which are shows which probably could not have come from anywhere else:
Serial Experiments Lain
Yes, every anime otaku on the whole fucking Internet insists you should see it. They are all correct. When you watch the entire run (especially in Japanese) it's amazing.
Kino's Jorney
The old "Kung Fu" TV series meets the novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." A masterpiece.
Haibane Renmei
Holy. Fucking. Shit. A series which really sneaks up on you. At first glance, it seems like some kind of light & pretty piece of fluff, but right out of the gate it drops hints of deeper themes and foreboding of a hard look at realities of life... and it delivers them. Possibly the best 13-episode series I've ever seen.
Gunslinger Girl
Not being a big fansub-downloader, I've only seen the first of 3 DVD's of this series, but it's a shockingly dark story about a shadowy government agency which brainwashes children to become cyborg assassins. The focus of the series is the almost-but-not-quite paternal relationship between the young assassins and their adult handlers. Spooky stuff.
but Im sick of the anime nerd's japan is better in every way mentality, because its just not true.
I never said it's better in every way, ass. Don't put words in my mouth.
I'm not going to go on an anti-Japanese rant to establish my "non-fanboy cred" with you, but suffice it to say that I'm more than well aware of some of the shortcomings of Japanese society. Can't we talk about culture and entertainment without being overly judgmental?
I said that they are more open to enjoy entertainment from foreign cultures, and that much is definitely true.
Your theory that our movies are more popular with them than theirs are with us because we are just so fucking amazing that everybody in the world loves the smell of our shit completely breaks up when you consider that Japanese anime is huge in many countries in Europe... so maybe, just maybe, it's not their cultural myopia which keeps anime from catching on here, but ours.
I was just thinking the same thing... Look at the cover of Maxim magazine on any given month. If you are out of college, odds are their cover girl is way too young for you to flirt with in person without feeling like a total perv. Youth is worshipped in America.
Look at how many adults go to teen sex comedies like "Porkies" and "American Pie"... or that first Britney Spears video... and tell me American pop culture is not obsessed with youth.
In Japan, the lives of High Schoolers are extremely rigid, so the middle-school years are the "golden years" of freedom that they look back on the way we look back on our Senior year of high school. It was the last time in their life when the pressures of adulthood didn't really apply to them.
Hense, a lot of their stories, particularilly stories involving fantasy or romance, revolve around that age. They had to grow up a little faster than us.
Dude, I'm not sure I'd show the non-cleaned up version to that group.
They do in Japan. There's nothing in Sailor Moon you couldn't let a pre-teen girl see... unless your family is kind of prudish about alternative-lifestyle villains.
(Two of the "bad guys" on Sailor Moon are a couple. In the US dub, they made it appear that the more effeminate of the two was a woman.)
Hell, I've watched several episodes of Inuyasha and I still have no idea what it's about... I assume a handsome fox-eared demon-hunter
The ears are easier to understand if you know that "inu" is Japanese for "dog."
As for the story... well, it's a mythical story which spanned something like 27 bajillion episodes, so I doubt I could explain it to you in a brief summary to the satisfaction of fans of the show.
Either there's something fundamentally more universal about our culture or there's something fundamentally more universal about our movies.
Or, far more likely, the Japanese are more open to other cultures than Americans are.
That's not intended as flame. Most of us who live in America grew up in a country with entire oceans separating us from anybody who's all that cultrually different from us. Canada? Mexico? I defy you to tell Northern Minnesota from Southern Ontario without looking closely at the street signs and money. Ditto South Texas vs. Mexico.
Apart from immigration (mostly by people trying to get the fuck away from whatever culture they came from) we don't really get exposed to much outside of our provincial and isolated chunk of the globe.
Japan, on the other hand, is almost within swimming distance of both China and... er.. um... whatever the fuck the former Soviet territory on that side of Asia is calling itself. It's Kamchatka on my Risk board, so I'll call it that. (What do I know about it!? I'm American!)
The reason why everybody watches our movies is that we are pretty good at making movies (or used to be, anyway), and people in a lot of other countries don't mind watching something "foreign" to them.
The reason we don't watch everybody else's movies is because if it's not aimed squarely at the only culture we really understand, we must struggle to "get it."
Anime is a terrific example of this. American animation has some very specific and uniquely American quirks that we don't notice because we are used to them. Nearly every major American animated move release follows the basic structure of a Broadway musical.
In Japan, they don't have broadway musicals. Their animation obviously shows some American influence, but their animated movies often feel a lot more like Asian opera. Everything is very broad and melodramatic. The "huge eyes" serve this purpose perfectly, because drawing expression in the eyes is a very usefull method for showing emotions on a simple line-drawing of a face, and over time they've mastered the technique over there.
"Trigun" is a great example. It's the American Western seen through the eyes of Japanese and then, of course, re-imported back to it's culture of origin for me to watch. It makes me wonder how "Samurai Jack" plays in the land of the rising sun.
Then again, some of the best cowboy movies ever made, which Trigun draws from, were American & Italian adaptations of Akira Kurasawa's samurai movies, so it's all one big delicious pot of stew when you get right down to it.
(For those who missed the reference: "The Magnificent Seven" was remake of "Seven Samurai", and "A Fist Full of Dollars" was a remake of "Yojimbo.")
Oh, and Kurasawa himself often returned the favor. "Ran" was a samurai remake of "King Lear."
I wasn't saying all that to bash your favorite razor. I was just point out that the "lose on the razor, make it back on the blades" model doesn't really work.
The Mach 3 lines of razors actually became a lot more popular when they jacked up the cost of the handle and cut the price of the blade carts. When you give away the handle, it creates the perception in people's minds that the handle must not be worth all that much, and since your competition is also giving away handles, it actually makes it easier for people to switch back and forth between brands, resulting in very much the opposite of vendor lock-in. Customers end up going with the better blade (if they are picky) or the cheaper one (if they are not.)
Since a lot of guys are not all that picky about their razors and choose on price, blade prices are quickly driven down to commodity levels, and suddenly you can't afford to lose money on the handle anymore.
Except that's not really the model they use anymore.
The "Mach 3" and "Mach 3 Turbo" cartriges are sometimes cheaper than Bic disposables, depending on where you shop, while the cheezy plastic handle for them is something like eight bucks.
Schick's offerings are priced along similar lines.
I think the "lose on the razor, make it back on the blades" model fell apart when people who already owned the razor handles started buying twin-blade disposables anyway, leaving their fancy handles in the back of a bathroom drawer.
Then they suddenly learned that "vendor lock-in" requires a lot more than a shiny chrome handle to actually compell people to stick with your product.
Every time somebody says that Nintendo doesn't need to bother with HDTV because "nobody" has it right now, it sounds to me almost exactly like the apocryphal "640k should be enough for anybody" line.
HDTV is not in a lot of family rooms today, but that will change fast.
Using the tiny data set of "people I know", I'd say maybe 10% of them have some kind of HDTV as their main TV set... but of the other 90%, almost all of them expect that they will be buying one within the next two years.
Usually all it takes is for them to watch a movie or football game at a friends house on a big wide-screen set to get them saying, "I think I should start saving up for one of those."
Nintendo is making a huge mistake. Unless their console is somehow significantly cheaper than the PS3 and X-Box360 (and by that, I mean in the $200 range on day 1, with lower-costing games as well), they are in for a really bumpy ride.
But to say that MS has practically gone nowhere (especially when they've gone leaps and bounds in some areas) in ten years is ignorant at best.
Good thing none of us said that, then.
Holy shit, why not try addressing my actual point (about Steve Balmer's selective memory) rather than go on a tirade about all the horrible things which you imagined me saying about Microsoft itself?
You pretty much said Microsoft still sucks just as bad as they did ten years ago
No.
No, I didn't.
Look again. Never said it.
I'm not a paid shill but I do work for a Microsoft consulting firm.
Meh. Six of one...
Nothing you just said contradicts anything I said. I said nothing to specifically bash MS-SQL, IIS, or .NET, so I don't know where the fuck you are getting all this.
.NET and things will sound very familiar...
My point remains the same.
Pull up a Lexus/Nexis on his comments around the launch of
Better still, go get your hands on the original broadcast of Cringely's PBS special, "Triumph of the Nerds" and you get to see a clip of Steve Balmer in his pre-CEO days making essentially the same "in the immediate future, we will not suck anymore" comments that he is now making about what he was promising back then.
Go back even further if you like. As surely as "no more GPF's" meant "BSOD", and as surely as "no more BSOD" actually means "RSOD", Balmer has been singing this same song for almost thirty years now.
If anybody is trolling, it's you. Hearing somebody describe Outlook as "rock solid" almost makes me want to weep for the future of America... but then I remember that there's a good chance, given Microsoft's past history of "astroturfing" on Internet discussion groups, that you could well be a paid shill for all I know.
I've got news for you: Your TV set already is a worthless box of glass and lead. The only thing which gives it value is the promise that somebody will be providing content for it, and there is by no means a guarantee that this will be the case forever.
One thing several people posting here seem to have overlooked is that they are not saying that 12% of TV watchers have analog TV. If I had to guess, I would say more than half of current cable subscribers are on analog.
They are saying 12% of TV sets are used for watching free over-the-air commercial TV.
I am part of that 12%. With a powerful UHF antenna and a high-def tuner (the EyeTV 500 connected via a Mac mini, to be exact), I watch 100% digital TV on my main television set.
Those with "analog" TV sets which are big enough to be worth keeping will just buy external digital tuners when the analog signal goes dark.
Others will decide they are better off buying a low-end digital TV set.
But it looks like 88% won't give a fuck, because they don't take advantage of free TV anyway. Sounds like a reasonable time to change.
(Note: I have a couple of smaller sets which will be going to the dump when this happens, and a basemet rec-room TV which will need a new tuner, so it's not like my ox is not getting gored here along with everybody else's. I'm just being realistic. Digital SDTV is cheaper to broadcast than analog, and digital HDTV is a great marketing tool, so the only real surprise about the full digital conversion is that it hasn't already happened.)
This has always been Balmer's M.O. He's played this game a hundred times.
"Aw, shucks... There's no point in denying that the horse crap we shoved out the door last year stunk to high heaven. What a big screw up! But look out, because this year we are going to really dazzle you with some great products!"
He's spent his whole career acknowleging that MS has made poor software "in the past" while promising the moon and the stars Real Soon Now.
He's gotta be giddy with laughter over the fact that it still works after all these years.
Gut feeling: it's cheap to add
I'll go one further and speculate that they reached the point where adding it to the low-end model was probably cheaper than keeping the B&W screens around.
This way, they have one stock display part going into all full-sized iPods. Less inventory management is usually a good thing.
I think one of the neatest things about Watchmen is that it's the first story I've ever seen in a comic book which simply could not have been told any other way.
Every time I hear about a Watchmen movie project, even if it's by a great director who says he really loves the original, I sincerely hope will not be made.
Terry Gilliam once considered doing it, and backed out after concluding that the book is "unfilmable."
Now if The Terry Gilliam says it can't be done, then it can't be done, folks!