I don't care about getting episodes older than the last five. I care about getting current episodes without having to wait a week. That, I would probably pay for.
I also can't help but wonder if they're going to be including ads on the subscription model or if they think the access alone is worth 10 bucks.
Radio Lab did a great radio story about 3 different iterations of the War of the Worlds broadcast - Welles' version, one in Central America and one in upstate New York in the 70's.
The problem with that example is that by some accounts, if Japan hadn't bombed pearl harbor, it's just as likely the US would have stayed out of the war entirely.
Do said accounts mention Lend-Lease at all? The US took sides in March, 1941. Or from the perspective of the Pacific conflict, the US took sides when they instigated embargoes against war supplies Japan desperately needed to (literally) fuel its war effort - Japan needed oil, rubber, and metals to feed the industrial machine, and the US wasn't cooperating.
Pearl Harbor was the tipping point, a rallying cry, and a tremendously effective excuse, but realistically the US would have entered the war eventually anyway.
Reasonable prices would do more to combat piracy than all the mobile platforms out there. 30 bucks list for 4 episodes of whatever anime series floats your boat at the moment on dvd is price-gouging.
Sherman Alexie has won the O. Henry Award, an NEA grant, and is the author of a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year and a National Book Award as well as being honored by The New Yorker and Granta - Alexie isn't some guy clawing for publicity, and the fact that you haven't heard of him (no offense) says more about the circles you move in than about his popularity. He's a genuine literary figure.
It isn't true for you. It is for me. If I have a paper in my hands, I flip through all of it - arts, culture, international news, business, sports, whatever. I might not READ all of it, but if something catches my eye that, for whatever reason, piques my curiosity, I'll read more and maybe learn something. Online, I need to actively want to look for international news. It isn't in front of me, it's a click or two away, and in terms of an attention economy that's two clicks farther away than I want to be.
It's possible that someday they'll figure out how to replicate the browsing experience of a newspaper on the internet, tactile goodness aside. And for the way I read the paper, the solutions out there aren't good enough. Glad it works for you, though.
And why bother walking to the store on the corner for milk when you can hop in the car and drive?
It isn't the same. Partially because I want to be able to leave the thing on the train when I'm done with it for somebody else to read, partially because paper feels good in my hands and plastic doesn't so much, partially because I like turning actual, real pages, and partially because I don't want to fiddle with a gizmo, or really have anything to DO with a gizmo, at 7am.
I spend all day and a good portion of my evenings in front of a computer or a TV; I want to spend some small amount of time every day not interacting with things with batteries. I want to have less crap in my pockets, not more.
I read the New York times every day. I'm 28. I know I'm in the minority, but I get things from a paper I don't get from a website or an rss feed. It's portable, it's easier on the eyes, it's got a crossword puzzle in it I can do with a pen and all that tactile stuff, but also it's better for my brain - the 'net is good at giving me information I'm looking for, but it blows at giving me information I didn't know I needed until I read the headline. I learn more from 15 minutes reading the paper on my commute every morning than I would get from an hour in front of the computer. YMMV.
Let the priests dither over what "marriage" is and minimize the governmental involvement in a process which is basically nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults.
Some of us, I'm sure, aren't especially comfortable with the idea of somebody else's god, or any god, being anywhere near our marriages - personally, if I have to choose between marriage as a contract between two people administered by the state and marriage as a contract between two people administered under god, I choose the former.
What the hell is wrong with you people? It's like you haven't read any fantasy written before 1970, and this is a literature class he's asking about, not a weekend at the beach.
I love sci-fi, I honestly do, but it isn't written for the classroom - while the concepts are often wonderful, the writing is a disaster. Remember that these stories used to be printed on pulp and sold for a nickel the way the National Enquirer is sold now. It's escapism, and that's fine. But come on - give the truly historic science fiction writers out there some credit and let Orson Scott Card be rediscovered a hundred years from now.
Try Ambrose Bierce (especially "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or Mary Shelley, or gk Chesterton, or Lovecraft, or Poe, or Jules Verne, or at the very latest Bradbury.
It seems like this is the perfect forum for this, but honestly? You couldn't have picked a worse group of people to ask this about.
Don't forget all interpretations much match the teachers own view as well. Nothing spoils someone interest in a topic, when a teacher always tells them what story they got from this abstracted fiction is wrong.
I hate this attitude. It's true that some teachers are narrow-minded in their acceptance of other people's interpretations, but it's more true that, from my experience, a greater number of students fall back on the "my interpretation is just as valid as yours because we're all delicate and unique snowflakes" argument as an excuse to not do some textual analysis and research. You don't get credit for finishing a book and thinking about it, you get credit for developing an idea and backing it up, from the text, in the face of Socratic criticism. Some teachers take that too far, but all the professors I've had have questioned their students' ideas to get them to back their shit up with reason and analysis. Some students don't respond well to that. Sounds like you didn't. But others have found that being taught to stick to your guns and prove you know your texts backwards and forwards is one hell of a valuable learning experience.
I'm sorry but this question is just ridiculous, or if not actually ridiculous then wasteful.
Let me see if I understand this correctly: The author has photographed a selection of pages from a book that he wants to have available to read at his leisure. He doesn't want to carry the book around because it's too heavy, so what he wants to do, because the photographs aren't as pretty as scanned copies but scanned copies have artifacts of the scanning process, is to develop a home rig to scan the pages he's interested and run them through some piece of software to straighten them out before loading them onto a pda so that they're available whenever and wherever he wants them.
Right?
Here's my issue: This is a problem that's been solved by a library, a photocopier and a pocketful of nickels for 30 years - no matter how efficiently he manages to get his whole basement book scanning setup working (which, let's be honest here, is going to be a mess of trouble and a timesink of not insignificant proportions) the benefit (PDA-stored documents) can't possibly be outweighed by the hours he'll end up spending researching and implementing a system that can't compete with a manila folder with a stack of photocopied pages in it.
I admire the thought experiment, and I bet there're a whole bunch of nerds here who are going to get all in a tizzy about cameras and lighting and whatnot, but this, and I mean it kindly, is a waste of time.
And if you think photocopying is too time-consuming, suck it up and bring the book with you - there are worse fates than slinging a backpack over your shoulder.
Your eyes aren't everything - I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm much faster to react to something I hear over something I see.
I live in a fairly large city in the northeast US. I walk a lot, but not like true urban walking - it's a mile and a half to the train station, and I walk it twice a day outside of light groceries and the like. I grew up walking in NYC and its suburbs, and I've been lucky enough to never actually need a driver's license. My feet do me just fine for most things.
So believe me when I say that the idea of a truly silent car terrifies me. I look both ways when I cross the street, I don't habitually jaywalk, I follow street signs and stay on the curb until the light changes, but if all that fails or if a driver isn't paying the same kind of attention I am to the road (he has a steel cage around him; I don't) I rely on my ears. I've had my ass saved on more than one occasion by hearing a car swinging around a corner towards me that I couldn't see yet.
There are a lot of stupid drivers on the road. There are also a lot of careless or over-confident pedestrians. But I can't see this as a bad thing - my eyes might keep me from walking out into the middle of traffic, but my ears are what get me to step back quickly onto the curb because somebody in a car isn't being careful.
Actually that is not true. Why was Henry Ford successful? Because he paid his employees enough to be able to afford the cars he produced.
That's true, sort of, but it's also one of those colorful American myths we like to repeat to ourselves - Ford did institute a $5 day to keep turnover low, but the bonus required the workers to not drink, or gamble, or have working wives, and a team of men were employed to follow the plant employees around when they were off work to make sure they weren't breaking any of the rules.
The workers didn't complain much because $5 is $5, and it was good for business, but let's not get carried away - would you let your boss to install a camera in your living room in exchange for a raise?
My favorite joke in the book, though, was the running "flowerpot that says 'oh no not again'" joke. That and flying. And crickett. Top 3, ok?
You may have gone off on a tangent without realizing it - all three of those things are from "Life, the Universe, and Everything," not "Mostly Harmless."
How much caffeine do you drink per day? I think a lot of the disparity is due to the fact that we (rightly) keep younger people from using caffeine and other stimulants.
You might want to take a look around you - teenagers now seem to be way, waaay more caffeinated than I was at that age - I would have a coke now and again, and the occasional coffee before school, but dem-darn-kids-nowadays guzzle energy drinks like Monster and Redbull at an alarming rate. Not a particularly scientific observation on my part, but others seem to have noticed. Also, check out the caffeine database.
My point was mostly editorial, that putting $scary_big_number; in a summary doesn't provide any information beyond making the reader think, "Huh. That's a scary big number." To use a familiar number, if McDonald's served 500,000 fewer people today than yesterday it would look like a point of concern if nobody told you that McDonald's serves 47,000,000 people a day on average.
We're scared of very, very big numbers because we're not trained to comprehend them - we're never going to have to make change for a million dollar bill, so who cares what 100,000,000 pennies looks like.
"Meanwhile, Sony is feeling the pain as well; the company sold 500,000 fewer PS3 consoles than in the previous quarter, and PSP sales saw an even bigger drop."
500,000 units is just a number; losing a sandwich is less of a tragedy if you had two of them to begin with. FTFA:
"Sony did release console sales numbers for the period, which also painted a bleak picture. Quarterly worldwide PlayStation 3 sales dropped from 1.6 million units in the first quarter of the past fiscal year to 1.1 million units in the most recent fiscal quarter, while PSP sales plummeted from 3.7 million units to just 1.3 million units. VAIO sales and profitability were also down, though Sony did not offer specific figures."
So selling 500,000 fewer units this quarter in this context means that Sony has sold approximately 30% fewer units than last quarter.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we could put it on a rocket and shoot it into space?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout
Try and sell that to general public.
Some dramas aired on FOX, like "House," are on a one week delay.
I don't care about getting episodes older than the last five. I care about getting current episodes without having to wait a week. That, I would probably pay for.
I also can't help but wonder if they're going to be including ads on the subscription model or if they think the access alone is worth 10 bucks.
I misremembered. Chile, not quite Central America.
Check it out.
The problem with that example is that by some accounts, if Japan hadn't bombed pearl harbor, it's just as likely the US would have stayed out of the war entirely.
Do said accounts mention Lend-Lease at all? The US took sides in March, 1941. Or from the perspective of the Pacific conflict, the US took sides when they instigated embargoes against war supplies Japan desperately needed to (literally) fuel its war effort - Japan needed oil, rubber, and metals to feed the industrial machine, and the US wasn't cooperating.
Pearl Harbor was the tipping point, a rallying cry, and a tremendously effective excuse, but realistically the US would have entered the war eventually anyway.
Wow. I used to think being a dorm RA was the fast-lane to friendlessness, but clearly this is worse.
Reasonable prices would do more to combat piracy than all the mobile platforms out there. 30 bucks list for 4 episodes of whatever anime series floats your boat at the moment on dvd is price-gouging.
Breach the cannon of...
If I had mod points right now I'd drive over to your house and whack you in the head with them for that joke.
Prior to this article, I'd never heard of him.
Sherman Alexie has won the O. Henry Award, an NEA grant, and is the author of a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year and a National Book Award as well as being honored by The New Yorker and Granta - Alexie isn't some guy clawing for publicity, and the fact that you haven't heard of him (no offense) says more about the circles you move in than about his popularity. He's a genuine literary figure.
--Triv
It isn't true for you. It is for me. If I have a paper in my hands, I flip through all of it - arts, culture, international news, business, sports, whatever. I might not READ all of it, but if something catches my eye that, for whatever reason, piques my curiosity, I'll read more and maybe learn something. Online, I need to actively want to look for international news. It isn't in front of me, it's a click or two away, and in terms of an attention economy that's two clicks farther away than I want to be.
It's possible that someday they'll figure out how to replicate the browsing experience of a newspaper on the internet, tactile goodness aside. And for the way I read the paper, the solutions out there aren't good enough. Glad it works for you, though.
And why bother walking to the store on the corner for milk when you can hop in the car and drive?
It isn't the same. Partially because I want to be able to leave the thing on the train when I'm done with it for somebody else to read, partially because paper feels good in my hands and plastic doesn't so much, partially because I like turning actual, real pages, and partially because I don't want to fiddle with a gizmo, or really have anything to DO with a gizmo, at 7am.
I spend all day and a good portion of my evenings in front of a computer or a TV; I want to spend some small amount of time every day not interacting with things with batteries. I want to have less crap in my pockets, not more.
I read the New York times every day. I'm 28. I know I'm in the minority, but I get things from a paper I don't get from a website or an rss feed. It's portable, it's easier on the eyes, it's got a crossword puzzle in it I can do with a pen and all that tactile stuff, but also it's better for my brain - the 'net is good at giving me information I'm looking for, but it blows at giving me information I didn't know I needed until I read the headline. I learn more from 15 minutes reading the paper on my commute every morning than I would get from an hour in front of the computer. YMMV.
So just this week I'm selling my mac and switching to a machine running Windows 7. I like it better than OS X.
You know you can install Windows on a Mac, right?
Let the priests dither over what "marriage" is and minimize the governmental involvement in a process which is basically nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults.
Some of us, I'm sure, aren't especially comfortable with the idea of somebody else's god, or any god, being anywhere near our marriages - personally, if I have to choose between marriage as a contract between two people administered by the state and marriage as a contract between two people administered under god, I choose the former.
Not citing your sources, even if the origin of the lifted material is murky, makes baby jesus cry.
(That poem's widely attributed to Martin Niemöller.)
What the hell is wrong with you people? It's like you haven't read any fantasy written before 1970, and this is a literature class he's asking about, not a weekend at the beach.
I love sci-fi, I honestly do, but it isn't written for the classroom - while the concepts are often wonderful, the writing is a disaster. Remember that these stories used to be printed on pulp and sold for a nickel the way the National Enquirer is sold now. It's escapism, and that's fine. But come on - give the truly historic science fiction writers out there some credit and let Orson Scott Card be rediscovered a hundred years from now.
Try Ambrose Bierce (especially "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or Mary Shelley, or gk Chesterton, or Lovecraft, or Poe, or Jules Verne, or at the very latest Bradbury.
It seems like this is the perfect forum for this, but honestly? You couldn't have picked a worse group of people to ask this about.
Don't forget all interpretations much match the teachers own view as well. Nothing spoils someone interest in a topic, when a teacher always tells them what story they got from this abstracted fiction is wrong.
I hate this attitude. It's true that some teachers are narrow-minded in their acceptance of other people's interpretations, but it's more true that, from my experience, a greater number of students fall back on the "my interpretation is just as valid as yours because we're all delicate and unique snowflakes" argument as an excuse to not do some textual analysis and research. You don't get credit for finishing a book and thinking about it, you get credit for developing an idea and backing it up, from the text, in the face of Socratic criticism. Some teachers take that too far, but all the professors I've had have questioned their students' ideas to get them to back their shit up with reason and analysis. Some students don't respond well to that. Sounds like you didn't. But others have found that being taught to stick to your guns and prove you know your texts backwards and forwards is one hell of a valuable learning experience.
I'm sorry but this question is just ridiculous, or if not actually ridiculous then wasteful.
Let me see if I understand this correctly: The author has photographed a selection of pages from a book that he wants to have available to read at his leisure. He doesn't want to carry the book around because it's too heavy, so what he wants to do, because the photographs aren't as pretty as scanned copies but scanned copies have artifacts of the scanning process, is to develop a home rig to scan the pages he's interested and run them through some piece of software to straighten them out before loading them onto a pda so that they're available whenever and wherever he wants them.
Right?
Here's my issue: This is a problem that's been solved by a library, a photocopier and a pocketful of nickels for 30 years - no matter how efficiently he manages to get his whole basement book scanning setup working (which, let's be honest here, is going to be a mess of trouble and a timesink of not insignificant proportions) the benefit (PDA-stored documents) can't possibly be outweighed by the hours he'll end up spending researching and implementing a system that can't compete with a manila folder with a stack of photocopied pages in it.
I admire the thought experiment, and I bet there're a whole bunch of nerds here who are going to get all in a tizzy about cameras and lighting and whatnot, but this, and I mean it kindly, is a waste of time.
And if you think photocopying is too time-consuming, suck it up and bring the book with you - there are worse fates than slinging a backpack over your shoulder.
Your eyes aren't everything - I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm much faster to react to something I hear over something I see.
I live in a fairly large city in the northeast US. I walk a lot, but not like true urban walking - it's a mile and a half to the train station, and I walk it twice a day outside of light groceries and the like. I grew up walking in NYC and its suburbs, and I've been lucky enough to never actually need a driver's license. My feet do me just fine for most things.
So believe me when I say that the idea of a truly silent car terrifies me. I look both ways when I cross the street, I don't habitually jaywalk, I follow street signs and stay on the curb until the light changes, but if all that fails or if a driver isn't paying the same kind of attention I am to the road (he has a steel cage around him; I don't) I rely on my ears. I've had my ass saved on more than one occasion by hearing a car swinging around a corner towards me that I couldn't see yet.
There are a lot of stupid drivers on the road. There are also a lot of careless or over-confident pedestrians. But I can't see this as a bad thing - my eyes might keep me from walking out into the middle of traffic, but my ears are what get me to step back quickly onto the curb because somebody in a car isn't being careful.
Actually that is not true. Why was Henry Ford successful? Because he paid his employees enough to be able to afford the cars he produced.
That's true, sort of, but it's also one of those colorful American myths we like to repeat to ourselves - Ford did institute a $5 day to keep turnover low, but the bonus required the workers to not drink, or gamble, or have working wives, and a team of men were employed to follow the plant employees around when they were off work to make sure they weren't breaking any of the rules.
The workers didn't complain much because $5 is $5, and it was good for business, but let's not get carried away - would you let your boss to install a camera in your living room in exchange for a raise?
My favorite joke in the book, though, was the running "flowerpot that says 'oh no not again'" joke. That and flying. And crickett. Top 3, ok?
You may have gone off on a tangent without realizing it - all three of those things are from "Life, the Universe, and Everything," not "Mostly Harmless."
How much caffeine do you drink per day? I think a lot of the disparity is due to the fact that we (rightly) keep younger people from using caffeine and other stimulants.
You might want to take a look around you - teenagers now seem to be way, waaay more caffeinated than I was at that age - I would have a coke now and again, and the occasional coffee before school, but dem-darn-kids-nowadays guzzle energy drinks like Monster and Redbull at an alarming rate. Not a particularly scientific observation on my part, but others seem to have noticed. Also, check out the caffeine database.
My point was mostly editorial, that putting $scary_big_number; in a summary doesn't provide any information beyond making the reader think, "Huh. That's a scary big number." To use a familiar number, if McDonald's served 500,000 fewer people today than yesterday it would look like a point of concern if nobody told you that McDonald's serves 47,000,000 people a day on average.
We're scared of very, very big numbers because we're not trained to comprehend them - we're never going to have to make change for a million dollar bill, so who cares what 100,000,000 pennies looks like.
Context matters.
"Meanwhile, Sony is feeling the pain as well; the company sold 500,000 fewer PS3 consoles than in the previous quarter, and PSP sales saw an even bigger drop."
500,000 units is just a number; losing a sandwich is less of a tragedy if you had two of them to begin with. FTFA:
"Sony did release console sales numbers for the period, which also painted a bleak picture. Quarterly worldwide PlayStation 3 sales dropped from 1.6 million units in the first quarter of the past fiscal year to 1.1 million units in the most recent fiscal quarter, while PSP sales plummeted from 3.7 million units to just 1.3 million units. VAIO sales and profitability were also down, though Sony did not offer specific figures."
So selling 500,000 fewer units this quarter in this context means that Sony has sold approximately 30% fewer units than last quarter.