I think it's ironic that MS originally put these capabilities in so the media companies could provide "richer" and more "interactive" content.
No no no, the irony is even richer than that! Even given that it wasn't the **AA itself that authored this little piece of nastiness but one of their hired cyberthugs.
Remember when Microsoft was posturing to make Windows Media the core of the home media environment? Enhanced DRM on Windows Media files, enhanced playback capabilities, even stripped-down media-playing machines?
Then this happens. An overenthusiastic underling has used the hub of this system, designed mostly to cater to the corporations that provide the media and lock in the customers that want to view the media, as a Trojan Horse. Consequently, I think a lot of people are even less likely to trust the Windows Media Hub.
Microsoft should treat them as the houseguest who willfully projectile vomited on the good rug and then moved on to dry-humping the family dog. But, of course, they're rich reprobates, so they're probably immune. Microsoft may still pimp^H^H^H^Htreat its "partners" a little differently after this incident...
my question...is why is Badnarik and Cobb the only two making noise?
Here's a very good reason for them to make noise: the numbers of votes that third parties get in an election sometimes play a profound role in getting on the ballot for the next election and/or getting recognition from the press.
One of the perpetual tricks played by the Democrats and Republicans in many states is to highball the number of signatures needed to get a candidated from a "non-recognized" party onto any given jurisdiction's presidential ballot. The established parties have it easy. They only need a fraction of the recognition that the third-parties need. And given that they tend to control the government at the local level (something to do with lack of recognition of third parties), they can and do continually raise the bar for them. Acting separately and individually, they collude to keep the game to themselves.
And how does a third party get "recognition?" There's a number of votes they need to get. It varies from area to area, and it tends to be high. (Higher, in fact, than the Democrats and Republicans have. It's good to be the major party.)
Now, consider this scenario. Start with two unpopular major party candidates (check). Mix in some third party candidates which at least sound different from the major party talking heads (check). Mix well in a slightly cracked election (check) and bake in the hot air of conspiratorial speculation (oh hell yeah check).
Their ability to get recognition as viable third parties depends greatly on their ability to get votes, which is why, even if they don't have a snowball's chance in Tampa of winning, they'd still want to verify any votes that might have been cast for them. I described elsewhere how votes could be juggled to steal from them and aid others. If it turns out that they got a good many more votes than was originally reported, then they earn credibility from that. And who knows, maybe a recount would put them above the line.
EA was one of the best companies that made games for the C64.
I too remember those glorious salad days. They did quite a bit for the Atari 400, 800, Apple II, and even some PC stuff. They were a game company then rather than a multinational giant, and they seemed more intent on making games than money.
until they start treating their human resources like people.
Language is a virus. It might also help if you referred to them as "workers" or "employees" instead of "human resources."
I'm certain Bush will win everywhere these machines are used.
The chances of Bush winning Maryland is almost nil. Registered Dems out number Reps 2 or 3 to 1. If Bush does take MD, it won't matter anyway because MD's puny E-college numbers won't mean anything.
(The widget hyperlinked above goes to the BBC. It's fun to play with, even despite it being Flash.)
However, there are a few facts to keep in mind.
1. Maryland is using electronic voting machines. So someone who wants to move a few votes around can do so thanks to the lackluster security on the back-end. That was discussed by the article, and it's been evident enough from shloads of stories over the past year or so.
Now, the kicker: 2. How many Presidential tickets are there on the Maryland ballot? Would you believe six?!? And there are three write-ins available below those! Anyone who wants to do a little jiggery-pokery can certainly make the numbers look good. Shave a few votes off of Badnarik, and add them to Bush. Shave a few votes off of Kerry and add them to the Green ticket (Cobb/LaMarche) and the Populist ticket (Nader/Camejo). Heck, shave some of those votes off of Kerry and stick them on Bush. As long as nobody contests, and nobody goes overboard (like eliminating ALL of the Libertarian ballots as was done elsewhere once), there's no reason small numbers in changes would be suspect.
Between all those options, the race could probably be thrown to either Bush or Kerry. And I have been seeing a lot of Bush/Cheney/Pipkin (senate) signs slapped around the roadways, so it's possible that there's enough support for Bush to make the skimfest proposed above work succeed.
I guess we should take dreidels and dice away from all kids. So much for monopoly....
People can gamble on practically everything, including the toss of a coin. Does it come down heads? Tails?
I'm 70% certain that we can eliminate this gambling problem once and for all by banning currency in any and all forms. Anyone want to take me up on that bet?
Hmm at this rate we'll soon have to put murderers, drug dealers, rapists, and terrorists out on the street to make room for all of the file swappers we're putting in jail! I know I'll feel a lot safer that way, and Britney will be able to sleep at night safe and secure in the knowledge that record company profits are secure!
You do realize that this means the person who kills Brittney would end up doing less jail time than the person ripping her music from the Internet, right?
Ladies and gentlemen, they say that "every dark cloud has a silver lining." Well...
If Walt Disney was an armatuer,... we could enlighten the world.
Given how Disney is being run these days and how they're trying to meddle incessantly in government, we should duct-tape magnets to Walt Disney's corpse and wrap his coffin in high-tension power cable. His dervish-like rotation in there would, like you kind of said, supply enough power to light at least a few major industrial centers.
All citizens of Alpha Complex are ORDERED to read the story linked above.
You must be new to Slashd<ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> nevermind...I'll just crawl into this bin here and wait for my replacem...
Oh, hello there. Ummm, read the article? You must be new to Slashd<ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/>...say, there's another of me in this bin...
Well, I'm certainly glad they'll be enlisting the crack security experts at Microsoft.
Absolutely! In this era of political muckraking and smear-campaigning, the last thing the Democrats want floating around their convention is unsecured crack.
It seemed to be true in the 80s, it was proven true in the 90s, and it doesn't show any sign at all of slowing down. Companies don't like teaming up with other companies, they like preying on other companies' customers.
Think of the corporate landscape as an enormous singles bar, with an all-night wedding chapel on one side and an all-night divorce lawyer on the other. Companies frequently get together, pop on over to the wedding chapel to start a harmonious relationship, then after they've tried making it work for a while they pop on over to the divorce lawyer because they had no idea what a gold-digging tramp/slut/cheapskate/moron the other one was. Then they go back into the singles bar to cruise for another sugar-incorporated.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, if only on the honeymoon they didn't screw their customers...
...the FCC will be bought out by the SEC which was recently acquired by the FBI.
...which means that the FCC is controlled by the SEC, which is controlled by the FBI (along with the Boy Sprouts and the Nephews of God), which is controlled by <fnord/>.
If they take control of Big Media next, and then play Bailout... Nooooo, damnit!! They're going to Immenantize the Eschaton before me!!
Quick, who's got transferrable power to help out with an Attack to Neutralize?
Of course #20 was in regards to working inside your development team. I must agree that if everyone could do the same thing worldwide things would be better.
True enough... that's the irony of #20: they insist on everybody sharing the same vision inside the development effort, but part of that internal vision is dedicated to making sure people can't capitalize on that vision outside the development effort. So they change the vision, sometimes randomly, to make sure that people can't follow along. Which is made a further joke by the fact that that's what they like to do with others:
Embrace/Copy
Extend/Corrupt
Extinguish/Copyrig ht
Extort/Collect.
It's in that shared vision that Open Source has its greatest successes. And it's in the lack of shared vision that Open Source has its greatest failures.
If people got as sick as many computers do, when the workers caught viruses, they would dash around the office, coughing hard on everyone they run into. Everyone infected in this manner would start doing the same thing.
The worst of them are some of those especially illegal eastern European bioengineered viruses -- if a worker catches one of those, he calls the manufacturer and leaves the doors and windows at the workplace unlocked. And then he starts sending out hundreds of emails hawking penis enlargements, breast enlargements, home mortgages, spyware, and immunizations against the most popular, common viruses.
12. Portability is for canoes.
20. Establish a shared vision.
These two grate on my nerves, and for good reason.
#12 claims bluntly that supporting something becomes so much easier when you only have to support it on one platform. From one perspective there's a certain truth to that, and from another perspective it's laziness. But contrast it with #20.
#20 says that the idea has to be shared as completely as possible between everybody in order for everybody to help out as best they can to making the idea a reality.
"Things become easier to support and test if they follow certain specific guidelines, and with a common implementation, everybody can follow a given idea better." Sure, it looks good on paper, and it makes a fine creed for developers, but with Microsoft, that's where it comes to a screeching halt. Because out in the real world:
Hey, nice standard! Mind if we grab it away from you and run this way with it?
It's both weird and wrong seeing people in Microsoft talking about ideas and commonality of vision when in practice the company as a whole so copiously defecates (both buttocks blazing, as it were) on any standards that they don't already have a headlock on.
The fact is, releasing this in Japan wasn't taking a risk, just like releasing graphic violence-based games like Grand Theft Auto in the US isn't a risk.
Nothing's really different -- the manufacturers continue to produce what they consider the surest bets and try to maximize their profits against development costs.
Meanwhile, each market continues to jones for something new, fresh, and innovative because the surest bets only cover the middle sixth or so of the bell curve. (Warning: I just pulled that statistic out of my ass.) The reward of a venture tends to be directly proportional to the risks of the venture. Most companies aren't willing to take that risk.
For those keeping score, this is where hard regionalization might hurt markets. Those people in market A might be interested in a product of market B and vice versa, but because of the artificial barriers, they remain inaccessible. (And yeah, I know, nationalization of software can be tricky. Even so, there are people who are bilingual...)
If 42 is the answer to the question of life, the Universe and everything(wikipedia.org), the equation probably is correct and easily to memorize. You may need a larger computer, though...
The math also works if you work in base 13.
Which, by the way, means that the folks who created this buggy 'universe' thing most likely counted on 13 digits. Which 13, like everything else, is left as an exercise for the reader.
True, a franchise doesn't necessarily equate to a good game (pun in title intended), but this fills me with hope:
After 3DO's closure, publishers neglected the title not because it was unwieldy, Mendheim explains, but because in its then-early stages it may not have been large enough. Publishers may have also been unwilling to provide the time necessary to complete the title properly.
Who knows? If they take the time to get the game right, perhaps they'll actually get it right. This is a pleasant reversal of a trend I'd seen too often discussed here: pinheads in upper management become too enamored with pretty graphics and give the green light to crap. Meanwhile, people trying to put forth serious effort get slapped for trying to put the serious effort into the game rather than appeasing their corporate overlords.
This development fills me with hope.
And then there's this not-so-choice quote...
"The Four Horsemen concept is cool because it is based on the most popular book in history, the Bible," Mendheim said. "Our fear factor isn't about zombies walking around. It's about plagues and torment. It's scary because of the realism. Everyday, people see and read about miracles happening, plagues, the devastation of famine or even a statue bleeding. Our concept is scary, because it just might be true."
It may be the Biblical story that they're suggesting is scary, but how exactly the modern implementation gets carried out could make it worse. See also Neal Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens... Famine and War are already working their wiles, and P-------- is probably farther along than you think.
Social-only worlds, I believe, can be made to work. But attracting that initial audience is the hard part, and then satisfying their expectations seems to be difficult as well.
If they're there just for the socializing, the only way you could fail to meet their expectations is by not having enough people or running a server that goes down like a $2 whore. (Or maybe the people that are on there are just feckless nerds.) The "chatter" has been around for many years, and though I haven't looked around for any in a long time, I gather they're still popular.
The MMORPG has, as necessary components, both the socializing and the game-play, and some of the most interesting action occurs where they run together.
There are two ways that you can look at the MMORPG: a community held together by a game, or a game whose participants can come together in non-combative ways and talk.
Another way you can look at the people coming onto the MMORPG: either they come for the people and stay for the game, or they come for the game and stay for the people.
It's this dichotomy (is it a game? Is it a community?) that makes the MMORPG so fascinating to me.
But attracting that initial audience is the hard part, and then satisfying their expectations seems to be difficult as well. These tasks are arguably more difficult now because of the success of Everquest and other "game" worlds -- people, in general, are attracted to the theme beyond the world itself.
That goes back to my initial assertion: a few MMORPGs have made excellent first showings, impressed the paying customers, and made them hungry. The one or two hits started the MMORPG buzz, and the customers clamored for more.
Now producers are realizing with some horror what kind of effort has to go into making an MMORPG pop and either not putting out full effort (buggy releases) or wringing every penny they can out of their audience (charging for necessary patches). Sometimes they're doing both, and that's kind of a downer on the MMORPG experience too.
Consumers want the cheap premium experience they had before. Producers want to give the premium experience an even premiumier price point. I expect this rift to grow until an open-source solution becomes available.
One way this could be made to work is to offer a "fake" theme, a fantasy world that's actually a social world under the surface.
Yeah, I guess you could. But if you de-emphasize one part or the other, then then MMORPG experience is lost. Tone down the game, and it becomes the world's most impractical chat client. Tone down the socializing, and it becomes a slightly less impractical MUD.
"If you look at the nongenre MMORPGS--There, Second Life, The Sims Online--they are all version 1 products that won't really be complete until version 37. The challenge is making version 1 commercially viable."
What?!Come on! How hard could it be to build a complete functioning online world in there are no negative emergent strategies and everything works as the designers intend them to? Oh, wait...
Right, sarcasm aside, it's damn near impossible to create an online experience which achieves that kind of perfection. That's why there are revision cycles, public betas (which still don't catch everything), and upgrades to put the stuff that wasn't caught before into the mix.
Don't get me wrong, the notion of the MMORPG is a wonderful idea, both as a game and as an online community.
But players either aren't willing to wait while the MMORPG gets tweaked into perfection, or the experience will be ruined for those few players who like exploiting those imperfections for their own good.
And many commercial companies who produce MMORPGs (cough*SONY*cough) will either not want to wait to create a perfect game, or they'll charge through the nose, both ears, and a tear duct for whatever work they do on it, which will still not make it perfect (but will make the company rich). Cash cows make the best hamburger.
No, to make an MMORPG good requires plenty of dialog with the participants, plenty of patience with programming, and lots of time. And the modern players and producers both tend to want instant gratification and lots of it.
I still want to see a good MMORPG make it. It just won't be any time soon.
Ask the client "Do you want mediocre? Cause that's what that site is, in the final analysis, and I can have it do exactly that if you want, but in the end it'll be mediocre - and I don't think that's what you want."
Or the variant approach I'm fond of:
"Okay, for $2000, the dog will walk through the hoop. For $4000, the dog will jump through the hoop. And for $6000, the dog will do a double-back flip through the hoop while juggling plates and whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner' through a body part not normally known for making music."
"So what will I get for $250?"
"For $250, the dog will look briefly at the hoop, and then go back to licking its balls."
Call it crude, call it poignant... but you'd be surprised how many people will go for the cheapest possible solution until you demonstrate to them how absolutely bad the thing they're asking for is. They don't even know how little qualified they are to evaluate wha they want.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no, the irony is even richer than that! Even given that it wasn't the **AA itself that authored this little piece of nastiness but one of their hired cyberthugs.
Remember when Microsoft was posturing to make Windows Media the core of the home media environment? Enhanced DRM on Windows Media files, enhanced playback capabilities, even stripped-down media-playing machines?
Then this happens. An overenthusiastic underling has used the hub of this system, designed mostly to cater to the corporations that provide the media and lock in the customers that want to view the media, as a Trojan Horse. Consequently, I think a lot of people are even less likely to trust the Windows Media Hub.
Microsoft should treat them as the houseguest who willfully projectile vomited on the good rug and then moved on to dry-humping the family dog. But, of course, they're rich reprobates, so they're probably immune. Microsoft may still pimp^H^H^H^Htreat its "partners" a little differently after this incident...
s/polock/patent attorney/w
Here's a very good reason for them to make noise: the numbers of votes that third parties get in an election sometimes play a profound role in getting on the ballot for the next election and/or getting recognition from the press.
One of the perpetual tricks played by the Democrats and Republicans in many states is to highball the number of signatures needed to get a candidated from a "non-recognized" party onto any given jurisdiction's presidential ballot. The established parties have it easy. They only need a fraction of the recognition that the third-parties need. And given that they tend to control the government at the local level (something to do with lack of recognition of third parties), they can and do continually raise the bar for them. Acting separately and individually, they collude to keep the game to themselves.
And how does a third party get "recognition?" There's a number of votes they need to get. It varies from area to area, and it tends to be high. (Higher, in fact, than the Democrats and Republicans have. It's good to be the major party.)
Now, consider this scenario. Start with two unpopular major party candidates (check). Mix in some third party candidates which at least sound different from the major party talking heads (check). Mix well in a slightly cracked election (check) and bake in the hot air of conspiratorial speculation (oh hell yeah check).
Their ability to get recognition as viable third parties depends greatly on their ability to get votes, which is why, even if they don't have a snowball's chance in Tampa of winning, they'd still want to verify any votes that might have been cast for them. I described elsewhere how votes could be juggled to steal from them and aid others. If it turns out that they got a good many more votes than was originally reported, then they earn credibility from that. And who knows, maybe a recount would put them above the line.
I too remember those glorious salad days. They did quite a bit for the Atari 400, 800, Apple II, and even some PC stuff. They were a game company then rather than a multinational giant, and they seemed more intent on making games than money.
Language is a virus. It might also help if you referred to them as "workers" or "employees" instead of "human resources."
In a fair fight, yeah, Maryland would easily go to Kerry given its demographics and past voting history, despite voting for Nixon, Reagan's second term, and Bush Senior.
(The widget hyperlinked above goes to the BBC. It's fun to play with, even despite it being Flash.)
However, there are a few facts to keep in mind.
1. Maryland is using electronic voting machines. So someone who wants to move a few votes around can do so thanks to the lackluster security on the back-end. That was discussed by the article, and it's been evident enough from shloads of stories over the past year or so.
Now, the kicker: 2. How many Presidential tickets are there on the Maryland ballot? Would you believe six?!? And there are three write-ins available below those! Anyone who wants to do a little jiggery-pokery can certainly make the numbers look good. Shave a few votes off of Badnarik, and add them to Bush. Shave a few votes off of Kerry and add them to the Green ticket (Cobb/LaMarche) and the Populist ticket (Nader/Camejo). Heck, shave some of those votes off of Kerry and stick them on Bush. As long as nobody contests, and nobody goes overboard (like eliminating ALL of the Libertarian ballots as was done elsewhere once), there's no reason small numbers in changes would be suspect.
Between all those options, the race could probably be thrown to either Bush or Kerry. And I have been seeing a lot of Bush/Cheney/Pipkin (senate) signs slapped around the roadways, so it's possible that there's enough support for Bush to make the skimfest proposed above work succeed.
People can gamble on practically everything, including the toss of a coin. Does it come down heads? Tails?
I'm 70% certain that we can eliminate this gambling problem once and for all by banning currency in any and all forms. Anyone want to take me up on that bet?
You do realize that this means the person who kills Brittney would end up doing less jail time than the person ripping her music from the Internet, right?
Ladies and gentlemen, they say that "every dark cloud has a silver lining." Well...
Oh, hello there. Ummm, read the article? You must be new to Slashd<ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <ZAP/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> <BLEED/> ...say, there's another of me in this bin...
Think of the corporate landscape as an enormous singles bar, with an all-night wedding chapel on one side and an all-night divorce lawyer on the other. Companies frequently get together, pop on over to the wedding chapel to start a harmonious relationship, then after they've tried making it work for a while they pop on over to the divorce lawyer because they had no idea what a gold-digging tramp/slut/cheapskate/moron the other one was. Then they go back into the singles bar to cruise for another sugar-incorporated.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, if only on the honeymoon they didn't screw their customers...
If they take control of Big Media next, and then play Bailout... Nooooo, damnit!! They're going to Immenantize the Eschaton before me!!
Quick, who's got transferrable power to help out with an Attack to Neutralize?
So really, we're all victims. But we're not all victims of this particular legal injury yet.
It's in that shared vision that Open Source has its greatest successes. And it's in the lack of shared vision that Open Source has its greatest failures.
Canadian warmongering.
That must be some culture gap between N. Korea and the western hemisphere!!
The worst of them are some of those especially illegal eastern European bioengineered viruses -- if a worker catches one of those, he calls the manufacturer and leaves the doors and windows at the workplace unlocked. And then he starts sending out hundreds of emails hawking penis enlargements, breast enlargements, home mortgages, spyware, and immunizations against the most popular, common viruses.
#12 claims bluntly that supporting something becomes so much easier when you only have to support it on one platform. From one perspective there's a certain truth to that, and from another perspective it's laziness. But contrast it with #20.
#20 says that the idea has to be shared as completely as possible between everybody in order for everybody to help out as best they can to making the idea a reality.
"Things become easier to support and test if they follow certain specific guidelines, and with a common implementation, everybody can follow a given idea better." Sure, it looks good on paper, and it makes a fine creed for developers, but with Microsoft, that's where it comes to a screeching halt. Because out in the real world:
Hey, nice standard! Mind if we grab it away from you and run this way with it?
It's both weird and wrong seeing people in Microsoft talking about ideas and commonality of vision when in practice the company as a whole so copiously defecates (both buttocks blazing, as it were) on any standards that they don't already have a headlock on.
But there's an awful lot of integration with .NET and DirectX. Does that count?
Meanwhile, each market continues to jones for something new, fresh, and innovative because the surest bets only cover the middle sixth or so of the bell curve. (Warning: I just pulled that statistic out of my ass.) The reward of a venture tends to be directly proportional to the risks of the venture. Most companies aren't willing to take that risk.
For those keeping score, this is where hard regionalization might hurt markets. Those people in market A might be interested in a product of market B and vice versa, but because of the artificial barriers, they remain inaccessible. (And yeah, I know, nationalization of software can be tricky. Even so, there are people who are bilingual...)
Though I wonder... if that happens, could we cite those other five as prior art?
Which, by the way, means that the folks who created this buggy 'universe' thing most likely counted on 13 digits. Which 13, like everything else, is left as an exercise for the reader.
This development fills me with hope.
And then there's this not-so-choice quote...
It may be the Biblical story that they're suggesting is scary, but how exactly the modern implementation gets carried out could make it worse. See also Neal Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's Good OmensThe MMORPG has, as necessary components, both the socializing and the game-play, and some of the most interesting action occurs where they run together.
There are two ways that you can look at the MMORPG: a community held together by a game, or a game whose participants can come together in non-combative ways and talk.
Another way you can look at the people coming onto the MMORPG: either they come for the people and stay for the game, or they come for the game and stay for the people.
It's this dichotomy (is it a game? Is it a community?) that makes the MMORPG so fascinating to me.
That goes back to my initial assertion: a few MMORPGs have made excellent first showings, impressed the paying customers, and made them hungry. The one or two hits started the MMORPG buzz, and the customers clamored for more.Now producers are realizing with some horror what kind of effort has to go into making an MMORPG pop and either not putting out full effort (buggy releases) or wringing every penny they can out of their audience (charging for necessary patches). Sometimes they're doing both, and that's kind of a downer on the MMORPG experience too.
Consumers want the cheap premium experience they had before. Producers want to give the premium experience an even premiumier price point. I expect this rift to grow until an open-source solution becomes available.
Yeah, I guess you could. But if you de-emphasize one part or the other, then then MMORPG experience is lost. Tone down the game, and it becomes the world's most impractical chat client. Tone down the socializing, and it becomes a slightly less impractical MUD.Right, sarcasm aside, it's damn near impossible to create an online experience which achieves that kind of perfection. That's why there are revision cycles, public betas (which still don't catch everything), and upgrades to put the stuff that wasn't caught before into the mix.
Don't get me wrong, the notion of the MMORPG is a wonderful idea, both as a game and as an online community.
But players either aren't willing to wait while the MMORPG gets tweaked into perfection, or the experience will be ruined for those few players who like exploiting those imperfections for their own good.
And many commercial companies who produce MMORPGs (cough*SONY*cough) will either not want to wait to create a perfect game, or they'll charge through the nose, both ears, and a tear duct for whatever work they do on it, which will still not make it perfect (but will make the company rich). Cash cows make the best hamburger.
No, to make an MMORPG good requires plenty of dialog with the participants, plenty of patience with programming, and lots of time. And the modern players and producers both tend to want instant gratification and lots of it.
I still want to see a good MMORPG make it. It just won't be any time soon.
"Okay, for $2000, the dog will walk through the hoop. For $4000, the dog will jump through the hoop. And for $6000, the dog will do a double-back flip through the hoop while juggling plates and whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner' through a body part not normally known for making music."
"So what will I get for $250?"
"For $250, the dog will look briefly at the hoop, and then go back to licking its balls."
Call it crude, call it poignant... but you'd be surprised how many people will go for the cheapest possible solution until you demonstrate to them how absolutely bad the thing they're asking for is. They don't even know how little qualified they are to evaluate wha they want.