If I am immersed in a movie, the last thing I want is to be jolted out of it by your wristwatch beeping just because you are too fucking stupid to turn it off.
How is it "self-centered" to not want to listen to every idiot's beeping watch during a movie? Like it's such a big hardship to you to not have it beep on the hour.
I usually don't. Between cell phones, watches beeping on the hour, pagers going off, babies crying (like an infant needs to be in a PG-13 movie), etc., I usually wait for it to come out on video.
Clue: My job is important, if for nothing else than to pay my rent and my bills.
But that does not mean that your job is, or should be, important to those sitting around you in a movie theater. And if it is not important to them, then it should not be interrupting or distracting them while they try to enjoy a movie.
I think the guy I responded to is a complete ass. He threatened me (not that I'm particularly scared), insulted me, and called me names. But I still think that making jokes about his kid's form of cancer is over the line. How about agreeing that it's off limits?
I assume you think important means people with lots of education making lots of money.
I am important. That's why I don't "sit in a cube 8 hours a day toiling away at the keyboard." (You're not very good at guessing, are you?) I run my own consulting business. And I leave my cell phone in my car when I go into a public place. Why? Because I'm not a self-centered ass that thinks that everyone around me should have to listen to my phone, hear me discussing business, or watch me responding to text messages.
By the way, your description of successful business people sounds awfully familiar. Were you the person who sent me the spam about how I could be my own boss?
Um you might want to take a moment off being an ass
bite me.
For one thing, nobody is going to hear the vibrate with the music sound going,
And all movies are loud and have music all of the time, right?
at least in every "stadium seating" theater I've been in you can't see everyone's lap in front of you...just their head.
The typical problem is for the persons seated in the same row as the cell phone user.
If your idea of a really great movie is the latest installment of Friday the 13th, then, no, I guess a buzzing cell phone next to you won't distract from the experience too much. But if you are watching a top-shelf movie like Lord of the Rings or Dr. Zhivago, then it is damned distracting and annoying. It detracts from the whole experience.
Many nights out at the movies are ruined because of hoardes of self-centered people that think their interruption of someone else's experience is somehow justified. You have the network geek that believes that keeping www.doggychewtoys.com on the web justifies his use of a backlit Blackberry pager during the movie. You have mom & dad who left the kids with some 12 year that has instructions to call them the for an "emergency" (like when she can't find the TV remote). You've got the guy who brings his PDA into the movie so that he can jot down his incredibly important, insightful thoughts (like "maybe we should call the new software 'Quantaria'"). Of course there are always people who set their watch to chime (actually "beep") on the hour so that they won't lose track of the time. And each of them thinks that they are justified in bothering others because they have their electronic gizmo for an "important reason."
If you have to have something that can make noise or light up while you are watching a movie, then you should be renting the movie on DVD or VHS and watching it at home.
And therefore, these people should not get to watch movies.
That's why Blockbuster exists. If your presence is likely to be an annoyance to others, whether because you have a chronic cough or you because you have to be on call 24/7, rent a movie and watch it at home.
And yes, when they were on call in the days before pagers, they were woken with a phone call.
So they were not sitting in a movie theatre while they were on call? I didn't think so.
I will personally beat you into the anal-retentive ball of slime you deserve to be.
I'm sorry that your son has RMS, but that gives you no right to threaten me. Besides, unless you are a LOT bigger and stronger than average, you are damned lucky that you said that while hiding behind your CRT. Here's a hint for you: Ever been mistaken for an NFL football player? I was -- by a member of the Raiders.
I am delighted that you are so easily replaced.
I'm not easily replaced. But neither am I so vain as to think that the entire company I work for would grind to a halt if I was unavailable by phone for a few hours. They recognize that they are lucky to have me and, while I'm sure that they would like to me to carry a cell phone so that they could reach me 24/7, they don't want to risk losing me by suggesting something that preposterous.
Going out to see a movie is a luxury -- and one that many people have not had in years. If you have taken the kind of job where you have to be on call 24/7, then you can watch videos at home rather than annoying people in theaters.
This reminds me of the parents that have infants that they insist on bringing into movie theaters and nice restaurants. When you make choices in your life, whether to be a new parent or a system administrator, you need to adjust your lifestyle accordingly and not act like the world owes you something.
Maybe you're more laid back than most people and don't mind waiting for services you paid for to come back up after a crash or waiting for the doctor you need to show up when the hospital can't reach him.
No, as you surmised, I am not "laid back." That's why I expect my ISP to have multiple people who can handle problems. I don't expect there to be one lone person without whom the ISP could not function. Nor do I expect a hospital to have only one doctor that can handle an emergency. How do you think hospitals, doctors, and computer centers functioned before the invention of the cell phone and text messaging?
Like I said before, if you can't be without your cell phone long enough to watch a movie, then rent a movie at Blockbuster and watch it at home.
I'm sorry, but like most of the/. posters I keep my cell phone on vibrate ALL THE TIME. I'm not going to be rude and talk in the theater, but I HAVE TO GET MY TEXT MESSAGES.
If you can't be without your cell phone long enough to see a movie, then wait until the movie shows up at Blockbuster, rent it, and watch it at home. I do not buy movie tickets so that I can listen to your cell phone doing the vibrate/buzz thing. Neither do I want to see your glaring backlit display while you read your text messages. I don't want you tripping over my feet or my girlfriend's while you stumble out of the theatre because of your oh-so-important message. Your job does not concern me in the slightest. I would sooner see you fired than have you interrupt a movie that I paid to see.
Clue: Important people don't have to carry cell phones into movie theatres. Schmucks that work for important people are the ones on call 24/7.
P.S. Who told you that most/. posters don't keep their cell phones on vibrate "ALL THE TIME"? I don't. I normally leave mine in the car when I go in a public place.
Spam is not "noise". It is e-mail abuse. It is not randomly caused by electromagnetic or other interference. It purposely injected into the e-mail stream. It contains specific messages and is delivered to specificied recipients. You act like it is some kind of natural phenomenon. It's not.
Claude Shannon said that communications channels have a source of noise (i.e., interference or distortion) which changes the message in unpredictable ways during transmission. What a spammer sends to me does not change other messages in unpredictable ways. It does not distort other messages. Spam is simply a source of unwanted messages.
If we stop complaining, we reduce the cost of spamming and it increases. Period.
I believe the government should promote the majority culture. You don't.
I do not believe that a majority culture needs promotion or protection. It is those people who are in the minority that need that protection. It is the atheists, Jews, and Buddhists that are facing the uphill battle in our society, not the Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists.
Our founding fathers recognized that and it is the reason why the ruling went the way that it did in this case.
However, there'd been a silent understanding all these years that let it stay, because it served the needs of the populace, and they liked it.
I was not in on that "silent understanding" and always found the PoA recital in the morning to be offensive both in it's Nazi-like forced nature to the reference to God. And there is something wrong when little children are forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance long before they ever know what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" mean.
If "freedom of not hearing" overrules "freedom of speech," there will be no freedom of speech.
You are mistaking "free speech" for government-sponsored speech. While I have a personal right to state that a belief in God is silly superstition, I don't think you would be trumpeting my rights to free speech if I was a public school teacher being paid with your tax dollars while I said that to a classroom full of kids that included yours.
So you admit that immigrants coming in and trashing the local culture is a bad thing?
When it involves torturing and murduring people that don't share your religious beliefs, yes.
By the way, Navajos, Apaches, and Seminoles had exactly zero books to destroy, and precious little treasure.
Do you really believe that immigrants coming into this country are native Americans? The largest immigrant population (and the one I was referring to) is hispanic, many of whom had ancestors who were Mayan, Incan, and Aztec before the missionaries "taught them" about Christianity through plunder, torture, and murder.
This argument is about whether the government should promote what I'm calling "traditional American culture", snide intentional misunderstandings aside.
Traditional American culture or traditional European culture? The Americans that were here before the Europeans were not Christians.
The government should not "promote" any religious belief, whether atheism, Christianity, Buddhism, or any other religion. Eisenhower was wrong to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Right now, I think, we are swinging too far in favor of minority opinions; the government should not be compel us to deny our heritage in order to make immigrants more comfortable.
So, which tribe are you? Apache? Navaho? Seminole?
As to your ill-informed comment about immigrants, the majority of immigrants coming into this country are Christian. They became that when the missionaries destroyed their religious art, treasures, books, etc. and forced Christianity on them.
I think that the timing was superb. As I see right-wing zealots chipping away at the Constitution post 9/11, I find it reassuring that the courts are unwilling to turn a blind eye to justice in the name of patriotism. If it inflames a few delusional Christians, so be it.
Indeed, there are some people who will gladly shell out several hundred dollars in order to avoid buying a cheap daytimer.
I can't download reference books to a daytimer. I can't download unit conversion software to it. I can't beam the addresses and phone numbers from my daytimer to my friend's. A daytimer won't function as an alarm or a stopwatch. The comparison is ill-conceived at best.
My main problem with Palm is that they subscribe to this philosophy -- that they know what their users want better than their users do.
They do. Users invariably yell for each feature that enters their heads, seldom considering the consequences (weight, battery usage, longevity, user interface, overall complexity, etc.). Palm has engineers do their engineering and they have a unified vision of how things should work.
So while you may just want all of the functions of a IIxe, there are people (and this is borne out by the fact that Compaq can still sell iPaqs) who want something more from their PDAs.
Think about what you say first.
I did think about what I said. I don't want a useful, efficient, cost-effective, professional tool turned into an expensive, battery-hungry, bloated, behemoth because some vocal group clamored for features that are neither needed nor wanted by most users.
A handheld is not supposed to replace a computer. It's supposed to provide useful functions like keeping to-do lists, schedules, phone directories, unit conversion programs, notes, etc. A good handheld design is a carefully engineered compromise between battery life, features, and speed. That's something that Palm and Handspring have pretty much understood. Only when Microsoft entered the market did people start demanding that handhelds come with 200mhz CPUs, ooh-gobs of RAM, and displays that ran the color spectrum from UV to IR.
A handheld is not an MP3 player. It's not a tiny laptop computer. It's not supposed to run X-Windows, FTP, or a web server. It's not supposed to be used for SETI at home, factoring huge primes, or playing first-person shooter games. I want month-long battery life, not a handheld with a heatsink and 10,000rpm fan. Don't screw up the market by demanding things that sway manufacturers to sell toys for geeks rather than tools for professionals.
The reason that extraterrestrials visit Scotland so often is that Scottish men wear kilts. That makes the anal probes much easier to perform. No fumbling with belts, zippers, etc.
So Marketing only focuses on the english speaking clientel or what ?
Marketing focuses on maximizing sales and English is the most widely spoken language in the industrialized world. Despite Germany's best efforts between 1939 and 1945 to convert all of Europe to a German-speaking country, there are still only about 1/8 as many German speakers as there are English speakers.
Frankly, I don't care if innumerate foreigners have trouble distinguishing which bill is which. It's good for our economy. If they want to leave a $92 tip on a $8 meal, who are we to complain? And if they don't pay enough, the cashier will tell them.
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Go fuck yourself you stupid little man-child.
If I am immersed in a movie, the last thing I want is to be jolted out of it by your wristwatch beeping just because you are too fucking stupid to turn it off.
How is it "self-centered" to not want to listen to every idiot's beeping watch during a movie? Like it's such a big hardship to you to not have it beep on the hour.
Why do you go to a theater at all?
I usually don't. Between cell phones, watches beeping on the hour, pagers going off, babies crying (like an infant needs to be in a PG-13 movie), etc., I usually wait for it to come out on video.
Clue: My job is important, if for nothing else than to pay my rent and my bills.
But that does not mean that your job is, or should be, important to those sitting around you in a movie theater. And if it is not important to them, then it should not be interrupting or distracting them while they try to enjoy a movie.
I think the guy I responded to is a complete ass. He threatened me (not that I'm particularly scared), insulted me, and called me names. But I still think that making jokes about his kid's form of cancer is over the line. How about agreeing that it's off limits?
I assume you think important means people with lots of education making lots of money.
I am important. That's why I don't "sit in a cube 8 hours a day toiling away at the keyboard." (You're not very good at guessing, are you?) I run my own consulting business. And I leave my cell phone in my car when I go into a public place. Why? Because I'm not a self-centered ass that thinks that everyone around me should have to listen to my phone, hear me discussing business, or watch me responding to text messages.
By the way, your description of successful business people sounds awfully familiar. Were you the person who sent me the spam about how I could be my own boss?
Um you might want to take a moment off being an ass
bite me.
For one thing, nobody is going to hear the vibrate with the music sound going,
And all movies are loud and have music all of the time, right?
at least in every "stadium seating" theater I've been in you can't see everyone's lap in front of you...just their head.
The typical problem is for the persons seated in the same row as the cell phone user.
If your idea of a really great movie is the latest installment of Friday the 13th, then, no, I guess a buzzing cell phone next to you won't distract from the experience too much. But if you are watching a top-shelf movie like Lord of the Rings or Dr. Zhivago, then it is damned distracting and annoying. It detracts from the whole experience.
Many nights out at the movies are ruined because of hoardes of self-centered people that think their interruption of someone else's experience is somehow justified. You have the network geek that believes that keeping www.doggychewtoys.com on the web justifies his use of a backlit Blackberry pager during the movie. You have mom & dad who left the kids with some 12 year that has instructions to call them the for an "emergency" (like when she can't find the TV remote). You've got the guy who brings his PDA into the movie so that he can jot down his incredibly important, insightful thoughts (like "maybe we should call the new software 'Quantaria'"). Of course there are always people who set their watch to chime (actually "beep") on the hour so that they won't lose track of the time. And each of them thinks that they are justified in bothering others because they have their electronic gizmo for an "important reason."
If you have to have something that can make noise or light up while you are watching a movie, then you should be renting the movie on DVD or VHS and watching it at home.
And therefore, these people should not get to watch movies.
That's why Blockbuster exists. If your presence is likely to be an annoyance to others, whether because you have a chronic cough or you because you have to be on call 24/7, rent a movie and watch it at home.
That's the point: you can expect it , so go to the bathroom before entering the theatre.
If you cant hold if for two hours, go see your doctor instead of the movie.
Being the sensitive guy I am, I make allowances for older people, pregnant women, and people with medical conditions.
And yes, when they were on call in the days before pagers, they were woken with a phone call.
.
So they were not sitting in a movie theatre while they were on call? I didn't think so.
I will personally beat you into the anal-retentive ball of slime you deserve to be
I'm sorry that your son has RMS, but that gives you no right to threaten me. Besides, unless you are a LOT bigger and stronger than average, you are damned lucky that you said that while hiding behind your CRT. Here's a hint for you: Ever been mistaken for an NFL football player? I was -- by a member of the Raiders.
I am delighted that you are so easily replaced.
I'm not easily replaced. But neither am I so vain as to think that the entire company I work for would grind to a halt if I was unavailable by phone for a few hours. They recognize that they are lucky to have me and, while I'm sure that they would like to me to carry a cell phone so that they could reach me 24/7, they don't want to risk losing me by suggesting something that preposterous.
Going out to see a movie is a luxury -- and one that many people have not had in years. If you have taken the kind of job where you have to be on call 24/7, then you can watch videos at home rather than annoying people in theaters.
This reminds me of the parents that have infants that they insist on bringing into movie theaters and nice restaurants. When you make choices in your life, whether to be a new parent or a system administrator, you need to adjust your lifestyle accordingly and not act like the world owes you something.
Maybe you're more laid back than most people and don't mind waiting for services you paid for to come back up after a crash or waiting for the doctor you need to show up when the hospital can't reach him.
No, as you surmised, I am not "laid back." That's why I expect my ISP to have multiple people who can handle problems. I don't expect there to be one lone person without whom the ISP could not function. Nor do I expect a hospital to have only one doctor that can handle an emergency. How do you think hospitals, doctors, and computer centers functioned before the invention of the cell phone and text messaging?
Like I said before, if you can't be without your cell phone long enough to watch a movie, then rent a movie at Blockbuster and watch it at home.
Are you going to have a fit of exaspiration when somebody needs to go to the bathroom during the film?
Going to the bathroom is normal, expected, and unavoidable. That one kind of interruption is permissable does not mean that they all are.
I'm sorry, but like most of the /. posters I keep my cell phone on vibrate ALL THE TIME. I'm not going to be rude and talk in the theater, but I HAVE TO GET MY TEXT MESSAGES.
/. posters don't keep their cell phones on vibrate "ALL THE TIME"? I don't. I normally leave mine in the car when I go in a public place.
If you can't be without your cell phone long enough to see a movie, then wait until the movie shows up at Blockbuster, rent it, and watch it at home. I do not buy movie tickets so that I can listen to your cell phone doing the vibrate/buzz thing. Neither do I want to see your glaring backlit display while you read your text messages. I don't want you tripping over my feet or my girlfriend's while you stumble out of the theatre because of your oh-so-important message. Your job does not concern me in the slightest. I would sooner see you fired than have you interrupt a movie that I paid to see.
Clue: Important people don't have to carry cell phones into movie theatres. Schmucks that work for important people are the ones on call 24/7.
P.S. Who told you that most
Heisenberg proved you can't know anything
Are you certain?
Spam is not "noise". It is e-mail abuse. It is not randomly caused by electromagnetic or other interference. It purposely injected into the e-mail stream. It contains specific messages and is delivered to specificied recipients. You act like it is some kind of natural phenomenon. It's not.
Claude Shannon said that communications channels have a source of noise (i.e., interference or distortion) which changes the message in unpredictable ways during transmission. What a spammer sends to me does not change other messages in unpredictable ways. It does not distort other messages. Spam is simply a source of unwanted messages.
If we stop complaining, we reduce the cost of spamming and it increases. Period.
I believe the government should promote the majority culture. You don't.
I do not believe that a majority culture needs promotion or protection. It is those people who are in the minority that need that protection. It is the atheists, Jews, and Buddhists that are facing the uphill battle in our society, not the Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists.
Our founding fathers recognized that and it is the reason why the ruling went the way that it did in this case.
However, there'd been a silent understanding all these years that let it stay, because it served the needs of the populace, and they liked it.
I was not in on that "silent understanding" and always found the PoA recital in the morning to be offensive both in it's Nazi-like forced nature to the reference to God. And there is something wrong when little children are forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance long before they ever know what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" mean.
If "freedom of not hearing" overrules "freedom of speech," there will be no freedom of speech.
You are mistaking "free speech" for government-sponsored speech. While I have a personal right to state that a belief in God is silly superstition, I don't think you would be trumpeting my rights to free speech if I was a public school teacher being paid with your tax dollars while I said that to a classroom full of kids that included yours.
And, as a typical hypocrite, you use the word "God" anyway, whenever it suits you, even to score +5 funny.
I am perfectly comfortable using the word "God" as part of a joke. How is that hypocritical?
You see, you just said you were an athiest, yet you used God to gain something.
Using the word "God" in a joke does not imply a belief in God. Everyone else seemed to get that. Why are you having so much trouble with it?
So you admit that immigrants coming in and trashing the local culture is a bad thing?
When it involves torturing and murduring people that don't share your religious beliefs, yes.
By the way, Navajos, Apaches, and Seminoles had exactly zero books to destroy, and precious little treasure.
Do you really believe that immigrants coming into this country are native Americans? The largest immigrant population (and the one I was referring to) is hispanic, many of whom had ancestors who were Mayan, Incan, and Aztec before the missionaries "taught them" about Christianity through plunder, torture, and murder.
This argument is about whether the government should promote what I'm calling "traditional American culture", snide intentional misunderstandings aside.
Traditional American culture or traditional European culture? The Americans that were here before the Europeans were not Christians.
The government should not "promote" any religious belief, whether atheism, Christianity, Buddhism, or any other religion. Eisenhower was wrong to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Right now, I think, we are swinging too far in favor of minority opinions; the government should not be compel us to deny our heritage in order to make immigrants more comfortable.
So, which tribe are you? Apache? Navaho? Seminole?
As to your ill-informed comment about immigrants, the majority of immigrants coming into this country are Christian. They became that when the missionaries destroyed their religious art, treasures, books, etc. and forced Christianity on them.
I think that the timing was superb. As I see right-wing zealots chipping away at the Constitution post 9/11, I find it reassuring that the courts are unwilling to turn a blind eye to justice in the name of patriotism. If it inflames a few delusional Christians, so be it.
As an atheist, all I can say about this ruling is "Thank God!"
;)
Indeed, there are some people who will gladly shell out several hundred dollars in order to avoid buying a cheap daytimer.
I can't download reference books to a daytimer. I can't download unit conversion software to it. I can't beam the addresses and phone numbers from my daytimer to my friend's. A daytimer won't function as an alarm or a stopwatch. The comparison is ill-conceived at best.
My main problem with Palm is that they subscribe to this philosophy -- that they know what their users want better than their users do.
They do. Users invariably yell for each feature that enters their heads, seldom considering the consequences (weight, battery usage, longevity, user interface, overall complexity, etc.). Palm has engineers do their engineering and they have a unified vision of how things should work.
So while you may just want all of the functions of a IIxe, there are people (and this is borne out by the fact that Compaq can still sell iPaqs) who want something more from their PDAs.
Think about what you say first.
I did think about what I said. I don't want a useful, efficient, cost-effective, professional tool turned into an expensive, battery-hungry, bloated, behemoth because some vocal group clamored for features that are neither needed nor wanted by most users.
A handheld is not supposed to replace a computer. It's supposed to provide useful functions like keeping to-do lists, schedules, phone directories, unit conversion programs, notes, etc. A good handheld design is a carefully engineered compromise between battery life, features, and speed. That's something that Palm and Handspring have pretty much understood. Only when Microsoft entered the market did people start demanding that handhelds come with 200mhz CPUs, ooh-gobs of RAM, and displays that ran the color spectrum from UV to IR.
A handheld is not an MP3 player. It's not a tiny laptop computer. It's not supposed to run X-Windows, FTP, or a web server. It's not supposed to be used for SETI at home, factoring huge primes, or playing first-person shooter games. I want month-long battery life, not a handheld with a heatsink and 10,000rpm fan. Don't screw up the market by demanding things that sway manufacturers to sell toys for geeks rather than tools for professionals.
The reason that extraterrestrials visit Scotland so often is that Scottish men wear kilts. That makes the anal probes much easier to perform. No fumbling with belts, zippers, etc.
So Marketing only focuses on the english speaking clientel or what ?
Marketing focuses on maximizing sales and English is the most widely spoken language in the industrialized world. Despite Germany's best efforts between 1939 and 1945 to convert all of Europe to a German-speaking country, there are still only about 1/8 as many German speakers as there are English speakers.
Frankly, I don't care if innumerate foreigners have trouble distinguishing which bill is which. It's good for our economy. If they want to leave a $92 tip on a $8 meal, who are we to complain? And if they don't pay enough, the cashier will tell them.