Apples are red. Apples are also green. That doesn't make the fact that some apples are red false.
If he was trying to make an "apple and oranges" type comparison, he should have picked two things that were a bit more different than "apples" and "red".
"Apples" and "blue" would have been better. Or anything non-red and "red".
I guess I can close this discussion out by saying, if you want to see pictures of my mouth after the surgery (since it's my most popular blogpost EVER):
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/tag/medical
I still had a $113 copay on my cyst. And I had to go twice, the first time THINKING IT WAS MY SURGERY THAT DAY, only to find out it was a mandatory consultation. (Cost of missing 3 hours of work: $96.)
They then tried to make me come back for a 3rd visit to get my results. I used HIPPA to make them tell me without a visit. Yay rights. So few people use them.
When the dentist found a cyst in my gums, it took me over three weeks to get a proper referral from my HMO, Kaiser-Permanente. This was something the oral surgeon told me "You should get this removed this week, it could be a maligant tumour."
It took me over an hour on the phone to determine how it worked. If they took the cyst out and it turned out to be an abcess, it would be considered dental, and my medical would not cover it.
If they took the cyst out and it turned out to actually be a cyst or tumor, then it would be considered medical, and my dental would not cover it.
So then I had to take a long arduous journey trying to find someone who was on both my medical AND dental insurance (tough, considering dentists != doctors).
I finally got it out, but it took almost a month from discovery, and I almost got screwed over financially.
I'm lucky in that my family takes in $100K a year. Many other people would simply suffer, or be financially screwed, or medically screwed.
You seem to lack any imagination whatsoever to visualize how things could possible be worse than anyone else. I am a govt employee with a security clearance and had problems getting what could have been a cancer removed in a timely manner. And I'm an in-your-face flex-your-rights kinda guy. Someone timid, poor, and uneducated probably would not have been able to get it done in a timely OR costly manner.
It's no wonder there are millions of Americans not using any health care at all. The system is poised to make getting anything done as painful as possible.
And yea, my $1250 annual dental benefit? Gone in one day. I wont be going to the dentist til 2007.
Yea, I looked thru trying to find a month with new releases, but I'm afraid my memory just isn't great enough to know what movies came out back then... (It was an old history emailed to me a good year ago.)
It must be regional then. Maybe there is a service issue netflix wants to correct, but they don't know about it! Where's grassroots activism when you need it?
Your comparison with your friends does indeed sound disheartening. I might badmouth Netflix in your position myself.
And yea, I think I'm in the top 10% of discs-per-dollar as well!:) It's the only place to be! People who don't milk their services for all their worth.. Well, I'm glad they exist, because they help pay for me.:) (I hit and run bittorrents too, though that is more for legal reasons than to be a dick.)
Wow, this whole thread is news to me. I really have never had a delay. I always return at LEAST 1 movie EVERY DAY THAT I HAVE ONE. 70% of discs we have for one evening. 90% of discs we have for 1 or 2 evenings.
One thing that I noticed -- You said you added it to your queue as soon as a date existed. Well, Netflix actually lets you "Save" movies that don't have announced dates WAY BEFORE a date is announced. I usually "Save" a movie to my "Save Queue" the first day I hear of it, the first time I see the trailer. Nobody is ahead of me.
So, to me, it certainly SEEMS like first come first serve. And that profit thing? I go thru far more movies than the average person. Read between the lines. The profit should be less for me, so I should be getting the movies I get within 48 hrs LAST, given your claims.
It's almost as if Netflix does things differently in different parts of the country, but THAT would make no sense either.
Just for reference, the "pacing" of my rentals goes about so:
03/25/04 04/02/04 Ravenous (1999) 03/26/04 04/02/04 Amores Perros (2000) 03/24/04 03/29/04 Drugstore Cowboy (1989) 03/22/04 03/29/04 Equilibrium (2002) 03/22/04 03/26/04 Gothika (2003) 03/16/04 03/24/04 May (2003) 03/19/04 03/24/04 Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) 03/17/04 03/22/04 Liar Liar (1997) 03/15/04 03/22/04 Airheads (1994) 03/15/04 03/22/04 21 Grams (2003) 03/10/04 03/19/04 It's in the Water (1998) 03/11/04 03/17/04 Liar Liar (1997) 03/10/04 03/15/04 Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles: The Pluto Campaign (1999) 03/03/04 03/15/04 Bruce Almighty (2003) 03/02/04 03/12/04 Perfect Blue (1997)
... And I never see a hitch or a glitch or a delay. Ever.
Go figure. I'd love to share some of the good service with everyone else who seems to be having problems. But no one in Northern Virginia that I know of (16 face-to-face friends on my Netflix friends list) has any of these problems described....
What a crock. Yeah, unix will "install" -- if you're lucky. And you'll have a text-only prompt. What fun.
I've used computers for 27 years, since I was 5, dating back to Apple2 command-line programming. I have had more average success installing windows than unix. Will unix support my FM transmitter? What about my ATI video card with tv-out? You know, the ones I've been using for 11 yeras? What about my IRMan infrared receiver? SATA drives?
When I tried RedHat, the soundblaster we had worked fine. But not in Quake. How the fuck can a soundcard work for the OS but not a program? Weak-ass linux drivers and ports, that's what. I guess if we all lived in Linux-land, this wouldn't be a problem. But we don't.
And GAIM sucks ass. Compiling Nethack sucks too. Of course, I can still download open-source stuff and compile it using my cygwin bash shell under windows, so given that I can get the best of both worlds, why would I bother with Unix?
Slackware sucks. Redhat sucks. Kubuntu sucks. FreeBSD is okay if someone else is dealing with it. And Ultrix sucks a donkey's nads.
Hmm, mine's either Richmond (90min south) or Gathersburg (60min north). Comparable distance. Interesting. Hmmm....-- Brought to you by Drool... You're tasting it now!
Actually, I knew you were referring to the Netflix distribution center. I still want to know how you find out where those are.:) -- She's hot, but in a weird way........... It's her cheekbones. She looks like Skeletor!
Maybe they have a scarcity algorithm? They could use all kinds of criteria to prioritize. I'm a customer who's given them several hundred so maybe that does something. I dunno. That does indeed sound strange and I would not be happy experiencing that. -- Karma: Negative (mostly from not giving a fuck)
How do you find out where the distribution centers are anyway? (I have a postal regional somethingorother center about 6 miles away....) -- For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. --Friedrich Nietzsche
Well, I would beg to differ on the "all other things being equal" part.
I go to a netflix page, I see what my friends rated it. I have 16 face-to-face friends on netflix and we share ratings. Who do I know on blockbuster? Nobody.
Indeed you are correct in asserting that my experiences cannot explain yours.
Still, your experiences are vastly different from mine.
Without knowing more (but still knowing more than I did before you posted), I would think this would have to do more with shipping routes than queueing. Do you live in a rural area?
For me, I'm inside the Washington D.C. beltway. I know Netflix works directly with the postal service and had a goal of 70% "next day delivery" by 2006 -- I think it was 2006.
I prefer my shows being shown on a 36-inch screen.
Hell, I generally prefer my email being shown on a 36-inch screen.
Now, if someone could just direct me to a decent 36-inch CRT with a DVI input in it, for under the $1200 I paid for my existing TV 5 years ago, I would be happy. EM-interference is the only remaining flaw, and while not noticeable during bright animation, it's bad during "space movies" sometimes. Less signal (the blackness of space) makes equal noise look a lot worse . . .
With all due respect, I beg to differ. I use Firefox-latest under Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I visit myspace about 3 times a month, and have done so for a good year. I have about 65 "friends" (some moreso than others, natch) and I visit several profiles each myspace visit.
My browser has never, ever, ever crashed from MySpace.
Sounds to me that the disdain you have for myspace is misdirected. It should be at your browser and operating system.
Why do people fall for the in-store coupons? Are they so short-sighted and impulsive that they really have no idea what they want to do that night? I know, for example, that I wanted to see "Corpse Bride". I added it to my netflix queue while it was in the theatre, and the dvd came to my house within 48 hours of its dvd release.
I didn't need to go running down to any store, risking car accident, spending gas, risking rude staff, parking hassles, the left turn out of the shopping center, or anything else.
Who are all these people who are so impulsive and impatient that they are willing to take a stupid path just for some instant gratification? Is this some left over hunter-gatherer instinct from the caveman days?
It sure as hell doesn't seem logical to me that people would use Blockbuster's "in-store rental coupons" as a reason to switch to Blockbuster's online service. It seems that these people want to hop on the new internet bandwagon, but they are too tied to their old ways to completely abandon them. And for that, they pay. I pity the fools.
In over a year of netflix, I have never ever received a new release any later than 48 hours after it was available.
You see, the first ones who queue it get it first.
That you were not interested enough in the movie to queue it until the last possible minute means that you DESERVE to see it after me, when I have been hungrily waiting 6 months for the dvd to come out. You see, I add movies to my netflix queue when the trailers come out for their theatrical release.
If you did it right, you'd get the results you want. You have no one to blame but yourself.
First queue, first serve. If you didn't queue the movie months ahead, you didn't want to see it as bad as me and don't deserve it before me. I have never EVER *not* gotten a new release within 48 hours, and I've been on netflix several years. Pay attention.
So format-shift it......... DVD-Decrypt it to your harddrive, then watch it later when you feel like it. You'll get more movies per dollar spent. Of course, technically, you should delete the movie after you watch it. But I wont tell.
(And anyone who doesn't have a computer hooked up to a television is just living in a sad, last-millenium hardware setup.)
are the people who wont go to a page their friend setup because they don't like the way it looks.
Can we say..... Superficial?
Can we say..... Valueing style over substance?
I'm a bit surprised to find nerds superficial, or valueing style. You should be happy everyone can finally establish a space for themselves on the internet. Or are you just jealous because any 7yo can make a "web page" now?
Either way, I would gladly look at 1,000 vomit-filled webpages if it meant meeting a REAL person in REAL life that I thought was cool. Oh yeah.. Nerds don't want friends, I forgot.
Because the strictest parents' kids DO NOT tell their parents the truths. The parents go to their deathbed thinking their kid didn't do any of the things (s)he did. . .
Slashdot Mirror
If he was trying to make an "apple and oranges" type comparison, he should have picked two things that were a bit more different than "apples" and "red".
"Apples" and "blue" would have been better. Or anything non-red and "red".
I guess I can close this discussion out by saying, if you want to see pictures of my mouth after the surgery (since it's my most popular blogpost EVER): http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/tag/medical
And I think that confuses your point.
They then tried to make me come back for a 3rd visit to get my results. I used HIPPA to make them tell me without a visit. Yay rights. So few people use them.
It took me over an hour on the phone to determine how it worked. If they took the cyst out and it turned out to be an abcess, it would be considered dental, and my medical would not cover it.
If they took the cyst out and it turned out to actually be a cyst or tumor, then it would be considered medical, and my dental would not cover it.
So then I had to take a long arduous journey trying to find someone who was on both my medical AND dental insurance (tough, considering dentists != doctors).
I finally got it out, but it took almost a month from discovery, and I almost got screwed over financially.
I'm lucky in that my family takes in $100K a year. Many other people would simply suffer, or be financially screwed, or medically screwed.
You seem to lack any imagination whatsoever to visualize how things could possible be worse than anyone else. I am a govt employee with a security clearance and had problems getting what could have been a cancer removed in a timely manner. And I'm an in-your-face flex-your-rights kinda guy. Someone timid, poor, and uneducated probably would not have been able to get it done in a timely OR costly manner.
It's no wonder there are millions of Americans not using any health care at all. The system is poised to make getting anything done as painful as possible.
And yea, my $1250 annual dental benefit? Gone in one day. I wont be going to the dentist til 2007.
It must be regional then. Maybe there is a service issue netflix wants to correct, but they don't know about it! Where's grassroots activism when you need it?
Your comparison with your friends does indeed sound disheartening. I might badmouth Netflix in your position myself.
And yea, I think I'm in the top 10% of discs-per-dollar as well! :) It's the only place to be! People who don't milk their services for all their worth.. Well, I'm glad they exist, because they help pay for me. :) (I hit and run bittorrents too, though that is more for legal reasons than to be a dick.)
One thing that I noticed -- You said you added it to your queue as soon as a date existed. Well, Netflix actually lets you "Save" movies that don't have announced dates WAY BEFORE a date is announced. I usually "Save" a movie to my "Save Queue" the first day I hear of it, the first time I see the trailer. Nobody is ahead of me.
So, to me, it certainly SEEMS like first come first serve. And that profit thing? I go thru far more movies than the average person. Read between the lines. The profit should be less for me, so I should be getting the movies I get within 48 hrs LAST, given your claims.
It's almost as if Netflix does things differently in different parts of the country, but THAT would make no sense either.
Just for reference, the "pacing" of my rentals goes about so:
... And I never see a hitch or a glitch or a delay. Ever.Go figure. I'd love to share some of the good service with everyone else who seems to be having problems. But no one in Northern Virginia that I know of (16 face-to-face friends on my Netflix friends list) has any of these problems described....
I've used computers for 27 years, since I was 5, dating back to Apple2 command-line programming. I have had more average success installing windows than unix. Will unix support my FM transmitter? What about my ATI video card with tv-out? You know, the ones I've been using for 11 yeras? What about my IRMan infrared receiver? SATA drives?
When I tried RedHat, the soundblaster we had worked fine. But not in Quake. How the fuck can a soundcard work for the OS but not a program? Weak-ass linux drivers and ports, that's what. I guess if we all lived in Linux-land, this wouldn't be a problem. But we don't.
And GAIM sucks ass. Compiling Nethack sucks too. Of course, I can still download open-source stuff and compile it using my cygwin bash shell under windows, so given that I can get the best of both worlds, why would I bother with Unix?
Slackware sucks. Redhat sucks. Kubuntu sucks. FreeBSD is okay if someone else is dealing with it. And Ultrix sucks a donkey's nads.
Hmm, mine's either Richmond (90min south) or Gathersburg (60min north). Comparable distance. Interesting. Hmmm....--
Brought to you by Drool... You're tasting it now!
Actually, I knew you were referring to the Netflix distribution center. I still want to know how you find out where those are. :) .......... It's her cheekbones. She looks like Skeletor!
--
She's hot, but in a weird way.
Maybe they have a scarcity algorithm? They could use all kinds of criteria to prioritize. I'm a customer who's given them several hundred so maybe that does something. I dunno. That does indeed sound strange and I would not be happy experiencing that.
--
Karma: Negative (mostly from not giving a fuck)
How do you find out where the distribution centers are anyway? (I have a postal regional somethingorother center about 6 miles away....)
--
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. --Friedrich Nietzsche
I go to a netflix page, I see what my friends rated it. I have 16 face-to-face friends on netflix and we share ratings. Who do I know on blockbuster? Nobody.
Still, you might want to look into simply using a separate service for that. (Well, moreso if you have a modchip.)
Allow me to blogspam my blog where I carefully researched every game-rental company I could find, determining a per-slot price for rentals: https://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/04/28/playstat ion-2-game-rental-survey-results/
Still, your experiences are vastly different from mine.
Without knowing more (but still knowing more than I did before you posted), I would think this would have to do more with shipping routes than queueing. Do you live in a rural area?
For me, I'm inside the Washington D.C. beltway. I know Netflix works directly with the postal service and had a goal of 70% "next day delivery" by 2006 -- I think it was 2006.
Hell, I generally prefer my email being shown on a 36-inch screen.
Now, if someone could just direct me to a decent 36-inch CRT with a DVI input in it, for under the $1200 I paid for my existing TV 5 years ago, I would be happy. EM-interference is the only remaining flaw, and while not noticeable during bright animation, it's bad during "space movies" sometimes. Less signal (the blackness of space) makes equal noise look a lot worse . . .
My browser has never, ever, ever crashed from MySpace.
Sounds to me that the disdain you have for myspace is misdirected. It should be at your browser and operating system.
I didn't need to go running down to any store, risking car accident, spending gas, risking rude staff, parking hassles, the left turn out of the shopping center, or anything else.
Who are all these people who are so impulsive and impatient that they are willing to take a stupid path just for some instant gratification? Is this some left over hunter-gatherer instinct from the caveman days?
It sure as hell doesn't seem logical to me that people would use Blockbuster's "in-store rental coupons" as a reason to switch to Blockbuster's online service. It seems that these people want to hop on the new internet bandwagon, but they are too tied to their old ways to completely abandon them. And for that, they pay. I pity the fools.
You see, the first ones who queue it get it first.
That you were not interested enough in the movie to queue it until the last possible minute means that you DESERVE to see it after me, when I have been hungrily waiting 6 months for the dvd to come out. You see, I add movies to my netflix queue when the trailers come out for their theatrical release.
If you did it right, you'd get the results you want. You have no one to blame but yourself.
First queue, first serve. If you didn't queue the movie months ahead, you didn't want to see it as bad as me and don't deserve it before me. I have never EVER *not* gotten a new release within 48 hours, and I've been on netflix several years. Pay attention.
(And anyone who doesn't have a computer hooked up to a television is just living in a sad, last-millenium hardware setup.)
Can we say..... Superficial?
Can we say..... Valueing style over substance?
I'm a bit surprised to find nerds superficial, or valueing style. You should be happy everyone can finally establish a space for themselves on the internet. Or are you just jealous because any 7yo can make a "web page" now?
Either way, I would gladly look at 1,000 vomit-filled webpages if it meant meeting a REAL person in REAL life that I thought was cool. Oh yeah.. Nerds don't want friends, I forgot.
http://www.myspace.com/clintjcl
http://www.jpsoft.com
I've had aliases, tab-completion, and much more ... since the 1980s I believe. Objects are nice, but I never use cmd.exe anyway!
Because the strictest parents' kids DO NOT tell their parents the truths. The parents go to their deathbed thinking their kid didn't do any of the things (s)he did. . .
puretna.com