This is a case where "the market" can regulate itself; theatres which strictly enforce bans on audible phones and beepers will do better than ones which don't.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
I thought the very same thing about smoking in restaurants, before my city enacted a smoking ban. Why didn't some enterprising type open up a chain of non-smoking restaurants, seeing as (according to statistics) 75% of people don't smoke, and an overwhelming majority of people say they'd rather not have smoking in restaurants?
It never happened. A few places went non-smoking, did decent business, but I guess not enough to warrant more restaurants doing it on their own. The city ended up with the ban (so far you can still smoke in bars and lounges here, so it's sorta half-ass), and most people think it's been a roaring success.
As much as I hate to say it, sometimes it seems that legislation is the only way for people's behaviour to change. Most people wanted smoke-free eating, but without a law, it was never going to happen. Same goes for cell-phones, I'd imagine. Even though I think most people make way too big a deal out of it - I hear more screaming/crying infants in most places I go, and that lasts a lot more than the 10 seconds a phone ring does, but NO ONE in their right mind has proposed a ban on children at public performances - at least not yet.
In order to run Linux on your Xbox, not only will you need an existing PC, with dvd-r drive (ok, there's a good $1000 at least), you'll also need an Xbox modchip (tack on another $70 iirc) and the skills to make something like 40 tiny solder connections inside your Xbox. Just a tad more money than $199.
Or has that damn hard drive finally been 'cracked'?
I guess living in Canada changes my perspective some, but a lot of this seems to hold true in any city I visit (American or Canadian):
For the most part, I'd much rather live in a newer building than one built 100 years ago. I don't know if people have grown, or we just need more space, but a lot of old buildings are VERY claustrophobic. Hell, some of the doorways are barely 6' high. Never mind the rambling tenements built to house immigrants back at the turn of the century, where having an 8'x10' bedroom was considered a luxury (this trend seems to have continued at least into the 1960's - most houses over 30 years old here have TINY bedrooms).
A building constructed 100 years ago may not have originally had much in the way of central heating, let alone air conditioning. Retrofitted, most of these buildings have atrocious heat efficiency (so sue me, I live in a -40 to 100 degree climate:), and these large gaping ducts which always seem to trap the most useful things - including pets.
Older buildings often are very difficult, if not impossible, to get modern appliances and/or furniture into - especially if they have any staircases, ESPECIALLY if those staircases try to 'save space' in the house by turning once or thrice. A lot of these places were designed for people who owned essentially nothing, or nothing that wouldn't fit into a suitcase - I've spent many an hour trying to navigate a 3-seater couch around turns, whereas it would take all of 10 seconds straight down a modern home stairway.
Obviously I'm over-generalizing, and can only speak from my own limited experience, but unless you radically alter the interior designs of most of the older buildings (let's try avoiding the mud basements from now on, eh?), I'd much prefer living in something designed with how people actually *live* nowadays.
Asthetically though, I have to agree - older is better. New houses and apartments look like utter crap.
In the US/Canada and Japan, you had the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In most parts of Europe and South America, the Sega Master System. Both came out around 1985 (exact date depended on where you lived), and pretty much dominated the gaming scene in their respective areas. Other than the Amiga, there was no personal computer that could stand up to these consoles (try Super Mario Brothers for the C64 if you don't believe me:) - and the Amiga was pretty much out of the price range of most consumers at the time.
The only time game consoles HAVEN'T the dominant platform was around 1983-4, when the entire video game industry crashed hard, and Commodore and Sinclair provided us with lots of fun. Although the case could be made for the modern era of games...
To me, "Futurama" is "The Simpsons" freed from its format and need for consistency with 13+ years of history.
If anything, the Simpsons is pretty far from consistent. Watch the earlier seasons and compare them to now - characters completely changed, gone, etc. Never mind the fact that the characters haven't aged one day in 13 years on the air - I don't think continuity issues are terribly important (hell, just last week Homer pointed out that he's had something like 75 different jobs:)
I don't catch as much Futurama as I'd like, but have they ever done anything remotely CLOSE to the 'Treehouse of Horror' episodes?
Umm... all versions of Office allow you to save files so that they may be read in older versions of Office, as well as some competitors' programs.
Yup, and in a typical office environment, that's about as useful as having everyone save docments as ASCII only. Ever try to train several dozen people out of clicking on the (obvious) 'save' icon?
Hell, ever look into the Save As drop down? There must be 50 entries there now. Scrolling through that list is NOT efficient, let alone in a typical workplace where someone might have to do it 100 times a day. Never mind the fact that you could potentially have several versions running in one office.
Having the foresight to know you're going to slightly modify file formats in the future doesn't take a genius to figure out. It would be child's play for Microsoft to just build their file formats to run at a 'default' level, and any extras they add on just be ignored if whatever app you're using doesn't recognize it. We're not talking about executable code here, it's just text with fancy markup features!
Hell, people make webpages today that run just fine under the latest moz build, and under lynx - which is a LOT older and a LOT less functional than say, Word 6.0. But there's no incentive for Microsoft to do this, because it would completely kill their revenue stream.
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
It's called "maintaining a revenue stream". Microsoft has no choice but to continually enhance their product, competition or no, or else people will no longer buy upgrades every few years. No new revenue == pissed off shareholders.
Of course, when they can't come up with any good ideas, they just break compatibility. Try using ANY Office document made with a new version on an older version. I'm sorry, but there's no technical reason at all why an Excel spreadsheet made under XP can't be opened in Office97. Just leave whatever miniscule new features that exist from being used. However, they don't do this. And as all new PCs come with OfficeXP, when you replace some of your office machines, guess what? You have to then go and upgrade ALL of your Office versions, at several hundred dollars a pop. For what benefit? I haven't seen any signifigant improvement in the Office suite since at least 4.2. I still word process the same way, and do spreadsheets the same way.
Fact of the matter is, Microsoft uses their monopoly position to force you to buy new software every few years, unless you're in the unlikely position of being able to keep every single one of your old machines doing what you want them to do, forever. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with adding new features.
Microsoft does not hold it's market share purely because of its bad business practices. Windows is very easy to install, device drivers are easy to manage, you can change display modes with a mouse click, etc...
Maybe not, but they certainly built their market share purely on bad business practices. (OK, originally they gained market share because people pirated the hell out of their BASIC interpreters..)
All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place.. or have we forgotten 95 already? Hell, by the time 3.1 was out, 'Windows' was pretty much synonymous with 'computer' for a lot of people. And you can't tell me that drivers or video modes were anything approaching easy back then:)
We actually caught a company doing this to us a couple of years back, except instead of the fax, they were actually mailing us those magazine ads dressed up to look like articles. Attached to said ad (carefully looking like it was ripped from a real magazine) was a Post-it-note, with our company's owner's name on it, to this effect:
"David, here is the article I was talking about". Seems pretty personal, until I found the very same thing at several companies we dealt with - all with THEIR company's owner/president/manager's name on it. I guess those business directories for mass marketing really DO have a purpose.
Of course, nothing beats the latest from Publishers Scamming House: envelopes and contents dressed up with realistic "highlighting" and "handwriting", all carefully printed out from a high-speed color printer. The crossed out "spelling mistakes" and detail of the highlighted lines, all made to look like a real person did it, astounds me every time I see it.
Maybe it's just me, but such blatant attempts at deception sure come close to fraud in my books. The Better Business Bureau disagreed, however:(
I've been seeing it in various IRC channels for a long time now.
I haven't decided who's sicker.. the original site, or whoever went and made an ASCII version of it...
Re:Old games != easy to find
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
Actually, on a good weekend, it's easy to hit 150+ over the 8 hours or so people usually run them. Garage sales are a big thing here, and it's very common for a street/block/neighbourhood to hold massive ones - I think my record is about 30 in an hour. Do that 16 hours a weekend, 4 weekends a month.. well, I'll leave the math to you.
In fact, the first weekend of September I don't even have to drive anywhere - the neighbourhood I live in is holding its annual sale. Last year there were over 300 sales listed.
As for eating and sleeping and working... what do you think M-F are for?:)
Yes, it did exist, at least in certain test markets. I played it at the local K-Mart many, many moons ago.
Recently, a local auto parts store (of all places) that also has tons of obsolete electronic goodies had the original modems for sale. Best 99 cents I ever spent. It plugs into the cartridge port on a Genesis, and your coaxial cable attaches to the side. Now if only someone could write a handy server that I could run off a coax ethernet card...:)
Nintendo and the blowing myth
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While dust certainly is a problem for any electrical connection, for the most part the old blowing trick really doesn't do very much. The main problem with Nintendo cartridges (all video game systems, eventually) is corrosion. The cartridge contacts build up an incredible amount of gunk on them, eventually rendering them almost useless. This problem is made worse by the fact that cartridges and the connectors within a console are often made from different metals, and some funky electolytic reaction goes on (chemistry majors feel free to expand upon this).
The original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was notorious for this, due to the way the cartridges go into the unit. Remember being able to slide the cartridge back and forth even when it was as firmly inserted as possible? Also notice how no other game company has again made anything close to the NES, and all used very firm connections? A dirty NES cartridge has to be EXACTLY aligned in the console, which is pretty tricky. Taking it out and blowing on it more likely just meant that you put it back in a slightly different alignment, hopefully one in which the contacts were nicely connected.
The solution? Good old rubbing alcohol. Dip a Q-tip in it, and rub the hell out of the cartridge contacts. Any NES cartridge that saw much use will give you a rather black Q-tip. You can usually use quite a lot of force (in fact, you may need to). I've restored hundreds of NES games this way (and a few for other systems, but 99% of the problem is that damn NES console !@$$!@#!@$), and have yet to see one that doesn't work eventually. The consoles themselves, strangely, seem to require little to no cleaning.
Old games != easy to find
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
I've spent the last 3 years building up a pretty decent classic cartridge collection. At this point it's up to several hundred or so. Not a single one was purchased at a video game store, as the oldest thing anyone sells here (Canadian city with a population of over 700,000) is Sony Playstation games. The profit just isn't high enough for stores to carry Super Nintendo, let alone Atari games anymore.
How did I accquire all of this? 3 solid years of hitting several hundred garage sales per month, and visiting the local junk shops at least once a week. That's a hell of a lot of work, and it's a good thing I really enjoy doing it. But there are literally hundreds of games I've always wanted to play, and simply cannot find. I'd much prefer the original, both for the authenticity in playing, and the collecting factor - but in many cases, I simply have no choice but to download the ROM image. Paying some guy on Ebay $200 for a rare Atari game doesn't put one dime more into the pocket of the copyright owner, so who's it hurting?
Also, Capcom has authorized distribution of several of its old game ROMs.. of course, afaik the sale is only allowed with one of your competitor's products:)
DoS attacks shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
EXCUSE ME?? You (or some script kiddie) have ZERO right to impede the use of MY computer. None. Zip. Zilch. There is no justifiable reason on Earth why you, or anyone else, should have the ability to maliciously attack my computer, denying me service that I have paid for, let alone any sort of income I may be gathering from said service.
Your rights end at the tip of my cat5, and unless you can come up with some reason why your attacking me better serves the public good than my being online, you have no business interfering with mine.
P.S. Does anybody else hate the word 'Ms.'? Good god, I hate it when a woman introduces herself like that. Telling a man your marital status upon introduction is simply good manners. He can politely conduct the rest of the social exchange in a manner that keeps him out of a fist-fight later on.
Um, just why exactly *should* you know a woman's marital status? Or is that the only reason you talk to women, for courting purposes?
Do you tell all people you meet (not just women, there are some men who might be interested in dating you) your marital status when you first meet? "Hi, my name is Joe, and I'm currently married, but unhappily, so if you'd like to have sex sometime, I'll all for it".
A woman can always tell you if she's married if she so chooses. There's also that little Western tradition of wearing a gold band on your left ring-finger. But how on Earth is it relevant when you're reading a newspaper article about someone you've never met, and probably will never meet?
Consider a privacy law recently passed by the European Parliament requiring companies anywhere in the world to obtain permission before sending marketing e-mail to Europeans.
Jim Conway of the New York-based Direct Marketing Association worries that U.S. companies may have to scale back U.S. campaigns if they cannot assure that their mailing lists contain no European addresses.
Someone let me know if this DOES happen.. I'll be wanting a European email address the minute it occurs:)
Or hell, anyone who buys Tommy, or damn near anything that's marked up insanely because of the logo. Americans (and Canadians, and Britons, and the French, and the Japanese, and, and, and...) LOVE not only advertising for companies, but paying for it as well.
It's something that sickens me to no end - when I went to high school, people kept the tags on their baseball caps to show they were the *real thing* - that being Starter brand, iirc.
I'm quite happy buying damn near everything I can with generic/unknown brands, and strangely enough, my quality of life hasn't suffered one bit. In fact, I can afford a hell of a lot more pairs of shoes than my Nike-buying friends. And wow! They last just as long. Now if only we had a generic brand of car (and whoever mentions KIA gets a kick in the face:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is a case where "the market" can regulate itself; theatres which strictly enforce bans on audible phones and beepers will do better than ones which don't.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
I thought the very same thing about smoking in restaurants, before my city enacted a smoking ban. Why didn't some enterprising type open up a chain of non-smoking restaurants, seeing as (according to statistics) 75% of people don't smoke, and an overwhelming majority of people say they'd rather not have smoking in restaurants?
It never happened. A few places went non-smoking, did decent business, but I guess not enough to warrant more restaurants doing it on their own. The city ended up with the ban (so far you can still smoke in bars and lounges here, so it's sorta half-ass), and most people think it's been a roaring success.
As much as I hate to say it, sometimes it seems that legislation is the only way for people's behaviour to change. Most people wanted smoke-free eating, but without a law, it was never going to happen. Same goes for cell-phones, I'd imagine. Even though I think most people make way too big a deal out of it - I hear more screaming/crying infants in most places I go, and that lasts a lot more than the 10 seconds a phone ring does, but NO ONE in their right mind has proposed a ban on children at public performances - at least not yet.
Um, not to sound too trollish, but..
In order to run Linux on your Xbox, not only will you need an existing PC, with dvd-r drive (ok, there's a good $1000 at least), you'll also need an Xbox modchip (tack on another $70 iirc) and the skills to make something like 40 tiny solder connections inside your Xbox. Just a tad more money than $199.
Or has that damn hard drive finally been 'cracked'?
I guess living in Canada changes my perspective some, but a lot of this seems to hold true in any city I visit (American or Canadian):
:), and these large gaping ducts which always seem to trap the most useful things - including pets.
For the most part, I'd much rather live in a newer building than one built 100 years ago. I don't know if people have grown, or we just need more space, but a lot of old buildings are VERY claustrophobic. Hell, some of the doorways are barely 6' high. Never mind the rambling tenements built to house immigrants back at the turn of the century, where having an 8'x10' bedroom was considered a luxury (this trend seems to have continued at least into the 1960's - most houses over 30 years old here have TINY bedrooms).
A building constructed 100 years ago may not have originally had much in the way of central heating, let alone air conditioning. Retrofitted, most of these buildings have atrocious heat efficiency (so sue me, I live in a -40 to 100 degree climate
Older buildings often are very difficult, if not impossible, to get modern appliances and/or furniture into - especially if they have any staircases, ESPECIALLY if those staircases try to 'save space' in the house by turning once or thrice. A lot of these places were designed for people who owned essentially nothing, or nothing that wouldn't fit into a suitcase - I've spent many an hour trying to navigate a 3-seater couch around turns, whereas it would take all of 10 seconds straight down a modern home stairway.
Obviously I'm over-generalizing, and can only speak from my own limited experience, but unless you radically alter the interior designs of most of the older buildings (let's try avoiding the mud basements from now on, eh?), I'd much prefer living in something designed with how people actually *live* nowadays.
Asthetically though, I have to agree - older is better. New houses and apartments look like utter crap.
Gaming in the 80s *was* dominated by consoles:
:) - and the Amiga was pretty much out of the price range of most consumers at the time.
In the US/Canada and Japan, you had the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In most parts of Europe and South America, the Sega Master System. Both came out around 1985 (exact date depended on where you lived), and pretty much dominated the gaming scene in their respective areas. Other than the Amiga, there was no personal computer that could stand up to these consoles (try Super Mario Brothers for the C64 if you don't believe me
The only time game consoles HAVEN'T the dominant platform was around 1983-4, when the entire video game industry crashed hard, and Commodore and Sinclair provided us with lots of fun. Although the case could be made for the modern era of games...
To me, "Futurama" is "The Simpsons" freed from its format and need for consistency with 13+ years of history.
:)
If anything, the Simpsons is pretty far from consistent. Watch the earlier seasons and compare them to now - characters completely changed, gone, etc. Never mind the fact that the characters haven't aged one day in 13 years on the air - I don't think continuity issues are terribly important (hell, just last week Homer pointed out that he's had something like 75 different jobs
I don't catch as much Futurama as I'd like, but have they ever done anything remotely CLOSE to the 'Treehouse of Horror' episodes?
Umm... all versions of Office allow you to save files so that they may be read in older versions of Office, as well as some competitors' programs.
Yup, and in a typical office environment, that's about as useful as having everyone save docments as ASCII only. Ever try to train several dozen people out of clicking on the (obvious) 'save' icon?
Hell, ever look into the Save As drop down? There must be 50 entries there now. Scrolling through that list is NOT efficient, let alone in a typical workplace where someone might have to do it 100 times a day. Never mind the fact that you could potentially have several versions running in one office.
Having the foresight to know you're going to slightly modify file formats in the future doesn't take a genius to figure out. It would be child's play for Microsoft to just build their file formats to run at a 'default' level, and any extras they add on just be ignored if whatever app you're using doesn't recognize it. We're not talking about executable code here, it's just text with fancy markup features!
Hell, people make webpages today that run just fine under the latest moz build, and under lynx - which is a LOT older and a LOT less functional than say, Word 6.0. But there's no incentive for Microsoft to do this, because it would completely kill their revenue stream.
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
It's called "maintaining a revenue stream". Microsoft has no choice but to continually enhance their product, competition or no, or else people will no longer buy upgrades every few years. No new revenue == pissed off shareholders.
Of course, when they can't come up with any good ideas, they just break compatibility. Try using ANY Office document made with a new version on an older version. I'm sorry, but there's no technical reason at all why an Excel spreadsheet made under XP can't be opened in Office97. Just leave whatever miniscule new features that exist from being used. However, they don't do this. And as all new PCs come with OfficeXP, when you replace some of your office machines, guess what? You have to then go and upgrade ALL of your Office versions, at several hundred dollars a pop. For what benefit? I haven't seen any signifigant improvement in the Office suite since at least 4.2. I still word process the same way, and do spreadsheets the same way.
Fact of the matter is, Microsoft uses their monopoly position to force you to buy new software every few years, unless you're in the unlikely position of being able to keep every single one of your old machines doing what you want them to do, forever. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with adding new features.
Microsoft does not hold it's market share purely because of its bad business practices. Windows is very easy to install, device drivers are easy to manage, you can change display modes with a mouse click, etc...
:)
Maybe not, but they certainly built their market share purely on bad business practices. (OK, originally they gained market share because people pirated the hell out of their BASIC interpreters..)
All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place.. or have we forgotten 95 already? Hell, by the time 3.1 was out, 'Windows' was pretty much synonymous with 'computer' for a lot of people. And you can't tell me that drivers or video modes were anything approaching easy back then
The ones here play both as well:
Classic Rock AND Roll.
How else are we supposed to compete for projectile vomitting distances?
Oh, I don't know... Britney LIVE at the IMAX! ?
We actually caught a company doing this to us a couple of years back, except instead of the fax, they were actually mailing us those magazine ads dressed up to look like articles. Attached to said ad (carefully looking like it was ripped from a real magazine) was a Post-it-note, with our company's owner's name on it, to this effect:
:(
"David, here is the article I was talking about". Seems pretty personal, until I found the very same thing at several companies we dealt with - all with THEIR company's owner/president/manager's name on it. I guess those business directories for mass marketing really DO have a purpose.
Of course, nothing beats the latest from Publishers Scamming House: envelopes and contents dressed up with realistic "highlighting" and "handwriting", all carefully printed out from a high-speed color printer. The crossed out "spelling mistakes" and detail of the highlighted lines, all made to look like a real person did it, astounds me every time I see it.
Maybe it's just me, but such blatant attempts at deception sure come close to fraud in my books. The Better Business Bureau disagreed, however
I've been seeing it in various IRC channels for a long time now.
I haven't decided who's sicker.. the original site, or whoever went and made an ASCII version of it...
Actually, on a good weekend, it's easy to hit 150+ over the 8 hours or so people usually run them. Garage sales are a big thing here, and it's very common for a street/block/neighbourhood to hold massive ones - I think my record is about 30 in an hour. Do that 16 hours a weekend, 4 weekends a month.. well, I'll leave the math to you.
:)
In fact, the first weekend of September I don't even have to drive anywhere - the neighbourhood I live in is holding its annual sale. Last year there were over 300 sales listed.
As for eating and sleeping and working... what do you think M-F are for?
Yes, it did exist, at least in certain test markets. I played it at the local K-Mart many, many moons ago.
:)
Recently, a local auto parts store (of all places) that also has tons of obsolete electronic goodies had the original modems for sale. Best 99 cents I ever spent. It plugs into the cartridge port on a Genesis, and your coaxial cable attaches to the side. Now if only someone could write a handy server that I could run off a coax ethernet card...
While dust certainly is a problem for any electrical connection, for the most part the old blowing trick really doesn't do very much. The main problem with Nintendo cartridges (all video game systems, eventually) is corrosion. The cartridge contacts build up an incredible amount of gunk on them, eventually rendering them almost useless. This problem is made worse by the fact that cartridges and the connectors within a console are often made from different metals, and some funky electolytic reaction goes on (chemistry majors feel free to expand upon this).
The original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was notorious for this, due to the way the cartridges go into the unit. Remember being able to slide the cartridge back and forth even when it was as firmly inserted as possible? Also notice how no other game company has again made anything close to the NES, and all used very firm connections? A dirty NES cartridge has to be EXACTLY aligned in the console, which is pretty tricky. Taking it out and blowing on it more likely just meant that you put it back in a slightly different alignment, hopefully one in which the contacts were nicely connected.
The solution? Good old rubbing alcohol. Dip a Q-tip in it, and rub the hell out of the cartridge contacts. Any NES cartridge that saw much use will give you a rather black Q-tip. You can usually use quite a lot of force (in fact, you may need to). I've restored hundreds of NES games this way (and a few for other systems, but 99% of the problem is that damn NES console !@$$!@#!@$), and have yet to see one that doesn't work eventually. The consoles themselves, strangely, seem to require little to no cleaning.
I've spent the last 3 years building up a pretty decent classic cartridge collection. At this point it's up to several hundred or so. Not a single one was purchased at a video game store, as the oldest thing anyone sells here (Canadian city with a population of over 700,000) is Sony Playstation games. The profit just isn't high enough for stores to carry Super Nintendo, let alone Atari games anymore.
How did I accquire all of this? 3 solid years of hitting several hundred garage sales per month, and visiting the local junk shops at least once a week. That's a hell of a lot of work, and it's a good thing I really enjoy doing it. But there are literally hundreds of games I've always wanted to play, and simply cannot find. I'd much prefer the original, both for the authenticity in playing, and the collecting factor - but in many cases, I simply have no choice but to download the ROM image. Paying some guy on Ebay $200 for a rare Atari game doesn't put one dime more into the pocket of the copyright owner, so who's it hurting?
Also, Capcom has authorized distribution of several of its old game ROMs.. of course, afaik the sale is only allowed with one of your competitor's products :)
DoS attacks shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
EXCUSE ME?? You (or some script kiddie) have ZERO right to impede the use of MY computer. None. Zip. Zilch. There is no justifiable reason on Earth why you, or anyone else, should have the ability to maliciously attack my computer, denying me service that I have paid for, let alone any sort of income I may be gathering from said service.
Your rights end at the tip of my cat5, and unless you can come up with some reason why your attacking me better serves the public good than my being online, you have no business interfering with mine.
P.S. Does anybody else hate the word 'Ms.'? Good god, I hate it when a woman introduces herself like that. Telling a man your marital status upon introduction is simply good manners. He can politely conduct the rest of the social exchange in a manner that keeps him out of a fist-fight later on.
Um, just why exactly *should* you know a woman's marital status? Or is that the only reason you talk to women, for courting purposes?
Do you tell all people you meet (not just women, there are some men who might be interested in dating you) your marital status when you first meet? "Hi, my name is Joe, and I'm currently married, but unhappily, so if you'd like to have sex sometime, I'll all for it".
A woman can always tell you if she's married if she so chooses. There's also that little Western tradition of wearing a gold band on your left ring-finger. But how on Earth is it relevant when you're reading a newspaper article about someone you've never met, and probably will never meet?
What kind of long distance rates are you getting with your dynamo flashlight?
Free, if you know Morse Code.
I guess no one ever told the Slashdot editors not to play with their food... :)
Consider a privacy law recently passed by the European Parliament requiring companies anywhere in the world to obtain permission before sending marketing e-mail to Europeans.
:)
Jim Conway of the New York-based Direct Marketing Association worries that U.S. companies may have to scale back U.S. campaigns if they cannot assure that their mailing lists contain no European addresses.
Someone let me know if this DOES happen.. I'll be wanting a European email address the minute it occurs
Does that make Front Page the TV dinner of Web design?
:)
I was thinking more like AFTER you've eaten the TV dinner - like say about 24 hours after
Or hell, anyone who buys Tommy, or damn near anything that's marked up insanely because of the logo. Americans (and Canadians, and Britons, and the French, and the Japanese, and, and, and...) LOVE not only advertising for companies, but paying for it as well.
:)
It's something that sickens me to no end - when I went to high school, people kept the tags on their baseball caps to show they were the *real thing* - that being Starter brand, iirc.
I'm quite happy buying damn near everything I can with generic/unknown brands, and strangely enough, my quality of life hasn't suffered one bit. In fact, I can afford a hell of a lot more pairs of shoes than my Nike-buying friends. And wow! They last just as long. Now if only we had a generic brand of car (and whoever mentions KIA gets a kick in the face
Damn funny, as the comment immediately below yours pretty much said it verbatim, except not MS :)