I once was involved in a tech support call while I was in the US (I was doing the calling) where I was asked to spell out a username that had a "z" in it. Being Canadian, I used "zed". Every time I said "zed", the tech support woman said "What?".
When I worked in tech support I would sometimes do that intentionally just for spite (too many rednecks who couldn't figure out the concept of right-clicking). Then the company told us to start using the phonetic alphabet to make sure we were understood. The NATO phoenetic alphabet. "Zed as in Zulu" just completely blew these callers' minds.
Besides which, free online sources for music tend to be somewhat unreliable.... And finding some more obscure songs can sometimes be difficult.
That's why I suggested allofmp3.com. They don't have every song, but they have some more obscure stuff as well as songs by artists that won't appear on itunes (like Metallica). And how do you beat $5 US for 500 Megabytes?
Does it matter? If you really want DRM enabled songs, you can buy from puretracks. If you want just plain MP3s, you can download them from your favourite source because making personal copies of music -no matter the source- is legal in Canada. And if you don't like leeching from Kazaa or wherever, check out allofmp3.com and pick what format and bitrate you want.
If you cut a baseball game to its "highlights", you're really missing the game.
If someone wants to watch a quick game of baseball, go watch some kids play. But don't watch the teams that have tryouts, watch houseleague games.
The best game I ever saw was the championship for a small tournament at the local park. I believe the kids were 7-9 years old. Here, pitching for younger kids is done with a pitching machine (used to be the coaches but the pitching machine gives the kids some accuracy). The game went 7 innings, took about 1 hour and 15 minutes, and ended in a 2-1 score.
Yes, I should have been more specific. Public High Schools.
I went to a public high school. Maybe being in Ontario, Canada makes the difference. Here's a short list of novels I can recall reading for english class:
To Kill a Mockingbird Fahrenheit 451 The Hobbit Old Man and the Sea One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest The Stone Angel 1984 Brave New World
Riiiight, I live in NYC, where the funding for the library gets cut yearly and my local neighborhood library serves several thousand people a week.
Allow me to feel pity for you. My local neighbourhood library (and the only one that does not require driving to get to) is one room. I haven't measured it, but it's something like 20 feet by 40 feet. 3 of the walls have bookshelves. 1 wall and about 1/4 of the shorter wall is non-fiction. The rest of the shorter wall is paperback fiction. The third wall is hardcover fiction. There are also about 5 shorter bookcases on the floor for young adult and children's books. The 4th wall has the spot for librarians, a photocopier, and 2 internet connected computers.
New books come in but they are rare and have to cater to many tastes. Thankfully interlibrary loans are easy. This local branch is part of a county-wide system and they can exchange with the nearby city if needed.
I feel this is the eventual fallout of not teaching the novel innhigh school. Many schools will allow a magazine article to stand in for a book.
What schools are these? We usually had at least 3 or 4 novels to read and analyse. Add on some short stories, some poems, and a Shakespeare play and that was English class.
I admit that a series/movie written and produced by JMS might suck franchise-wise and lack in general mass appeal, but the guy knows how to write.
I think you misunderstood what I said.
Because then we wouldn't get something that sucks.
Meaning that if JMS wrote and produced it, it wouldn't suck. This is in direct contrast to whatever B&B come up with. Because whatever B&B come up with, it'll probably suck.
People at fast food restaurants make minimum wage, people in "sit down" restaurants make less than minimum wage because part of their income is expected to come from tips.
This is also partly why Canadians are regarded as horrible tippers. In Ontario (and I think it's similar across the country), the minimum wage is $7.15/hour. There is a seperate minimum wage for "employees who serve liquor directly to customers or guests in licensed premises as a regular part of their work" (mostly waiters and waitresses in sitdown restaurants as well as bartenders) which is $6.20/hour. So 95 cents difference. It is my impression that the gap in the states is quite a bit larger.
Yours might have been an extreme case, but it is generally know to retailers that someone with nothing to do, i.e. waiting on the phone, has a horrible perception of time. You get people who have waited only 1 or 2 minuets claiming 5 or 10
I used to work tech support and every single person that complained about the time they spent on hold would say they were on hold longer than they actually were. Normally the only time people would wait for more than a minute or so on hold was if there was an outage. I hated those times but got a perverse amusement out of telling people that they were really only on hold 10 minutes when they told me 30.
Website customers also had an odd sense of how much money they lose when their site goes down. They were always losing "thousands of dollars for every minute" on their $25/month shared server website. Yeah. Sure you are.
The most damage it might cause, depending out how outrageous the customer is being, is a few lost immediate sales. If the customer is being beligerant no sales will be lost (except by those who would probably have been similar complainers).
There are exceptions to this such as when the person who is wronged by the company owns or makes buying decisions for another company. Especially on items or services that are easy to switch.
I got fired for complaining about our low health scores and tried encouraging others to not eat there because of the health scores. Out of 50+ people I think I might have convinced one person of the health safty concerns I had with the store (then again, maybe I came of like a zealot, I don't know).
Whenever I want to encourage someone not to eat at Taco Bell, I show them a picture a coworker took of the meat. It's quite a disgusting picture if you know what it is. The meat is quite liquidy and there are a few pools of grease floating on the top.
My (limited) understanding is that the studios don't expect to make money on every film -- they rely on a blockbuster every once in a while to cover the costs of the duds. So, by not milking the profits on the rare profitable documentary-ish film, they are limiting the number of films they can make in the future (and the degree of risk they are willing to take that those films will not make money).
The budget for f9/11 was $6 million. It made over $21 million in the opening weekend. It will make more in theatres. I don't know if Lion's Gate distributes DVDs, but it will make additional money there.
Compare this to Dogma. A movie that is quite similar in some ways (funded by the same people, Disney wouldn't distribute it because of political pressure, picked up by Lion's Gate). Dogma was produced for about $10 million. It made about $30 million in theatres. It's considered to be a sucess. Not a rolling around in bags of money sucess, but enough that it made a bit of profit. f9/11 will make money.
As a side note, I did download the movie and watch it. This was after I tried to go see it at the only theatre who was showing it in the theatre (and on only one screen). Surpise, suprise, it was sold out. I plan to see it later when the crowds die down a bit.
Are CD burners that expensive in Canada? Assuming 1 CAD = 0.75 USD that's like $45.00. I can pickup a Liteon, Sony or a Samsung local for $30-$35usd ($40-46CAD). It's possible you mean the retail box, or your cd-r drives are taxed extra.
CD burners are not taxed extra in Canada. Media isn't taxed at time of purchase either, the levy is paid by the manufacturer and passed onto the consumer.
The grandparent post is probably going by the price of a drive at Futureshop (like Best Buy). Check out a site like ncix.com for good prices. Right now they have a Liteon drive on sale for $37CDN. Regular price is about $45CDN. Oddly enough they also have a DVD burner for $74CDN. It's a BenQ though.
I'm in Canada too, and this is really interesting to me. Are you saying that the CRTC says that cable companies have to sell channels individually with no other purchases? CAN I get one channel for $5 if I wanted to?
No and no. I'm not totally clear on exactly what's in the ruling, but I believe it only applies to digital channels. And since the last I heard, Rogers requires you to get basic cable before they'll let you subscribe to anything else, you need to subscribe to that too.
So if you wanted say TechTV (now G4TechTV), you'd need to pay $24/month for basic cable and $2.50/month for TechTV. You'd also need to either buy a digital cable box for $100 or rent one for $8.95/month. So if you only wanted to get TechTV, you're paying $26.50/month plus $100 up front or $34.50/month without the up front cost.
Yeah, but you're already paying $33 a month! I hardly see how this is a good deal.
Exactly. It's a horrible deal. The CRTC (equivalent of the FCC) forced cable companies to offer channels unbundled but they didn't force the prices along with the ruling. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the digital cable box can be bought for $100
If you saw Star Trek at noon, you don't watch it again at 4 then at 11 or whatever, because you already saw that episode.
Specialty channels rarely have more than one feed. Space (the Canadian equivalent of Sci-Fi) used to show Babylon 5 at 3pm, 7pm, and 3am (all eastern time) so that it was easier for people in different time zones to watch. Canada covers 6 different timezones (Newfoundland, Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific). The USA covers 4 plus whatever Alaska and Hawaii are in.
That's why specialty channels show the same episode 3 or 4 times per day. Plus it's cheaper.
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I once was involved in a tech support call while I was in the US (I was doing the calling) where I was asked to spell out a username that had a "z" in it. Being Canadian, I used "zed". Every time I said "zed", the tech support woman said "What?".
When I worked in tech support I would sometimes do that intentionally just for spite (too many rednecks who couldn't figure out the concept of right-clicking). Then the company told us to start using the phonetic alphabet to make sure we were understood. The NATO phoenetic alphabet. "Zed as in Zulu" just completely blew these callers' minds.
But I also worked near a school where one of the kids snapped and cut the head off another student
It's sad when immortals become immortal while still children. They have to resort to being sneaky to get the quickening.
There can be only one!
Why don't we encase our children in 'Nerf'? After all, then they would just bounce off of cars when they run out in the street.
If it saved one child, it's worth it right?
That would be worth it for the entertainment value alone.
Besides which, free online sources for music tend to be somewhat unreliable. ...
And finding some more obscure songs can sometimes be difficult.
That's why I suggested allofmp3.com. They don't have every song, but they have some more obscure stuff as well as songs by artists that won't appear on itunes (like Metallica). And how do you beat $5 US for 500 Megabytes?
When will iTMS be made available in Canada?
Does it matter? If you really want DRM enabled songs, you can buy from puretracks. If you want just plain MP3s, you can download them from your favourite source because making personal copies of music -no matter the source- is legal in Canada. And if you don't like leeching from Kazaa or wherever, check out allofmp3.com and pick what format and bitrate you want.
you cannot prevent radio frequency broadcasts from penetrating your home.
Sure you can, you just need to build a faraday cage around your home.
A large portion of the Canadian population doesn't know that Ottawa is the capital, Toronto is the first choice of many.
You seem to have misspelled American. Do you have a source for this statistic?
Isn't the East Coast mostly on coal and oil power? I'd be doing ANYTHING possible to get off of coal power, even if it's just a tiny little 10mw dent.
The East Coast of the US also imports a whole lot of power from Quebec. I would assume this is mostly hydroelectric.
If you cut a baseball game to its "highlights", you're really missing the game.
If someone wants to watch a quick game of baseball, go watch some kids play. But don't watch the teams that have tryouts, watch houseleague games.
The best game I ever saw was the championship for a small tournament at the local park. I believe the kids were 7-9 years old. Here, pitching for younger kids is done with a pitching machine (used to be the coaches but the pitching machine gives the kids some accuracy). The game went 7 innings, took about 1 hour and 15 minutes, and ended in a 2-1 score.
Yes, I should have been more specific.
Public High Schools.
I went to a public high school. Maybe being in Ontario, Canada makes the difference. Here's a short list of novels I can recall reading for english class:
To Kill a Mockingbird
Fahrenheit 451
The Hobbit
Old Man and the Sea
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Stone Angel
1984
Brave New World
Riiiight, I live in NYC, where the funding for the library gets cut yearly and my local neighborhood library serves several thousand people a week.
Allow me to feel pity for you. My local neighbourhood library (and the only one that does not require driving to get to) is one room. I haven't measured it, but it's something like 20 feet by 40 feet. 3 of the walls have bookshelves. 1 wall and about 1/4 of the shorter wall is non-fiction. The rest of the shorter wall is paperback fiction. The third wall is hardcover fiction. There are also about 5 shorter bookcases on the floor for young adult and children's books. The 4th wall has the spot for librarians, a photocopier, and 2 internet connected computers.
New books come in but they are rare and have to cater to many tastes. Thankfully interlibrary loans are easy. This local branch is part of a county-wide system and they can exchange with the nearby city if needed.
Oh, and it's only open about 20 hours per week.
I feel this is the eventual fallout of not teaching the novel innhigh school.
Many schools will allow a magazine article to stand in for a book.
What schools are these? We usually had at least 3 or 4 novels to read and analyse. Add on some short stories, some poems, and a Shakespeare play and that was English class.
Instead of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", how about some Frank Herbert.
What was wrong with One Flew Over teh Cuckoo's Nest? Insane asylum, drug-induced dreaming, and whores. What's not to like?
I admit that a series/movie written and produced by JMS might suck franchise-wise and lack in general mass appeal, but the guy knows how to write.
I think you misunderstood what I said.
Because then we wouldn't get something that sucks.
Meaning that if JMS wrote and produced it, it wouldn't suck. This is in direct contrast to whatever B&B come up with. Because whatever B&B come up with, it'll probably suck.
Straczynski of the B5-fame has expressed his interest in getting involved with Star Trek.
Why don't they just give B&B something else to do and give JMS free hands like Warner Bros did with B5.
Because then we wouldn't get something that sucks. And who wants something that doesn't suck?
Anyone have any guesses on how to speed up a planet? ;^)
Hit it with another planet of course. Or you could hit it with something smaller than a planet but moving faster.
People at fast food restaurants make minimum wage, people in "sit down" restaurants make less than minimum wage because part of their income is expected to come from tips.
This is also partly why Canadians are regarded as horrible tippers. In Ontario (and I think it's similar across the country), the minimum wage is $7.15/hour. There is a seperate minimum wage for "employees who serve liquor directly to customers or guests in licensed premises as a regular part of their work" (mostly waiters and waitresses in sitdown restaurants as well as bartenders) which is $6.20/hour. So 95 cents difference. It is my impression that the gap in the states is quite a bit larger.
Yours might have been an extreme case, but it is generally know to retailers that someone with nothing to do, i.e. waiting on the phone, has a horrible perception of time. You get people who have waited only 1 or 2 minuets claiming 5 or 10
I used to work tech support and every single person that complained about the time they spent on hold would say they were on hold longer than they actually were. Normally the only time people would wait for more than a minute or so on hold was if there was an outage. I hated those times but got a perverse amusement out of telling people that they were really only on hold 10 minutes when they told me 30.
Website customers also had an odd sense of how much money they lose when their site goes down. They were always losing "thousands of dollars for every minute" on their $25/month shared server website. Yeah. Sure you are.
The most damage it might cause, depending out how outrageous the customer is being, is a few lost immediate sales. If the customer is being beligerant no sales will be lost (except by those who would probably have been similar complainers).
There are exceptions to this such as when the person who is wronged by the company owns or makes buying decisions for another company. Especially on items or services that are easy to switch.
I got fired for complaining about our low health scores and tried encouraging others to not eat there because of the health scores. Out of 50+ people I think I might have convinced one person of the health safty concerns I had with the store (then again, maybe I came of like a zealot, I don't know).
Whenever I want to encourage someone not to eat at Taco Bell, I show them a picture a coworker took of the meat. It's quite a disgusting picture if you know what it is. The meat is quite liquidy and there are a few pools of grease floating on the top.
So in the broadest view, how is this even REMOTELY considered wrong?
Because Valenti says it is wrong. We must obey Valenti. Valenti is a good and benevolent leader. All hail the great and wise Valenti.
My (limited) understanding is that the studios don't expect to make money on every film -- they rely on a blockbuster every once in a while to cover the costs of the duds. So, by not milking the profits on the rare profitable documentary-ish film, they are limiting the number of films they can make in the future (and the degree of risk they are willing to take that those films will not make money).
The budget for f9/11 was $6 million. It made over $21 million in the opening weekend. It will make more in theatres. I don't know if Lion's Gate distributes DVDs, but it will make additional money there.
Compare this to Dogma. A movie that is quite similar in some ways (funded by the same people, Disney wouldn't distribute it because of political pressure, picked up by Lion's Gate). Dogma was produced for about $10 million. It made about $30 million in theatres. It's considered to be a sucess. Not a rolling around in bags of money sucess, but enough that it made a bit of profit. f9/11 will make money.
As a side note, I did download the movie and watch it. This was after I tried to go see it at the only theatre who was showing it in the theatre (and on only one screen). Surpise, suprise, it was sold out. I plan to see it later when the crowds die down a bit.
Are CD burners that expensive in Canada? Assuming 1 CAD = 0.75 USD that's like $45.00. I can pickup a Liteon, Sony or a Samsung local for $30-$35usd ($40-46CAD). It's possible you mean the retail box, or your cd-r drives are taxed extra.
CD burners are not taxed extra in Canada. Media isn't taxed at time of purchase either, the levy is paid by the manufacturer and passed onto the consumer.
The grandparent post is probably going by the price of a drive at Futureshop (like Best Buy). Check out a site like ncix.com for good prices. Right now they have a Liteon drive on sale for $37CDN. Regular price is about $45CDN. Oddly enough they also have a DVD burner for $74CDN. It's a BenQ though.
I'm in Canada too, and this is really interesting to me. Are you saying that the CRTC says that cable companies have to sell channels individually with no other purchases? CAN I get one channel for $5 if I wanted to?
No and no. I'm not totally clear on exactly what's in the ruling, but I believe it only applies to digital channels. And since the last I heard, Rogers requires you to get basic cable before they'll let you subscribe to anything else, you need to subscribe to that too.
So if you wanted say TechTV (now G4TechTV), you'd need to pay $24/month for basic cable and $2.50/month for TechTV. You'd also need to either buy a digital cable box for $100 or rent one for $8.95/month. So if you only wanted to get TechTV, you're paying $26.50/month plus $100 up front or $34.50/month without the up front cost.
Yeah, but you're already paying $33 a month! I hardly see how this is a good deal.
Exactly. It's a horrible deal. The CRTC (equivalent of the FCC) forced cable companies to offer channels unbundled but they didn't force the prices along with the ruling. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the digital cable box can be bought for $100
If you saw Star Trek at noon, you don't watch it again at 4 then at 11 or whatever, because you already saw that episode.
Specialty channels rarely have more than one feed. Space (the Canadian equivalent of Sci-Fi) used to show Babylon 5 at 3pm, 7pm, and 3am (all eastern time) so that it was easier for people in different time zones to watch. Canada covers 6 different timezones (Newfoundland, Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific). The USA covers 4 plus whatever Alaska and Hawaii are in.
That's why specialty channels show the same episode 3 or 4 times per day. Plus it's cheaper.