Actually, it's maximization of profit. First you take out the über-trekkies that'll pay almost anything, then the "normal" trekkies in box sets, then slowly slide price down. If you look at a normal price-demand curve, they're trying to grab it all.
In China now you can buy DVD box sets of such things as MASH, 24, Alias, The Sopranos, Babylon 5, Buffie... all at $10-15 per season. They look legit, though you can never be sure. Lacking some extras, but otherwsie they play perfectly. I'll look out for TOS next trip. I notice some people selling them on Ebay for a good markup, but they're still 80% cheaper than US editions.
I bitch a lot about Slashdot for its biased summaries and viewpoints, but this time I have to applaud it for sounding rational. If only this sort of calm, rational perspective was applied to all the articles posted!
If only the same editor had bothered to spellcheck "I find this an intriguing article".
I read it in, i believe, Datamation. Perhaps InfoWeek,
With all respect, that's not good enough, and an authoritative yet unspecific source is the hallmark of an urban legend. If it had been published in such a magazine, someone (certainly someone reading this now) would have a copy and have confirmed it over the last 10 or more years this has been floating around.
Wait 'til you have kids. Then you'll be right into the home video and video editing
I have a kid. I don't have a video camera. And I can't really imagine why I'd need one. I think a lot of the ideas people have about home videos are from TV and movies, where it provides a method of exposition (eg, Tom Cruise playing the recording of his dead kid in Minority Report), when real people just remember stuff. But in the real world, how often does one look at old videos of family events? Or of yourself having sex for that matter? Maybe I'm untypical, but I can't stand to watch America's Funniest Home Videos, and these are selected from a huge number of submissions as the most entertaining.
Actually, I'm fairly certain that he did say it. I know it was reported in the popular press of the time
Oh yes? Which "popular press"? Or do you mean, like everyone else, that you've heard it was "reported in the popular press of the time"? Don't you think that in all the years that this sily statement has been going around that someone might produce an actual citation? NO ONE EVER HAS. It comes up at Slashdot often enough. How many tens of thousands of geeks read this -- if any one had the ability and desire to prove this, some reader here would.
There are also some moderated usenet groups that just stop, with no one able to submit articles. One assumes that either the moderator has lost interest, but maybe he died. Either way there should be some way that after a set period (say 2 months) without word from such a person that the group becpomes unmoderated. One in particular I miss is comp.laserprinters, which went silent a few years ago. Now you can just use the more general group comp.periphs.printers, which however is dominated by inkjet discussion these days. It's a problem that most services never delist a group, so people try to post to it, and may not realise that it's not being distributed (presumably coming to a dead end at the moderator's mail address).
Re:Whoa... that's a lot of accounts for sale
on
Gmail Addresses For Sale
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If more than
[ ] 100
[ ] 500
[ ] 1000
[ ] 2000 other GMail users have recieved an e-mail with the same content...
Too many false positives. There are such things as mailing lists, not to mention various automated alerts for bill payment, etc that you do want to receive, and which might vary only in a few details from thousands of others sent simultaneously -- with the obfuscation standard in spam you can't just look for identical messages.
If they do not have a deal with the RIAA equivalent in what ever country you're in, it is a waste of money.
If you'd RTFA, they got a (qualified) opinion from an actual lawyer:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
The absolute worst that could happen, if the site doesn't have any permission to sell (in Russia) is you'd be asked to delete all the downloads.
I don't live in the US, but I can buy CDs from Amazon in Seattle, or hundreds of other onlne dealers. What difference is there?
Here's when the slashdot effect gets kind of worrying- destroying a website which is the front end of a business, and in turn killing their business (costing them money).
Maybe they lose a day's uptime while the story is on/.'s front page; they'll rake it in later when even a tiny percentage of us come back as customers.
All throught the press release, the distro is referred to as "Turbolinux 10 F...". The ellipsis is always there, it doesn;t seem to signify omission. WTF does that mean? Japanese characters?
That's almost a redundancy there. I suppose you mean: true, but I don't care.
Not everyone has an etymological dictionary with them all the time, and I suspect that most people wouldn't happen to know the roots as well as you do.
Though remembering "annus" = year, from primary school, I just cut and pasted it. Actually everyone does have access to an etymological dictionary ( for example). But that is just for those who find such background interesting, more important is simply the meaning of the word, which anyone using words professionally (e.g. those who publish online) should know.
Usage is a critical mass thing - once a certain expression or meaning becomes popular enough it becomes domninant...
I doubt this is popular enough yet to displace the real meaning. At least years are stil the default units. (This phrase wasn't in the referenced FA, just in the summary the submitter gave and blindly pasted by the "editors" here into the headline).
By the definition you provide, "one year anniversary" is not redundant.
I thought it unnecessary to explain further; but it's the "year" that's redundant, i.e. "the upcoming first anniversary" would be unambiguous as to the period.
the upcoming one year anniversary of Apple's iTunes
-1 redundant
Have we come to the point, with "monthly anniversaries" and similar perverted uses, that the actual meaning of "anniversary" has to be explained?
Oxford Dictionary: The yearly return of a noteworthy date... [L anniversarius returning yearly, f. annus year + versus turning + -arius -ARY1; used as n. in med.L anniversaria (sc. dies day), -arium (sc. festum feast); cf. (O)Fr. anniversaire.]
Get a life some of us see movies to be entertained, not to see applied physics.
There's a place for fantasy, but science fiction, or even sci-fi, should show some respect for science. And though you take it as a given that it's impossible to be both entertaining and not stupid at the same time, I don't see why. What is offensive is things that are wrong when here is no need for them to be; for instance would silent explosions in space really be so tedious? I think things like that are surprising from common experience but understandable actually intensify the experience. The problem is that most of those who make movies are simply rearranging elements from other movies, maybe with a bigger budget or more sparkly effects. Even the writers have no knowledge or apparent interest in the subject that they're supposedly creating a story around. It's rare for real SF novel to be made into a movie, when for say historical movies, it's the norm -- and historical novels share a lot of the methodology of SF as to researching the background and creating a narrative that makes it interesting and intelligible to a modern audience.
we also understand that to say "Segways can't be ridden on sidewalks in NYC" is essentially to argue that "Segways shouldn't exist in NYC", since the only place left to ride them would be on streets. And to tell someone standing on an unprotected platform to mix with 8,000 pound SUV's is not a reasonable thing to say as it places the Segway rider in unacceptable danger.
I don't know anything about this "pedestrian advocacy group', but this seems really backwards. Elsewhere on their site they show great hostility to cyclists, yet show no sympathy for the exact same argument that cyclists are in danger of their lives by being required to ride on the roads. Their argument apparently is that segways are preferable to cars, and old and infirm people can use them. Well, that still doesn't convince me that this organisation has not been completely subverted by gizmo-loving yuppies, if not actual corporate shills. (If the old and infirm do have a need to use them, they should have an exemption, and a licence, and a low maximimum speed; this shouldn't be a lever to let every lazy slob who doesn't want to walk from his parking garage to his apartment.)
Re:HOW TO FIX THIS PROBLEM
on
HDD Assault Cannon
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Most sites would probably have a Google cache.
Mostly useless in stories like this (picture galleries) as the Google cache only caches the text -- the images are still referenced from the original site. The Wayback Machine is always worth trying, they do cache images (though not all) but they spider much less frequently.
and the editors fault for letting that submission get by them.
You say that as if they actually had a policy not to link to such sites. They don't. They don't bother to run submissions through a spellcheck, let alone see if the links are stable, or even exist at all.
Funny though that Ford, as Indiana Jones, several times shot or attacked preemptively without noticeably coming off like a bad guy. Anyway, any "fan" who takes this so seriously is definitely going to buy every new DVD, regardless of what they say now.
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong
There isn't much if any child labour in Hong Kong, probably less than most American cities. But there is exploitation of foreign guest workers, like Filipinas.
Slashdot Mirror
In China now you can buy DVD box sets of such things as MASH, 24, Alias, The Sopranos, Babylon 5, Buffie... all at $10-15 per season. They look legit, though you can never be sure. Lacking some extras, but otherwsie they play perfectly. I'll look out for TOS next trip. I notice some people selling them on Ebay for a good markup, but they're still 80% cheaper than US editions.
Ignore above post -- they must have read my email and fixed it (it was "intruiging").
If only the same editor had bothered to spellcheck "I find this an intriguing article".
With all respect, that's not good enough, and an authoritative yet unspecific source is the hallmark of an urban legend. If it had been published in such a magazine, someone (certainly someone reading this now) would have a copy and have confirmed it over the last 10 or more years this has been floating around.
We've been used to it since 1976: An Open Letter to Hobbyists.
I have a kid. I don't have a video camera. And I can't really imagine why I'd need one. I think a lot of the ideas people have about home videos are from TV and movies, where it provides a method of exposition (eg, Tom Cruise playing the recording of his dead kid in Minority Report), when real people just remember stuff. But in the real world, how often does one look at old videos of family events? Or of yourself having sex for that matter? Maybe I'm untypical, but I can't stand to watch America's Funniest Home Videos, and these are selected from a huge number of submissions as the most entertaining.
Oh yes? Which "popular press"? Or do you mean, like everyone else, that you've heard it was "reported in the popular press of the time"? Don't you think that in all the years that this sily statement has been going around that someone might produce an actual citation? NO ONE EVER HAS. It comes up at Slashdot often enough. How many tens of thousands of geeks read this -- if any one had the ability and desire to prove this, some reader here would.
There are also some moderated usenet groups that just stop, with no one able to submit articles. One assumes that either the moderator has lost interest, but maybe he died. Either way there should be some way that after a set period (say 2 months) without word from such a person that the group becpomes unmoderated. One in particular I miss is comp.laserprinters, which went silent a few years ago. Now you can just use the more general group comp.periphs.printers, which however is dominated by inkjet discussion these days. It's a problem that most services never delist a group, so people try to post to it, and may not realise that it's not being distributed (presumably coming to a dead end at the moderator's mail address).
If more than
[ ] 100
[ ] 500
[ ] 1000
[ ] 2000
other GMail users have recieved an e-mail with the same content...
Too many false positives. There are such things as mailing lists, not to mention various automated alerts for bill payment, etc that you do want to receive, and which might vary only in a few details from thousands of others sent simultaneously -- with the obfuscation standard in spam you can't just look for identical messages.
If you'd RTFA, they got a (qualified) opinion from an actual lawyer:
The absolute worst that could happen, if the site doesn't have any permission to sell (in Russia) is you'd be asked to delete all the downloads.I don't live in the US, but I can buy CDs from Amazon in Seattle, or hundreds of other onlne dealers. What difference is there?
Maybe they lose a day's uptime while the story is on /.'s front page; they'll rake it in later when even a tiny percentage of us come back as customers.
It uses the codec, not the player. From the FA: "Turbolinux engineers developed new software called Turbo Media Player that works with xine".
All throught the press release, the distro is referred to as "Turbolinux 10 F...". The ellipsis is always there, it doesn;t seem to signify omission. WTF does that mean? Japanese characters?
Never mind, someone has modded it "troll", which will have the same effect.
That's almost a redundancy there. I suppose you mean: true, but I don't care.
Not everyone has an etymological dictionary with them all the time, and I suspect that most people wouldn't happen to know the roots as well as you do.
Though remembering "annus" = year, from primary school, I just cut and pasted it. Actually everyone does have access to an etymological dictionary ( for example). But that is just for those who find such background interesting, more important is simply the meaning of the word, which anyone using words professionally (e.g. those who publish online) should know.
Usage is a critical mass thing - once a certain expression or meaning becomes popular enough it becomes domninant...
I doubt this is popular enough yet to displace the real meaning. At least years are stil the default units. (This phrase wasn't in the referenced FA, just in the summary the submitter gave and blindly pasted by the "editors" here into the headline).
I thought it unnecessary to explain further; but it's the "year" that's redundant, i.e. "the upcoming first anniversary" would be unambiguous as to the period.
-1 redundant
Have we come to the point, with "monthly anniversaries" and similar perverted uses, that the actual meaning of "anniversary" has to be explained?
Oxford Dictionary: The yearly return of a noteworthy date... [L anniversarius returning yearly, f. annus year + versus turning + -arius -ARY1; used as n. in med.L anniversaria (sc. dies day), -arium (sc. festum feast); cf. (O)Fr. anniversaire.]
There's a place for fantasy, but science fiction, or even sci-fi, should show some respect for science. And though you take it as a given that it's impossible to be both entertaining and not stupid at the same time, I don't see why. What is offensive is things that are wrong when here is no need for them to be; for instance would silent explosions in space really be so tedious? I think things like that are surprising from common experience but understandable actually intensify the experience. The problem is that most of those who make movies are simply rearranging elements from other movies, maybe with a bigger budget or more sparkly effects. Even the writers have no knowledge or apparent interest in the subject that they're supposedly creating a story around. It's rare for real SF novel to be made into a movie, when for say historical movies, it's the norm -- and historical novels share a lot of the methodology of SF as to researching the background and creating a narrative that makes it interesting and intelligible to a modern audience.
Mostly useless in stories like this (picture galleries) as the Google cache only caches the text -- the images are still referenced from the original site. The Wayback Machine is always worth trying, they do cache images (though not all) but they spider much less frequently.
and the editors fault for letting that submission get by them.
You say that as if they actually had a policy not to link to such sites. They don't. They don't bother to run submissions through a spellcheck, let alone see if the links are stable, or even exist at all.
um, no.
Um, yes. onelook.com
I thought more likely "anonymously sumbit a story linking to your corporate site selling web software and get loads of free publicity".
Funny though that Ford, as Indiana Jones, several times shot or attacked preemptively without noticeably coming off like a bad guy. Anyway, any "fan" who takes this so seriously is definitely going to buy every new DVD, regardless of what they say now.
There isn't much if any child labour in Hong Kong, probably less than most American cities. But there is exploitation of foreign guest workers, like Filipinas.
"Mac's" can also be the possessive form of "Mac."
For example, "My Mac's rather dirty; it likes to be spanked."
Sorry to be pedantic, but you started it.
Unfortunately, that isn't an example of possessive, but another contraction (for "Mac is").
"My Mac's hard disk is dead" is a possessive.