Hopefully they'll work better than the LED stoplights that were put up around here a couple years ago. Everywhere you look you see LED arrays with 1/3 or more out or blinking madly.
I think LEDs are a very good idea, and I'm looking forward to the time it's cost effective at home to swap out these stupid CFLs, a technology that was (in my humble opinion) only ever a stopgap. But I wonder if current LED lamp technology is up to the extreme environments seen in outdoor applications? At least, after it's been value engineered and provided by the lowest bidder? Clearly, we're not getting stellar results with the current crop of stoplights.
I'm perfectly calm. The moment someone has to resort to that kind of patronizing insult, you know they've lost any argument.
I don't want anything of the kind.
If you aren't suggesting exactly what I said, why is it important whether the car shops record the odometer reading when they do service? It would be irrelevant unless they were expected to do something with it.
Oh, c'mon, you are arguing for the sake of arguing. From the message you partially quoted:
I said this as an argument *against* putting an additional device in your car. I suspect that the gov wants to put the device in your car because it gets people used to having a device characterizing your movements, and prepares people for the next step, which is location.
In other words, I was pointing out that the assertion that we needed an additional device in order to track our mileage is blatantly false. And that was all I was saying. Not everyone is trying to steal your precious bodily fluids.
I agree. It's not without precident -- your odo is checked every time your car is serviced, for instance.
So you would add a mandate that every vehicle service facility report automobile milage to the state every time someone comes in for any work? Do you include Pep Boys and Napa so you can catch people who do their own auto maintenance? Create a whole black market for auto parts, and a large number of people who refuse to take their cars in for regular service because it comes with a tax bill?
Geeze, calm down. I don't want anything of the kind. I want the government to live within our means and stay out of our business. Just pointing out that the odometer information is freely available. I said this as an argument *against* putting an additional device in your car. I suspect that the gov wants to put the device in your car because it gets people used to having a device characterizing your movements, and prepares people for the next step, which is location.
In fact, in Oregon, DEQ doesn't even sniff the exhaust in modern cars, they just plug into the computer.
I live in Oregon and DEQ has neither "sniffed" my exhaust nor plugged into my computer in all the time I owned it.
In either case, Oregon is a state with a very area farming industry, and land use laws that prohibit people from doing things with their farm land other than... farm. You can't tax people for driving on their own farms, and if you won't let them do anything but farm you better not try. Just recording the odometer doesn't differentiate between taxable and nontaxable uses.
Ok ok ok you live in a rural area. I live in the suburbs. Any such system (which I still oppose) would be more likely to be implemented here than there, just as DEQ is required here in metropolitan areas and not in sparsely populated areas.
why we're trying to over-complicate this? Take the odometer reading at annual inspection and be done with it.
Will there be corner cases where someone gets screwed under this system? Sure.
Is it worth all the trouble, expense, and privacy violations of being 100% perfect when 80% is good enough? No. Not even a little.
I agree. It's not without precident -- your odo is checked every time your car is serviced, for instance.
In fact, in Oregon, DEQ doesn't even sniff the exhaust in modern cars, they just plug into the computer. I'd be surprised if the data available from that interface did not include the odometer information. Even if it didn't, the information is easy to come by.
But that doesn't train users to accept heightened surveillance. To do that, you have to add a new device to the car and allow the population to get used to its presence.
> You're suggesting we won't be using C, bubble sort algorithms, TCP/IP, Cisco routers, Unix-compatible OSes, 4+ years from now? In fact the bulk of those are over 40 years old, now, aren't they?
...if you did learn C in school, and not Pascal. (Or Lisp.:-)) I learned Fortran on punch cards, fed to a batch mainframe -- no interactive OSs at all. I think the number of Fortran programs I wrote in my professional career was...lemme see... carry the one.... zero. Although admittedly I did debug a Fortran program once in professional life. Some obscure circuit analysis program written in ratfor. Was surprised I still remembered the syntax.
There was this new microprocessor class in my sophomore year. We studied the 8008. That's not a typo. The 8080 had (just) come out, but the curriculum takes awhile to get updated. Mind you, that actually did help in one job, where I programmed Z80 code for an embedded system. Not the instruction set, but the methods.
Even when C was common, many colleges still taught Pascal. We had one Stanford grad on the "war toys" team who insisted in using Pascal, (because it "was superior") even when all the rest of us had taught ourselves C.
I submit, though, that even today you'll tend to see newer, less familiar technologies in the field than you'll see in college. This comes from having different goals -- teach vs do. And of course, it does depend on the college. I maintained a MACH system in the early days on which a PHD was doing parallel computing research, and carnegie mellon definitely had a leg up on us.:-)
You are absolutely right about knowing the basis behind a technology as opposed to a witch doctor's understanding. It's the difference between being able to figure out the root cause of a new problem or only being able to fix what you have fixed in the past. But I've seen people with non-engineering degrees step up and learn what was necessary to do the job. It's not impossible.
I've seen examples of what you've said, also. The most trivial of which: "First we try uninstalling and reinstalling the application, then we try reinstalling the OS". "But it's a network error!" "Shut up and help me with these CDs."
> Seriously, are we not past this, I got to have hair to be a man thing yet?
True story: A friend and I have finished an afternoon of skiing and we're sitting in the bar afterwards enjoying irish coffee. Discussion drifts to this very subject, how much society appears to demand a full head of man-hair and how much money is spent on products trying to achieve this. We had both agreed that this was all silly and narcissistic and although we're both going a little bald we'd never do any of those things.
The waitress, young and pretty, comes by to refresh our drinks and lingers at the table since there's not many in the bar, and we ask her the question -- what does she think of society's insistence on thick hair?
She said it was ridiculous. The presence or absence of hair doesn't make you any more intelligent or resourceful and it's stupid that men would be judged in that fashion. She equated it to judging women on breast size, which she thought was equally ridiculous.
So, my friend asked if she'd go out with a bald guy?
She laughed. "A bald guy? Are you kidding? No."...and walked away.
And so, we left our caps on...
The point being, there are people who are obsessed with their hair. My nephew started using Rogaine at 18, not because his hair was thinning (it wasn't) but because he thought it might some day and he wanted to get a head start on keeping it.
But even for those of us who don't care, some of us think we should do something about it, because the rest of the world *does* care.
And looks damn good with a bald head, I say: bring it on! The only way I will ever have hair again... is if I can have a JESUS-MANE of hair! Damn straight! I'll grow that out down to my shoulders! Hell yeah!!! Go long, or go bald--No in-betweens!!!!
How about long and bald? At the local hippy-fair I see a lot of heads that are bald on the top with a long fringe tied back in a rather stringy pony tail. I haven't decided whether it's a common fashion statement or part of the uniform.
This a perfect example of an article that makes a statement but does not make a conclusion. I guess the conclusion -- perhaps that we should be concerned that our IT professionals don't have scientific or technical degrees -- is implied?
> About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!
Panic!
I have an engineering degree, got a job making war toys for a military contractor, needed the computer to do my work, and found that nobody was administrating the computer. In self-defense, I learned how to administer Unix, how to do backups and housecleaning and diagnose problems, all so I could get my primary job done. After several years, when I got burned out on my primary job, (designing stuff for the military is less fun than it sounds) I found that I had learned enough to carry on with systems administration full time.
I strongly suspect that this happened to a lot of people, especially during the rise of the dot coms, and I also suspect that many of them were not originally in engineering. It happens -- people rise to the occasion, and find new career opportunities.
Why is this a problem? Is the admin going to see a countdown someday that says "answer this question that was on the 3rd trimester final in year two of an EE curriculum in 30 seconds or the computer melts into slag"? What you learn in college, other than techniques like ways to attack and solve a problem, are going to be horribly out of date anyway. What you accomplish in the workforce is more up to your commitment and talents, (and training you've sought post-college) than the letters after your name.
Conversely, having letters after your name does not mean you get a free ride (in most companies). You still have to show competency.
If I were in Iowa I'd worry less about the impact of climate change on the agriculture, which will take decades versus the immediate impact diverting massive amounts of ground water into ethanol production for fuel, which scientists estimate will take centuries to replenish. Stopping climate change today won't refill the underground aquafiers and without water, there are no farms, nor rural communities to farm them.
This. It's time to admit that burning our food for fuel was a bad idea.
In my experience in the US, every town larger than 300,000 or so has its own community college. That's in California and completely anecdotal, but right now I live in a more heavily populated area (silicon valley), and there are at least three colleges/universities within a 12 minute drive of my house. So 36 doesn't sound completely impossible to me.
As for 'scientists,' it doesn't say who they are in the link, but I'm guessing they count nearly anyone who is a professor, which isn't entirely unreasonable.
Isn't a "scientist" someone who actually practices science? One would think a professor in an unrelated field wouldn't count, nor would someone consumed with faculty paperwork who hadn't done research in decades.
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks
Yeah, hoping that said geeks will be so enamored of that little bit of mainstream acknowledgment that they'll completely miss the fact that it's just one long stream of the same old stereotypical crap we've been hearing from the mundanes since the 80s (and probably before, but my logfile doesn't go back that far).
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks
Yeah, hoping that said geeks will be so enamored of that little bit of mainstream acknowledgment that they'll completely miss the fact that it's just one long stream of the same old stereotypical crap we've been hearing from the mundanes since the 80s (and probably before, but my logfile doesn't go back that far).
Well, ok, but how is that different from any other category? As a dad, I have to confess I'm getting a little tired of the Phil Dunphy-like portrayal of goofy, ineffective dads. (Somewhat offset in that show by Jay Pritchett's quiet competency.) I'm sure there are housewives who aren't terribly impressed with I Love Lucy. If you can't laugh at yourself, you may be in for an unhappy life.
> "After reports of update problems including bricking of some devices,"
Hang on, aren't all Windows RT machines exactly the same hardware? How could there be differences between machines where an update would brick some and not others?
And the Windows 8 journey just keeps getting more entertaining.
That's called an antenna. Say it with me. "An-TEN-na." It magically sucks network TV signals right out of the air. For everything else, we have Netflix and Hulu. And you don't. Get off my lawn.
With antenna + Netflix + Hulu Plus, you still miss out on Monday Night Football. And without cable, you may end up stuck on slow DSL.
Yeah, I don't watch football, but my wife is a rabid fan. Somehow she manages to watch the games. Monday Night Football was on one of the local channels (I honestly don't know if it is this season -- it's something I don't follow) but I know she's been using a combination of off-air tv, the internet, and the occasional evening in a sports bar to keep up with her games.
We watch The Big Bang Theory religiously. (What geek doesn't?)
One with some self respect, who understands the difference in being laughed "at" and laughed "with".
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks. Did you also hate The IT Crowd? As a geek, you know that geekiness is a continuum, from the Asperger’s of Sheldon, (and to a certain extent Amy) the mostly-unconscious bromance of Raj and Howard, brilliant-but-mostly-normal people like Bernadette and Leonard. We've all met people like this if we've been in a technical or scientific field for any length of time. There are a lot of more negative characteristics of geeks that Lorre did not explore, probably because it wouldn't have been funny.
The technical and scientific aspects of the plots often mirror real events -- the ISS toilet, Spirit getting stuck in the sand, the Hadron Collider -- I mean c'mon, waitresses and gas station attendants aren't going to get any of that. All of that is for us. You're missing out.
To which I might add, until you do at least these things, stop coming to my door monthly and trying to get me to switch from your competitor. I'm not *using* your competitor for anything except internet. I don't *care* how good a deal the bundle is. I don't *care* how many hundreds of channels you have. I don't need you. Take two steps back. Look up. That's called an antenna. Say it with me. "An-TEN-na." It magically sucks network TV signals right out of the air. For everything else, we have Netflix and Hulu. And you don't. Get off my lawn.
So yeah, the last of the "tv generation" is paying the exorbitant salaries and production costs for three-and-a-half men. Serves them right.
You are fully aware that the show is called "Two and a half men", but you deliberately got it "wrong" in the hopes that someone would, correct you, so that you could scoff and pretend you're above such "low pop culture".
You're not, though, and you never will be.
Wow, nice try. If you blindly guess at someone's motives, it has to be right some time, doesn't it? And those times must feel like magic.
I freely admit to being quite fond of some of Chuck Lorre's other creations. I got his vanity card coffee table book for Christmas last year. We watch The Big Bang Theory religiously. (What geek doesn't?) My daughter can sing the second verse of the theme song. (The full version is available on itunes.) However, I have never watched an episode of 2 1/2 men all the way through, first because I can't stand Charlie Sheen, and currently because I really am not impressed with Ashton Kutcher. And also because the situations and humor really don't appeal to me. Rather than read a whole bunch into a simple typo and go off on an embarrassingly inappropriate tirade, why not just ask?
I don't have a "kill your tv" bumper sticker. I do watch some TV (although not a lot) but exactly what I want to see, with no commercials, when I want to see it. And if the shows I watch go away, (cue Aretha Franklin) I will survive. It's only TV. It's not, like, oxygen.
I think most people will survive without cable tv. Even the people who think they wouldn't
The cable TV model is broken. You know what, TV isn't that important. Screw them.
It'll probably have to crash and burn until something reasonable emerges. We've had direct-to-DVD for awhile, and we're starting to see direct-to-streaming-services. There may come a time when big expensive TV shows can't be produced anymore, but that model is broken too. Screw them also.
I suspect that things will transition to something new, and the studios and networks and content providers that refused to evolve will die. And that's fine. And if TV devolved to public access, that'd be fine to. Sometime last century we were trained to believe that TV is essential. If the entire broadcast/cable TV system collapsed with nothing to take its place (which I think is unlikely) at very least, we'd find out that TV really isn't essential after all.
So yeah, the last of the "tv generation" is paying the exorbitant salaries and production costs for three-and-a-half men. Serves them right.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully they'll work better than the LED stoplights that were put up around here a couple years ago. Everywhere you look you see LED arrays with 1/3 or more out or blinking madly.
I think LEDs are a very good idea, and I'm looking forward to the time it's cost effective at home to swap out these stupid CFLs, a technology that was (in my humble opinion) only ever a stopgap. But I wonder if current LED lamp technology is up to the extreme environments seen in outdoor applications? At least, after it's been value engineered and provided by the lowest bidder? Clearly, we're not getting stellar results with the current crop of stoplights.
Geeze, calm down.
I'm perfectly calm. The moment someone has to resort to that kind of patronizing insult, you know they've lost any argument.
I don't want anything of the kind.
If you aren't suggesting exactly what I said, why is it important whether the car shops record the odometer reading when they do service? It would be irrelevant unless they were expected to do something with it.
Oh, c'mon, you are arguing for the sake of arguing. From the message you partially quoted:
I said this as an argument *against* putting an additional device in your car. I suspect that the gov wants to put the device in your car because it gets people used to having a device characterizing your movements, and prepares people for the next step, which is location.
In other words, I was pointing out that the assertion that we needed an additional device in order to track our mileage is blatantly false. And that was all I was saying. Not everyone is trying to steal your precious bodily fluids.
I agree. It's not without precident -- your odo is checked every time your car is serviced, for instance.
So you would add a mandate that every vehicle service facility report automobile milage to the state every time someone comes in for any work? Do you include Pep Boys and Napa so you can catch people who do their own auto maintenance? Create a whole black market for auto parts, and a large number of people who refuse to take their cars in for regular service because it comes with a tax bill?
Geeze, calm down. I don't want anything of the kind. I want the government to live within our means and stay out of our business. Just pointing out that the odometer information is freely available. I said this as an argument *against* putting an additional device in your car. I suspect that the gov wants to put the device in your car because it gets people used to having a device characterizing your movements, and prepares people for the next step, which is location.
In fact, in Oregon, DEQ doesn't even sniff the exhaust in modern cars, they just plug into the computer.
I live in Oregon and DEQ has neither "sniffed" my exhaust nor plugged into my computer in all the time I owned it.
In either case, Oregon is a state with a very area farming industry, and land use laws that prohibit people from doing things with their farm land other than ... farm. You can't tax people for driving on their own farms, and if you won't let them do anything but farm you better not try. Just recording the odometer doesn't differentiate between taxable and nontaxable uses.
Ok ok ok you live in a rural area. I live in the suburbs. Any such system (which I still oppose) would be more likely to be implemented here than there, just as DEQ is required here in metropolitan areas and not in sparsely populated areas.
why we're trying to over-complicate this? Take the odometer reading at annual inspection and be done with it.
Will there be corner cases where someone gets screwed under this system? Sure.
Is it worth all the trouble, expense, and privacy violations of being 100% perfect when 80% is good enough? No. Not even a little.
I agree. It's not without precident -- your odo is checked every time your car is serviced, for instance.
In fact, in Oregon, DEQ doesn't even sniff the exhaust in modern cars, they just plug into the computer. I'd be surprised if the data available from that interface did not include the odometer information. Even if it didn't, the information is easy to come by.
But that doesn't train users to accept heightened surveillance. To do that, you have to add a new device to the car and allow the population to get used to its presence.
Maybe she was a lesbian???
Now that you mention, she did say that, but I said that's ok, how are things in Beirut?
I've been waiting since 1971 to use that joke.
"Public hair?" Tragic autocorrect error, or just trying to avoid a PG-13?
> You're suggesting we won't be using C, bubble sort algorithms, TCP/IP, Cisco routers, Unix-compatible OSes, 4+ years from now? In fact the bulk of those are over 40 years old, now, aren't they?
There was this new microprocessor class in my sophomore year. We studied the 8008. That's not a typo. The 8080 had (just) come out, but the curriculum takes awhile to get updated. Mind you, that actually did help in one job, where I programmed Z80 code for an embedded system. Not the instruction set, but the methods.
Even when C was common, many colleges still taught Pascal. We had one Stanford grad on the "war toys" team who insisted in using Pascal, (because it "was superior") even when all the rest of us had taught ourselves C.
I submit, though, that even today you'll tend to see newer, less familiar technologies in the field than you'll see in college. This comes from having different goals -- teach vs do. And of course, it does depend on the college. I maintained a MACH system in the early days on which a PHD was doing parallel computing research, and carnegie mellon definitely had a leg up on us. :-)
You are absolutely right about knowing the basis behind a technology as opposed to a witch doctor's understanding. It's the difference between being able to figure out the root cause of a new problem or only being able to fix what you have fixed in the past. But I've seen people with non-engineering degrees step up and learn what was necessary to do the job. It's not impossible.
I've seen examples of what you've said, also. The most trivial of which: "First we try uninstalling and reinstalling the application, then we try reinstalling the OS". "But it's a network error!" "Shut up and help me with these CDs."
> Seriously, are we not past this, I got to have hair to be a man thing yet?
True story: A friend and I have finished an afternoon of skiing and we're sitting in the bar afterwards enjoying irish coffee. Discussion drifts to this very subject, how much society appears to demand a full head of man-hair and how much money is spent on products trying to achieve this. We had both agreed that this was all silly and narcissistic and although we're both going a little bald we'd never do any of those things.
The waitress, young and pretty, comes by to refresh our drinks and lingers at the table since there's not many in the bar, and we ask her the question -- what does she think of society's insistence on thick hair?
She said it was ridiculous. The presence or absence of hair doesn't make you any more intelligent or resourceful and it's stupid that men would be judged in that fashion. She equated it to judging women on breast size, which she thought was equally ridiculous.
So, my friend asked if she'd go out with a bald guy?
She laughed. "A bald guy? Are you kidding? No." ...and walked away.
And so, we left our caps on...
The point being, there are people who are obsessed with their hair. My nephew started using Rogaine at 18, not because his hair was thinning (it wasn't) but because he thought it might some day and he wanted to get a head start on keeping it.
But even for those of us who don't care, some of us think we should do something about it, because the rest of the world *does* care.
And looks damn good with a bald head, I say: bring it on! The only way I will ever have hair again... is if I can have a JESUS-MANE of hair! Damn straight! I'll grow that out down to my shoulders! Hell yeah!!! Go long, or go bald--No in-betweens!!!!
How about long and bald? At the local hippy-fair I see a lot of heads that are bald on the top with a long fringe tied back in a rather stringy pony tail. I haven't decided whether it's a common fashion statement or part of the uniform.
Wake me when they've managed to grow chest hair.
This a perfect example of an article that makes a statement but does not make a conclusion. I guess the conclusion -- perhaps that we should be concerned that our IT professionals don't have scientific or technical degrees -- is implied?
> About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!
Panic!
I have an engineering degree, got a job making war toys for a military contractor, needed the computer to do my work, and found that nobody was administrating the computer. In self-defense, I learned how to administer Unix, how to do backups and housecleaning and diagnose problems, all so I could get my primary job done. After several years, when I got burned out on my primary job, (designing stuff for the military is less fun than it sounds) I found that I had learned enough to carry on with systems administration full time.
I strongly suspect that this happened to a lot of people, especially during the rise of the dot coms, and I also suspect that many of them were not originally in engineering. It happens -- people rise to the occasion, and find new career opportunities.
Why is this a problem? Is the admin going to see a countdown someday that says "answer this question that was on the 3rd trimester final in year two of an EE curriculum in 30 seconds or the computer melts into slag"? What you learn in college, other than techniques like ways to attack and solve a problem, are going to be horribly out of date anyway. What you accomplish in the workforce is more up to your commitment and talents, (and training you've sought post-college) than the letters after your name.
Conversely, having letters after your name does not mean you get a free ride (in most companies). You still have to show competency.
If I were in Iowa I'd worry less about the impact of climate change on the agriculture, which will take decades versus the immediate impact diverting massive amounts of ground water into ethanol production for fuel, which scientists estimate will take centuries to replenish. Stopping climate change today won't refill the underground aquafiers and without water, there are no farms, nor rural communities to farm them.
This. It's time to admit that burning our food for fuel was a bad idea.
In my experience in the US, every town larger than 300,000 or so has its own community college. That's in California and completely anecdotal, but right now I live in a more heavily populated area (silicon valley), and there are at least three colleges/universities within a 12 minute drive of my house. So 36 doesn't sound completely impossible to me.
As for 'scientists,' it doesn't say who they are in the link, but I'm guessing they count nearly anyone who is a professor, which isn't entirely unreasonable.
Isn't a "scientist" someone who actually practices science? One would think a professor in an unrelated field wouldn't count, nor would someone consumed with faculty paperwork who hadn't done research in decades.
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks
Yeah, hoping that said geeks will be so enamored of that little bit of mainstream acknowledgment that they'll completely miss the fact that it's just one long stream of the same old stereotypical crap we've been hearing from the mundanes since the 80s (and probably before, but my logfile doesn't go back that far).
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks
Yeah, hoping that said geeks will be so enamored of that little bit of mainstream acknowledgment that they'll completely miss the fact that it's just one long stream of the same old stereotypical crap we've been hearing from the mundanes since the 80s (and probably before, but my logfile doesn't go back that far).
Well, ok, but how is that different from any other category? As a dad, I have to confess I'm getting a little tired of the Phil Dunphy-like portrayal of goofy, ineffective dads. (Somewhat offset in that show by Jay Pritchett's quiet competency.) I'm sure there are housewives who aren't terribly impressed with I Love Lucy. If you can't laugh at yourself, you may be in for an unhappy life.
> "After reports of update problems including bricking of some devices,"
Hang on, aren't all Windows RT machines exactly the same hardware? How could there be differences between machines where an update would brick some and not others?
And the Windows 8 journey just keeps getting more entertaining.
For everything else, we have Netflix and Hulu.
Must be nice. Around here all Netflix and Hulu have is a "Content not available in your area" webpage.
Sounds like a justification for illegal downloads.
I watch as much YouTube as broadcast TV now. All amateur stuff too. TV execs must be shitting themselves.
I think they're living in denial. It can't be that they're this century's buggy whip; it must be piracy.
Be damned. So Franklin covered it?
Roger that!
That's called an antenna. Say it with me. "An-TEN-na." It magically sucks network TV signals right out of the air. For everything else, we have Netflix and Hulu. And you don't. Get off my lawn.
With antenna + Netflix + Hulu Plus, you still miss out on Monday Night Football. And without cable, you may end up stuck on slow DSL.
Yeah, I don't watch football, but my wife is a rabid fan. Somehow she manages to watch the games. Monday Night Football was on one of the local channels (I honestly don't know if it is this season -- it's something I don't follow) but I know she's been using a combination of off-air tv, the internet, and the occasional evening in a sports bar to keep up with her games.
We watch The Big Bang Theory religiously. (What geek doesn't?)
One with some self respect, who understands the difference in being laughed "at" and laughed "with".
Oh, c'mon, when Lorre has to explain the jokes in the vanity cards, with graphs, when the significance of t-shirts and props are lost on most non-geeks and never explained in-story, the show is clearly designed for (or at least giving a firm nod to) geeks. Did you also hate The IT Crowd? As a geek, you know that geekiness is a continuum, from the Asperger’s of Sheldon, (and to a certain extent Amy) the mostly-unconscious bromance of Raj and Howard, brilliant-but-mostly-normal people like Bernadette and Leonard. We've all met people like this if we've been in a technical or scientific field for any length of time. There are a lot of more negative characteristics of geeks that Lorre did not explore, probably because it wouldn't have been funny.
The technical and scientific aspects of the plots often mirror real events -- the ISS toilet, Spirit getting stuck in the sand, the Hadron Collider -- I mean c'mon, waitresses and gas station attendants aren't going to get any of that. All of that is for us. You're missing out.
This.
To which I might add, until you do at least these things, stop coming to my door monthly and trying to get me to switch from your competitor. I'm not *using* your competitor for anything except internet. I don't *care* how good a deal the bundle is. I don't *care* how many hundreds of channels you have. I don't need you. Take two steps back. Look up. That's called an antenna. Say it with me. "An-TEN-na." It magically sucks network TV signals right out of the air. For everything else, we have Netflix and Hulu. And you don't. Get off my lawn.
You are fully aware that the show is called "Two and a half men", but you deliberately got it "wrong" in the hopes that someone would, correct you, so that you could scoff and pretend you're above such "low pop culture".
You're not, though, and you never will be.
Wow, nice try. If you blindly guess at someone's motives, it has to be right some time, doesn't it? And those times must feel like magic.
I freely admit to being quite fond of some of Chuck Lorre's other creations. I got his vanity card coffee table book for Christmas last year. We watch The Big Bang Theory religiously. (What geek doesn't?) My daughter can sing the second verse of the theme song. (The full version is available on itunes.) However, I have never watched an episode of 2 1/2 men all the way through, first because I can't stand Charlie Sheen, and currently because I really am not impressed with Ashton Kutcher. And also because the situations and humor really don't appeal to me. Rather than read a whole bunch into a simple typo and go off on an embarrassingly inappropriate tirade, why not just ask?
I don't have a "kill your tv" bumper sticker. I do watch some TV (although not a lot) but exactly what I want to see, with no commercials, when I want to see it. And if the shows I watch go away, (cue Aretha Franklin) I will survive. It's only TV. It's not, like, oxygen.
I think most people will survive without cable tv. Even the people who think they wouldn't
The cable TV model is broken. You know what, TV isn't that important. Screw them.
It'll probably have to crash and burn until something reasonable emerges. We've had direct-to-DVD for awhile, and we're starting to see direct-to-streaming-services. There may come a time when big expensive TV shows can't be produced anymore, but that model is broken too. Screw them also.
I suspect that things will transition to something new, and the studios and networks and content providers that refused to evolve will die. And that's fine. And if TV devolved to public access, that'd be fine to. Sometime last century we were trained to believe that TV is essential. If the entire broadcast/cable TV system collapsed with nothing to take its place (which I think is unlikely) at very least, we'd find out that TV really isn't essential after all.
So yeah, the last of the "tv generation" is paying the exorbitant salaries and production costs for three-and-a-half men. Serves them right.