The problem isn't the quality of movies. There are just as many good movies (And bad movies) as there have always been.
The problem for the movie industry is that there are a lot more things for people to spend money on to entertain themselves. Look at the phenomonal growth of the video game industry - that money has to come from somewhere. Some of it comes from seeing fewer movies.
If you are at Microsoft, and you feel like you are being undercompensated, go work for someone else. Either you are right, and someone else will pay you more for your skills, or you are wrong, and you should have kept your job at Microsoft.
Adding the expense of a union to your compensation arrangement may increase your wages in the short term, but in the long term makes your company less competetive and evenually causes your job to move somewhere where your cost is not inflated by a union.
The American auto industry has unions. And those union employees have great jobs - the few of them who still have jobs at all.
It's a HUGE corporation. Are there instances where some thigns have happened that were not legal? In one of the largest corporations on the planet? Sure. And we do what we usually do when someone in some office in a corporation screws up: We fine them.
What I sympathize with Wal-Mart about is that it gets a bad rap as a "bad employer". Common metrics of Wal-Mart being a "bad employer" are that "X number of Wal-Mart employees don't have health insurance, the largest number of any employer in the state." Well no shit, when you employ 3 times as many people, you have a lot more people who don't have health insurance. It's a BS statistic. Or "Wal-Mart hires illegal workers". Right - because there arn't any local businesses who hire workers and pay them cash, immigrants or otherwise.
What people do NOT mention, however, is that people who work at WalMart have better pay and benefits than people who work at the mom-and-pop shops WalMart tends to put out of business. Do you think the people working for the local independent grocer get health insurance? The local hardware store? Extremely unlikely they get benefits or are paid more than marginally above the minimum wage.
WalMart pays its employees more than those employees would be paid doing similar jobs for competing retailers, and it sells products for less than competing retailers charge.
Walmart creates economic efficiency. It allows consumers to have more stuff for the same price. It allows some employees to buy more stuff than they could buy at other jobs. The only people who lose are the individual small store owners who can't compete with WalMart. Which is fine with me. Why should I pay more for goods simply because YOU want to own a store?
I'm not saying WalMart isn't a little evil. It's a corporation, so it's probably at least a little evil. But it's less evil than not having WalMart. When someone says "Don't shop at WalMart, it's evil!" what they're really saying is "Pay more to shop at stores that have even worse employee wages and benefits than WalMart does." or "Pay more to shop at stores that force their employees to support cushy jobs for union leaders."
There are over 50 DMVs. I'm sure they have better tings to do than sit someone down and come up with every word a police officer might use to indicate that a vehicle's tags are missing. And then still miss some, which at some point would get hit unintentionally.
It's a case of trying to proactively solve the problem is more work than retroactively solving it (from the perspective of the DMV, anyway).
If you think having to use Chinese characters to send email from America to China is bad, how would you feel if you had to use chinese characters to send email from America to America?
That's what we make the chinese do - use english characters to send email from China to China.
Even if the lawsuit is not successful, it still serves two purposes:
- It highlights the fact that the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps, and helps make more of the public aware of the problem and keep them thinking about the problem - It helps NYT sell papers with articles about how the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps.
We probably are not too concerned with the second, but the motivation provided to the paper by the second causes the paper to act in a manner that gives us the benefits of the first. Go Free Press.
ISPs or whoever will just have a.com and a.uscom or something like that so the end user, if they really want to, can still get to US domains. It's not any different than the phone system. If someone wants to call me, they would dial 555-1212. If someone in Germany called 555-1212 they'd probably get Hans in Munich. Is this because Germany is trying to ruin the US phone system? Of course not. It's just that MOST people dont need to call people across the planet, or even outside their immediate area, so people can share phone numbers. When you want to call someone with the same phone number as a local person who lives far, far away, you use the workaround: The area code, or the international calling code if you're going really far.
At worst, this will just drive another level of abstraction onto the system. And if you think about it, the internet already has this for MOST domains with country codes:.co.uk,.co.jp,.co.it, etc. Same function: Websites are compartmentalized by country, and if you want the same website name in a different country, you change the country TLD.
People need to realize that blank CDs don't just grow on trees. In order to sell a blank CD, you have to take a regular CD and remove the content. It doesn't make sense to remove content people want, like software, so most blank CDs are originally Britney Spears or N'Sync CDs with the songs taken off. The music industry gets the money because only the music industry produces CDs with content so poor that it's worth paying a little to remove it and resell as a blank.
We've been doing this for years at events. For some reason, every time we shut everything down and come back in the morning the network doesn't work and we have to redo the network setup on every computer. You also always need to have the computer with the cell modem on, and if you need to change which computer has the modem you have to go and mess with your network settings again. Or if the computer with the connection crashes (as Windows computers are prone to do) your connection goes down with it.
So it would be nice to have a separate, dedicated box that was designed specifically for serving out a wireless connection and not have to worry about that stuff.
Also useful if you don't have a laptop with a card slot, or even if you live in an urban area and want to use cellular service with your home PC. I could cancel my cable modem service if I lived in a covered area.
We have two unlimited cell plans (sometimes in two places at the same time) and run several computers for extened periods over the verizon modems on the Broadband access plan. Never been a problem in 2 years.
The only reason you can send a first-class letter in this country for $0.39 is because advertisers send lots of spam mail. The carrier has to talk the route whether there is the one letter from your grandma or the one letter from your grandma and the 8 credit card offers, so letting people pay to send you credit card offers lets those fixed costs get spread around so you can have cheap mail.
This would do the same thing for email. YOU still get free email. You can still send your friends free email. People who you know are going to send you email can still send you free email. And, people who don't know you can pay money to send you email, which you can open, or not.
It's teh same thing when you open your mailbox: You probably pull out a bundle of envelopes, pull out your bills and letters from grandma, and in most cases throw out the junk mail. It's the price you pay to have an inexpensive mail system.
The other thing this does is change the nature of spam. You will get less spam about penis pills, because the people who certify the mail won't certify mail advertising penis pills. Why? Because it's fraud. It's much the same with the US mail: Why don't you get junk mail advertising penis pills? Cause it's a federal offense to commit fraud through the mail system. so if you get something in the mail, you do a least have some level of assurance that it's not fraudulent. (If's not impossible, but far less likely than with, say, email.)
Free email may have been reasonable when it was ARPAnet. Totally free email probably is not reasonable when it's everybody-on-the-planet. It would be nice if it were free, but as with everything else, most things worth having cost money.
We all know that every single 18 year old, without exception, is an immature, boozing, sex-addict.
I've encountered more immature 18 year olds who are straight-edge sexaphobics than boozing sexaholics. There is a whole segment of our society devoted to making sure children are shielded from any sort of adult social behavior until at least after they graduate college. Are they safe until they finish college? I suppose. Are they prey after that? You betcha.
The pinnacle of an oppressive regime is the ability to sit behind closed doors, inside of protective walls, while shooting at the underclass demonstrators outside.
You're not substituting like things for each other in the statement. Jaywalking != possessing kiddie porn. Nobody has to be molested for you to jaywalk. In order for you to possess kiddie porn, some kid, at some point, had to have been abused. That's why having kiddie porn is as bad as molesting children.
It's kind of like being the get-away driver for a bank robbery where someone gets killed. Or possessing ivory. Possessing/trading ivory is illegal, even if you didn't kill the animal yourself, because part of the motivation for killing animals for ivory is the market for ivory. Part of the motivation for creating kiddie porn is the market for kiddie porn.
It's also unfair to compare the crimes in a practicality sense. If you make driving 10 MPH over the limit a crime, you'll end up busting people who speed compulsively, and people who speed accidentally. More importantly, you'll ruin the traffic system because people will be so paranoid about accidentally breaking the speed limit that everyone will drive 15 MPH under the limit.
There's no downside to giving someone 20 years for trafficking in kiddie porn. The only people you're going to get are the irrational sickos; the rational people won't have kiddie porn because they won't want it.
If you're going to trade in kiddie porn or rape children at all, it doesn't matter what the penalty is. You're a sicko, and sickos don't sit there and thing "Well, I'll do it as long as I won't get more than 10 years." People who commit sexual crimes against children are sickos, and the punishment is mainly about removing them from society.
We punish kiddie porn traders very hard because:
- It's a strong indicator the person is likely to commit a more serious crime later, so let's get them out of society for 20 years once we've figured out they're a sicko insted of waiting until they act on it - Kiilling the market for kiddie porn is just as important as killing the supply.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows how many laws restricting information we don't know about due to laws restricting information about laws restricting information?
The problem isn't the quality of movies. There are just as many good movies (And bad movies) as there have always been.
The problem for the movie industry is that there are a lot more things for people to spend money on to entertain themselves. Look at the phenomonal growth of the video game industry - that money has to come from somewhere. Some of it comes from seeing fewer movies.
If you are at Microsoft, and you feel like you are being undercompensated, go work for someone else. Either you are right, and someone else will pay you more for your skills, or you are wrong, and you should have kept your job at Microsoft.
Adding the expense of a union to your compensation arrangement may increase your wages in the short term, but in the long term makes your company less competetive and evenually causes your job to move somewhere where your cost is not inflated by a union.
The American auto industry has unions. And those union employees have great jobs - the few of them who still have jobs at all.
It's a HUGE corporation. Are there instances where some thigns have happened that were not legal? In one of the largest corporations on the planet? Sure. And we do what we usually do when someone in some office in a corporation screws up: We fine them.
What I sympathize with Wal-Mart about is that it gets a bad rap as a "bad employer". Common metrics of Wal-Mart being a "bad employer" are that "X number of Wal-Mart employees don't have health insurance, the largest number of any employer in the state." Well no shit, when you employ 3 times as many people, you have a lot more people who don't have health insurance. It's a BS statistic. Or "Wal-Mart hires illegal workers". Right - because there arn't any local businesses who hire workers and pay them cash, immigrants or otherwise.
What people do NOT mention, however, is that people who work at WalMart have better pay and benefits than people who work at the mom-and-pop shops WalMart tends to put out of business. Do you think the people working for the local independent grocer get health insurance? The local hardware store? Extremely unlikely they get benefits or are paid more than marginally above the minimum wage.
WalMart pays its employees more than those employees would be paid doing similar jobs for competing retailers, and it sells products for less than competing retailers charge.
Walmart creates economic efficiency. It allows consumers to have more stuff for the same price. It allows some employees to buy more stuff than they could buy at other jobs. The only people who lose are the individual small store owners who can't compete with WalMart. Which is fine with me. Why should I pay more for goods simply because YOU want to own a store?
I'm not saying WalMart isn't a little evil. It's a corporation, so it's probably at least a little evil. But it's less evil than not having WalMart. When someone says "Don't shop at WalMart, it's evil!" what they're really saying is "Pay more to shop at stores that have even worse employee wages and benefits than WalMart does." or "Pay more to shop at stores that force their employees to support cushy jobs for union leaders."
Clearly you've never seen how blind mice run.
Come on people, think!
Ow.
Obviously it would be much better to own You. than it would be to own Me.
There are over 50 DMVs. I'm sure they have better tings to do than sit someone down and come up with every word a police officer might use to indicate that a vehicle's tags are missing. And then still miss some, which at some point would get hit unintentionally.
It's a case of trying to proactively solve the problem is more work than retroactively solving it (from the perspective of the DMV, anyway).
If you think having to use Chinese characters to send email from America to China is bad, how would you feel if you had to use chinese characters to send email from America to America?
That's what we make the chinese do - use english characters to send email from China to China.
Even if the lawsuit is not successful, it still serves two purposes:
- It highlights the fact that the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps, and helps make more of the public aware of the problem and keep them thinking about the problem
- It helps NYT sell papers with articles about how the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps.
We probably are not too concerned with the second, but the motivation provided to the paper by the second causes the paper to act in a manner that gives us the benefits of the first. Go Free Press.
ISPs or whoever will just have a .com and a .uscom or something like that so the end user, if they really want to, can still get to US domains. It's not any different than the phone system. If someone wants to call me, they would dial 555-1212. If someone in Germany called 555-1212 they'd probably get Hans in Munich. Is this because Germany is trying to ruin the US phone system? Of course not. It's just that MOST people dont need to call people across the planet, or even outside their immediate area, so people can share phone numbers. When you want to call someone with the same phone number as a local person who lives far, far away, you use the workaround: The area code, or the international calling code if you're going really far.
.co.uk, .co.jp, .co.it, etc. Same function: Websites are compartmentalized by country, and if you want the same website name in a different country, you change the country TLD.
At worst, this will just drive another level of abstraction onto the system. And if you think about it, the internet already has this for MOST domains with country codes:
People need to realize that blank CDs don't just grow on trees. In order to sell a blank CD, you have to take a regular CD and remove the content. It doesn't make sense to remove content people want, like software, so most blank CDs are originally Britney Spears or N'Sync CDs with the songs taken off. The music industry gets the money because only the music industry produces CDs with content so poor that it's worth paying a little to remove it and resell as a blank.
We've been doing this for years at events. For some reason, every time we shut everything down and come back in the morning the network doesn't work and we have to redo the network setup on every computer. You also always need to have the computer with the cell modem on, and if you need to change which computer has the modem you have to go and mess with your network settings again. Or if the computer with the connection crashes (as Windows computers are prone to do) your connection goes down with it.
So it would be nice to have a separate, dedicated box that was designed specifically for serving out a wireless connection and not have to worry about that stuff.
Also useful if you don't have a laptop with a card slot, or even if you live in an urban area and want to use cellular service with your home PC. I could cancel my cable modem service if I lived in a covered area.
We have two unlimited cell plans (sometimes in two places at the same time) and run several computers for extened periods over the verizon modems on the Broadband access plan. Never been a problem in 2 years.
Pinochet used to have this deal for journalists too - if you wrote an article that fairly reviewed the Chilean government, he wouldn't kill you.
Devices that eliminate the horrible computing UI that just perform simple tasks are what the masses need.
You must be refering to nigga technology.
The only reason you can send a first-class letter in this country for $0.39 is because advertisers send lots of spam mail. The carrier has to talk the route whether there is the one letter from your grandma or the one letter from your grandma and the 8 credit card offers, so letting people pay to send you credit card offers lets those fixed costs get spread around so you can have cheap mail.
This would do the same thing for email. YOU still get free email. You can still send your friends free email. People who you know are going to send you email can still send you free email. And, people who don't know you can pay money to send you email, which you can open, or not.
It's teh same thing when you open your mailbox: You probably pull out a bundle of envelopes, pull out your bills and letters from grandma, and in most cases throw out the junk mail. It's the price you pay to have an inexpensive mail system.
The other thing this does is change the nature of spam. You will get less spam about penis pills, because the people who certify the mail won't certify mail advertising penis pills. Why? Because it's fraud. It's much the same with the US mail: Why don't you get junk mail advertising penis pills? Cause it's a federal offense to commit fraud through the mail system. so if you get something in the mail, you do a least have some level of assurance that it's not fraudulent. (If's not impossible, but far less likely than with, say, email.)
Free email may have been reasonable when it was ARPAnet. Totally free email probably is not reasonable when it's everybody-on-the-planet. It would be nice if it were free, but as with everything else, most things worth having cost money.
We all know that every single 18 year old, without exception, is an immature, boozing, sex-addict.
I've encountered more immature 18 year olds who are straight-edge sexaphobics than boozing sexaholics. There is a whole segment of our society devoted to making sure children are shielded from any sort of adult social behavior until at least after they graduate college. Are they safe until they finish college? I suppose. Are they prey after that? You betcha.
The pinnacle of an oppressive regime is the ability to sit behind closed doors, inside of protective walls, while shooting at the underclass demonstrators outside.
You're not substituting like things for each other in the statement. Jaywalking != possessing kiddie porn. Nobody has to be molested for you to jaywalk. In order for you to possess kiddie porn, some kid, at some point, had to have been abused. That's why having kiddie porn is as bad as molesting children.
It's kind of like being the get-away driver for a bank robbery where someone gets killed. Or possessing ivory. Possessing/trading ivory is illegal, even if you didn't kill the animal yourself, because part of the motivation for killing animals for ivory is the market for ivory. Part of the motivation for creating kiddie porn is the market for kiddie porn.
It's also unfair to compare the crimes in a practicality sense. If you make driving 10 MPH over the limit a crime, you'll end up busting people who speed compulsively, and people who speed accidentally. More importantly, you'll ruin the traffic system because people will be so paranoid about accidentally breaking the speed limit that everyone will drive 15 MPH under the limit.
There's no downside to giving someone 20 years for trafficking in kiddie porn. The only people you're going to get are the irrational sickos; the rational people won't have kiddie porn because they won't want it.
If you're going to trade in kiddie porn or rape children at all, it doesn't matter what the penalty is. You're a sicko, and sickos don't sit there and thing "Well, I'll do it as long as I won't get more than 10 years." People who commit sexual crimes against children are sickos, and the punishment is mainly about removing them from society.
We punish kiddie porn traders very hard because:
- It's a strong indicator the person is likely to commit a more serious crime later, so let's get them out of society for 20 years once we've figured out they're a sicko insted of waiting until they act on it
- Kiilling the market for kiddie porn is just as important as killing the supply.
I left a book next to the copier yesterday.
You'll need a gown, a towel, a satchel, and a pile of junk mail.
And, of course, an AQ dispenser.
Do I just not watch enough TV or do these people watch WAY to much?
They're probably just married.
Maybe it's humans' innate tendency towards socializing with people they can understand.
The only time I want to hang around with someone who I don't share a language with is if they've got nice boobs.
Now you're probably going to call me a sexist or something.