My sweetie and I really like watching movies at the theatre. When you fully consider the adventure that awaits, the measly $20-25 bucks you shell out (more if you pay online) to take you and your sweetie out to the movies these days is a real bargain.
The adventure begins with that long rope line at the door. Its fun to get pressed in with complete strangers and weave your way in and out like cattle to the slaughter working your way up to the pimply-faced kid with the glazed look and speech impediment. Usually I just smile a lot, sign the little ticket and laugh at all their little hand gestures. You know they're so helpful and friendly.
When you make it past the counter you get another treat as you stand in the line to buy your munchies. For me its always difficult to decide between the little $10 bag of popcorn or the $5 dollar bag of peanut M&M's. Either way I usually wash it down with a $5 dollar cup of sicky-syrupy Coca-Cola. My sweetie likes getting the bottled water for $4 dollars. She says "its decadent and thrilling to pay so much." Frankly, I don't know how they're able to do it without going out of business-- if you went anywhere else you'd have to pay at least $6.50 for it all, maybe less.
When we finally get our tickets and munchies though, that's when the real fun begins-- negotiating the lobby. Its quite a trick to make it to the other side without getting jostled or run-over by all of the other folks. On Fridays and Saturday nights they have all the really experienced players out on the floor who know all the moves. It can be quite a challenge, but the real rush is when you get to that "Ticket-Taker" boss. Boy that guy is tough. He's got his mumbling down to an art. That's where so many players get tripped-up, trying to figure out if he said five doors down on the left or nine doors down on the right.
Either way you can get plenty of good exercise walking down that enormous hallway that just goes on forever and ever and ever. One time this old couple came up to us and asked if we knew the way out. They said they'd gotten lost in there and had been wandering around for a long time. Ha ha ha. We knew that was a trick so we sent them down to the mid-level mezzanine! My sweetie and I got a good laugh out of that one.
Your first break comes when you finally find your theatre and make your way up the steps, past those cans they put out for target practice, over the couple inevitably making-out in the third row, to your seats. And the experience is always heightened, for me at least, by the forty-five minutes of real-estate slides and mind-numbing commercials. They do such a good job of getting you into the mood to watch the show. I especially like the ones that advertise all those fantastic programs you could have watched if you'd stayed home.
I don't know who thought it up, but kudos to whomever it is that always manages to put the flatulent fat guy in front of us and the ceaselessly talking couple behind us. They're always an excellent choice to distract us from the row of wiggly, whining kids with the constant coughs two rows up. How exciting it is to sit there and experience the delightfully aromatic and aurally invigorating atmosphere while we wait and wonder what mysterious illness we'll surely develop this week. My sweetie and I love the mystery-- last time it was Malaria. This time my sweetie is hoping for Denge Fever while I'm holding out for Whooping Cough.
Then comes the best part, my favorite part of the whole experience, when they turn down the lights and switch from the really sharp projector showing the slides and commercials to the other projector they have for the movie-- the one with the soft, fuzzy look that makes you have to squint to get it into focus. And they lower down the sound too, which is always a relief. You know right before, while they're still running the commercials its always just blaring. Its good that they can turn it down for the show. We wouldn't want to miss any of those witty comments from the au
Didn't need Ebert for that, heck I've been saying that for years!
WHY I LIKE THE MOVIES
My sweetie and I really like watching movies at the theatre. When you fully consider the adventure that awaits, the measly $20-25 bucks you shell out (more if you pay online) to take you and your sweetie out to the movies these days is a real bargain.
The adventure begins with that long rope line at the door. Its fun to get pressed in with complete strangers and weave your way in and out like cattle to the slaughter working your way up to the pimply-faced kid with the glazed look and speech impediment. Usually I just smile a lot, sign the little ticket and laugh at all their little hand gestures. You know they're so helpful and friendly.
When you make it past the counter you get another treat as you stand in the line to buy your munchies. For me its always difficult to decide between the little $10 bag of popcorn or the $5 dollar bag of peanut M&M's. Either way I usually wash it down with a $5 dollar cup of sicky-syrupy Coca-Cola. My sweetie likes getting the bottled water for $4 dollars. She says "its decadent and thrilling to pay so much." Frankly, I don't know how they're able to do it without going out of business-- if you went anywhere else you'd have to pay at least $6.50, maybe less.
When we finally get our tickets and munchies though, that's when the real fun begins-- negotiating the lobby. Its quite a trick to make it to the other side without getting jostled or run-over by all of the other folks. On Fridays and Saturday nights they have all the really experienced players out on the floor who know all the moves. It can be quite a challenge, but the real rush is when you get to that "Ticket-Taker" boss. Boy that guy is tough. He's got his mumbling down to an art. That's where so many players get tripped-up, trying to figure out if he said five doors down on the left or nine doors down on the right.
Either way you can get plenty of good exercise walking down that enormous hallway that just goes on forever and ever and ever. One time this old couple came up to us and asked if we knew the way out. They said they'd gotten lost in there and had been wandering around for a long time. Ha ha ha. We knew that was a trick so we sent them down to the mid-level mezzanine! My sweetie and I got a good laugh out of that one.
Your first break comes when you finally find your theatre and make your way up the steps, past those cans they put out for target practice, over the couple inevitably making-out in the third row, to your seats. And the experience is always heightened, for me at least, by the forty-five minutes of real-estate slides and mind-numbing commercials. They do such a good job of getting you into the mood to watch the show. I especially like the ones that advertise all those fantastic programs you could have watched if you'd stayed home.
I don't know who thought it up, but kudos to whomever it is that always manages to put the flatulent fat guy in front of us and the ceaselessly talking couple behind us. They're always an excellent choice to distract us from the row of wiggly, whining kids with the constant coughs two rows up. How exciting it is to sit there and experience the delightfully aromatic and aurally invigorating atmosphere while we wait and wonder what mysterious illness we'll surely develop this week. My sweetie and I love the mystery-- last time it was Malaria. This time my sweetie is hoping for Denge Fever while I'm holding out for Whooping Cough.
Then comes the best part-- my favorite part-- of the whole experience when they turn down the lights and switch from the really sharp projector showing the slides and commercials to the other projector they have for the movie-- the one with the soft, fuzzy look that makes you have to squint to get it into focus. And they lower down the sound too, which is always a relief. You know right before, while they're still running the commercials its always just blaring. Its good that they can turn it down for the show. W
I should say not! There's actually a lot more that goes into making a law. First you have to buy yourself a politician. For some laws you might need to buy several. Then you'll need to write the text for your new law and give it to your politician's staff so they can get it ready for passage. Then you'll need to tell your politician which way to vote-- it might help to pin a note to their shirt and make arrangements for transportation to and from the voting place as politicians are notoriously useless without proper handling.
So what else is new. Congress sucks. They kowtow to their corporate masters and media industry bosses and like good lackeys, only do what they're told. In fact, they do such a good job, I find myself often wishing we could find some folks like that who could do the same for the rest of us...
In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
As long as you're making the choice for yourself that's fine. But when your choice significantly raises the probability that you could be taking out other people who *didn't* make that same choice, I'd say you have overstepped your right. Obviously there is always some elevation of risk to other persons in nearly any activity. But I'd wager that you would have a problem if I took my gun and just started randomly shooting bullets in whatever direction the gun happens to be pointed. Sure, one of them might hit me and that'd be my end. But hey, since I'm holding the gun by the handle and pulling the trigger, the odds are pretty good that they're *not* going to hit me, so according to your criteria, this must be a suitable activity. No matter that I'm definitely upping the risk to anybody else who happens to be around, for quite some distance.
So how is that different from the people who will only see if "at a friend's house" or some such? Surely even in the days before the Internet there would be some percentage of "sales lost" due to being able to see / experience the product without paying for it-- and yet, in a LEGAL manner.
Sure there are also people who would take or steal it too just because they can-- but there are multiple ways that the product can be LEGALLY used without paying for it.
To navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
And to think, that's after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the subsequent planned rebuilding strategies to improve it! I'd had to think what it was like before that!
Actually it was about the same, except instead of spaghetti, they only had vermicelli.
So now how can we expand this marvelous service to include pollsters, banks, realtors, obnoxious sales people, wall street brokers, anybody with a "good deal", scammers and my cousin Freddie who just can't figure out that some people actually *sleep* at night?
What *I* wanna know is how they managed to make Danny De-Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger look so much alike in that movie "Twins" ??? The resemblance was so real it was spooky!
This technique wouldn't work on me. I answer emails according to how much time the answer is likely to take. If it's going to take a while, I always put it off until later. If it's a one word or couple of words answer, chances are good you'll get a response right away.
Just out of curiosity, how would such a system deal with a slow-moving passenger, or a passenger who drops their (whatever) and is struggling to pick it up? Sooner or later, under this marvelous system, the train and the tram-dock, would have to separate or else there's going to be a problem. Will the train be able to stop in time? What if mischievous people decide to utilize that problem to cause service delays or interruptions? A variation on the old crowd-sourced denial-of-service attack...
No, it's just that everything these days is patented, copyrighted, intellectually-protected and DMCA'd with legions of lawyers, patent trolls and marketing leeches, that hardly anybody in their right innovative mind wants to swim in such submarine shark infested waters. If Alexander Graham Bell or Charles Babbage were alive today, they'd both have been eaten by preemptive litigation and opportunistic legislation long before they'd have had a chance to innovate. In fact, about the only person I can think of who might have been stood a chance, even today, would be Nikola Tesla, as nobody could be really certain as to whether or not he was able to retaliate with long-distance death-ray beams...
Slashdot Mirror
You can do whatever you want to almost anything you want and people will suck it up and take it.
But DON"T fuck with the Net.
In the end, it's all the same. We either die of discorporation or asphyxiation.
Are they supposed to be watching US or the TSA thugs?
WHY I LIKE THE MOVIES
My sweetie and I really like watching movies at the theatre. When you fully consider the adventure that awaits, the measly $20-25 bucks you shell out (more if you pay online) to take you and your sweetie out to the movies these days is a real bargain.
The adventure begins with that long rope line at the door. Its fun to get pressed in with complete strangers and weave your way in and out like cattle to the slaughter working your way up to the pimply-faced kid with the glazed look and speech impediment. Usually I just smile a lot, sign the little ticket and laugh at all their little hand gestures. You know they're so helpful and friendly.
When you make it past the counter you get another treat as you stand in the line to buy your munchies. For me its always difficult to decide between the little $10 bag of popcorn or the $5 dollar bag of peanut M&M's. Either way I usually wash it down with a $5 dollar cup of sicky-syrupy Coca-Cola. My sweetie likes getting the bottled water for $4 dollars. She says "its decadent and thrilling to pay so much." Frankly, I don't know how they're able to do it without going out of business-- if you went anywhere else you'd have to pay at least $6.50 for it all, maybe less.
When we finally get our tickets and munchies though, that's when the real fun begins-- negotiating the lobby. Its quite a trick to make it to the other side without getting jostled or run-over by all of the other folks. On Fridays and Saturday nights they have all the really experienced players out on the floor who know all the moves. It can be quite a challenge, but the real rush is when you get to that "Ticket-Taker" boss. Boy that guy is tough. He's got his mumbling down to an art. That's where so many players get tripped-up, trying to figure out if he said five doors down on the left or nine doors down on the right.
Either way you can get plenty of good exercise walking down that enormous hallway that just goes on forever and ever and ever. One time this old couple came up to us and asked if we knew the way out. They said they'd gotten lost in there and had been wandering around for a long time. Ha ha ha. We knew that was a trick so we sent them down to the mid-level mezzanine! My sweetie and I got a good laugh out of that one.
Your first break comes when you finally find your theatre and make your way up the steps, past those cans they put out for target practice, over the couple inevitably making-out in the third row, to your seats. And the experience is always heightened, for me at least, by the forty-five minutes of real-estate slides and mind-numbing commercials. They do such a good job of getting you into the mood to watch the show. I especially like the ones that advertise all those fantastic programs you could have watched if you'd stayed home.
I don't know who thought it up, but kudos to whomever it is that always manages to put the flatulent fat guy in front of us and the ceaselessly talking couple behind us. They're always an excellent choice to distract us from the row of wiggly, whining kids with the constant coughs two rows up. How exciting it is to sit there and experience the delightfully aromatic and aurally invigorating atmosphere while we wait and wonder what mysterious illness we'll surely develop this week. My sweetie and I love the mystery-- last time it was Malaria. This time my sweetie is hoping for Denge Fever while I'm holding out for Whooping Cough.
Then comes the best part, my favorite part of the whole experience, when they turn down the lights and switch from the really sharp projector showing the slides and commercials to the other projector they have for the movie-- the one with the soft, fuzzy look that makes you have to squint to get it into focus. And they lower down the sound too, which is always a relief. You know right before, while they're still running the commercials its always just blaring. Its good that they can turn it down for the show. We wouldn't want to miss any of those witty comments from the au
Didn't need Ebert for that, heck I've been saying that for years!
WHY I LIKE THE MOVIES
My sweetie and I really like watching movies at the theatre. When you fully consider the adventure that awaits, the measly $20-25 bucks you shell out (more if you pay online) to take you and your sweetie out to the movies these days is a real bargain.
The adventure begins with that long rope line at the door. Its fun to get pressed in with complete strangers and weave your way in and out like cattle to the slaughter working your way up to the pimply-faced kid with the glazed look and speech impediment. Usually I just smile a lot, sign the little ticket and laugh at all their little hand gestures. You know they're so helpful and friendly.
When you make it past the counter you get another treat as you stand in the line to buy your munchies. For me its always difficult to decide between the little $10 bag of popcorn or the $5 dollar bag of peanut M&M's. Either way I usually wash it down with a $5 dollar cup of sicky-syrupy Coca-Cola. My sweetie likes getting the bottled water for $4 dollars. She says "its decadent and thrilling to pay so much." Frankly, I don't know how they're able to do it without going out of business-- if you went anywhere else you'd have to pay at least $6.50, maybe less.
When we finally get our tickets and munchies though, that's when the real fun begins-- negotiating the lobby. Its quite a trick to make it to the other side without getting jostled or run-over by all of the other folks. On Fridays and Saturday nights they have all the really experienced players out on the floor who know all the moves. It can be quite a challenge, but the real rush is when you get to that "Ticket-Taker" boss. Boy that guy is tough. He's got his mumbling down to an art. That's where so many players get tripped-up, trying to figure out if he said five doors down on the left or nine doors down on the right.
Either way you can get plenty of good exercise walking down that enormous hallway that just goes on forever and ever and ever. One time this old couple came up to us and asked if we knew the way out. They said they'd gotten lost in there and had been wandering around for a long time. Ha ha ha. We knew that was a trick so we sent them down to the mid-level mezzanine! My sweetie and I got a good laugh out of that one.
Your first break comes when you finally find your theatre and make your way up the steps, past those cans they put out for target practice, over the couple inevitably making-out in the third row, to your seats. And the experience is always heightened, for me at least, by the forty-five minutes of real-estate slides and mind-numbing commercials. They do such a good job of getting you into the mood to watch the show. I especially like the ones that advertise all those fantastic programs you could have watched if you'd stayed home.
I don't know who thought it up, but kudos to whomever it is that always manages to put the flatulent fat guy in front of us and the ceaselessly talking couple behind us. They're always an excellent choice to distract us from the row of wiggly, whining kids with the constant coughs two rows up. How exciting it is to sit there and experience the delightfully aromatic and aurally invigorating atmosphere while we wait and wonder what mysterious illness we'll surely develop this week. My sweetie and I love the mystery-- last time it was Malaria. This time my sweetie is hoping for Denge Fever while I'm holding out for Whooping Cough.
Then comes the best part-- my favorite part-- of the whole experience when they turn down the lights and switch from the really sharp projector showing the slides and commercials to the other projector they have for the movie-- the one with the soft, fuzzy look that makes you have to squint to get it into focus. And they lower down the sound too, which is always a relief. You know right before, while they're still running the commercials its always just blaring. Its good that they can turn it down for the show. W
I wonder if that includes figuring out whether or not it was purchased from the bargain bin at Target... ??
Raping, looting, pillaging and being general all-around scoundrels is one thing, but now they're fucking with access to the Internet!
I reckon the Taliban's days are finally numbered....
Companies don't get to arbitrarily make laws.
I should say not! There's actually a lot more that goes into making a law. First you have to buy yourself a politician. For some laws you might need to buy several. Then you'll need to write the text for your new law and give it to your politician's staff so they can get it ready for passage. Then you'll need to tell your politician which way to vote-- it might help to pin a note to their shirt and make arrangements for transportation to and from the voting place as politicians are notoriously useless without proper handling.
Apple is becoming an evil empire!
Becoming ??
So what else is new. Congress sucks. They kowtow to their corporate masters and media industry bosses and like good lackeys, only do what they're told. In fact, they do such a good job, I find myself often wishing we could find some folks like that who could do the same for the rest of us...
In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
As long as you're making the choice for yourself that's fine. But when your choice significantly raises the probability that you could be taking out other people who *didn't* make that same choice, I'd say you have overstepped your right. Obviously there is always some elevation of risk to other persons in nearly any activity. But I'd wager that you would have a problem if I took my gun and just started randomly shooting bullets in whatever direction the gun happens to be pointed. Sure, one of them might hit me and that'd be my end. But hey, since I'm holding the gun by the handle and pulling the trigger, the odds are pretty good that they're *not* going to hit me, so according to your criteria, this must be a suitable activity. No matter that I'm definitely upping the risk to anybody else who happens to be around, for quite some distance.
So how is that different from the people who will only see if "at a friend's house" or some such? Surely even in the days before the Internet there would be some percentage of "sales lost" due to being able to see / experience the product without paying for it-- and yet, in a LEGAL manner.
Sure there are also people who would take or steal it too just because they can-- but there are multiple ways that the product can be LEGALLY used without paying for it.
They need them to fly their top-secret stealth drones.
Sony refused to let them load Linux and look what happened in Iran...
I'm just sayin...
His point is perfectly valid. Wikipedia is, for example, all about version control. Somebody defaces a page? Revert.
There is a clear difference here. Wikipedia tells you that's the deal up front. You don't have to file a foia request to find out.
And to think, that's after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the subsequent planned rebuilding strategies to improve it! I'd had to think what it was like before that!
Actually it was about the same, except instead of spaghetti, they only had vermicelli.
So now how can we expand this marvelous service to include pollsters, banks, realtors, obnoxious sales people, wall street brokers, anybody with a "good deal", scammers and my cousin Freddie who just can't figure out that some people actually *sleep* at night?
What *I* wanna know is how they managed to make Danny De-Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger look so much alike in that movie "Twins" ??? The resemblance was so real it was spooky!
How about a bill to get Congress off their big fat asses to actually DO something useful for American PEOPLE for a change.
This technique wouldn't work on me. I answer emails according to how much time the answer is likely to take. If it's going to take a while, I always put it off until later. If it's a one word or couple of words answer, chances are good you'll get a response right away.
Just out of curiosity, how would such a system deal with a slow-moving passenger, or a passenger who drops their (whatever) and is struggling to pick it up? Sooner or later, under this marvelous system, the train and the tram-dock, would have to separate or else there's going to be a problem. Will the train be able to stop in time? What if mischievous people decide to utilize that problem to cause service delays or interruptions? A variation on the old crowd-sourced denial-of-service attack...
And, you bought it.
Yeah, you're right, we're all doomed.
"Is American Innovation Losing Its Shine?"
No, it's just that everything these days is patented, copyrighted, intellectually-protected and DMCA'd with legions of lawyers, patent trolls and marketing leeches, that hardly anybody in their right innovative mind wants to swim in such submarine shark infested waters. If Alexander Graham Bell or Charles Babbage were alive today, they'd both have been eaten by preemptive litigation and opportunistic legislation long before they'd have had a chance to innovate. In fact, about the only person I can think of who might have been stood a chance, even today, would be Nikola Tesla, as nobody could be really certain as to whether or not he was able to retaliate with long-distance death-ray beams...
It could simply be that they got their guy back quietly and thus the threat is no longer required.
The thing they DIDN'T point out, of course, is that you'll need TWO (or more) hands. You can't do all that bending and twisting with one hand.