For the most part, my experiences with Tech Support have been very positive. Being slightly, addled I tend to conjure up all sorts of malfunctions within my computer and various other devices and guidance from various points in the tech set.
As for my experience with some other end users (somehow my lack of real skillset is still better than most people's) has led me to believe that this topic is absolutely true. I've had people go on for ten minutes about how their scanner wouldn't work even though they had plugged it in, and they kept getting an error message (saying that the driver wasn't installed) and had no idea what to do.
Also, if this ignorance wasn't a fact. Then a lot of those internet accelerator or, memory leak preventer pop-ups that you see cruising about wouldn't be that effective. After all, to the lay user they look like system messages (because they aren't really colorful advertisements, they look like highly technical things telling them that their computer is leaking memory like a sieve).[end topic on tangent]
You could always pull a frame up an have it look like a group of students pulled of the exploit. Or find someone that you really don't like, who doesn't like you, drop down your grades and accuse them of tampering with them.
In all seriousness we live in such a paranoid culture that there isn't really a right answer that anyone can give you. It's nice to see that someone out in America has a conscience but my paranoid mind is telling me that if a student came over and told me that there were exploits in the software, I would begin thinking that he might have done something about it. You might just try an anonymous note to the people in charge of the program.
You know, the Feds probably wouldn't have cared up until SCO got uppity and wants to charge them even more money. I'm sensing some accounting improprieties might show up in their future.
Don't mess with the SEC, they'll do things to you that'll make the FBI look like girl scouts.
Well, the whole point of Spam is to send out your little advert (or whatever) to as many people as humanly (well, as electronically) possible. Now, taking the number of stupid people there are in the world (this is a very high number, especially in these here United States, no offense but it's true). Then cross reference that with how many people have the internet (tens, perhaps hundreds of millions in the US alone).
This brings us to one conclusion, 6,000 seems awfully low.
In all reality, spam is the carpet bombing of advertising. Sure it causes a lot of collateral damage, but it gets your objective cleared without any need for 'market research' or 'targeted marketing'.
A phone call to tech support...
on
In-Flight Reboot?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Pilot: (Dialing microsoft support services while cruising at mach 50,000) Come on, pick up, pick up.
Pre-recorder message: We're sorry, all circuitys are busy now. Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line until an operator is availible.
Pilot: (Over enemy territory and ready to drop payload, toggling switches like a madman) Damnit, pick up.
Tech Support Person: Hi, This is Candice, how are you today.
Pilot: (Engine failure light flashing) Can you can the chatter, I'm cruising over Eastern Kreblenkistan about to die at Mach 40,000.
Candice: There's no need to be rude sir. First I'll need to confirm that you're not using a pirated copy of our software, so will you please refer to the key sticker located on your computer.
Pilot: (Frustrated, going down) I can't do that, I'm sort of in a plane right now, can you just tell me how to reboot the thing.
Candice: I'm sorry sir, but we can't be responsible for the failures of pirated software... (transmission ends, big fiery explosion)
Simply letting federal agencies run around and spy on people simply because they can doesn't seem to be the best idea for a country based on freedom and all of that jazz. Accountability is what keeps things from going bad to worse, look at dictatorships all over the planet, when people aren't held accountable for their actions they go to extremes.
Americans or not, I don't fel very secure when someone can peer into any old asset of my life without asking my permission or without being checked in some fashion. I for one, feel more threatened by the current way the administration is going in regards to policy (foreign, fiscal, energy, environmental, copyright, and pretty everything else) than I do by any terrorist threat (then again, like 90% of americans I don't live in a threatened area, I likve in the 'burbs, well, the sort of burbs).
The constitutuion claims a right to life, liberty and property, not hapiness as it is commonly touted. That was found in the declaration of independence and then changed when the US drafted the constitution (after the articles of confederation managed to suck so much).
A little cruise around the Doctor Who site gives a vague inkling of what might be up with that http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/index.shtml There isn't much other information though and most references to it are kind of buried, if I weren't so thoroughly lazy I would do a more thorough investigation.
But come on, it's Richard E. Grant.
The only benefit I can see for constant streaming of photos for the media is the ability of a photographer's editor to be able to provide immediate input as to what the page or paper needs in a given situation. The second benefit is that a reporter does not have to go back to the office to download the picture so they can then go on to the next assignment right away (or just go right home to bed).
My issue with this is more for internet news/whatever sources. If you are getting a constant stream of pictures you can do one of two things, the first is to hold onto them and put them up later (which sort of eliminates the point of getting a constant stream of photos), the second is to get someone to move the pictures to a page and try to put them into some form of context.
Say that you're a sports web-site and your reporter is covering a tiddlewinks competition on main street. Normally, you'd wait until the end of the event to post scores and a summary of some kind. With streaming photos, you have to have someone telling you about what's going on or people are just going to look at the photos and go "What the heck?". Then again, no one really cares about the tiddlywinks game anyhow.
A lot of it is willpower and just sitting down and crunching out whatever it is that you have to do. I'm not a coder or a programmer, the only real work that I do inside of the home; I however do attempt to generate content for my website (the poor excuse for a site that it is); write AD&D advenutres for several area conventions; and short stories. This is of course something that everyone else claims to do also, but most people that I've met who say that they do some writing turn out to be people who don't really do much of anything. No offense meant to anyone.
Scheduling has helped me an awful lot in my work, settin ggoals is also the best way to do anything. If you're doing something like writing, or coding, or whatever else you might be doing on the comuter. See how far you can get, just sit down for as long as you can hold yourself in front of your monitor and crack away. Once your done, you go back and see the amount that you've managed to push out.
Use that amount as a goal or a guideline, say you were writing and you nailed down about 200 words before you went stir crazy. Just say to yourself that you'll write 200 or so words a day, and you'll get there.
Of course if you have deadlines to meet than that really gets thrown out the window. It's mostly a matter of self-discipline and scheduling. I think the first respondent metnioned physical activity, and that's something that is absolutely great. Unwind, relax a bit and then get to work, even if you do it in like fifteen minute bursts.
Again, as for deadlines, I really can't help because I seem to just magically get motivated the night before when those come around.
Thanks for the clarifications, it was all broadly speaking of course though. Of course the problem is endemic to the medium, really a single band would be hard pressed to distribute their music in an anolog (well, solid non-electrical sort of thing) form. Which why the internet is sort of ideal, but then again, people are clamoring for free content and not subscription services, and if you want to sell something then you'll want people to be exposed to it or have a name behind you.
It's a great cycle that's been built up by the recording industry, a real give and take relationship that ends up being rather one-sided.
The world needs some real villains, well real Bond style villains. A gaint space based laser, not one of those stupid Anti-Missile LASRERs, but a large scale anit-structural LASER in geosyncrhonis orbit with favroite slashdot targets, like RIAA headquarters, Redmond Washington, or other places that cannot be mentioned because of NSA watchdogs and software that likes to catalogue such references.
Copyright law is designed so that the originators of creative works can derive compensation from those works, right? No, the recording industry likes to take 90% of artist proceeds and stuff it into some hole and now wants to put a greater lean onto touring revenue.
The RIAA is of course whining about how it isn't gettin gits fair share of cash for these songs that are being downloaded. Now, the RIAA for the most part, has nothing to do with the creative process, and those corporate bands/singers that are puppets, can't really be called creative (say hi Justin) by any real stretch.
In essence, by swapping files we take money away from the RIAA (money that it really didn't deserve to have in the first place, but that's just an editorial aside), and then the RIAA takes away more money from the artists.
Here's a simple solution, let the artists sue the RIAA for getting continually raped and having this crusade carried out in their name. I'm sure that any number of artists down on their luck would like their fifty million dollars from their platinum album back from the RIAA. They are the originators of the creative content and are thus in charge of the copyright (unless they were stupid with their contracts), it should be the decision of the artist who gets their money and who gets to be compensated for money lost from file downloading.
Hopefully the artists aren't totally stupid and just keep the suits to the RIAA, because suing their fans would be very much counterproductive (after all, would you buy a band's cd if they were in the middle of litigation with you). Just a thought.
A lot of the time they're doing dramatic readings on teh stuff they play on the NPR affiliate int eh states, but it's always at four in the morning. I should be clear being that slashdot is international, thanks for the guide.
Let me state then that American radio needs such things.
I stopped watching television when they stopped caring about saturday morning cartoons. Actually it was more when I realized how dumb they were to begin with.
Here's an idea to put down, how much time a week do these kids today spend reading books or newspapers?
As for radio, I think that this is a wondeful medium for just about everything. The problem is that you have 75 some odd channels adn most of them are the exact same thing as fifteen other stations, so you have the rap, oldies, adult contemporary, pop, miscellaneous paradigm. I'm really in support of bringing back radio plays and dramatizations, mix it up a little, the music formats are all so played to death and most of the time there isn't anything decent on them.
To go off on a really different tangent, it's actually pretty sad that ILM can do some great work for other companies, but when it comes to Lucas's baby so far they've been striking out.
In the pst two years two trilogies have come out, the Lord of the Rings series and the Harry Potter series (don't know if it's really a trilogy, but whatever). Each of them is being put out one year after the last film and the digital work is fair (arguably in Fellowship and the Two Towers some of it was painful, like where the fellowship runs through the mines of Moria; I really didn't scrutinize the Harry Potter films that much).
If we're lucky, the Star Wars films come out once every two years, the visual effects at that point are nothing to marvel and and overall they're really like getting a date with the pretty girl next door and then finding out that what she meant was that she wanted you to take out her frumpy second cousin.
My current theory is that Lucas is putting a big gap between releases not just because of production, but so that the general public forgets how much the last movie managed to inhale vigorously.
"The Faculty", a rather insipid and forgetable sci-fi film from the mid-to-late 90s for the teeny bopper set. It was about alien pod people and that sort of thing, I suppose that it was supposed to be a message about conformity or whatever, like the "in crowd", or whatever that equally forgetable film was.
Don't you just find mass market media, preaching to teens about conformity to be wonderfully ironic?
I suppose that I should talk about Pixar though. Some of their movies have been all right, people have been saying that they have great writers and all of that. The animation I can respect, but the writing isn't anything out of the world. Really, if it wasn't for the fact that the films were fully computer animated they would just be standard fare, but as of right now we have this love affair with all things tech.
Of course the writing is far better than a great number of a lot of the schlock they throw at us in order to keep us pacified.
Of course, visually Pixar films aren't much without all of the fun gloss of the computer animation, it all seems to be pretty standard format kinds of things, but I guess they really aren't the kinds of films to delve into the artistic side of things. I like them, I don't love them, not tha tanyone cares.
This reminds me of the Star Trek scale... Penny Arcade brought this up in a news post about Star Trek: Nemesis, where we find that a truly bad movie, like nemesis is good, because the overall quality of the line has declined so slowly that we haven't noticed.
The Gates scale is where we are all adjusted to mediocre software at high price, so full of bugs and exploits that on any given day in the US 5% of windows based computers will crash (the number is probably higher). We get so used to the booting, and reloading that we don't really notice that despite all of the money we spent on it, it fails about 18 times a year.
Microsoft starts out with free updates (everyone rushes to get things out to market, in the current way that we accept programs it's almost expected, and it's par for the course because the computing community, and the gaming community especially, never really does anything about it, like product boycotts or thousands of angry letters), and everyone is kind of happy. Sure they don't really make an effort to keep a step ahead of hackers, and only really put something out when they find out that 8 million people just got a virus because of an exploit in their software.
Of course people get frustrated, and Gates goes around and is saying:
"Look, we can't keep up with all of these hackers. They're doing things in an instant, and these viruses can increase in such a manner that would give third year math majors a headache to calculate, if you expect us to keep up at that pace, then we're going to need more money. Sure, you paid for the software, but that was just for the basic function that we developed at the time.
"There was never any statement that this stuff was bullet proof, and as the economy is and wtih the direction that computing is going, it is very unreasonable to expect us to continue keeping pace with these hooligans, or even to step ahead of them, then we have to charge these service fees. For the kittens."
Then of course he would laugh maniacally.
One of the big problems is with name brand designer drugs, is tha tthey have ridiculous amounts of patent control and lock down every bit of research associated with the drugs so other people really can't get their hands on a cheaper alternative. Recall all of the articles (no linking here, there are like 50) about ridiculous patents, or the making of patents purely to keep other people from competing with you?
That's pretty much what huge drug companies like Pfizer and Glaxco do. Combine that with the screwy HMO system in the United States and you get outrageous prices that go into paying off junkets for doctors and health-care managers.
Recently (like last year and early 2003) there was a big debate about whether or not US drug companies that had patents on AIDS vaccines should be forced to allow generic drug manufacturers from India and other countries to make cheaper copies of the drugs for use in Africa where AIDS is running rampant.
Of course US Administration policies toward international family planning groups isn't really helping, nor did their oppostion to opening up the patents initially. Anyhow, I'm going to stop in the interest of keeping this a-political.
Well, being tha the science of genetics was being pursued since the mid to late 1800s.
Gregor Mendel wrote up about the founding principles of heredity starting about 1843. He created the basic principle for 'genes' though primitive.
By 1900 we already figured out chromosomes and how some traits were linked to certain chromosomes thanks to Morgan.
Though, in all fairness we did not figure out that DNA was the vehicle for cell data untilt he debate started in 1928 when Griffith was studying why some pnumonia bateria was disease causing and the others were not.
Granted DNA was not affirmed to be the code until 1944, but the point here is that gene science is not based solely in DNA but also in a bunch of other things. Like dousihng everyone in radiation and hoping for a beneficial mutation, experiements would have been crude and mostly ineffective, yet they happened.
DNA is a red herring my friend, farmers have been performing genetic experiments for eons. Nazis sure as heck could pervert it to their own ends, like they did boots and mass production, and zombies.
THat and arguably if the occult is fictional, then the suspension of disbelief is already there to make someone go; 'Oh heck, the nazis could do that.'
I think that there is a general consensu on the dark rites that Record Industry executives perform in their lounges. We have seen production costs range anywhere from $1,000 to a million on this chat, and fundamentally any of those numbers could be right. It just depends on the circumstances of the artist and company.
I would like to point out that CD Prices haven't really varied that much (correct me if I'm wrong) over the past 15 years. For those of you familiar with the concept of inflation you might notice something, that no real change in the price over a long period of time actually means that the price went down. Every year, your dollar buys a little bit less, and for something to stay the same price means that whomever is producing that good has reduced costs in such a way that it is either outpacing, or matching inflation (more likely the decrease in production costs outpaced inflation).
The issue then is if the price of calculators can drop during a period when inflation was insane, then why can't the price of a lower end item (as compared to say, graphing calculators) drop. It can, but the people producing it, want to make money and they do that the best way they no how to keep prices as high as they can.
This is called marketing. Marketing is a slang term for 'randomly finding out something that makes money and then copying it about 15,000 times until either a) you find a new thing that makes more money, or b) the copies stop making money'. In the era of splashy pop music (that of 98 degrees, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, In Synch, Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Christina Aguillera) the formula was for big exciting shows and a lot of pomp and circumstance. In english this means finding people with no real talent, but a degree of looks and the ability to 'shake that ass' (please excuse that last comment), since no one wants to listen to a group of people that can't sing and since none of them play any instruments they have to get someone to do all that work.
So the real costs for Pop albums come in:
-Promotion (creating a fervor for a group using; flouride in the water, MTV, and Derro mind beams)
-Engineering a group (not just sound engineering, but consultants for image, sound, dance, and every other aspect; they also need writers for the music (since when other bands write music they do it themselves, and thus you don't have to pay a writer), writers for the lyrics (see the last side comment), and a team of engineers to make up the sound, you probably get the idea)
-Choreography (making those white boys dance is hard work)
-Videos (yes, this is part of the MTV push)
-Concerts (you have to coordinate all that lip synching after all, and the fireworks and ridiculous stage designs)
-Sacrifice of four blondes, 3 brunettes and a redhead to Cthulu (because you know, he desires to eat all ofthe recording industry for not making enough music about him, but most music written about Cthulu played over and over summons him, and chaos ensues, so in reality it's easier to get the sacrifices)
-15% tithe to the Lord of Darkness (with a big deposit up front, the devil wants his money before you try and repent)
Anyhow, that's my story and I'm going to stick by it.
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part, my experiences with Tech Support have been very positive. Being slightly, addled I tend to conjure up all sorts of malfunctions within my computer and various other devices and guidance from various points in the tech set.
As for my experience with some other end users (somehow my lack of real skillset is still better than most people's) has led me to believe that this topic is absolutely true. I've had people go on for ten minutes about how their scanner wouldn't work even though they had plugged it in, and they kept getting an error message (saying that the driver wasn't installed) and had no idea what to do.
Also, if this ignorance wasn't a fact. Then a lot of those internet accelerator or, memory leak preventer pop-ups that you see cruising about wouldn't be that effective. After all, to the lay user they look like system messages (because they aren't really colorful advertisements, they look like highly technical things telling them that their computer is leaking memory like a sieve).[end topic on tangent]
I just want to know what I'm supposed to do besides sink five dollars into the pac-man machine while I'm waiting for my pizza?
You could always pull a frame up an have it look like a group of students pulled of the exploit. Or find someone that you really don't like, who doesn't like you, drop down your grades and accuse them of tampering with them.
In all seriousness we live in such a paranoid culture that there isn't really a right answer that anyone can give you. It's nice to see that someone out in America has a conscience but my paranoid mind is telling me that if a student came over and told me that there were exploits in the software, I would begin thinking that he might have done something about it. You might just try an anonymous note to the people in charge of the program.
Until SCO sues Real... That's my prediction
You know, the Feds probably wouldn't have cared up until SCO got uppity and wants to charge them even more money. I'm sensing some accounting improprieties might show up in their future.
Don't mess with the SEC, they'll do things to you that'll make the FBI look like girl scouts.
Well, the whole point of Spam is to send out your little advert (or whatever) to as many people as humanly (well, as electronically) possible. Now, taking the number of stupid people there are in the world (this is a very high number, especially in these here United States, no offense but it's true). Then cross reference that with how many people have the internet (tens, perhaps hundreds of millions in the US alone).
This brings us to one conclusion, 6,000 seems awfully low.
In all reality, spam is the carpet bombing of advertising. Sure it causes a lot of collateral damage, but it gets your objective cleared without any need for 'market research' or 'targeted marketing'.
Pilot: (Dialing microsoft support services while cruising at mach 50,000) Come on, pick up, pick up.
Pre-recorder message: We're sorry, all circuitys are busy now. Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line until an operator is availible.
Pilot: (Over enemy territory and ready to drop payload, toggling switches like a madman) Damnit, pick up.
Tech Support Person: Hi, This is Candice, how are you today. Pilot: (Engine failure light flashing) Can you can the chatter, I'm cruising over Eastern Kreblenkistan about to die at Mach 40,000.
Candice: There's no need to be rude sir. First I'll need to confirm that you're not using a pirated copy of our software, so will you please refer to the key sticker located on your computer. Pilot: (Frustrated, going down) I can't do that, I'm sort of in a plane right now, can you just tell me how to reboot the thing.
Candice: I'm sorry sir, but we can't be responsible for the failures of pirated software... (transmission ends, big fiery explosion)
Simply letting federal agencies run around and spy on people simply because they can doesn't seem to be the best idea for a country based on freedom and all of that jazz. Accountability is what keeps things from going bad to worse, look at dictatorships all over the planet, when people aren't held accountable for their actions they go to extremes. Americans or not, I don't fel very secure when someone can peer into any old asset of my life without asking my permission or without being checked in some fashion. I for one, feel more threatened by the current way the administration is going in regards to policy (foreign, fiscal, energy, environmental, copyright, and pretty everything else) than I do by any terrorist threat (then again, like 90% of americans I don't live in a threatened area, I likve in the 'burbs, well, the sort of burbs).
The constitutuion claims a right to life, liberty and property, not hapiness as it is commonly touted. That was found in the declaration of independence and then changed when the US drafted the constitution (after the articles of confederation managed to suck so much).
A little cruise around the Doctor Who site gives a vague inkling of what might be up with that http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/index.shtml There isn't much other information though and most references to it are kind of buried, if I weren't so thoroughly lazy I would do a more thorough investigation. But come on, it's Richard E. Grant.
The only benefit I can see for constant streaming of photos for the media is the ability of a photographer's editor to be able to provide immediate input as to what the page or paper needs in a given situation. The second benefit is that a reporter does not have to go back to the office to download the picture so they can then go on to the next assignment right away (or just go right home to bed).
My issue with this is more for internet news/whatever sources. If you are getting a constant stream of pictures you can do one of two things, the first is to hold onto them and put them up later (which sort of eliminates the point of getting a constant stream of photos), the second is to get someone to move the pictures to a page and try to put them into some form of context.
Say that you're a sports web-site and your reporter is covering a tiddlewinks competition on main street. Normally, you'd wait until the end of the event to post scores and a summary of some kind. With streaming photos, you have to have someone telling you about what's going on or people are just going to look at the photos and go "What the heck?". Then again, no one really cares about the tiddlywinks game anyhow.
A lot of it is willpower and just sitting down and crunching out whatever it is that you have to do. I'm not a coder or a programmer, the only real work that I do inside of the home; I however do attempt to generate content for my website (the poor excuse for a site that it is); write AD&D advenutres for several area conventions; and short stories. This is of course something that everyone else claims to do also, but most people that I've met who say that they do some writing turn out to be people who don't really do much of anything. No offense meant to anyone.
Scheduling has helped me an awful lot in my work, settin ggoals is also the best way to do anything. If you're doing something like writing, or coding, or whatever else you might be doing on the comuter. See how far you can get, just sit down for as long as you can hold yourself in front of your monitor and crack away. Once your done, you go back and see the amount that you've managed to push out.
Use that amount as a goal or a guideline, say you were writing and you nailed down about 200 words before you went stir crazy. Just say to yourself that you'll write 200 or so words a day, and you'll get there.
Of course if you have deadlines to meet than that really gets thrown out the window. It's mostly a matter of self-discipline and scheduling. I think the first respondent metnioned physical activity, and that's something that is absolutely great. Unwind, relax a bit and then get to work, even if you do it in like fifteen minute bursts.
Again, as for deadlines, I really can't help because I seem to just magically get motivated the night before when those come around.
Thanks for the clarifications, it was all broadly speaking of course though. Of course the problem is endemic to the medium, really a single band would be hard pressed to distribute their music in an anolog (well, solid non-electrical sort of thing) form. Which why the internet is sort of ideal, but then again, people are clamoring for free content and not subscription services, and if you want to sell something then you'll want people to be exposed to it or have a name behind you. It's a great cycle that's been built up by the recording industry, a real give and take relationship that ends up being rather one-sided.
The world needs some real villains, well real Bond style villains. A gaint space based laser, not one of those stupid Anti-Missile LASRERs, but a large scale anit-structural LASER in geosyncrhonis orbit with favroite slashdot targets, like RIAA headquarters, Redmond Washington, or other places that cannot be mentioned because of NSA watchdogs and software that likes to catalogue such references.
Copyright law is designed so that the originators of creative works can derive compensation from those works, right? No, the recording industry likes to take 90% of artist proceeds and stuff it into some hole and now wants to put a greater lean onto touring revenue.
The RIAA is of course whining about how it isn't gettin gits fair share of cash for these songs that are being downloaded. Now, the RIAA for the most part, has nothing to do with the creative process, and those corporate bands/singers that are puppets, can't really be called creative (say hi Justin) by any real stretch.
In essence, by swapping files we take money away from the RIAA (money that it really didn't deserve to have in the first place, but that's just an editorial aside), and then the RIAA takes away more money from the artists.
Here's a simple solution, let the artists sue the RIAA for getting continually raped and having this crusade carried out in their name. I'm sure that any number of artists down on their luck would like their fifty million dollars from their platinum album back from the RIAA. They are the originators of the creative content and are thus in charge of the copyright (unless they were stupid with their contracts), it should be the decision of the artist who gets their money and who gets to be compensated for money lost from file downloading.
Hopefully the artists aren't totally stupid and just keep the suits to the RIAA, because suing their fans would be very much counterproductive (after all, would you buy a band's cd if they were in the middle of litigation with you). Just a thought.
A lot of the time they're doing dramatic readings on teh stuff they play on the NPR affiliate int eh states, but it's always at four in the morning. I should be clear being that slashdot is international, thanks for the guide. Let me state then that American radio needs such things.
I stopped watching television when they stopped caring about saturday morning cartoons. Actually it was more when I realized how dumb they were to begin with.
Here's an idea to put down, how much time a week do these kids today spend reading books or newspapers?
As for radio, I think that this is a wondeful medium for just about everything. The problem is that you have 75 some odd channels adn most of them are the exact same thing as fifteen other stations, so you have the rap, oldies, adult contemporary, pop, miscellaneous paradigm. I'm really in support of bringing back radio plays and dramatizations, mix it up a little, the music formats are all so played to death and most of the time there isn't anything decent on them.
done.
To go off on a really different tangent, it's actually pretty sad that ILM can do some great work for other companies, but when it comes to Lucas's baby so far they've been striking out.
In the pst two years two trilogies have come out, the Lord of the Rings series and the Harry Potter series (don't know if it's really a trilogy, but whatever). Each of them is being put out one year after the last film and the digital work is fair (arguably in Fellowship and the Two Towers some of it was painful, like where the fellowship runs through the mines of Moria; I really didn't scrutinize the Harry Potter films that much).
If we're lucky, the Star Wars films come out once every two years, the visual effects at that point are nothing to marvel and and overall they're really like getting a date with the pretty girl next door and then finding out that what she meant was that she wanted you to take out her frumpy second cousin.
My current theory is that Lucas is putting a big gap between releases not just because of production, but so that the general public forgets how much the last movie managed to inhale vigorously.
"The Faculty", a rather insipid and forgetable sci-fi film from the mid-to-late 90s for the teeny bopper set. It was about alien pod people and that sort of thing, I suppose that it was supposed to be a message about conformity or whatever, like the "in crowd", or whatever that equally forgetable film was.
Don't you just find mass market media, preaching to teens about conformity to be wonderfully ironic?
I suppose that I should talk about Pixar though. Some of their movies have been all right, people have been saying that they have great writers and all of that. The animation I can respect, but the writing isn't anything out of the world. Really, if it wasn't for the fact that the films were fully computer animated they would just be standard fare, but as of right now we have this love affair with all things tech.
Of course the writing is far better than a great number of a lot of the schlock they throw at us in order to keep us pacified.
Of course, visually Pixar films aren't much without all of the fun gloss of the computer animation, it all seems to be pretty standard format kinds of things, but I guess they really aren't the kinds of films to delve into the artistic side of things. I like them, I don't love them, not tha tanyone cares.
Not like anyone read, but I forgot to turn off HTML formatting.
This reminds me of the Star Trek scale... Penny Arcade brought this up in a news post about Star Trek: Nemesis, where we find that a truly bad movie, like nemesis is good, because the overall quality of the line has declined so slowly that we haven't noticed. The Gates scale is where we are all adjusted to mediocre software at high price, so full of bugs and exploits that on any given day in the US 5% of windows based computers will crash (the number is probably higher). We get so used to the booting, and reloading that we don't really notice that despite all of the money we spent on it, it fails about 18 times a year. Microsoft starts out with free updates (everyone rushes to get things out to market, in the current way that we accept programs it's almost expected, and it's par for the course because the computing community, and the gaming community especially, never really does anything about it, like product boycotts or thousands of angry letters), and everyone is kind of happy. Sure they don't really make an effort to keep a step ahead of hackers, and only really put something out when they find out that 8 million people just got a virus because of an exploit in their software. Of course people get frustrated, and Gates goes around and is saying: "Look, we can't keep up with all of these hackers. They're doing things in an instant, and these viruses can increase in such a manner that would give third year math majors a headache to calculate, if you expect us to keep up at that pace, then we're going to need more money. Sure, you paid for the software, but that was just for the basic function that we developed at the time. "There was never any statement that this stuff was bullet proof, and as the economy is and wtih the direction that computing is going, it is very unreasonable to expect us to continue keeping pace with these hooligans, or even to step ahead of them, then we have to charge these service fees. For the kittens." Then of course he would laugh maniacally.
One of the big problems is with name brand designer drugs, is tha tthey have ridiculous amounts of patent control and lock down every bit of research associated with the drugs so other people really can't get their hands on a cheaper alternative. Recall all of the articles (no linking here, there are like 50) about ridiculous patents, or the making of patents purely to keep other people from competing with you?
That's pretty much what huge drug companies like Pfizer and Glaxco do. Combine that with the screwy HMO system in the United States and you get outrageous prices that go into paying off junkets for doctors and health-care managers.
Recently (like last year and early 2003) there was a big debate about whether or not US drug companies that had patents on AIDS vaccines should be forced to allow generic drug manufacturers from India and other countries to make cheaper copies of the drugs for use in Africa where AIDS is running rampant.
Of course US Administration policies toward international family planning groups isn't really helping, nor did their oppostion to opening up the patents initially. Anyhow, I'm going to stop in the interest of keeping this a-political.
Well, being tha the science of genetics was being pursued since the mid to late 1800s.
Gregor Mendel wrote up about the founding principles of heredity starting about 1843. He created the basic principle for 'genes' though primitive.
By 1900 we already figured out chromosomes and how some traits were linked to certain chromosomes thanks to Morgan.
Though, in all fairness we did not figure out that DNA was the vehicle for cell data untilt he debate started in 1928 when Griffith was studying why some pnumonia bateria was disease causing and the others were not.
Granted DNA was not affirmed to be the code until 1944, but the point here is that gene science is not based solely in DNA but also in a bunch of other things. Like dousihng everyone in radiation and hoping for a beneficial mutation, experiements would have been crude and mostly ineffective, yet they happened.
DNA is a red herring my friend, farmers have been performing genetic experiments for eons. Nazis sure as heck could pervert it to their own ends, like they did boots and mass production, and zombies.
THat and arguably if the occult is fictional, then the suspension of disbelief is already there to make someone go; 'Oh heck, the nazis could do that.'
I think that there is a general consensu on the dark rites that Record Industry executives perform in their lounges. We have seen production costs range anywhere from $1,000 to a million on this chat, and fundamentally any of those numbers could be right. It just depends on the circumstances of the artist and company. I would like to point out that CD Prices haven't really varied that much (correct me if I'm wrong) over the past 15 years. For those of you familiar with the concept of inflation you might notice something, that no real change in the price over a long period of time actually means that the price went down. Every year, your dollar buys a little bit less, and for something to stay the same price means that whomever is producing that good has reduced costs in such a way that it is either outpacing, or matching inflation (more likely the decrease in production costs outpaced inflation). The issue then is if the price of calculators can drop during a period when inflation was insane, then why can't the price of a lower end item (as compared to say, graphing calculators) drop. It can, but the people producing it, want to make money and they do that the best way they no how to keep prices as high as they can. This is called marketing. Marketing is a slang term for 'randomly finding out something that makes money and then copying it about 15,000 times until either a) you find a new thing that makes more money, or b) the copies stop making money'. In the era of splashy pop music (that of 98 degrees, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, In Synch, Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Christina Aguillera) the formula was for big exciting shows and a lot of pomp and circumstance. In english this means finding people with no real talent, but a degree of looks and the ability to 'shake that ass' (please excuse that last comment), since no one wants to listen to a group of people that can't sing and since none of them play any instruments they have to get someone to do all that work. So the real costs for Pop albums come in: -Promotion (creating a fervor for a group using; flouride in the water, MTV, and Derro mind beams) -Engineering a group (not just sound engineering, but consultants for image, sound, dance, and every other aspect; they also need writers for the music (since when other bands write music they do it themselves, and thus you don't have to pay a writer), writers for the lyrics (see the last side comment), and a team of engineers to make up the sound, you probably get the idea) -Choreography (making those white boys dance is hard work) -Videos (yes, this is part of the MTV push) -Concerts (you have to coordinate all that lip synching after all, and the fireworks and ridiculous stage designs) -Sacrifice of four blondes, 3 brunettes and a redhead to Cthulu (because you know, he desires to eat all ofthe recording industry for not making enough music about him, but most music written about Cthulu played over and over summons him, and chaos ensues, so in reality it's easier to get the sacrifices) -15% tithe to the Lord of Darkness (with a big deposit up front, the devil wants his money before you try and repent) Anyhow, that's my story and I'm going to stick by it.