Good games are ones that are hard fought between evenly matched opponents - so the product on the field (the game itself) didn't suffer as much as you said - it just lacked the star power of the high-dollar players.
Had the games been played where the replacements of one team played the real Superbowl team - a game where the talent differential is too great to overcome - the product on the field would have been worse.
The distinction I was trying to make (and apparently failed at) was that given the same amount of preparation, you wouldn't need the superstar players to field a good league - as long as the product on the field (the game, not the players) is good.
The supply of jobs is rationed by the limit of the number of teams in the NFL. There are 30(?) NFL teams and they each have 50(?) roster spots. The total population of professional football players is around 1500 at any one time (and I know that there are other leagues available like the European or Canadian football leagues).
The 1500 or so players at any given time are supposedly the best of the best and if there were more pay for play leagues, they would still be making the high salaries.
During the 80's, the NFL players union went on strike and the teams were able to hire replacement players fairly easily. The quality of the product (the game itself - not necessarily the players) didn't suffer because you were having games played with players of similar talent. The replacements would not have been able to hold a candle against the strikers, but could play a good game against someone of like talent. I guess that what I'm saying that a close hard fought game is good to watch - no matter if the quarterback is Joe Montana or Joe Montegna.
That's a bit doubtful - unless the number of professional teams increases. There are a limited number of roster spots available in the NFL or NBA, but there doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of people who do stuff that they call "art."
All of the fees that are tacked on tuition are impossible to remove once there - and make up a pretty good chunk of the cost of going to school now - but that's the way that it is with any government entity when they get their hands on a couple of bucks.
I also only said that they have an opportunity to get a free college education - and that's not something that most people get. If they choose not to capitalize on that opportunity, it's their own problem.
It's probably not a popular opinion here, but people go to college to get the skills to attempt to get a job in their chosen field (vet-med, engineering, modern dance,...). Why should it be any different for football and basketball players? Only a small percentage of those who play the sports in college go on to be professionals - and the fact that scholarships are given to many who don't go on give a lifetime of opportunity to them that an education affords.
I personally like college football and basketball more than the NBA or NFL and I do attend games when I can.
Dude, I said nothing about any living politicians.
I was just saying that Lincoln and Jefferson probably would consider ambulance chasing, lawsuit happy lawyers about the same way the IT community considers spam merchants and virus writers.
I copy important stuff from important servers to a "backup server" running linux/samba each night during the backup window (when the servers are also being backed up to tape). This gives me the ability to just pull any file from yesterday back for a user without having to recover from tape.
Each day, the contents of the backups are dropped into a tar archive which is kept for 7 days.
I think that it's more likely that the problem is in the communications giants themselves. They'll not roll out the serverices except to the most profitable areas.
I live in a small town in Iowa and have had DSL at home longer than what its been available to people in all but the state's largest cities. This is because we have a local phone company that can and will roll out these kind of services.
Companies would deliver anything that they could call "broadband", take the money and run. Read about the scandals over the "Gore Tax" money to wire schools? It would be that, times a thousand.
The problem isn't that their not FDIC Insured (the amount of money people keep with them is minimal), it's that they're not regulated as a bank and don't have to follow banking regulations.
I don't really like other sports games, but EA Sports makes a good NCAA Football game. It's got a decent AI and can allow the player as much (or as little) interaction with the plays as he wants.
I kind of like just calling the plays and letting them sort themselves out (instead of controlling the runningback or quarterback). I also like the "dynasty" portion of the game.
Defense is a legitimate function of the federal government as are the interstates. Financial regulation is also a proper function - a stable banking sector is the cornerstone of a good economy. I'm not so sure that social welfare programs are - but that's another issue.
I'm on the city council of a small town and I also do tax preparation work. I know how much money flows out of the area to both the state and federal governments, and I know what pittance we have to left over to run the town.
We have done two block grant projects in the last four years - projects where we've gone hat in hand to Uncle Sam and asked for some of our money back so that we can do some good in the community. And (just like any time you get involved with the feds) we got that money with strings attached.
One of the programs was a low income housing rehabilitation project - a very worthy goal and one that did help some needy people in the community. For us, the overhead involved because of paying someone to handle federal paperwork was about 10%. Without that, we could have helped another family but couldn't because of the regulations involved in receiving the money.
This theme repeats itself whenever you deal with the federal government. The tax code is so long and convoluted that you probably couldn't survive an audit - even without trying to pull a fast one. Regulations that sound good (HIPAA - medical privacy sounds great) lead to rules that leave no good way of doing things. Financial regulations are mostly good for the economy (safety and soundness of banks), but many of them are open to interpretation (if you have a savings account, you are limited to a small number of automatic or telephone transfers - but can have unlimited ATM transfers or over the counter transactions by regulation. How do online transfers or payments count?)
The more you remove the government from those who live under it the less common sense it has and the more it wastes.
The best government is local. It's a lot easier to go and complain about something to your neighbor than it is to someone separated from you (in the county seat, the state capitol, or Washington).
We've sort of got the whole government concept thing turned upside down - most money should stay local and most services should stay local. Instead the local governments have to live off of the scraps left over by the other levels of government.
Slashdot Mirror
Had the games been played where the replacements of one team played the real Superbowl team - a game where the talent differential is too great to overcome - the product on the field would have been worse.
The distinction I was trying to make (and apparently failed at) was that given the same amount of preparation, you wouldn't need the superstar players to field a good league - as long as the product on the field (the game, not the players) is good.
The 1500 or so players at any given time are supposedly the best of the best and if there were more pay for play leagues, they would still be making the high salaries.
During the 80's, the NFL players union went on strike and the teams were able to hire replacement players fairly easily. The quality of the product (the game itself - not necessarily the players) didn't suffer because you were having games played with players of similar talent. The replacements would not have been able to hold a candle against the strikers, but could play a good game against someone of like talent. I guess that what I'm saying that a close hard fought game is good to watch - no matter if the quarterback is Joe Montana or Joe Montegna.
That's a bit doubtful - unless the number of professional teams increases. There are a limited number of roster spots available in the NFL or NBA, but there doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of people who do stuff that they call "art."
I also only said that they have an opportunity to get a free college education - and that's not something that most people get. If they choose not to capitalize on that opportunity, it's their own problem.
I personally like college football and basketball more than the NBA or NFL and I do attend games when I can.
Well, it is Alabama, after all.
The Right Wing Conspiracy meetings are on Thursday nights at 7pm
You'd just need a really bright projector
must have misread it - was probably sleepy
I was just saying that Lincoln and Jefferson probably would consider ambulance chasing, lawsuit happy lawyers about the same way the IT community considers spam merchants and virus writers.
And I'll bet both of them would be ashamed to share a profession with the ambulance chasers that are so prevalent today.
As long as there was a reason...
I copy important stuff from important servers to a "backup server" running linux/samba each night during the backup window (when the servers are also being backed up to tape). This gives me the ability to just pull any file from yesterday back for a user without having to recover from tape.
Each day, the contents of the backups are dropped into a tar archive which is kept for 7 days.
Does that mean that you'll spin around the bed a few times, sniff to make sure it's right, and curl up into a ball?
Why would you install the flash add-in. Most of the time the flash content is just annoying stuff that gets in the way of where you're looking to go.
We've got no gripe with the service, but we've started looking at the numbers and the economics seem to make sense to do this.
I live in a small town in Iowa and have had DSL at home longer than what its been available to people in all but the state's largest cities. This is because we have a local phone company that can and will roll out these kind of services.
Tack on a few more zeros to your multiplier.
North Central Iowa. We're one of the small towns looking to municipalize the electric utility and we've been getting spammed by them something fierce.
The problem isn't that their not FDIC Insured (the amount of money people keep with them is minimal), it's that they're not regulated as a bank and don't have to follow banking regulations.
I kind of like just calling the plays and letting them sort themselves out (instead of controlling the runningback or quarterback). I also like the "dynasty" portion of the game.
Nothing is more fun than crushing the kids in a video game.
I'm on the city council of a small town and I also do tax preparation work. I know how much money flows out of the area to both the state and federal governments, and I know what pittance we have to left over to run the town.
We have done two block grant projects in the last four years - projects where we've gone hat in hand to Uncle Sam and asked for some of our money back so that we can do some good in the community. And (just like any time you get involved with the feds) we got that money with strings attached.
One of the programs was a low income housing rehabilitation project - a very worthy goal and one that did help some needy people in the community. For us, the overhead involved because of paying someone to handle federal paperwork was about 10%. Without that, we could have helped another family but couldn't because of the regulations involved in receiving the money.
This theme repeats itself whenever you deal with the federal government. The tax code is so long and convoluted that you probably couldn't survive an audit - even without trying to pull a fast one. Regulations that sound good (HIPAA - medical privacy sounds great) lead to rules that leave no good way of doing things. Financial regulations are mostly good for the economy (safety and soundness of banks), but many of them are open to interpretation (if you have a savings account, you are limited to a small number of automatic or telephone transfers - but can have unlimited ATM transfers or over the counter transactions by regulation. How do online transfers or payments count?)
The more you remove the government from those who live under it the less common sense it has and the more it wastes.
We've sort of got the whole government concept thing turned upside down - most money should stay local and most services should stay local. Instead the local governments have to live off of the scraps left over by the other levels of government.
Yeah - the problem is that they treat those that know the issues the same as someone's grandma who knows where the power button is