Until it does, why would investing in a $1500+ television be worth it? Does MythBusters really get better when I can see the pieces of food stuck in Hyneman's moustache? Does BSG get better when I can see the battle scars on Galactica or the pockmarks on Eddie's face in full 720p?
The picture quality isn't what makes these shows good. It's the quality of the content. I'd watch them on a grainy black and white set if I had to, and I'd enjoy them just as much. Until I find a compelling reason to spend that much money on a TV, as opposed to a new MacBook Pro, I'm not going to.
Of course I won't punish him for defending himself. I simply want to instill in him the sense that violence should be the very last resort after all other options have been exhausted.
My school years were never like you describe. Maybe I got lucky. I never had to defend myself or others, though that may have been because I was 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds by the time I was in 7th grade. Fights were very few and far between. I can only really remember three of them, none of which involved any of my close friends.
I didn't go to a typical public school, though. People came to our football games to watch the marching band's halftime show.
The rotor may be protected, but how will this thing operate in the event of a power failure? Helicopters can auto-rotate, effectively gliding back to the ground. This thing wouldn't be able to do that, so if you're going to use it for manned craft you're going to need to find some way of bringing it down safely in the event of engine failure.
Why would I want to blow $1000+ on a TV so I can watch commercials interrupted with bad acting most of the time? Until an HD TV can actually improve the CONTENT of the shows, I'm not going to buy one.
I've worked at one place where it was "dog eat dog." I left after three months. I'm amazed anyone would let themselves be put in that situation. Cooperation makes us more powerful than competition. While I won't discourage my children from pursuing a job like that, I'll try to point them in the direction of a cooperative environment because it's much more fulfilling.
As I have said before, the people who are just so anti-violent video games are pathologically incapable of accepting the fact that we young men tend to be aggressive, bordering on violent in our natures between the ages of about 15-25.
I'm just coming out of that age (I'll be 26 in September), and I was never violent. I never picked a fight and I never was picked on. In fact, none of my friends were like that either.
When I have my son, which might be in September, I'm going to teach him that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and that if inter-personal relations come to blows it represents a personal failure to avoid that conflict.
Is all this extra power actually necessary, or is it just the modern equivalent of beating my chest?
Nobody "needs" it. But if we all spent our lives with only what we needed we wouldn't have much.
Now, only a few people would actually "want" something like that, and, yes, it is the cultural equivalent of beating your chest. When and where anyone would actually use something like that is beyond me, though I hope they buy it before they've got a chance to breed. But if you've got the money, there are plenty of ways of wasting it trying to kill yourself.
Lego Star Wars is also a spouse-friendly game. My wife loves it because, after I beat the levels, she can go around and collect every goddamn stud in the level. I wouldn't mind except she insists we play together, and waiting for someone to check every single place for studs is crazy-making.
Just a supplement: You may be interested that there's software out there that can adjust a singer's key in real time to keep them in tune? A whore with a tin-ear who doesn't mind humping the air in her underpants can become a star thanks to this stuff.
I love my iPod and I love iTMS. But as soon as I realized that I couldn't burn my TV purchases and that there was no "PlayFair" for video DRM I refused to give them another cent. Their video DRM is hideous and unacceptable. Imagine if FairPlay refused to let you burn them to CD. Well, THATS the kind of service you're paying for. $2 for 22 minutes of video that is crippled beyond all usefulness.
Video content is a lot different from audio content. I can listen to the same songs over and over again. I rarely want to watch a TV show again, and if I do it's better to just buy the DVD since there will be extras.
I'll pay $2 for the 22 minutes of video because those extra 8 minutes of my life are worth more to me than $2. (Based on what I get paid at work per hour, I'm actually saving about a dollar buying a "half hour" show from iTunes versus watching it on TV.) Combine that with being able to take it with me and pause it during playback, it's more than worth it.
You're not paying for music thats stops playing when you stop paying. You're paying to listen to HUGE, GIGANTIC libraries of ANY SONG YOU WANT, whenever you want, wherever you want.
I think a better solution would be to offer a subscription service that also lets you buy the songs permanently. If I hear a song I'd like to keep, I could buy it and it would work even if I stopped paying. Heck, buying it without DRM would make that even better. But the biggest disadvantage to most of a subscription service is that I haven't heard of any of them that allow you to keep songs after you've stopped paying.
I wouldn't mind eating some of the stupider members of society. Some of them are too scrawny to make it worth it, but most of them have been fattened on a steady diet of potato chips and bud light.
Easy. Folks who want to give them out to girls at Christian Rock festivals to get them to engage in "higher risk" sexual activities, as they are wont to do.
If I were in high school today, I'd hang out in the Christian youth group.
Re:US fuel efficiency figures seem incredibly poor
on
Japanese Mileage Maniacs
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· Score: 1, Insightful
US auto manufacturers have convinced Americans that they need 4,000 pounds of steel wrapped around them to feel "safe" on the roads, and that 25mpg is the price you pay for "safety." What they can't bring themselves to say is that the best safety gear is between your ears, but that's just because most Americans don't seem to have come with that as standard equipment.
(I'm an American, so I can speak from experience.)
It might seem weird to give us a game of a sport rather than encouraging us to actually do said sport, but it's not.
The benefit of the Wii is that its convenient, adaptive, and inside.
It's more convenient than, say, actual tennis because you don't have to find someone to play against, buy a racket and some balls, and find a tennis court that's not in use. By the time you're done with that you're probably going to be too tired to actually play tennis, especially if you're out of shape.
It's adaptive in that it's easy to pick up and play. Most people can't serve a tennis ball over the net reliably, let alone sustain a volley. And most people don't even know the rules of tennis. The Wii takes all those things out of the picture and lets you just play. And as you get better, the person you're playing against gets better. And maybe you'll grow to love tennis enough to actually want to start playing it.
Finally, it's inside. You can't play tennis every day, and fees for indoor tennis courts are cost prohibitive for many people, especially after getting a racket and balls and shoes and clothes. As long as you've got electricity, you can play Wii tennis. Hell, you don't even have to get dressed to do it.
So there are real benefits to playing Wii sports versus playing actual sports.
There's other advantages to those prep schools than class sizes. They don't have to accept all kids, meaning they can get rid of all but the best and brightest. They're also privately funded, so they can pay their teachers better and therefore get the better teachers.
Imagine you were a teacher fresh out of school with a good GPA, and had the following choice: Work in a public school system where you have 35+ kids in a class, including kids with behavioral problems, and get paid $25,000 per year or work in a private school where you have 5-10 kids per class, which are all well behaved (or they'd be expelled) and intelligent, and you're making $35,000+/year. If you're not altruistic and want to "make a difference," you pick the private school.
Now couple this with having the private school in a good neighborhood, or a better state, and the public school being in downtown Detroit, and you see the problem that Michigan public schools are having.
Companies don't do anything that doesn't make them money. They've got a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make a profit. They won't share unless they'll make money from sharing, or at least not lose money because of sharing.
While corporations may legally be people, they have none of the good attributes that people have, like altruism, empathy or selflessness.
I think I figured out your problem. You were dealing with some company called "Vontage." Try calling "Vonage" and I'm sure you'll have as good an experience as I am continuing to have.
Re:Vonage is money for nothing
on
The End for Vonage?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I connect Vonage to my cable broadband and call someone else who connects their Vonage box to their cable broadband, where is the phone company involved?
Seems to me that if Verizon has to charge twice as much as Vonage for half the features, the problem is with Verizon, not Vonage.
If Vonage dies I'll drop my landline entirely. Why? Because Verizon's the only landline provider in my area, and I'm not giving them the fucking time of day.
First, I think that iTunes showed that if you make the online store easy enough to use, people would rather buy from there rather than steal music. I know that I'd much rather spend a buck to get a song I like there than hunt down a good copy on a P2P service. And now that I can get certain songs DRM free and at virtually CD quality, why would I even use a P2P service?
Second, the Internet has empowered artists to go directly to the people. Folks like George Hrab and Jonathan Coulton have made enough money on their "side projects" to quit their day jobs. In fact, Jonathan Coulton has said that he makes more per month than the Dresden Dolls, who are signed to a major label.
So by making a distribution method easy for customers and artists alike, we create an environment where artists get money directly from the customers without going through hoops. And because the overhead is extremely low, there's no reason a good artist couldn't make a decent living.
The reason the record industry is failing to help smaller artists is because the old record industry had so much overhead. Between studio time, promotions, pressing the albums, and having so many people at so many levels taking a cut, the artists never really got rich unless they sold millions of albums.
Granted, this new music industry, and indeed the new content industry as a whole, won't make anyone super rich, but it will spread the wealth amongst many more artists, and create a system where exposure to artists is mostly word of mouth.
That is if the record companies don't succeed in smothering it in its crib.
The biggest single reason to buy a domain name is to get control over your own email. I got my own domain name and web host and the $10/year and $10/month is more than worth the flexibility of having email addresses that I can create and destroy at will. Whenever I sign up for a mailing list or ecommerce site, I create a new email address and forward it to my main one. If I start getting spam, I can delete that email address. I haven't found a solution as convenient anywhere else.
So the solution isn't for people to stop buying domains. The solution is to crack down on domain name squatters who buy hundreds of domains and then hold them for ransom.
Kids will not listen to the federal government telling them not to steal music. They're used to "music as commodity." In fact, I'd say most of the kids in college today never used a computer without knowing you could get "free" music off of it. To them, this is like the federal government telling people to stop using cell phones because landlines are losing money.
The content industry needs to pull its head out of its ass. Times have changed. Your monopoly and ridiculous, antiquated system of telling people who gets what music or movies where is untenable in this day and age. Now that people have the ability to get the content they want from wherever it's produced, they'll do it. Why can't I buy Dr. Who from iTunes the day after it's released? I'd gladly do it. But because of an agreement that was struck decades ago, I have to wait for a butchered version to show up on Sci Fi if I want to get it legally. Why should Australians have to wait a year to get BSG on their TVs?
The content producers seem to have chosen to sue their fans rather than provide them with the content they want. And if they want too long, other, independent, content providers are going to eat their lunch.
(I know I'll get modded insightful, but I don't understand why. I'm just pointing out the obvious.)
While I'm sure the people are nice and not as retarded as the media makes them out to be, one thing I couldn't stand about South Carolina is the weather. Yes, the winters are mild. But that's just a euphemism for "oppressively humid summers and bugs that won't die."
I can't stand August here in PA. It's too hot to enjoy anything outside between 10AM and sunset. Going further south would mean that period of time would get longer and longer. Not to mention that the only winter weather in SC seems to be horrible ice storms. Snow I can deal with, but not three inches of solid ice. And I couldn't stand to be represented by douchebags like Jim DeMint and Lindsay Graham. I spent most of last year working to get rid of Santorum, and they're a lot worse than him.
If it were up to me, I'd probably be living in New Hampshire or Vermont, but my wife can't stand cold weather.
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Until it does, why would investing in a $1500+ television be worth it? Does MythBusters really get better when I can see the pieces of food stuck in Hyneman's moustache? Does BSG get better when I can see the battle scars on Galactica or the pockmarks on Eddie's face in full 720p?
The picture quality isn't what makes these shows good. It's the quality of the content. I'd watch them on a grainy black and white set if I had to, and I'd enjoy them just as much. Until I find a compelling reason to spend that much money on a TV, as opposed to a new MacBook Pro, I'm not going to.
Of course I won't punish him for defending himself. I simply want to instill in him the sense that violence should be the very last resort after all other options have been exhausted.
My school years were never like you describe. Maybe I got lucky. I never had to defend myself or others, though that may have been because I was 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds by the time I was in 7th grade. Fights were very few and far between. I can only really remember three of them, none of which involved any of my close friends.
I didn't go to a typical public school, though. People came to our football games to watch the marching band's halftime show.
The rotor may be protected, but how will this thing operate in the event of a power failure? Helicopters can auto-rotate, effectively gliding back to the ground. This thing wouldn't be able to do that, so if you're going to use it for manned craft you're going to need to find some way of bringing it down safely in the event of engine failure.
Exactly.
Why would I want to blow $1000+ on a TV so I can watch commercials interrupted with bad acting most of the time? Until an HD TV can actually improve the CONTENT of the shows, I'm not going to buy one.
I've worked at one place where it was "dog eat dog." I left after three months. I'm amazed anyone would let themselves be put in that situation. Cooperation makes us more powerful than competition. While I won't discourage my children from pursuing a job like that, I'll try to point them in the direction of a cooperative environment because it's much more fulfilling.
I'm just coming out of that age (I'll be 26 in September), and I was never violent. I never picked a fight and I never was picked on. In fact, none of my friends were like that either.
When I have my son, which might be in September, I'm going to teach him that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and that if inter-personal relations come to blows it represents a personal failure to avoid that conflict.
Nobody "needs" it. But if we all spent our lives with only what we needed we wouldn't have much.
Now, only a few people would actually "want" something like that, and, yes, it is the cultural equivalent of beating your chest. When and where anyone would actually use something like that is beyond me, though I hope they buy it before they've got a chance to breed. But if you've got the money, there are plenty of ways of wasting it trying to kill yourself.
Lego Star Wars is also a spouse-friendly game. My wife loves it because, after I beat the levels, she can go around and collect every goddamn stud in the level. I wouldn't mind except she insists we play together, and waiting for someone to check every single place for studs is crazy-making.
Just a supplement: You may be interested that there's software out there that can adjust a singer's key in real time to keep them in tune? A whore with a tin-ear who doesn't mind humping the air in her underpants can become a star thanks to this stuff.
It's sickening.
Video content is a lot different from audio content. I can listen to the same songs over and over again. I rarely want to watch a TV show again, and if I do it's better to just buy the DVD since there will be extras.
I'll pay $2 for the 22 minutes of video because those extra 8 minutes of my life are worth more to me than $2. (Based on what I get paid at work per hour, I'm actually saving about a dollar buying a "half hour" show from iTunes versus watching it on TV.) Combine that with being able to take it with me and pause it during playback, it's more than worth it.
I think a better solution would be to offer a subscription service that also lets you buy the songs permanently. If I hear a song I'd like to keep, I could buy it and it would work even if I stopped paying. Heck, buying it without DRM would make that even better. But the biggest disadvantage to most of a subscription service is that I haven't heard of any of them that allow you to keep songs after you've stopped paying.
And I'll only use it if it's Mac compatible.
I wouldn't mind eating some of the stupider members of society. Some of them are too scrawny to make it worth it, but most of them have been fattened on a steady diet of potato chips and bud light.
I imagine they'd taste quite a bit like pork.
Easy. Folks who want to give them out to girls at Christian Rock festivals to get them to engage in "higher risk" sexual activities, as they are wont to do.
If I were in high school today, I'd hang out in the Christian youth group.
US auto manufacturers have convinced Americans that they need 4,000 pounds of steel wrapped around them to feel "safe" on the roads, and that 25mpg is the price you pay for "safety." What they can't bring themselves to say is that the best safety gear is between your ears, but that's just because most Americans don't seem to have come with that as standard equipment.
(I'm an American, so I can speak from experience.)
I want to know how the hell you're abusing your poor car to get it down to 30mpg.
The benefit of the Wii is that its convenient, adaptive, and inside.
It's more convenient than, say, actual tennis because you don't have to find someone to play against, buy a racket and some balls, and find a tennis court that's not in use. By the time you're done with that you're probably going to be too tired to actually play tennis, especially if you're out of shape.
It's adaptive in that it's easy to pick up and play. Most people can't serve a tennis ball over the net reliably, let alone sustain a volley. And most people don't even know the rules of tennis. The Wii takes all those things out of the picture and lets you just play. And as you get better, the person you're playing against gets better. And maybe you'll grow to love tennis enough to actually want to start playing it.
Finally, it's inside. You can't play tennis every day, and fees for indoor tennis courts are cost prohibitive for many people, especially after getting a racket and balls and shoes and clothes. As long as you've got electricity, you can play Wii tennis. Hell, you don't even have to get dressed to do it.
So there are real benefits to playing Wii sports versus playing actual sports.
There's other advantages to those prep schools than class sizes. They don't have to accept all kids, meaning they can get rid of all but the best and brightest. They're also privately funded, so they can pay their teachers better and therefore get the better teachers.
Imagine you were a teacher fresh out of school with a good GPA, and had the following choice: Work in a public school system where you have 35+ kids in a class, including kids with behavioral problems, and get paid $25,000 per year or work in a private school where you have 5-10 kids per class, which are all well behaved (or they'd be expelled) and intelligent, and you're making $35,000+/year. If you're not altruistic and want to "make a difference," you pick the private school.
Now couple this with having the private school in a good neighborhood, or a better state, and the public school being in downtown Detroit, and you see the problem that Michigan public schools are having.
Companies don't do anything that doesn't make them money. They've got a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make a profit. They won't share unless they'll make money from sharing, or at least not lose money because of sharing.
While corporations may legally be people, they have none of the good attributes that people have, like altruism, empathy or selflessness.
I think I figured out your problem. You were dealing with some company called "Vontage." Try calling "Vonage" and I'm sure you'll have as good an experience as I am continuing to have.
If I connect Vonage to my cable broadband and call someone else who connects their Vonage box to their cable broadband, where is the phone company involved?
Seems to me that if Verizon has to charge twice as much as Vonage for half the features, the problem is with Verizon, not Vonage.
If Vonage dies I'll drop my landline entirely. Why? Because Verizon's the only landline provider in my area, and I'm not giving them the fucking time of day.
I think the way we get artists paid is two fold.
First, I think that iTunes showed that if you make the online store easy enough to use, people would rather buy from there rather than steal music. I know that I'd much rather spend a buck to get a song I like there than hunt down a good copy on a P2P service. And now that I can get certain songs DRM free and at virtually CD quality, why would I even use a P2P service?
Second, the Internet has empowered artists to go directly to the people. Folks like George Hrab and Jonathan Coulton have made enough money on their "side projects" to quit their day jobs. In fact, Jonathan Coulton has said that he makes more per month than the Dresden Dolls, who are signed to a major label.
So by making a distribution method easy for customers and artists alike, we create an environment where artists get money directly from the customers without going through hoops. And because the overhead is extremely low, there's no reason a good artist couldn't make a decent living.
The reason the record industry is failing to help smaller artists is because the old record industry had so much overhead. Between studio time, promotions, pressing the albums, and having so many people at so many levels taking a cut, the artists never really got rich unless they sold millions of albums.
Granted, this new music industry, and indeed the new content industry as a whole, won't make anyone super rich, but it will spread the wealth amongst many more artists, and create a system where exposure to artists is mostly word of mouth.
That is if the record companies don't succeed in smothering it in its crib.
That's completely untrue.
Word blew chunks until 6.0
The biggest single reason to buy a domain name is to get control over your own email. I got my own domain name and web host and the $10/year and $10/month is more than worth the flexibility of having email addresses that I can create and destroy at will. Whenever I sign up for a mailing list or ecommerce site, I create a new email address and forward it to my main one. If I start getting spam, I can delete that email address. I haven't found a solution as convenient anywhere else.
So the solution isn't for people to stop buying domains. The solution is to crack down on domain name squatters who buy hundreds of domains and then hold them for ransom.
Kids will not listen to the federal government telling them not to steal music. They're used to "music as commodity." In fact, I'd say most of the kids in college today never used a computer without knowing you could get "free" music off of it. To them, this is like the federal government telling people to stop using cell phones because landlines are losing money.
The content industry needs to pull its head out of its ass. Times have changed. Your monopoly and ridiculous, antiquated system of telling people who gets what music or movies where is untenable in this day and age. Now that people have the ability to get the content they want from wherever it's produced, they'll do it. Why can't I buy Dr. Who from iTunes the day after it's released? I'd gladly do it. But because of an agreement that was struck decades ago, I have to wait for a butchered version to show up on Sci Fi if I want to get it legally. Why should Australians have to wait a year to get BSG on their TVs?
The content producers seem to have chosen to sue their fans rather than provide them with the content they want. And if they want too long, other, independent, content providers are going to eat their lunch.
(I know I'll get modded insightful, but I don't understand why. I'm just pointing out the obvious.)
While I'm sure the people are nice and not as retarded as the media makes them out to be, one thing I couldn't stand about South Carolina is the weather. Yes, the winters are mild. But that's just a euphemism for "oppressively humid summers and bugs that won't die."
I can't stand August here in PA. It's too hot to enjoy anything outside between 10AM and sunset. Going further south would mean that period of time would get longer and longer. Not to mention that the only winter weather in SC seems to be horrible ice storms. Snow I can deal with, but not three inches of solid ice. And I couldn't stand to be represented by douchebags like Jim DeMint and Lindsay Graham. I spent most of last year working to get rid of Santorum, and they're a lot worse than him.
If it were up to me, I'd probably be living in New Hampshire or Vermont, but my wife can't stand cold weather.
Maybe I just need a new wife.