Maybe it's just me, but when I'm on an exotic vacation, I don't go out and start taking pictures of my car.
If I took my Enzo Ferrarri to the utah salt flats and had a choice of pictures of salt, or pictures of my car tearing it up on the flats, I'd have to go with pictures of the car.
The companies should have to pay a rental tax, that gets used to discount individual income taxes.
Which will most likely be taken from the consumer times three in the "Regulatory and other fees" portion of your cell phone bill (e.g. if the bandwidth were used for a pay service, other than broadcast TV). As it is when all carriers were required to provide number portability they "absorbed" the costs of supporting this by adding a small fee to every user's bill. That fee has recovered the costs of their conversion many times over already, however I'm willing to bet you will never see that fee removed.
I agree, the public airwaves should remain public and be rented and not sold, but unfortunately consumers who use pay services on those rented airwaves are just going to end up paying through the nose.
but if you can't accurately figure out where your money is going or what it's doing, you shouldn't be trusting it to somebody else
I'm assuming you're an American citizen, likely therefore a taxpayer. So if you would, please inform us exactly how much of your taxes this year (in dollars) went to:
a) paving roads
b) maintaining our national parks
c) bullets used in Iraq
d) "black" progams of the military that develop advanced weapons and vehicles
The only correct answer you can give, of course, is 'I have no idea.'
It's all well and good to say that if a company is doing something illegal/immoral/dangerous to just not invest or pull your money. But much like your taxes going to the goverment, you only know a certain face value of what's going on, but with a corporation there's even more spin put on things for the investors. One can study quarterly finanace reports, company press releases, etc. but short of touring the company itself at VIP status these tell you squat about the harmful things a company is doing. Most of the time their illegal activities, such as toxic waste dumping, or cutting corners on drug research, are so well hidden that it takes a random discovery and expose before anyone even knows about it and files a class action lawsuit. Just because I've invested $700 in Large Drug Co. doesn't mean I should be liable when their new asthma medicine ends up killing 45 people. Terrible? Yes. Will I pull my money out at that point? Possibly, it depends on if this was caused by shady dealings or if this was just some unfortunate fluke - either way I shouldn't have to lose my house in a lawsuit against the company just because I didn't know precisely how my money was being spent. Even at the 400 person company I work for day-in day-out I don't know every little thing that's going on, how could an investor possible be able to evaluate the secret immoral dealings of a huge multinational?
I think there should be more liability among shareholders, but amoung the ones actually controlling the company, and overseeing the day-today activities. If you sit on the board then you damn well better know why those 45 people died from bad inhalers, and if a court finds that it was for illegal reasons and that you were complicit then you're busted chief.
The inherent problem with giving a corporation the same rights as a person, is that it cannot be penalized like a person. When someone kills or injures someone else, they are liable for fines and/or jailtime depending on the crime. A large corporation can be fined, perhaps have sanctions against it, and maybe even be shut down, but for the most part the corp. continues on and the punishment amounts to nothing more than a handslap because of the shear scale and lifetime of a company. If a person spends 5 years in jail they have lost a portion of their lives, and will have difficulty resuming their life as a labeled felon. Time is precious to a person, we only get so much and we must live with how our past choices have changed us. A corporation may lose market share, investors, possibly people in management are fired or jailed, but the corporation has time on its side. It can remake its image, it can get more investors, and most importantly, it has no remorse. With a new board of directors the company could be just as immoral as before, and has learned nothing from it's disreputable past. One might argue that the shareholders would prevent this from happening by pulling investments etc, but I pose this question - why weren't the shareholders able to discern and prevent it the first time? If they could be duped once, they could be again.
Eventually if a person commits enough, or heinous enough crimes they are sent to jail for life, they are effectively removed from society. How do we remove a criminal corporation from society altogether? It can be done, but I point out that a corporation is much more likely to receive fines and sactions than be dismantled, whereas in the criminal courts a repeat offender eventually is going to g
First off, I'll appologize/set aside the whole Russia argument, sometimes a good rant just needs someplace to start and with the recent oxygen scrubber issue fresh in my mind Russia was the springboard for my venting. However, as I recall most of the major delays pre-Columbia we due to Russia. What I'm calling out at fault is NASA's poor administration that keeps letting those types of things happen.
Now, let's get into some rebuttal: "As far as the incremental approach, it's crap. The complexities of trans-planetary flight are a quantum leap above that of orbital flight." A perfect contradiction in just two sentences. You claim the incremental approach is "crap," and then proceed to point out the (very true) fact that trans-planetary flight is orders of magnitude harder to pull off than orbital. So, would you have us just build an interplanetary shuttle and send it off someplace w/o first sending all the sattelites, then orbiters, then landers/rovers that we have over the years? That makes no sense. If you aim directly for your goal in such a massive undertaking you're going to miss. Period.
The biggest argument one can give in favor of a step-wise path to Mars is that we know there are going to be unaccounted-for problems along the way, without a doubt it's a lot faster, easier, and cheaper to solve those problems running prep missions between here and the moon than between here and Mars. For one, signal delay is shorter, we'll know within 3 seconds if something goes wrong, rather than 6 minutes, that gives us time to react, study, and correct a problem before it possibly ruins the entire mission. Also, it takes 5 days to get to the moon, on closest orbit we're at least IIRC 5 months from Mars. If something goes wrong, or a design needs correction you'll know in a week instead of half a year, which cuts down development time.
"What incremental development gives you is an illusion of progress. Just look at the shuttle. We have dumped 30 years and countless billions into it's development. We have nothing to show for it. It has fewer capabilities than the Apollo program. It costs more to launch." Your points about the shuttle are valid, but they do not prove incremental development gives only the illusion of progress. For one, the shuttle program was designed to be our answer to space flight, not a first step in some greater space vehicle program. It was created as a one-stop-shop for getting payloads and people to and from space, nothing more. NASA dropped the ball on creating second generation designs that used the first shuttle as a learning experience. Yes they created some, but none of them have been pursued to the point of being viable replacements for the current fleet. So here there has been no illusion of progress (or any progress really) and there has been no incremental plan, just make the shuttles and use them.
"
Most of the conditions in orbit can be re-created on the ground. (Ok, maybe not zero-g. But certainly the sealed environment.) "
Who cares about orbit? Orbit is the least of our worries in going to Mars, what about transporting humans through the radiation sea of interplanetary space? What about maintaining a habitat on another planet? We can do it in the space station, but even that is only technically a simulation of the conditions for a planet-based habitat. Simulations do not explore all possible failure modes, they can't by definition since there is no way to create a simulation that matches the real thing 100%. We have a lot of experience with orbital living, and we have a lot of experience with simulated ET habitats that have been done in extreme environments like the dessert and Antarctica, but we have no real experience with manning an actual ET habitat on another planet (or moon). You don't think that might be a valuable experience? There's no knowledge to be gained from building a base on the moon and staffing it? There are thousands of issues never before encountered that
--[gives micro$oft and the RIAA the finger from space]--
I hope they can see this because I'm doing it harder than I ever have before.
But seriously, does anyone else see this as a trojan virus style tactic from M$? Get into the music industry through the lucrative promise of widespread effective DRM, then pull the puppet strings to steer their giant lawsuit machine. This follows their 'embrace and extend' strategy but could take it one step further:
1) embrace
2) extend
3) ??? profit!
4) use the RIAA law juggernaut to sue everyone not just for copyright infringement but patent infringement and DMCA infractions.
Seriously. There were also glorious predictions for the International Space Station. It was actually going to be a massive sprawling habitat of modules and panels and experiments - I drolled over "artist's rendition" paintings as a kid growing up. Now, in reality, we have a half assed understaffed flying crapshoot that doesn't even have oxygen producers with a living engineering support staff.
And why? Among other reasons, one of the biggest in terms of setbacks has been relying on Russia for technology, manpower, and funding. This is not a let's-bash-Russia troll, I think this points to directly to serious project management issues at NASA, and if we can't get a sealed stable environment orbiting our planet, how do we expect to pack a crew into a ship and send it 36 million miles away and be anything other than an extraterrestrial coffin?
I love space exploration, I want people on Mars, I want habitats on the moon, I want shuttles flying weekly between the ISS and MoonPod 1, but it's never gonna happen if NASA can't get its act together enough to do something as obvious and QA process basic as asking "Gee, Yakov, I've never seen an oxygen system like this before, do we have the specs on that?" Granted, in space just about every system is critical, but I'd put O2 scrubbers pretty damn high on my list of priorities, why wasn't it on theirs?
We need to do this thing smart, and to do that we've got to do it incrementally. Speaking as a software engineer for complex automated systems, if you skip design phases you're guaranteed to have problems down the line. So let's not skip phases, let's fix the shuttle fleet, to fix the space station and get it on track. Let's go back to the moon and run some long term sorties, build a moon base, shuttle between base and station. We need real world (moon) experience with extraterrestrial habitation before we pick 6 of our country's finest minds to asphyxiate in the cold black of interplanetary space.
It's worth noting that overland collection happened in the US for catching film canisters from spy satellites:
"After the cameras photographed the world from polar orbit, the exposed film was jettisoned back to earth near Hawaii..."
Added emphasis mine.
Last I checked, while Hawaii itself is land, everything around it for quite some distance is not.
From the parent's source article: "The capsules were designed to float, so that if the plane missed, Navy boats could retrieve them. In case the boats missed, the capsules were fitted with salt plugs that would dissolve after two days in the ocean, causing the capsule to sink beneath the waves, so the film could never fall into enemy hands."
So while we have technically done mid-air captures before, they were not over land, and in fact were specifically designed to only be over water.
Not really trying to troll here, but I saw this wonderful gadget on newegg at least a month ago. Either the submissions for today are that crummy already (it's only 9am here!) or we as slashdotters are losing our edge on posting tech stories as they happen. Come on now people, let's not let any more of these slip through the cracks!
Anyone in the camera hacker community know if it might be possible to set this thing into a direct display mode? (i.e. realtime display of the camera image)? Obviously it would require a bigger power supply than the batteries for any sort of extended use, but I'm thinking this could make a nice head mounted display for cheap.:)
Also, what about swapping the 2 megapixel camera for a CCD board camera that can pickup infrared? Now we're talking a DIY nightvision headset for under $100!!
Also, I know most (all?) LCDs require a controller to use with any sort of viedo signal - to control the H and V and refresh rate etc. Does this LCD have the controller built in? Is it on the camera board and easily removed? Or is it built into the camera processor and intimately linked with that hardware? I've got a bunch of little mobile robots that could sure use these displays for full color state feedback and mapping displays!
[they] certainly are better at handling the king's English than the average PC operator
Well, since last I heard, PCs running Windows account for something above 95% of personal computers you're comparing an average Mac user against the average person.
Seems fair enough, but in my experience those are not going to be equally distributed slices of the population. On one hand you have every parent and grandparent who need to be painstakingly coaxed through reading their hotmail account, kids who think clicking on popups is fun, and your average teen who can use the computer but mostly for games, or Word.
On the Mac hand you have a lot of graphic and industrial designers, and skilled professionals with more income to purchase a Mac, since Macs - on average - cost much more than a basic PC setup (Dell, gateway, etc).
Yes, these are kinda broad generaliztaions, but the distinctions do exist. If you compare your average unwashed masses citizen to your average possibly higher-income and more advanced skill set citizen then you are going to find disparities in intelligence and education.
Remeber folks, correlation is not causation, look at where the numbers are coming from.
#1 - Thanks to the parent for posting a link to your source, rather than just blindly pasting numbers.
#2 - Why am I not surprised that the average ticket prices posted by the National Association of Theater Owners have nothing to do with reality?
I have never, for as long as I have gone to the movies on my own (~ 1993), paid less than $6 to see a film unless it was at non-first-run theater.
Where are these rare and mysteriously budget-friendly theaters in America that were selling tickets for $5 or less up until 2000?
As a teen I lived about 45 minutes outside of Boston, but in that time I've also gone to theaters in NJ, CT, NY, PA, in cities and in totally rural areas. Not a nation-wide sampling, but one of a large enough size to know that the average ticket prices I saw was more around $7.50 for the last 12 years. And most of what I see these days is $8.75 to $10.
Unless there is some super-discount movie rate in the midwest I'm not aware of, then I call bullshit on these "statistics." (Not on the parent poster mind you, but on NATOonline.org or whoever they compiled their numbers from.)
This is exactly what we've been saying is necessary. Instead of mandating spyware on all of our computers or forcing ISP to pay royalties for potential copyright infringement, they're actually trying to stop it at the source.
I totally agree they should stop the problam at the source rather than blanket punish everyone with a computer, however, this type video bootleg is not the one the MPAA is really worried about being traded online.
Who wants to watch a shakey, grainy copy, with terrible sound quality, when someone else is hosting the ripped DVD image, or a better camera copy done by the projectionist on his own time after closing?
This arrest is for publicity, when you ctach people stealing screeners, that's for all the marbles.
Don't pay taxes - simply donate to a non-profit that you support and take the tax credit.
That works great for the end of the year, but what about all this money they take from every paycheck, from every item I purchase, from all the gas I pump, from simply owning a car, from using the telephone, from connecting 3 computers via a private network (soon to be in FL).
It's really quite terrifying when you list all the things you're taxed for. In fact it takes about a thousand times less effort to list things you aren't taxed for.... yet.
I don't pretend to have a full understanding of the Freedom of Information Act, but isn't there a whole section detailing reasons that a request can be turned down? I know the obvious ones such as endangering national security (as if that weren't an excuse they could stretch a mile anyway), or the like, but I seriously doubt that a request could legally be denied on the basis of GROSS INCOMPETANCE and LACK OF JOB SKILLS on the part of the person fulfilling the request.
That's like a request being denied because the clerk was too tired to go down in the basement to find the files.
If fulfilling the request somehow breaks something, then the response should be to fix the damn thing and then fulfill the request.
If these were criminals setting up videocameras to record pin numbers at ATMs, you can bet there would be a huge effort to track them down.
Actually, there have been scams like that, for some time. There was even a great online documentation of one such device that someone found attached to an ATM.
Amazingly these crimes aren't being tracked down by the FBI either.
Right now if you're not threatening national security by using DeCSS or Kazaa then you're off the FBI's radar, they have bigger payoffs... er lobbyists... er... I mean problems to take care of.
Slashdot Mirror
If I took my Enzo Ferrarri to the utah salt flats and had a choice of pictures of salt, or pictures of my car tearing it up on the flats, I'd have to go with pictures of the car.
Which will most likely be taken from the consumer times three in the "Regulatory and other fees" portion of your cell phone bill (e.g. if the bandwidth were used for a pay service, other than broadcast TV). As it is when all carriers were required to provide number portability they "absorbed" the costs of supporting this by adding a small fee to every user's bill. That fee has recovered the costs of their conversion many times over already, however I'm willing to bet you will never see that fee removed.
I agree, the public airwaves should remain public and be rented and not sold, but unfortunately consumers who use pay services on those rented airwaves are just going to end up paying through the nose.
I'm assuming you're an American citizen, likely therefore a taxpayer. So if you would, please inform us exactly how much of your taxes this year (in dollars) went to:
a) paving roads
b) maintaining our national parks
c) bullets used in Iraq
d) "black" progams of the military that develop advanced weapons and vehicles
The only correct answer you can give, of course, is 'I have no idea.'
It's all well and good to say that if a company is doing something illegal/immoral/dangerous to just not invest or pull your money. But much like your taxes going to the goverment, you only know a certain face value of what's going on, but with a corporation there's even more spin put on things for the investors. One can study quarterly finanace reports, company press releases, etc. but short of touring the company itself at VIP status these tell you squat about the harmful things a company is doing. Most of the time their illegal activities, such as toxic waste dumping, or cutting corners on drug research, are so well hidden that it takes a random discovery and expose before anyone even knows about it and files a class action lawsuit. Just because I've invested $700 in Large Drug Co. doesn't mean I should be liable when their new asthma medicine ends up killing 45 people. Terrible? Yes. Will I pull my money out at that point? Possibly, it depends on if this was caused by shady dealings or if this was just some unfortunate fluke - either way I shouldn't have to lose my house in a lawsuit against the company just because I didn't know precisely how my money was being spent. Even at the 400 person company I work for day-in day-out I don't know every little thing that's going on, how could an investor possible be able to evaluate the secret immoral dealings of a huge multinational?
I think there should be more liability among shareholders, but amoung the ones actually controlling the company, and overseeing the day-today activities. If you sit on the board then you damn well better know why those 45 people died from bad inhalers, and if a court finds that it was for illegal reasons and that you were complicit then you're busted chief.
The inherent problem with giving a corporation the same rights as a person, is that it cannot be penalized like a person. When someone kills or injures someone else, they are liable for fines and/or jailtime depending on the crime. A large corporation can be fined, perhaps have sanctions against it, and maybe even be shut down, but for the most part the corp. continues on and the punishment amounts to nothing more than a handslap because of the shear scale and lifetime of a company. If a person spends 5 years in jail they have lost a portion of their lives, and will have difficulty resuming their life as a labeled felon. Time is precious to a person, we only get so much and we must live with how our past choices have changed us. A corporation may lose market share, investors, possibly people in management are fired or jailed, but the corporation has time on its side. It can remake its image, it can get more investors, and most importantly, it has no remorse. With a new board of directors the company could be just as immoral as before, and has learned nothing from it's disreputable past. One might argue that the shareholders would prevent this from happening by pulling investments etc, but I pose this question - why weren't the shareholders able to discern and prevent it the first time? If they could be duped once, they could be again.
Eventually if a person commits enough, or heinous enough crimes they are sent to jail for life, they are effectively removed from society. How do we remove a criminal corporation from society altogether? It can be done, but I point out that a corporation is much more likely to receive fines and sactions than be dismantled, whereas in the criminal courts a repeat offender eventually is going to g
I really hope they enjoyed their time as a museum, as they will themselves be a historical artifact after their hosting bill comes.
Now, let's get into some rebuttal:
" As far as the incremental approach, it's crap. The complexities of trans-planetary flight are a quantum leap above that of orbital flight. "
A perfect contradiction in just two sentences. You claim the incremental approach is "crap," and then proceed to point out the (very true) fact that trans-planetary flight is orders of magnitude harder to pull off than orbital. So, would you have us just build an interplanetary shuttle and send it off someplace w/o first sending all the sattelites, then orbiters, then landers/rovers that we have over the years? That makes no sense. If you aim directly for your goal in such a massive undertaking you're going to miss. Period.
The biggest argument one can give in favor of a step-wise path to Mars is that we know there are going to be unaccounted-for problems along the way, without a doubt it's a lot faster, easier, and cheaper to solve those problems running prep missions between here and the moon than between here and Mars. For one, signal delay is shorter, we'll know within 3 seconds if something goes wrong, rather than 6 minutes, that gives us time to react, study, and correct a problem before it possibly ruins the entire mission. Also, it takes 5 days to get to the moon, on closest orbit we're at least IIRC 5 months from Mars. If something goes wrong, or a design needs correction you'll know in a week instead of half a year, which cuts down development time.
" What incremental development gives you is an illusion of progress. Just look at the shuttle. We have dumped 30 years and countless billions into it's development. We have nothing to show for it. It has fewer capabilities than the Apollo program. It costs more to launch. "
Your points about the shuttle are valid, but they do not prove incremental development gives only the illusion of progress. For one, the shuttle program was designed to be our answer to space flight, not a first step in some greater space vehicle program. It was created as a one-stop-shop for getting payloads and people to and from space, nothing more. NASA dropped the ball on creating second generation designs that used the first shuttle as a learning experience. Yes they created some, but none of them have been pursued to the point of being viable replacements for the current fleet. So here there has been no illusion of progress (or any progress really) and there has been no incremental plan, just make the shuttles and use them.
" Most of the conditions in orbit can be re-created on the ground. (Ok, maybe not zero-g. But certainly the sealed environment.) "
Who cares about orbit? Orbit is the least of our worries in going to Mars, what about transporting humans through the radiation sea of interplanetary space? What about maintaining a habitat on another planet? We can do it in the space station, but even that is only technically a simulation of the conditions for a planet-based habitat. Simulations do not explore all possible failure modes, they can't by definition since there is no way to create a simulation that matches the real thing 100%. We have a lot of experience with orbital living, and we have a lot of experience with simulated ET habitats that have been done in extreme environments like the dessert and Antarctica, but we have no real experience with manning an actual ET habitat on another planet (or moon). You don't think that might be a valuable experience? There's no knowledge to be gained from building a base on the moon and staffing it? There are thousands of issues never before encountered that
I hope they can see this because I'm doing it harder than I ever have before.
But seriously, does anyone else see this as a trojan virus style tactic from M$? Get into the music industry through the lucrative promise of widespread effective DRM, then pull the puppet strings to steer their giant lawsuit machine. This follows their 'embrace and extend' strategy but could take it one step further:
1) embrace
2) extend
3) ??? profit!
4) use the RIAA law juggernaut to sue everyone not just for copyright infringement but patent infringement and DMCA infractions.
And why? Among other reasons, one of the biggest in terms of setbacks has been relying on Russia for technology, manpower, and funding. This is not a let's-bash-Russia troll, I think this points to directly to serious project management issues at NASA, and if we can't get a sealed stable environment orbiting our planet, how do we expect to pack a crew into a ship and send it 36 million miles away and be anything other than an extraterrestrial coffin?
I love space exploration, I want people on Mars, I want habitats on the moon, I want shuttles flying weekly between the ISS and MoonPod 1, but it's never gonna happen if NASA can't get its act together enough to do something as obvious and QA process basic as asking "Gee, Yakov, I've never seen an oxygen system like this before, do we have the specs on that?"
Granted, in space just about every system is critical, but I'd put O2 scrubbers pretty damn high on my list of priorities, why wasn't it on theirs?
We need to do this thing smart, and to do that we've got to do it incrementally. Speaking as a software engineer for complex automated systems, if you skip design phases you're guaranteed to have problems down the line. So let's not skip phases, let's fix the shuttle fleet, to fix the space station and get it on track. Let's go back to the moon and run some long term sorties, build a moon base, shuttle between base and station. We need real world (moon) experience with extraterrestrial habitation before we pick 6 of our country's finest minds to asphyxiate in the cold black of interplanetary space.
Can we build it yet? huh? huh? Can we can we can we?
Can you tell I'm really excited by this?
Time to go enter a ribbon climbing robot contest!
"After the cameras photographed the world from polar orbit, the exposed film was jettisoned back to earth near Hawaii..."
Added emphasis mine.
Last I checked, while Hawaii itself is land, everything around it for quite some distance is not.
From the parent's source article:
"The capsules were designed to float, so that if the plane missed, Navy boats could retrieve them. In case the boats missed, the capsules were fitted with salt plugs that would dissolve after two days in the ocean, causing the capsule to sink beneath the waves, so the film could never fall into enemy hands."
So while we have technically done mid-air captures before, they were not over land, and in fact were specifically designed to only be over water.
Answers:
a) yes.
b) they make a travel version and the drive is removable from the rest fo the tool.
Homework assignment: RTFA
Not really trying to troll here, but I saw this wonderful gadget on newegg at least a month ago. Either the submissions for today are that crummy already (it's only 9am here!) or we as slashdotters are losing our edge on posting tech stories as they happen. Come on now people, let's not let any more of these slip through the cracks!
Because I am horrifically addicted to Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance. :P
Also, what about swapping the 2 megapixel camera for a CCD board camera that can pickup infrared? Now we're talking a DIY nightvision headset for under $100!!
Also, I know most (all?) LCDs require a controller to use with any sort of viedo signal - to control the H and V and refresh rate etc. Does this LCD have the controller built in? Is it on the camera board and easily removed? Or is it built into the camera processor and intimately linked with that hardware? I've got a bunch of little mobile robots that could sure use these displays for full color state feedback and mapping displays!
Any help, hints, or links appreciated!
All the way to the bank.
Woohoo! Finally, now I don't have to sit in my car in front of my neighbor's house, I can just leech their connexon from my living room!
Well, since last I heard, PCs running Windows account for something above 95% of personal computers you're comparing an average Mac user against the average person.
Seems fair enough, but in my experience those are not going to be equally distributed slices of the population. On one hand you have every parent and grandparent who need to be painstakingly coaxed through reading their hotmail account, kids who think clicking on popups is fun, and your average teen who can use the computer but mostly for games, or Word.
On the Mac hand you have a lot of graphic and industrial designers, and skilled professionals with more income to purchase a Mac, since Macs - on average - cost much more than a basic PC setup (Dell, gateway, etc).
Yes, these are kinda broad generaliztaions, but the distinctions do exist. If you compare your average unwashed masses citizen to your average possibly higher-income and more advanced skill set citizen then you are going to find disparities in intelligence and education.
Remeber folks, correlation is not causation, look at where the numbers are coming from.
(Although technically I suppose it's an infinite % more, since the closest thing to French I see around here is the occasional distance in kM...)
#2 - Why am I not surprised that the average ticket prices posted by the National Association of Theater Owners have nothing to do with reality?
I have never, for as long as I have gone to the movies on my own (~ 1993), paid less than $6 to see a film unless it was at non-first-run theater.
Where are these rare and mysteriously budget-friendly theaters in America that were selling tickets for $5 or less up until 2000?
As a teen I lived about 45 minutes outside of Boston, but in that time I've also gone to theaters in NJ, CT, NY, PA, in cities and in totally rural areas. Not a nation-wide sampling, but one of a large enough size to know that the average ticket prices I saw was more around $7.50 for the last 12 years. And most of what I see these days is $8.75 to $10.
Unless there is some super-discount movie rate in the midwest I'm not aware of, then I call bullshit on these "statistics." (Not on the parent poster mind you, but on NATOonline.org or whoever they compiled their numbers from.)
Jay Sherman: [To Reinier Wolfcastle] How do you sleep at night??
As excerpted from The Critic.
Either the codec in my wav player is screwy or that is the gorram scariest liquid noise I have ever heard.
How convenient, I'm an object-oriented programmer. ;)
I totally agree they should stop the problam at the source rather than blanket punish everyone with a computer, however, this type video bootleg is not the one the MPAA is really worried about being traded online.
Who wants to watch a shakey, grainy copy, with terrible sound quality, when someone else is hosting the ripped DVD image, or a better camera copy done by the projectionist on his own time after closing?
This arrest is for publicity, when you ctach people stealing screeners, that's for all the marbles.
That works great for the end of the year, but what about all this money they take from every paycheck, from every item I purchase, from all the gas I pump, from simply owning a car, from using the telephone, from connecting 3 computers via a private network (soon to be in FL).
It's really quite terrifying when you list all the things you're taxed for. In fact it takes about a thousand times less effort to list things you aren't taxed for .... yet.
That's like a request being denied because the clerk was too tired to go down in the basement to find the files.
If fulfilling the request somehow breaks something, then the response should be to fix the damn thing and then fulfill the request.
Actually, there have been scams like that, for some time. There was even a great online documentation of one such device that someone found attached to an ATM.
Amazingly these crimes aren't being tracked down by the FBI either.
Right now if you're not threatening national security by using DeCSS or Kazaa then you're off the FBI's radar, they have bigger payoffs... er lobbyists... er... I mean problems to take care of.