You're right, he would never do something cheap like allowing his characters to appear in diet pepsi commercials or something.
Considering that the Star Wars movies themselves have been as much a marketing enterprise as a movie experience, I don't see a problem with that. It seems to fit.
Me, I'd like to see Tony Montana in a Pepsi commercial. "Say hello to my little friend!" Then he whips out a Pepsi and pops it open.
This is very true. I never understood why, rationally speaking, should a movie star (or a pop singer, a soccer player etc) get such ridiculous money. Is it how much their contribution to society really worth? I very much doubt it.
The real question is, how much is someone's work worth, in purely economic terms, to the person writing the check? If I were a producer and thought that Brad Pitt's name on my movie would be worth an extra $50 million in revenues, I'd be happy to write him a check for $10 million (numbers are pulled out of the air; I don't know what Pitt typically gets paid).
Yes, the $35,000-a-year teachers who teach kids to read are making a far greater contribution to society, but the fact is, their jobs aren't generating any "cash flow."
I work at a Web site development agency, and we use these same tools (Omniture, DoubleClick, WebTrends, etc) to track behavior on our clients' sites. There's no sharing of data, no sinister plots.
But, see, here's the problem. We have an article with this in it:
"We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax.
That's a big attention-getter, and it's not easy to pass it off with an easy denial.
The dude goes on to say they don't do it. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For now. But when a new executive gets hired, or the company reports losses for a quarter, that policy could easily change. Or if they hire someone who's unscrupulous and greedy... or even someone who's honest but for one reason or another has too much debt and is easily tempted... identity thieves could make an offer. Who knows?
That is why every little movie simply must have its own.com domain, rather than having a virtual directory under the domain of the publisher - e.g. paramount.com/drecky_summer_movie/
The problem here is that if people type the URL in (as opposed to following a link) they have to know that Paramount is the studio. That's the sort of thing that I'm not likely to remember because I don't give a rat's ass. Of coure, that's just me, and maybe I'm not typical, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Also, assuming someone remembers Paramount, they still have to remember how to spell it.
I like your plan to have more top level domains, but it is ultimately pointless to have more, since trademarks make it hard to register similar domains under different toplevels anyway.
Since the article talks about.pro domains, that makes sense in this context. But overall, business isn't the only reason for registering a domain name. I registered my last name as a.net for personal use. I have no reason to care if someone else registers the name under a different TLD.
...you could argue I was more "accepting" of it, when really I have just resigned myself to forever receiving spam.
I think this touches on the heart of the matter for a lot of the replies I've seen. There's a huge, massive difference between "being accepting of it" (meaning you've resigned yourself to the unavoidable fact of receiving it) and "thinking it's acceptable" (meaning you think it's okay for spammers to send it).
The idea is that all candidates should be able to compete fairly. In theory, a poor person with a good idea should be able to compete on the basis of his policies, not on the size of his pocket book.
The basic principle is laudible. In practice however; what a mess. I think the FEC is trying to protect us from astroturfing and outright lying. It would be nice if they could dream up rules that would do that without wreaking havoc on the rights of the rest of us. Oh well. (resigned sigh. Is it too early for a beer? Probably.)
While I don't like to say things that might associate me with the tin-foil-hat crowd, it's really, really hard for me to reconcile these proposed regulations with the idea of "protecting" us from anything. It's a far easier conclusion for me to think that regulating political speech is one of the basic steps in consolidating political power.
If candidates are to be allowed to "compete fairly" in the world as it exists today, an unregulated Internet is, quite possibly, the only way to do it.
No. But then I'm not a moral crusader, I'm a thief with a grudge. I believe that the collective refusal of the community to pay the high prices currently charged for music will lead to a shakedown eventually and I'm willing to break laws in order to get there.
This kind of civil disobedience may be exciting and subversive and stuff, but it's not going to go anywhere. As long as piracy in any form exists at some detectable level, that's their excuse for ever stricter laws.
What you need to be willing to do is not acquire any music from the mainstream industry through any means, and get as many people as you can to do the same. It might not be as fun as being a "thief with a grudge," but it's the best shot you have at doing something that'll actually make a difference.
No, forget the commas. Just write it like this: "BBC News is reporting that the British police National High Tech Crime Unit has foiled an attempted fraud by hackers who used keylogging software."
This is just another step in the corporatization of America where people voluntarily give up their freedom and rational minds by being fooled into believing that allowing corporations to create a virtual caste system through modern marketing methods is actually a good thing.
A bit off topic, but this touches on an idea that I had an idea just yesterday. I think they should revamp congress. Instead of having the states elect senators and representatives, let congress be made up of handpicked members from the boards of Fortune 500 companies.
So, instead of hearing a soundbite on the news where a senator is saying, "My esteemed colleague from Rhode Island," you'd hear him say, "My esteemed colleage from Disney."
This just in: you're not important enough for anyone to give a rat's ass about you.
No, but they do care about the money they think you're going to spend.
Having said that, I don't care if they try to guess my birthday or anniversary. I don't think my online purchasing is consistent enough for them to figure it out, anyway.
I just don't want them to flood me with spam because of it. Keep it at the level of suggesting purchases when I log onto the web site, and I have no problem.
What's wrong with banning contents providing information on how to commit suicide. Nothings wrong with it... the worst that can happen is one person suicides and does it wrong and actually survives! (which is of course debatable if thats a good thing or not)
...or does it wrong and ends up on a respirator for the next seven years, finally dying long after the family has passed the point at which the death is considered a relief to all concerned.
Slashdot needs to understand: Suicide bad! Life good!
In general, yes. But I'm not prepared to make that decision for someone else.
Having said that, I still reserve my right to hold people who commit suicide in contempt and regard them as gutless weenies. (The exception being terminally ill people who know they have nothing to look forward to but continued and increasing pain.)
Begorrah ! The ones who knew enough to find the "swag" on a relevant website are the ones who should be first in the queue to be admiited. After all they're the ones with the acumen.
They found out about the hack by reading a posting on a message board. No acumen required for that.
The MEDIA has been claiming that you could keep the rentals for as long as you'd like, but I have yet to actually see anything from Blockbuster that explicitly states that.
I dunno... The slogan "The end of late fees" sounds pretty definitive to me.
I would hope that no one was fired for the imaginary loss of nonexistent disks.
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with firing someone who's responsible for a screwup that results in the appearance that disks are missing. That's a symptom of incompetence and/or carelessness that should be examined closely.
Someone just got finished telling me in another thread (the speil on Vadalia Desktop) that the linux community is all about choice and is not interested in competing with Windows. If that is the case and the truth, why do you even care about a story like this, or care that M$ thinks they are competing with you? After all, it's all about freedom of choice isn't it -- or it is only about choice as long as the choice is Linux?
Because when people make that choice (whatever that choice might be), it should be a properly informed choice, made for the right reasons.
There's nothing inherently more secure about having my passwords stored on a single server out there than the current system, and, quite frankly, there's not much more convience in it.
Good point. But if you market the system effectively, you can make people believe it's more secure and convenient.
Personally, I do care about privacy. Or rather, I would if it was conceivably possible to have any, but as Scott McNealy accurately said back in 1999, there is no privacy, get over it. He's right unfortunately...
"These days it's all secrecy, and no privacy..."
Mick Jagger wrote that line in a song called Fingerprint file, in 1974.
One example: The world is imperfect. It's conceivable that someone might forget to close a table cell with a TD or close a table row with a TR.
No matter how a browser might deal with that, you have to wonder about someone who'd let a page like that go live on the web. Wouldn't they look at it first? (...and yet, I see pages that make me wonder that on a fairly regular basis...)
The article says that he had to route his connection through an anonymous proxy in the US to get a DRM licence to view his legitimately purchased content - are you telling me that the masses would know how to do this? I think not.
This leads into a point I'm wondering about. The author of the article doesn't say how he got this disc. If it was coded to be licensed in just the US or Canada, why was it made available for sale where he was?
Yeah, I don't think Yahoo wants to get involved in ensuring that a supposedly dead person matches up to a particular account. Imagine if Yahoo announced that they would allow this -- it would probably be abused to get access to other people's accounts, and would probably expose them to lawsuits too. They're too big to do something like that.
It seems to me that if you want your family to have access to those accounts after you're gone, all you have to do is write the info down and put it where they'll find it.
It really helped to highlight some of the issue with the freeIpod stuff; people can ignore marketing, but are absolutely infuriated if they feel "deceived" somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that the Star Wars movies themselves have been as much a marketing enterprise as a movie experience, I don't see a problem with that. It seems to fit.
Me, I'd like to see Tony Montana in a Pepsi commercial. "Say hello to my little friend!" Then he whips out a Pepsi and pops it open.
The real question is, how much is someone's work worth, in purely economic terms, to the person writing the check? If I were a producer and thought that Brad Pitt's name on my movie would be worth an extra $50 million in revenues, I'd be happy to write him a check for $10 million (numbers are pulled out of the air; I don't know what Pitt typically gets paid).
Yes, the $35,000-a-year teachers who teach kids to read are making a far greater contribution to society, but the fact is, their jobs aren't generating any "cash flow."
But, see, here's the problem. We have an article with this in it:
"We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax.
That's a big attention-getter, and it's not easy to pass it off with an easy denial.
The dude goes on to say they don't do it. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For now. But when a new executive gets hired, or the company reports losses for a quarter, that policy could easily change. Or if they hire someone who's unscrupulous and greedy... or even someone who's honest but for one reason or another has too much debt and is easily tempted... identity thieves could make an offer. Who knows?
There are too many variables.
The problem here is that if people type the URL in (as opposed to following a link) they have to know that Paramount is the studio. That's the sort of thing that I'm not likely to remember because I don't give a rat's ass. Of coure, that's just me, and maybe I'm not typical, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Also, assuming someone remembers Paramount, they still have to remember how to spell it.
Since the article talks about .pro domains, that makes sense in this context. But overall, business isn't the only reason for registering a domain name. I registered my last name as a .net for personal use. I have no reason to care if someone else registers the name under a different TLD.
I think this touches on the heart of the matter for a lot of the replies I've seen. There's a huge, massive difference between "being accepting of it" (meaning you've resigned yourself to the unavoidable fact of receiving it) and "thinking it's acceptable" (meaning you think it's okay for spammers to send it).
The basic principle is laudible. In practice however; what a mess. I think the FEC is trying to protect us from astroturfing and outright lying. It would be nice if they could dream up rules that would do that without wreaking havoc on the rights of the rest of us. Oh well. (resigned sigh. Is it too early for a beer? Probably.)
While I don't like to say things that might associate me with the tin-foil-hat crowd, it's really, really hard for me to reconcile these proposed regulations with the idea of "protecting" us from anything. It's a far easier conclusion for me to think that regulating political speech is one of the basic steps in consolidating political power.
If candidates are to be allowed to "compete fairly" in the world as it exists today, an unregulated Internet is, quite possibly, the only way to do it.
That says more about your imagination than it does about Firefox.
This kind of civil disobedience may be exciting and subversive and stuff, but it's not going to go anywhere. As long as piracy in any form exists at some detectable level, that's their excuse for ever stricter laws.
What you need to be willing to do is not acquire any music from the mainstream industry through any means, and get as many people as you can to do the same. It might not be as fun as being a "thief with a grudge," but it's the best shot you have at doing something that'll actually make a difference.
No, forget the commas. Just write it like this: "BBC News is reporting that the British police National High Tech Crime Unit has foiled an attempted fraud by hackers who used keylogging software."
A bit off topic, but this touches on an idea that I had an idea just yesterday. I think they should revamp congress. Instead of having the states elect senators and representatives, let congress be made up of handpicked members from the boards of Fortune 500 companies.
So, instead of hearing a soundbite on the news where a senator is saying, "My esteemed colleague from Rhode Island," you'd hear him say, "My esteemed colleage from Disney."
In other words, just drop the pretense.
No, but they do care about the money they think you're going to spend.
Having said that, I don't care if they try to guess my birthday or anniversary. I don't think my online purchasing is consistent enough for them to figure it out, anyway.
I just don't want them to flood me with spam because of it. Keep it at the level of suggesting purchases when I log onto the web site, and I have no problem.
Slashdot needs to understand: Suicide bad! Life good!
In general, yes. But I'm not prepared to make that decision for someone else.
Having said that, I still reserve my right to hold people who commit suicide in contempt and regard them as gutless weenies. (The exception being terminally ill people who know they have nothing to look forward to but continued and increasing pain.)
They found out about the hack by reading a posting on a message board. No acumen required for that.
I dunno... The slogan "The end of late fees" sounds pretty definitive to me.
As opposed to the people we have now? I say, let's give it a try.
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with firing someone who's responsible for a screwup that results in the appearance that disks are missing. That's a symptom of incompetence and/or carelessness that should be examined closely.
Because when people make that choice (whatever that choice might be), it should be a properly informed choice, made for the right reasons.
Good point. But if you market the system effectively, you can make people believe it's more secure and convenient.
"These days it's all secrecy, and no privacy..."
Mick Jagger wrote that line in a song called Fingerprint file, in 1974.
No matter how a browser might deal with that, you have to wonder about someone who'd let a page like that go live on the web. Wouldn't they look at it first? (...and yet, I see pages that make me wonder that on a fairly regular basis...)
This leads into a point I'm wondering about. The author of the article doesn't say how he got this disc. If it was coded to be licensed in just the US or Canada, why was it made available for sale where he was?
It seems to me that if you want your family to have access to those accounts after you're gone, all you have to do is write the info down and put it where they'll find it.
Not a bad idea. But doesn't it defeat the purpose to tell other people what the answer is?
And you didn't see that coming because... ???