Just look at the useless (seeming inactive) coalition governments around the world and their regular crises.
I'll take a gridlocked government over an effective government any day.
It is probably a product of my American upbringing, but I believe that the worst possible threat to a population's freedom and safety is an overbearing government.
Ultimately, any organization's primary goal is to increase the size and power of the organization. A gridlocked government will be just as ineffective at growing itself as it will be at doing anything else.
So, as long as we have to have a government as a necessary evil, the best kind is the kind that does the least. Gridlock is the most effective way to assure that the government does the least.
The egg white is not liquid, nor solid. Something like this strange mix called liquid-solid.
Otherwise known as egg-white plasma.
You gotta be careful when experimenting with this stuff, if it gets too cold, it may turn into a superfluid and climb over the edges and out of the pan on its own.
Even today DirecTV is compressing their HD signals to fit more channels in the same bandwidth. They OUGHT to be maxing out the 19.8Mbps that ATSC allocates because for some scenes, 19.8Mbps isn't quite enough to fully resolve high-motion without ugly macro-blocking.
But, HD shows on DirecTV (and a lot of the other satellight providers) are being squished down into 14Mbps or less. It's like they don't get it - HDTV is about the HIGH DEFINITION not the LSTCTV (lots of stupid channels tv). People who pay for high def want the best possible picture quality, not the most possible crappy looking channels.
Leave the crappy picture quality to the standard def channels where people have already given up on ever getting it look good again (once upon a tv, early in the mini-dish era, the standard-def channels had so much bandwidth available that they often looked at least as good as DVD and lots of times they would even look better, but it hasn't been like that for years).
Well, I just spent 20 minutes in google looking for the place where I first ran into this a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, the FLSA keeps sucking up the majority of the hits and I'm not finding it there and the DOL's website is way too much style over substance right now that I can't find much useful there either (plus it gave me a headache).
There is the possibility that I have confused exempt with merely salaried as well.
Nobody want to be seen alienating plumbers (or whores), because they never know when they'll really, really need them.
During the recent democratic national convention in Boston there was a small, haphazardly organized attempt by the local sex industry to convince their clients during that week (i.e. a bunch of convention delegates) to support legalization of prostitution.
The plan was to wait until their clients were, "thorougly commited" to their current activities and then stop and say that they just couldn't go on because of the moral dilemma the current situation presented -- here they were participating in a clearly illegal activity with one of the people responsible for making it, or at least keeping it, illegal
Well, I haven't heard of any new bills to legalize the sex industry since the DNC ended, so I suspect the clients end up promising anything to keep the girls in bed, but then 'forgot' all about it afterwards.
I don't think the nationals do shit for unions...most of it is organized crime, IMHO. But at the lower end, there are unions that actually do some good and help folks out that need it.
Do you mean the people I have to deal with on a regular basis that make my job more difficult because they don't do theirs? Your own job depends on theirs and your attempts to educate them and their supervisor about about their refusal to work are ignored. Real nice.
Perhaps you should consider that the devil you know is not as bad the devil you don't know. Before this country's organized labor movement, working conditions REALLY SUCKED. How would you like to go 9 hours without a meal, water or even a bathroom break for 7 days a week?
Maybe putting up with a bunch of deadwood is the price you pay for not being physically tortured by your employer, just because he can.
In theory the salaried employee should be averaging 40 hours week too. The idea is that keeping track of overtime and undertime is more work than it is worth for certain kinds of jobs. It is illegal for an employer to consistently expect more than 40 hours per week from an "exempt" employee.
However, in practice these salaried employees are often unaware of their rights, and in fact most of their management is unaware of the legalities of mandatory unpaid/uncompensated overtime. So, the effect is not just an ass-ramming but a group ass-ramming by all involved because none know any better.
That's one reason I enjoy working contracts at a set hourly rate. My ass remains strictly one-way and if somebody starts thinking about doing a little construction to make it two-way, I can just take off with no feelings of guilt or remorse.
Sorry, this isn't Spider-man. This is a business. With great power does not necessarily come with great responsibility.
But regardless of their comic book status, with great power comes great vulnerability.
If you go around acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla (you know the one that can sit anywhere it likes, without caring whom it might squash in the process), sooner or later you are going to get bit in the ass. Or, to really mix metaphors, you'll wake up one day like Guilliver -- tied down by 1,000 lillputians who are now standing on your face with with their toothpick-sized swords ready to stick your eyeballs.
This is also something that Bush and his neocronies haven't seemed to figure out either, despite receiving a few bites in the ass already.
720/60p is pretty damn good for fast motion; but then when you want to sit down with a really immersive movie you give up some on the res. Switching back and forth between them isn't the best on my older RPTV; and creates some hell for recording.
What material is available in 720p at 60Hz? No film-based material will be since its all shot at 24Hz to begin with and as far as I know, even ABC only does 720p at 30Hz for their few native-HDTV shows.
You do realize that 1080/60p is a valid format don't you?
Just as valid as 1080/75p. The ATSC standard only defines 4 frame rates for 1920x1080: 23.976Hz, 24Hz, 29.97Hz and 30Hz. Look it up, it is specified on page 21 of ATSC standard A/53C rev C, dated May 2004.
You don't know WTF you are talking about. First off -- "540 lines per second" I don't think so. 1080i is 540 lines at 60Hz. That's sixty times per second. Then there is 1080p which is typically one of three rates - 1080 lines at 30Hz, 25Hz or 24Hz. Those last two are more about european (PAL) and film frame rates than anything else.
So, 1080p at the fastest rate of 30Hz that's 1080 lines/field x 30 fields/second = 32400 lines/second. Compare that to 1080i's 540 lines/field x 60 fields/second = 32400 lines/second. EXACTLY THE SAME NUMBER OF LINES.
Add to that the fact that MPEG2 does a better job (more efficient) compressing progressive video than it does compressing interlaced video and you find that your required data rates to get the same level of picture quality actually go down slightly.
Actually, you'll have less space (on your desk!).;) Though, I agree that having an extra monitor is great. OTOH, if you happen to use LCD flat panels instead of monitors, then it's not entirely a feasible option!
Huh? I have three SGI 1600SW LCDs on my machine at home. Two of them horizontal (1600x1024) and the third vertical (1024x1600) for web browsing. How is this not feasible? There is no way I could do the same with CRTs, there just isn't enough space.
Translucency means you can (for example) have an editor window open on top of a reference web site in Mozilla, and still read the reference information while working in the editor without having to repeatedly raise and lower the two windows.
But now you can't convince your boss to spend this year's equipment budget on a bigger monitor for you -- say goodbye to that 30" 2500x1600 LCD monitor from Apple.
I mean, come on -- if you've gotta use a battery and not a hardwired power source, change the battery at 3 am. Preferably after she's gotten back from a party and is pretty sloshed, or something.
Yeah, like when she's busy slapping skin with the new guy!
Whose is more of a fool the parent who tries or the parent who do nothing?
That's pretty stupid. So, electronic monitoring - potentially 24x7 - is the only way to "try?" Otherwise a parent is doing nothing?
Reading your original post, I couldn't tell if you were reasonable or clueless, it was borderline. But, by phrasing the options in such absolute, black & white terms, you've become pretty well situated in the land of the clueless.
Here's the reason - if the kid knows he's always being monitored, then they are, by definition never "flying on their own." If you monitor them secretly you get one chance, as soon as you are caught you will never be able to secretly monitor them again, no matter what the method because they will become extremely paranoid and will actively look to catch you in any other secret monitoring and just as actively work to fool that monitoring.
Just wait until your kid puts his GPS car monitor, that he suppossedly doesn't even know about, on his friend's car for the weekend and then goes out to party. You can only lose that game, kids may not be as experienced as most adults but they can be a hell of a lot more persistent and tricky.
Related to the fact that "anyone" can change an article -- if you are having an argument, er discussion, with an idiot and cite a wikipedia article as supporting evidence, the idiot can go edit the wikipedia article and make it say the opposite, here's an example of exactly that (only gets good at the end):
But I am worried about the commodification of everything, including the battle field 'experience,' which has now been reduced officially to being, like, incredible and amazing. I guess it is, when you command a home theatre.
Just like television made the news more personal to the viewer compared to radio broadcasts and just as radio broadcasts made the news more personal compared to newspaper articles. I don't think there is anything wrong with bringing as close a simulation as possible home to the general public. Sure, there is the initial ooohing and aaahing over the technology rather than relating to the actual events, but that wears off quickly enough.
With all the unacknowledged bias in news "reporting" these days, I don't think editorialization is really as valuable as you make it out to be. Certainly even raw footage can have en editorial bias, but without words to twist the viewer's perspective, that can only go so far.
As someone who has put more money than he should have into his home theater, I can definitely tell you that an accurate battlefield simulation can scare the crap out of you with only the slightest suspension of disbelief. The realism that hidef video and audio can provide is enough to convince my cat that the birds on the screen are real enough that he has tried to jump through and kill them on a number of occasions, something that previously has only happened with a real window with real birds.
I suspect that your hypothetical 3D blood-spatter system(TM) would be all the more effective in giving the more hawkish among the population pause to consider exactly what it means for both our troops and the "enemy" to declare war and go off to battle.
You know there is a direct correlation between the size of your pipe and the size of your penis, which means the Japanese and the Koreans have penises 33 times the size of ours! Even the women! ... Argument through fallacy is always the recourse of the weak mind.
Probably because Ibrahim is not so much of a "mainstream" movie? Hence fewer would watch it, and theatres would have to run the show half full?
I was talking about the DVD prices, that's why I referenced dvdpricesearch.com. Both movies are pretty sure to have gone into the black before their respective DVD release dates.
As for half-empty theaters, a) you can be sure that last samurai had its share of half-empty theaters before its theaterical run ended because it ran on soo many screens, after the initial few weeks, the hype machine ended but it kept playing for quite a while andb b) I don't go to the theater any more (have one in my basement that is better than most) but I'm pretty sure Ibrahim's limited run would have been mostly at arthouse type theaters dedicated to such movies and thus able to better fill their seats for a non-mainstream title than the average mall-based multiplex.
In other words, I would not be surprised if last samurai had actually played to a higher percentage of empty seats by the end of its theaterical run than Ibrahim did.
I've changed my viewing habits a lot over the years, I'd much rather see a good performance than some marquee face.
Don't you find it odd that high-budget movies are often priced the same, or less than the low-budget ones? If the cost to produce is orders of magnitude lower, why does the product cost the same or more -- and I'm not just talking MSRP either, but effective street pricing. For example, compare the current street pricing for "Monsieur Ibrahim" (a recent French movie, that I'm guessing had a budget of about $1M) vs street pricing for "the last samurai" with Tom Cruise and a budget of approximately $100M. Ibrahim is streeting for about twice what samurai is (~$2o vs ~$1o on the low end per dvdpricesearch). So, you generally have high prices justified by high costs, but when you don't have high costs, you still have high prices. Definitely a sign of a non-free market.
we've gone from ~$1 for a video rental in 1985 to ~$1 for a video rental in 2004
Not at the major rental chains we haven't. If anything, their prices have gone up - typically $5+ at BBV and HWV today, and they are responsible for bulk of the rental business. More recent releases just have shorter rental periods (2-day, vs 3-day, vs 5-day, etc).
If anything, it has been the death of rental pricing (it didn't survive the transition to DVDs, partly because BBV got into a feud with the studios and the studios fought back by commoditizing the market) that has been the cause of a resurgence in mom&pop rental places, since they couldn't afford rental pricing either.
Personally, I don't think rental is a good deal at all, I buy all my DVDs used from places like BBV and HWV and my avg buying price is now under $7. Even if it is a dud, I can resell it to the used DVD store for more than the $2 difference between buying used and renting, and one late fee on a rental would make it cheaper to have bought the disc in the first place anyway.
The biggest disruption to come along for a while now is the netflix business model. Just this summer both BBV and HWV have started their own instore netflix-style plans on the order of $10-$30 per month for any X titles out at once. That sort of subscription pricing may end up tilting the balance back to the side of renting versus buying.
I'm quite interested to see how it turns out, both BBV and HWV are so poorly managed that even at $5+/rental they have had a string of a quarterly losses. If the subscription model works out for them, bringing in more money for the same or less cost it might just save their asses. If not, they had better get more efficient and start charging less, or end up as more roadkill on the information super-highway.
Perhaps you should ask yourself why theater tickets cost so much instead of just using it as a base to rationalize the price of a DVD. Perhaps it is because the monopoly of copyright allows things to get out of hand. By out of hand I'm talking about movie stars that are paid $10M+ to do a movie. They certainly don't have any intrinsic value anywhere near $10M, much less $10M per movie. They are just pretty faces with (sometimes very limited) acting skills.
But, because copyright grants an artificial monopoly, the market for their services (and the entire range of services used to produce a movie) becomes bloated and inefficient. Not only do you gotta pay for the $10M to gods-gift-to-man, but you also gotta pay for all the coke going up the noses of the suits in the "production company." There are plenty of other useless expenses in the movie biz that are just accepted as part of the price of doing business because the real cost is just passed on to the customer and competition for customers is very limited - more than 90% of all "entertainment" in the west is controlled by just five companies.
So, while you may not consider it overcharging, that's only because you don't have a good understanding of the inefficiencies in the market. The real big picture shows that pricing is incredibly abusive and we've just been so well trained that few are able to even wrap their brains around the situation enough to question it.
As for comparisons to VHS, you are talking about a practice called "rental" pricing which made most videos only available to video rental stores because of the artificially high price -- and it certainly wasn't limited to just one studio, all of them did it for the first X months of release. And again, rental pricing was only feasible because it was supported by the monopoly of copyright and not indicative of any real value.
It doesn't sound to me like the policeman was being a jerk. From the description on the site, he was polite, if rather clueless about technology.
Ah, so as long as they do it nicely, it's ok for the state to violate a person's rights? If only those officers had kept their language civil, that whole Rodeny King case would never have been a problem, eh?
Yeah, instead sue them for still not giving a shit after burning 700 other patrons with coffee served at a temperature that causes 3rd degree burns after less than 7 seconds of skin contact.
As a former sprintpcs customer I knew who you were talking about just by reading your second sentence. Amazing how universally poor their customer service was (is? I dunno, and I don't plan to ever find out either).
Perhaps the people should pay their fucking bills on time and not just ignore them for weeks/months/years?
You must live in a perfect world. Too bad no one else does.
I know a guy who cancelled his cabletv and phone service over a year ago. The cableco was so F-ed up that they kept trying to bill him. He finally got it cleared up, but now they send him a monthly bill for $0.00. Every month, on the dot. No big deal right? Well, they also have sicced a collection agency on him for the original misbilled amount. He sent the agency copies of the last 6 $0.00 bills. They still keep claiming that he owes money. I don't know how much more proof than $0.00 bills for the last half year one might need to get the dogs called off.
Fortunately since it was a combo cable/telephone provider the only phone number the collection agency has for him is the same phone number that he cancelled when he cancelled his account with them. But that hasn't stopped the collection agency from sending him a bunch of those mysterious letters that look like junk mail and don't say anything but imply threats to life and limb, if not credit score.
All in all, he's glad he quit comcast (oops!), with their 1GB usenet quota and secret bandwidth limits and steadily increasing prices for broadband and tv, the incompetent billing is just the icing on the cake. I'm glad I never had them to begin with, and next time I move, I will make sure to stay out of comcast-monopolized territory .
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Just look at the useless (seeming inactive) coalition governments around the world and their regular crises.
I'll take a gridlocked government over an effective government any day.
It is probably a product of my American upbringing, but I believe that the worst possible threat to a population's freedom and safety is an overbearing government.
Ultimately, any organization's primary goal is to increase the size and power of the organization. A gridlocked government will be just as ineffective at growing itself as it will be at doing anything else.
So, as long as we have to have a government as a necessary evil, the best kind is the kind that does the least. Gridlock is the most effective way to assure that the government does the least.
The egg white is not liquid, nor solid. Something like this strange mix called liquid-solid.
Otherwise known as egg-white plasma.
You gotta be careful when experimenting with this stuff, if it gets too cold, it may turn into a superfluid and climb over the edges and out of the pan on its own.
Even today DirecTV is compressing their HD signals to fit more channels in the same bandwidth. They OUGHT to be maxing out the 19.8Mbps that ATSC allocates because for some scenes, 19.8Mbps isn't quite enough to fully resolve high-motion without ugly macro-blocking.
But, HD shows on DirecTV (and a lot of the other satellight providers) are being squished down into 14Mbps or less. It's like they don't get it - HDTV is about the HIGH DEFINITION not the LSTCTV (lots of stupid channels tv). People who pay for high def want the best possible picture quality, not the most possible crappy looking channels.
Leave the crappy picture quality to the standard def channels where people have already given up on ever getting it look good again (once upon a tv, early in the mini-dish era, the standard-def channels had so much bandwidth available that they often looked at least as good as DVD and lots of times they would even look better, but it hasn't been like that for years).
Well, I just spent 20 minutes in google looking for the place where I first ran into this a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, the FLSA keeps sucking up the majority of the hits and I'm not finding it there and the DOL's website is way too much style over substance right now that I can't find much useful there either (plus it gave me a headache).
There is the possibility that I have confused exempt with merely salaried as well.
Nobody want to be seen alienating plumbers (or whores), because they never know when they'll really, really need them.
During the recent democratic national convention in Boston there was a small, haphazardly organized attempt by the local sex industry to convince their clients during that week (i.e. a bunch of convention delegates) to support legalization of prostitution.
The plan was to wait until their clients were, "thorougly commited" to their current activities and then stop and say that they just couldn't go on because of the moral dilemma the current situation presented -- here they were participating in a clearly illegal activity with one of the people responsible for making it, or at least keeping it, illegal
Well, I haven't heard of any new bills to legalize the sex industry since the DNC ended, so I suspect the clients end up promising anything to keep the girls in bed, but then 'forgot' all about it afterwards.
I don't think the nationals do shit for unions...most of it is organized crime, IMHO. But at the lower end, there are unions that actually do some good and help folks out that need it.
Sounds like government in general to me.
Do you mean the people I have to deal with on a regular basis that make my job more difficult because they don't do theirs? Your own job depends on theirs and your attempts to educate them and their supervisor about about their refusal to work are ignored. Real nice.
Perhaps you should consider that the devil you know is not as bad the devil you don't know. Before this country's organized labor movement, working conditions REALLY SUCKED. How would you like to go 9 hours without a meal, water or even a bathroom break for 7 days a week?
Maybe putting up with a bunch of deadwood is the price you pay for not being physically tortured by your employer, just because he can.
In theory the salaried employee should be averaging 40 hours week too. The idea is that keeping track of overtime and undertime is more work than it is worth for certain kinds of jobs. It is illegal for an employer to consistently expect more than 40 hours per week from an "exempt" employee.
However, in practice these salaried employees are often unaware of their rights, and in fact most of their management is unaware of the legalities of mandatory unpaid/uncompensated overtime. So, the effect is not just an ass-ramming but a group ass-ramming by all involved because none know any better.
That's one reason I enjoy working contracts at a set hourly rate. My ass remains strictly one-way and if somebody starts thinking about doing a little construction to make it two-way, I can just take off with no feelings of guilt or remorse.
Work once, paid once. Nice and simple.
Sorry, this isn't Spider-man. This is a business. With great power does not necessarily come with great responsibility.
But regardless of their comic book status, with great power comes great vulnerability.
If you go around acting like the proverbial 800lb gorilla (you know the one that can sit anywhere it likes, without caring whom it might squash in the process), sooner or later you are going to get bit in the ass. Or, to really mix metaphors, you'll wake up one day like Guilliver -- tied down by 1,000 lillputians who are now standing on your face with with their toothpick-sized swords ready to stick your eyeballs.
This is also something that Bush and his neocronies haven't seemed to figure out either, despite receiving a few bites in the ass already.
720/60p is pretty damn good for fast motion; but then when you want to sit down with a really immersive movie you give up some on the res. Switching back and forth between them isn't the best on my older RPTV; and creates some hell for recording.
What material is available in 720p at 60Hz? No film-based material will be since its all shot at 24Hz to begin with and as far as I know, even ABC only does 720p at 30Hz for their few native-HDTV shows.
You do realize that 1080/60p is a valid format don't you?
Just as valid as 1080/75p. The ATSC standard only defines 4 frame rates for 1920x1080:
23.976Hz, 24Hz, 29.97Hz and 30Hz.
Look it up, it is specified on page 21 of ATSC standard A/53C rev C, dated May 2004.
You don't know WTF you are talking about. First off -- "540 lines per second" I don't think so. 1080i is 540 lines at 60Hz. That's sixty times per second. Then there is 1080p which is typically one of three rates - 1080 lines at 30Hz, 25Hz or 24Hz. Those last two are more about european (PAL) and film frame rates than anything else.
So, 1080p at the fastest rate of 30Hz that's 1080 lines/field x 30 fields/second = 32400 lines/second.
Compare that to 1080i's 540 lines/field x 60 fields/second = 32400 lines/second.
EXACTLY THE SAME NUMBER OF LINES.
Add to that the fact that MPEG2 does a better job (more efficient) compressing progressive video than it does compressing interlaced video and you find that your required data rates to get the same level of picture quality actually go down slightly.
Actually, you'll have less space (on your desk!). ;) Though, I agree that having an extra monitor is great. OTOH, if you happen to use LCD flat panels instead of monitors, then it's not entirely a feasible option!
Huh? I have three SGI 1600SW LCDs on my machine at home. Two of them horizontal (1600x1024) and the third vertical (1024x1600) for web browsing. How is this not feasible? There is no way I could do the same with CRTs, there just isn't enough space.
Translucency means you can (for example) have an editor window open on top of a reference web site in Mozilla, and still read the reference information while working in the editor without having to repeatedly raise and lower the two windows.
But now you can't convince your boss to spend this year's equipment budget on a bigger monitor for you -- say goodbye to that 30" 2500x1600 LCD monitor from Apple.
I mean, come on -- if you've gotta use a battery and not a hardwired power source, change the battery at 3 am.
Preferably after she's gotten back from a party and is pretty sloshed, or something.
Yeah, like when she's busy slapping skin with the new guy!
Whose is more of a fool the parent who tries or the parent who do nothing?
That's pretty stupid. So, electronic monitoring - potentially 24x7 - is the only way to "try?" Otherwise a parent is doing nothing?
Reading your original post, I couldn't tell if you were reasonable or clueless, it was borderline. But, by phrasing the options in such absolute, black & white terms, you've become pretty well situated in the land of the clueless.
Here's the reason - if the kid knows he's always being monitored, then they are, by definition never "flying on their own." If you monitor them secretly you get one chance, as soon as you are caught you will never be able to secretly monitor them again, no matter what the method because they will become extremely paranoid and will actively look to catch you in any other secret monitoring and just as actively work to fool that monitoring.
Just wait until your kid puts his GPS car monitor, that he suppossedly doesn't even know about, on his friend's car for the weekend and then goes out to party. You can only lose that game, kids may not be as experienced as most adults but they can be a hell of a lot more persistent and tricky.
Related to the fact that "anyone" can change an article -- if you are having an argument, er discussion, with an idiot and cite a wikipedia article as supporting evidence, the idiot can go edit the wikipedia article and make it say the opposite, here's an example of exactly that (only gets good at the end):
Latest Blu-Ray News
But I am worried about the commodification of everything, including the battle field 'experience,' which has now been reduced officially to being, like, incredible and amazing. I guess it is, when you command a home theatre.
Just like television made the news more personal to the viewer compared to radio broadcasts and just as radio broadcasts made the news more personal compared to newspaper articles. I don't think there is anything wrong with bringing as close a simulation as possible home to the general public. Sure, there is the initial ooohing and aaahing over the technology rather than relating to the actual events, but that wears off quickly enough.
With all the unacknowledged bias in news "reporting" these days, I don't think editorialization is really as valuable as you make it out to be. Certainly even raw footage can have en editorial bias, but without words to twist the viewer's perspective, that can only go so far.
As someone who has put more money than he should have into his home theater, I can definitely tell you that an accurate battlefield simulation can scare the crap out of you with only the slightest suspension of disbelief. The realism that hidef video and audio can provide is enough to convince my cat that the birds on the screen are real enough that he has tried to jump through and kill them on a number of occasions, something that previously has only happened with a real window with real birds.
I suspect that your hypothetical 3D blood-spatter system(TM) would be all the more effective in giving the more hawkish among the population pause to consider exactly what it means for both our troops and the "enemy" to declare war and go off to battle.
You know there is a direct correlation between the size of your pipe and the size of your penis, which means the Japanese and the Koreans have penises 33 times the size of ours! Even the women!
...
Argument through fallacy is always the recourse of the weak mind.
Don't you mean, "argument through phallasy?"
Probably because Ibrahim is not so much of a "mainstream" movie? Hence fewer would watch it, and theatres would have to run the show half full?
I was talking about the DVD prices, that's why I referenced dvdpricesearch.com. Both movies are pretty sure to have gone into the black before their respective DVD release dates.
As for half-empty theaters, a) you can be sure that last samurai had its share of half-empty theaters before its theaterical run ended because it ran on soo many screens, after the initial few weeks, the hype machine ended but it kept playing for quite a while andb b) I don't go to the theater any more (have one in my basement that is better than most) but I'm pretty sure Ibrahim's limited run would have been mostly at arthouse type theaters dedicated to such movies and thus able to better fill their seats for a non-mainstream title than the average mall-based multiplex.
In other words, I would not be surprised if last samurai had actually played to a higher percentage of empty seats by the end of its theaterical run than Ibrahim did.
I've changed my viewing habits a lot over the years, I'd much rather see a good performance than some marquee face.
Don't you find it odd that high-budget movies are often priced the same, or less than the low-budget ones? If the cost to produce is orders of magnitude lower, why does the product cost the same or more -- and I'm not just talking MSRP either, but effective street pricing. For example, compare the current street pricing for "Monsieur Ibrahim" (a recent French movie, that I'm guessing had a budget of about $1M) vs street pricing for "the last samurai" with Tom Cruise and a budget of approximately $100M. Ibrahim is streeting for about twice what samurai is (~$2o vs ~$1o on the low end per dvdpricesearch). So, you generally have high prices justified by high costs, but when you don't have high costs, you still have high prices. Definitely a sign of a non-free market.
we've gone from ~$1 for a video rental in 1985 to ~$1 for a video rental in 2004
Not at the major rental chains we haven't. If anything, their prices have gone up - typically $5+ at BBV and HWV today, and they are responsible for bulk of the rental business. More recent releases just have shorter rental periods (2-day, vs 3-day, vs 5-day, etc).
If anything, it has been the death of rental pricing (it didn't survive the transition to DVDs, partly because BBV got into a feud with the studios and the studios fought back by commoditizing the market) that has been the cause of a resurgence in mom&pop rental places, since they couldn't afford rental pricing either.
Personally, I don't think rental is a good deal at all, I buy all my DVDs used from places like BBV and HWV and my avg buying price is now under $7. Even if it is a dud, I can resell it to the used DVD store for more than the $2 difference between buying used and renting, and one late fee on a rental would make it cheaper to have bought the disc in the first place anyway.
The biggest disruption to come along for a while now is the netflix business model. Just this summer both BBV and HWV have started their own instore netflix-style plans on the order of $10-$30 per month for any X titles out at once. That sort of subscription pricing may end up tilting the balance back to the side of renting versus buying.
I'm quite interested to see how it turns out, both BBV and HWV are so poorly managed that even at $5+/rental they have had a string of a quarterly losses. If the subscription model works out for them, bringing in more money for the same or less cost it might just save their asses. If not, they had better get more efficient and start charging less, or end up as more roadkill on the information super-highway.
Perhaps you should ask yourself why theater tickets cost so much instead of just using it as a base to rationalize the price of a DVD. Perhaps it is because the monopoly of copyright allows things to get out of hand. By out of hand I'm talking about movie stars that are paid $10M+ to do a movie. They certainly don't have any intrinsic value anywhere near $10M, much less $10M per movie. They are just pretty faces with (sometimes very limited) acting skills.
But, because copyright grants an artificial monopoly, the market for their services (and the entire range of services used to produce a movie) becomes bloated and inefficient. Not only do you gotta pay for the $10M to gods-gift-to-man, but you also gotta pay for all the coke going up the noses of the suits in the "production company." There are plenty of other useless expenses in the movie biz that are just accepted as part of the price of doing business because the real cost is just passed on to the customer and competition for customers is very limited - more than 90% of all "entertainment" in the west is controlled by just five companies.
So, while you may not consider it overcharging, that's only because you don't have a good understanding of the inefficiencies in the market. The real big picture shows that pricing is incredibly abusive and we've just been so well trained that few are able to even wrap their brains around the situation enough to question it.
As for comparisons to VHS, you are talking about a practice called "rental" pricing which made most videos only available to video rental stores because of the artificially high price -- and it certainly wasn't limited to just one studio, all of them did it for the first X months of release. And again, rental pricing was only feasible because it was supported by the monopoly of copyright and not indicative of any real value.
It doesn't sound to me like the policeman was being a jerk. From the description on the site, he was polite, if rather clueless about technology.
Ah, so as long as they do it nicely, it's ok for the state to violate a person's rights? If only those officers had kept their language civil, that whole Rodeny King case would never have been a problem, eh?
Don't sue McDonalds for making hot coffee.
Yeah, instead sue them for still not giving a shit after burning 700 other patrons with coffee served at a temperature that causes 3rd degree burns after less than 7 seconds of skin contact.
As a former sprintpcs customer I knew who you were talking about just by reading your second sentence. Amazing how universally poor their customer service was (is? I dunno, and I don't plan to ever find out either).
Perhaps the people should pay their fucking bills on time and not just ignore them for weeks/months/years?
You must live in a perfect world. Too bad no one else does.
I know a guy who cancelled his cabletv and phone service over a year ago. The cableco was so F-ed up that they kept trying to bill him. He finally got it cleared up, but now they send him a monthly bill for $0.00. Every month, on the dot. No big deal right? Well, they also have sicced a collection agency on him for the original misbilled amount. He sent the agency copies of the last 6 $0.00 bills. They still keep claiming that he owes money. I don't know how much more proof than $0.00 bills for the last half year one might need to get the dogs called off.
Fortunately since it was a combo cable/telephone provider the only phone number the collection agency has for him is the same phone number that he cancelled when he cancelled his account with them. But that hasn't stopped the collection agency from sending him a bunch of those mysterious letters that look like junk mail and don't say anything but imply threats to life and limb, if not credit score.
All in all, he's glad he quit comcast (oops!), with their 1GB usenet quota and secret bandwidth limits and steadily increasing prices for broadband and tv, the incompetent billing is just the icing on the cake. I'm glad I never had them to begin with, and next time I move, I will make sure to stay out of comcast-monopolized territory .