Neat idea, but it's really quite ugly, and much too big. The "cool for geeks" factor is high, but the design of the actual watch looks like a prototype, not something ready for sale.
Keep trying, guys. Once you find something that's interesting and looks good, you'll tap into a huge market of gals buying gifts for their geeky guys, as well as the smaller market of geeky women who will want one of their own.
My theory is that the timeline for purchasing an iPod & using iTunes goes something like this:
1) Buy iPod. 2) Rip CDs purchased way back when. 3) Buy music at iTunes to fill in the gaps in music collection. 4) Load everything on the iPod.
Now, everyone will have their own personalized timeline; you may already have ripped your CD music collection, or bought/downloaded mp3's from somewhere else, who knows? My main point here is that, for most people, buying an iPod is the first step, and buying music from iTunes (if they're going to do it at all) will come somewhere later, right?
Now, take into account that it is right before Christmas. People are buying iPods like mad (I know that in my city it's bloody impossible to find a 4GB Nano anywhere), and possibly iTunes gift certificates with them. Yet these iPods won't actually be opened until Christmas, and then people still have to install them and all that jazz (which, for the more technically savvy, is a piece of cake, but there are a lot of people out there who will have to wait for help from the family geek to get their iPod up and going). So the ratio of iPods sold over the last little while to people buying music from iTunes is of course going to be a little wonky.
Go ahead, iPod customers, prove my theory wrong. But I'd be curious to see what the rate of downloads is between Christmas and, say, the end of January. I'd predict that they'll be higher than the monthly average over the past year.
I work in the television industry, and I know how much corporate sponsorship plays a large part in the funding of both television and film. Most of your favorite (modern-day scenario) characters are wearing Timex watches, drinking Coke, talking on Motarola phones, and wearing Nike shoes. Companies pay for those out-of-focus billboards in the background to be recognizably from a specific company. All the vending machines on your favorite show will market only one brand of product. This has been going on for years.
What I think many people don't realize is that many television broadcast deals include a certain amount of advertising space, i.e. a contract will specify $X per show broadcast, plus a "bonus" of the television show owning a certain amount of commercial time. A television show then sell this commercial break time and hence can generate revenue from the ads that are played during the show. Without commercial breaks, the budget for a show can drop because they cannot sell commercial time.
Without the revenue generated by sales of commercial times, many shows would not have the budgets to continue production. This is another reason why there is more product placement in many shows. True, in previous years, product placement advertising wasn't necessarily so glaringly obvious. But if the viewer doesn't want to have commercial breaks, then a television series has to make money somehow. Granted, not every show needs that extra revenue to keep going -- but some do, especially smaller productions and those for the "fringe" markets. So before you protest that you don't know where the show ends and the advertisement begins, please remember: the consumer has demanded no commercial breaks, and has also demanded that their favorite television series have another season. There are consequences to every action.
It's amazing how many people will protest the use of mice/rats for scientific research when many of them would lay down poison or steel-jawed traps to get them out of their house.
We had a family of mice take up residence in our garage, so my father laid out traps. My younger brother found out about this and confronted my father in the garage, protesting the fact that my father would "kill the poor mice". Then one of the little critters ran towards him, and my brother whacked it to death with a broom.
To me, that's a great analogy for people who are against animal testing.
...you could get identical quality out of your DVDs with a standard definition 16:9 screen...
However, most of the TVs out there these days can be broken down into two general categories; 4:3 SD and 16:9 HD. What I'm getting at is that it's not exactly easy to find a 16:9 SDTV, although I'm sure they have been made. If someone wants to get a new widescreen TV, it's HD or nothing these days. Even if it's not any better than SD, at least it's a big, clear, new screen at the right ratio... (Or it's closer to the right ratio, anyway. I do realize that not all widescreen movies are presented in 16:9; there's a whole bunch of anamorphic ratios out there.)
What gets me is the people who watch SD-TV on a widescreen HDTV and somehow don't notice that the image often has been stretched horizontally. For example, I was in a sports bar that was showing an SD professional basketball on one of its HDTVs, and the players actually appeared to be short and squat. Now, not all HDTVs will do this -- some will reverse-letterbox the video. But how can you not notice when the image is stretched? It's just as annoying as having some DVD players playing widescreen videos in fullscreen mode (this happens all the time with older models, and the same effect occurs sometimes when the wrong lens is put on the projector at the movie theater). In that case, the video is squished horizontally and stretched vertically. And most of the time, nobody notices but me!
I understand that not everyone has a great eye for video quality; most of us can "tune out" the grain. But I hadn't realized that so many people were totally lacking a visual sense of proportion.
The underlying issue here, really, is that "children should not have access to porn, all that sex is bad for them."
Oh-ho. Seeing people have sex is horrible for the development of children, is it? Procreation is evil! Gawd, I thought that this line of thinking went out with Victorian times.
Right now, extreme conservatives look back to the "good old days" and see perfection. Children weren't exposed to sex as much in the old days as now, right?
Yet in most countries in the world until about 100 years ago (and some countries much more recently), all but the rich were living in one- and two-room houses, and people bred like bloody rabbits. How in the world were children not exposed to sex from a young age? Were all children deaf and blind until they were sent to marriages arranged by their aprents? Not to mention whores on city streetcorners, Daddy's mistress, and print pornography. No, no, no, the "good old days" were a haven of morality and conscience.
But now, any exposure of children to sex is seen as a horrible, horrible thing. Mostly this comes from the people who think that their teenagers couldn't possibly be experimenting with sex (or booze or drugs, for that matter), despite the fact that most adults have fond memories of doing so when they were teens! As long as adults desire sex, in all of its many forms (which, btw, is a biological, not a cultural, desire), teenagers will desire sex as well, and pre-pubescent children will be curious and imitate what they see (although they don't often really understand it).
And what gets me is that people make all the wrong arguments about pornography. Politicians are all about "saving the children" from exposure to sex, because sex at a young age is bad. (Not just unprotected sex and, of course, rape, but all sex.) But they never talk about the idea that pornography can objectify women, lead to unrealistic expectations about the human body and self-image, etc. Whether these arguments have weight or not in the public eye, the fact is that they are rarely brought up in the first place. No, because that would hint at some knowledge of the subject matter!
Give me a freaking break. People are killing each other in new and inventive ways on the 7-oclock news, but show a piece of flesh on prime time -- won't someone think of the children???????
Not so the US, but the word 'root' in Australia is slang to have sex.
Which is exactly why the Aussies were laughing their heads off at us Canadians at the last Olympics, when all of our nation's competitors were dressed in Roots brand clothing...
In the Unites States, companies create __________!
Okay, it's not quite as good as "In the Soviet Union...", but it's about as relevant.
(And don't bother starting an argument about how relevant these comments are in relation to the other ones on Slashdot. For every article posted here, there is at least one "In the Soviet Union..." or "In Korea, only old people..." that gets ridiculously modded up.)
Well, Kleenex started up in 1924, and you have to admit that the term "Kleenex" as opposed to "facial tissue" is still in use... Band-Aid first came on the market in 1920; these days, it's rare to hear someone ask where they can find the "adhesive bandages".
So yes, anything that was the first of its kind to become popular often will stand the test of time. "Walkman" and "rollerblades" have also become popularly used to replace "portable cassette deck" and "in-line skates," but they haven't been around long enough to pass the 50-year test. Although, from what I have observed, it really depends on the level of technology with regards to how long a name sticks around. With the invention of CD's, and now mp3 players, nobody really uses the traditional Walkman anymore (although Sony has also labelled their mp3 players "Walkmans", the term still seems to apply to portable cassette players in popular jargon). Rollerblades, too, while less techy than a walkman, aren't nearly as popular as at their first inception. However, terms like Kleenex and Band-Aids stick around for a long time because they have evolved very little since the product was first marketed.
As an aside, I would personally hope that the term blogosphere does not stand the test of time. It's possibly one of the silliest terms I have ever heard. But with my luck, it will stick around forever, or perhaps be replaced by something much worse...
If you want to have a cat in a city, keep it indoors or walk it leashed. Seriously. Just like with dogs, if they are trained to wear a leash as kittens they have no problem with it.
That's assuming that all of us get our pets when they are young. If you get a pet from a friend/family member when they move, or you adopt one from the local animal shelter, you're pretty much stuck with whatever training the animal recieved when it was young.
We have a wonderful cat that we got full-grown from a shelter. She's friendly, cuddly, has a great personality, and is well-trained regarding all indoor rules (doesn't go on tables/counters, doesn't use potted plants as litter boxes, etc.). She loves to go outside, but she stays pretty much in our backyard. We have yet to have a complaint from the neighbours (and trust me, if she was pissing them off, these are not the kind of neighbours who would keep it to themselves). However, when we got her, I thought I would do the "right thing" and put her in a harness and on a leash when she went outside. After a half-hour struggle to get the damned harness on, when we let the cat outside, she promptly took a hissy fit, then she flopped down on the ground and played the "oh, I am so weak, I cannot lift my own body weight plus this harness and leash" routine for all it was worth. Disgusted with the whole affair, I went inside to clean up some of the scratches. By the time I went to check on the cat (about 5min later), she'd somehow wormed herself out of the harness and we didn't see her again for three days. We went through this whole routine a couple of times, and every single time she was gone for longer afterwards. Only when she wasn't on a leash did our cat come back promptly.
I live in the 'burbs. We have many cats in our neighbourhood, and although every once and a while I do find a cat turd in my garden, for some remarkable reason, I never have rabbits eating the veggies or voles digging up my lawn. Just saying.
Kitty goes out, Kitty comes back in. Except when Kitty gets run over, or sneaks onto a truck bound for Vladivostok, or urinates on the wrong car, or gets caught by animal control, or...
Most of the cats that I've noticed that have gone missing were indoor cats who for some reason got out. Many outdoor cats come from a long line of cats who have come to grips with the concept of a car. If you live in a smaller city/town or on the outskirts, though, your cat may dissappear due to predators -- but that can happen with or without a leash. And if you havea a collar on your cat with a nametag that has your phone number, you're bound to get the her back from animal control -- for a fee, of course.
But the BSOD comments have to stop. It's so windows 3.1.
If only.
I run a legit version of Windows XP, all the updates installed, with three legit anti-virus/anti-spyware programs (among other software), on a fairly new box. Basically, I've done all of the things that Microsoft has told me to do to keep my computer running smoothly. I still get BSOD's on a semi-regular basis -- sometimes for spontaneous driver conflicts, sometimes for what appears to be no reason at all. I'm not a Windows fan (I only run it 'cause I can't run the software I use without it), but I do agree with the fact that the Windows bashing is getting old. However, BSODs do still happen -- don't think they stopped happening with the old versions of the OS. Occurrences decreased in frequency, sure, but the problem still exists.
BSODs are still a legit problem, and are one of the flaws inherent in Windows, no matter what version.
Personally, I think that parents should stop preparing to send their kids to college, and let them fend for themselves.
Hear, hear!
It is my personal experience that the kids that paid their own way through post-secondary education were much more likely to pay attention to and pass their courses. Nothing says "pass this course the first time through" more than the idea of working for an additional six months at the local McDonalds to pay for that class they have to re-take. Honestly, kids should have to take a year off between high school and post-secondary education and try to live on their own working full-time at minimum wage (if they can even get that much work). That would definitely give people incentive to actually try in school.
On the other side of things, it is my personal observation that the kids who skipped class the most, got drunk on weeknights/weekdays, flunked tests due to lack of studying and didn't bother to hand in assignments were generally the kids whose parents paid their whole way. What's the problem with re-taking an entire year if it's on mom and dad's tab and it just means another year of partying?
Sure, these are generalizations, there are exceptions to every rule. But if people are willing to work hard to go to school, they can get bursaries, scholarships, government assistance, lines of credit, etc. That work ethic continues into the learning ethic, which creates students who are more interested in learning than just passing.
I repeat simple common sense - drink water most of the time. It seems nothing else is safe these days.
I don't know where you get the idea that water is "safe". Hell, here in Ontario, Canada, we had the Walkerton debacle in 2000 wherein people died from E.coli that was circulated through "clean" tap water. And this is in an industrialized nation where we're not supposed to have problems with this kind of crap anymore. God forbid you visit/live in Mexico or Africa or some such where the water quality is worse.
- water can carry harmful bacteria - artificially created/modified products (such as soda and juice from concentrate) contain chemicals that may kill you - butter is too high in fat, but margarine contains too many artificial products and can even lead to anal leakage - sugar is bad for you, but so are artificial sweeteners - grains are treated with pesticides and other chemicals, and, once processed, are often so robbed of nutrients as to be totally unhealthy - vegetables are treated with pesticides and other chemicals, and are coated with wax to look pretty on the shelf - beef can be unsafe due to mad cow disease, and it's also much too fatty - poultry can be unsafe due to salmonella, and force-fed poultry is often, once again, much too high in fat - pork is just too high in fat to be healthy, and it also can carry its own share of harmful bacteria
Shall I go on?
I could find links that lead to studies that support all of the previous claims, but anyone who really cares enough can just Google it. What I'm getting at is that nothing is safe. That's why we have an immune system, but it's also why we get sick and die. That's why I've given up on eating "healthy", because nobody can agree on what "healthy" is!
Way to shoot yourself in the foot, Sony!
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay, I've fallen for your lines about downloading and not paying for mp3's "taking money away from artists", that downloading is illegal and immoral and God knows what else. Or maybe I've just gotten tired of trying to find a good copy of a song online. Or I might simply prefer to have a high-quality copy of my favorite album(s) so that, if for some reason my computer should crash, I can convert a new copy to MP3 and lose nothing but a little time.
For whatever reason, I buy one of your CD's, pay the $18 CAD or thereabouts for a new release. But this is the computer age, I don't even own a stereo, so I want to play the CD on my computer.
The first thing I notice is that the CD is DRM-ed to death so it's a pain in the ass to convert the songs to MP3 format; so much for listening to the music that I've bought on my iPod. (If I live in Canada, I may have also paid for this music twice, once through the purchase of the CD, and a second time through the levy on my iPod as "blank media".) Oh yeah, and for some reason, neither iTunes nor Winamp will play the CD.
The second thing I notice (because who really reads the EULA?) while researching how to crack the DRM, is that, among other things, if my house is burgled I will have to delete all the mp3's from this disc. (Because, you know, a burglar would spend all that time copying the MP3's from my hard drive instead of stealing the whole damn computer. And man, if I own a laptop, they're just going to leave it on the desk and take my crappy TV instead...) Also, if I don't update the software whenever it prompts me to, I will lose all access to the music that I have purchased. And I can't listen to the music on a work computer, nor can I re-sell the CD that I have just purchased. WTF?
But then my system crashes, and some virus I can't get rid of keeps me from accessing all the data on my hard drives that I haven't backed up in ages (of course). And how did this virus get on my system? Through a root kit that the Sony CD installed without even telling me it was doing so, thank you very much....
Alright, Sony, now you've shot yourself in the foot. You've basically persuaded millions of CD buyers out there (you know, the people who were actually paying for your product?) that it's easier, safer, and plain old less annoying to yoink MP3's from thier favorite website or file-sharing program.
What people need to keep in mind is that many users of any given P2P service are located in countries other than the United States. Here in Canada, it is completely legal to download any music we want to. This is why there is a levy on blank media here (tapes, CD's, DVD's, and hard drives too, now, I believe), which is supposed to be used to compensate the artists/industry for "lost revenue".
So really, the "main legal usage" of a P2P network varies from country to country. When you say that "anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure", you're implying that all P2P users are from the United States and are bound by American laws. This is simply untrue. With the Internet being a worldwide phenomenon, "you can't do that, it's illegal!" isn't really a viable argument.
(BTW, I'm not saying that if the people/company who run the network are doing something illegal in their own country, that the network shouldn't be shut down. That's another matter entirely.)
Actually, "irregardless" is a word according to Dictionary.com. However, even the dictionary has a side-note stating that it's a term still in dispute "for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term."
'Driven to riot' implies a lack of accountability on the part of the people looting and burning one of history's great civilizations.
These days, everyone is "driven", and there is no sense of personal accountability. People are "driven" towards things by poverty, violence, drugs, alcohol, religion, family, peer pressure... Which totally fails to take into account that people have a choice in their actions. They can choose to say, "No, I will not do this..." Whatever "this" may be. Hell, look at Ghandi. He was "driven" by many factors to protest violently... And yet he never did.
No matter how rich/poor/happy/sad whatever your life is, bad shit can and will happen to you. Most of it probably won't be your fault. But everyone has a choice about how they deal.
A product associated with the Apple brand name fails, and hence it must be a conspiracy? O-kaaay...
Apple took a risk by associating the iTunes branding with another company's cell phone. The phone didn't end up being a big seller -- perhaps because of the 512MB/100 song limit, or because it was bad timing for such a product, or because the market is already saturated with cell phones at $0 down that locks customers into a 2+ year contract.
Why in the world would Apple associate its brand name with an intentional flop? If they really wanted it to fail, they would have let someone else take the risk. It makes no sense to sully your own name... When was the last time that you bought a brand name device when you had already had bad experiences with something of the same brand name? Despite the fact that they were totally different devices, like a portable CD player and a TV, for example.
Additionally, the idea that Apple was trying to sour consumers on the idea of integrated devices seems particularily silly. The iPod itself is an integrated deivce, and becomes more so with every new version. First it just played music. Then it showed pictures. Now you can get ones that also play video. Why in the world would Apply try to convince people not to buy iPods? They'd be shooting themselves in the foot -- on purpose!
I would definitely buy downloadable video for rental costs, although I have to admit that rental prices do vary... Here in Canada, it's about $5 for a new release for two days, and it goes down in price from there ($3 for a 7-day rental, $0.99 for a kid's movie, etc.). Then it wouldn't be a big deal if the file was DRM-ed to death, you didn't expect to keep the movie anyway. However, rental times would have to be modified to allow for download time. When you bring home a movie from the rental outlet, you can watch it as soon as you stick the disc in the machine. Depending on your internet connection, it can take hours, or even days, to download a movie. I'd hope that the time limit would start ticking only upon the successful download of a file.
However, if I actually want to own a movie, I'd still go out and buy a disc instead of downloading it. Hell, for many people, that's how it works for their "illegal" downloads now, too -- you download it so you can watch it once, but if you want to store it, re-watch it at a later date, watch it in high-quality video, watch all the special features, etc. One of the reasons that there are more downloads than movie purchases is that so many of the movies out there are such crap that nobody wants to see them more than once... Okay, that and there are a lot of international shows and movies that aren't available in any given country at any given time.
Oh great. As if those planes that pull banners behind them and drop fliers weren't bad enough. Now we could potentially have high-tech paper airplanes launched en-masse from rooftops that soar/flutter/plunge down and bombard you with ever-changing spam content -- literally! And I thought pop-ups were annoying.
It's not the technology that's the problem, it's some peoples' inability to manage their time and to say "no" to unreasonable demands.
Over the course of your average work day, I use a land line, a cell phone, email, instant messaging, and a fax machine, not to mention actually physically talking to real people. I do not use these tools so that people can have indiscriminate access to me; rather, I use them to have immediate access to information.
All of the above devices have methods of separating the wheat from the chaff. Phones of any kind can have caller ID -- the only people I pick up for are those that I actually want to or have to speak to, like immediate clients or my boss. Everyone else can leave a message, and I go through my voice mail two or three times a day and get back only to the people that I want to speak to.
As for email and IM, well, if it's urgent, you shouldn't be emailing or IM-ing it. I don't care how easily most people are "accessible" these days, you can't assume that someone is a) in front of a computer at all times, and b) availble to answer your messages. And really, that's what subject lines, SPAM filters, and organizational folders are for -- so that you don't have to read everything in its entirety to filter out what you really need to pay attention to!
Communications tools have yet to replace face-to-face meetings entirely, and how would you feel if someone you were talking to was interrupted twenty times in a conversation due to these tools? (And yes, I do hate people that do this. If I am not important enough for you to ignore your cell phone and your blackberry for a few minutes, I should be talking to someone else.) If it's urgent, people will phone, and you will recognize the number -- it's not very often that someone will have an urgent request that you will actually respond to that is related to something you're not immediately working on.
Oh yes, and fax machines are really easy to ignore, I check them maybe once a day, and since 99% of the time it's spam with 1% of the time being invoices, this has never created a problem for me.
Basically, if it's really important, people will phone you or, God forbid, meet you in person. And if you can't tell someone over the phone that you have matters you have to attend to, or you can't tell the person in your office that you have to work on a project, it's not the fault of technology, it's your own wishy-washy-ness. Well, either that or they're actually (gasp!) the people you want/neet to talk to.
It works in reverse, too; I don't expect people to get back to me instantaneously. But I have no problem with that. If I have to talk to someone, I'll phone them, show up in person, or set up a meeting in advance. "Immediately" in the business world does not mean "right now," it really means "as soon as possible".
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Neat idea, but it's really quite ugly, and much too big. The "cool for geeks" factor is high, but the design of the actual watch looks like a prototype, not something ready for sale.
Keep trying, guys. Once you find something that's interesting and looks good, you'll tap into a huge market of gals buying gifts for their geeky guys, as well as the smaller market of geeky women who will want one of their own.
My theory is that the timeline for purchasing an iPod & using iTunes goes something like this:
1) Buy iPod.
2) Rip CDs purchased way back when.
3) Buy music at iTunes to fill in the gaps in music collection.
4) Load everything on the iPod.
Now, everyone will have their own personalized timeline; you may already have ripped your CD music collection, or bought/downloaded mp3's from somewhere else, who knows? My main point here is that, for most people, buying an iPod is the first step, and buying music from iTunes (if they're going to do it at all) will come somewhere later, right?
Now, take into account that it is right before Christmas. People are buying iPods like mad (I know that in my city it's bloody impossible to find a 4GB Nano anywhere), and possibly iTunes gift certificates with them. Yet these iPods won't actually be opened until Christmas, and then people still have to install them and all that jazz (which, for the more technically savvy, is a piece of cake, but there are a lot of people out there who will have to wait for help from the family geek to get their iPod up and going). So the ratio of iPods sold over the last little while to people buying music from iTunes is of course going to be a little wonky.
Go ahead, iPod customers, prove my theory wrong. But I'd be curious to see what the rate of downloads is between Christmas and, say, the end of January. I'd predict that they'll be higher than the monthly average over the past year.
I work in the television industry, and I know how much corporate sponsorship plays a large part in the funding of both television and film. Most of your favorite (modern-day scenario) characters are wearing Timex watches, drinking Coke, talking on Motarola phones, and wearing Nike shoes. Companies pay for those out-of-focus billboards in the background to be recognizably from a specific company. All the vending machines on your favorite show will market only one brand of product. This has been going on for years.
What I think many people don't realize is that many television broadcast deals include a certain amount of advertising space, i.e. a contract will specify $X per show broadcast, plus a "bonus" of the television show owning a certain amount of commercial time. A television show then sell this commercial break time and hence can generate revenue from the ads that are played during the show. Without commercial breaks, the budget for a show can drop because they cannot sell commercial time.
Without the revenue generated by sales of commercial times, many shows would not have the budgets to continue production. This is another reason why there is more product placement in many shows. True, in previous years, product placement advertising wasn't necessarily so glaringly obvious. But if the viewer doesn't want to have commercial breaks, then a television series has to make money somehow. Granted, not every show needs that extra revenue to keep going -- but some do, especially smaller productions and those for the "fringe" markets. So before you protest that you don't know where the show ends and the advertisement begins, please remember: the consumer has demanded no commercial breaks, and has also demanded that their favorite television series have another season. There are consequences to every action.
It's amazing how many people will protest the use of mice/rats for scientific research when many of them would lay down poison or steel-jawed traps to get them out of their house.
We had a family of mice take up residence in our garage, so my father laid out traps. My younger brother found out about this and confronted my father in the garage, protesting the fact that my father would "kill the poor mice". Then one of the little critters ran towards him, and my brother whacked it to death with a broom.
To me, that's a great analogy for people who are against animal testing.
"Server not found..."
Dammit.
...you could get identical quality out of your DVDs with a standard definition 16:9 screen...
However, most of the TVs out there these days can be broken down into two general categories; 4:3 SD and 16:9 HD. What I'm getting at is that it's not exactly easy to find a 16:9 SDTV, although I'm sure they have been made. If someone wants to get a new widescreen TV, it's HD or nothing these days. Even if it's not any better than SD, at least it's a big, clear, new screen at the right ratio... (Or it's closer to the right ratio, anyway. I do realize that not all widescreen movies are presented in 16:9; there's a whole bunch of anamorphic ratios out there.)
What gets me is the people who watch SD-TV on a widescreen HDTV and somehow don't notice that the image often has been stretched horizontally. For example, I was in a sports bar that was showing an SD professional basketball on one of its HDTVs, and the players actually appeared to be short and squat. Now, not all HDTVs will do this -- some will reverse-letterbox the video. But how can you not notice when the image is stretched? It's just as annoying as having some DVD players playing widescreen videos in fullscreen mode (this happens all the time with older models, and the same effect occurs sometimes when the wrong lens is put on the projector at the movie theater). In that case, the video is squished horizontally and stretched vertically. And most of the time, nobody notices but me!
I understand that not everyone has a great eye for video quality; most of us can "tune out" the grain. But I hadn't realized that so many people were totally lacking a visual sense of proportion.
The underlying issue here, really, is that "children should not have access to porn, all that sex is bad for them."
Oh-ho. Seeing people have sex is horrible for the development of children, is it? Procreation is evil! Gawd, I thought that this line of thinking went out with Victorian times.
Right now, extreme conservatives look back to the "good old days" and see perfection. Children weren't exposed to sex as much in the old days as now, right?
Yet in most countries in the world until about 100 years ago (and some countries much more recently), all but the rich were living in one- and two-room houses, and people bred like bloody rabbits. How in the world were children not exposed to sex from a young age? Were all children deaf and blind until they were sent to marriages arranged by their aprents? Not to mention whores on city streetcorners, Daddy's mistress, and print pornography. No, no, no, the "good old days" were a haven of morality and conscience.
But now, any exposure of children to sex is seen as a horrible, horrible thing. Mostly this comes from the people who think that their teenagers couldn't possibly be experimenting with sex (or booze or drugs, for that matter), despite the fact that most adults have fond memories of doing so when they were teens! As long as adults desire sex, in all of its many forms (which, btw, is a biological, not a cultural, desire), teenagers will desire sex as well, and pre-pubescent children will be curious and imitate what they see (although they don't often really understand it).
And what gets me is that people make all the wrong arguments about pornography. Politicians are all about "saving the children" from exposure to sex, because sex at a young age is bad. (Not just unprotected sex and, of course, rape, but all sex.) But they never talk about the idea that pornography can objectify women, lead to unrealistic expectations about the human body and self-image, etc. Whether these arguments have weight or not in the public eye, the fact is that they are rarely brought up in the first place. No, because that would hint at some knowledge of the subject matter!
Give me a freaking break. People are killing each other in new and inventive ways on the 7-oclock news, but show a piece of flesh on prime time -- won't someone think of the children???????
Not so the US, but the word 'root' in Australia is slang to have sex.
Which is exactly why the Aussies were laughing their heads off at us Canadians at the last Olympics, when all of our nation's competitors were dressed in Roots brand clothing...
In the Unites States, companies create __________!
Okay, it's not quite as good as "In the Soviet Union...", but it's about as relevant.
(And don't bother starting an argument about how relevant these comments are in relation to the other ones on Slashdot. For every article posted here, there is at least one "In the Soviet Union..." or "In Korea, only old people..." that gets ridiculously modded up.)
Well, Kleenex started up in 1924, and you have to admit that the term "Kleenex" as opposed to "facial tissue" is still in use... Band-Aid first came on the market in 1920; these days, it's rare to hear someone ask where they can find the "adhesive bandages".
So yes, anything that was the first of its kind to become popular often will stand the test of time. "Walkman" and "rollerblades" have also become popularly used to replace "portable cassette deck" and "in-line skates," but they haven't been around long enough to pass the 50-year test. Although, from what I have observed, it really depends on the level of technology with regards to how long a name sticks around. With the invention of CD's, and now mp3 players, nobody really uses the traditional Walkman anymore (although Sony has also labelled their mp3 players "Walkmans", the term still seems to apply to portable cassette players in popular jargon). Rollerblades, too, while less techy than a walkman, aren't nearly as popular as at their first inception. However, terms like Kleenex and Band-Aids stick around for a long time because they have evolved very little since the product was first marketed.
As an aside, I would personally hope that the term blogosphere does not stand the test of time. It's possibly one of the silliest terms I have ever heard. But with my luck, it will stick around forever, or perhaps be replaced by something much worse...
Well, all the people whose mail servers have been getting overwhelmed by Sober hits are already having a bird.
Aw, forget it, I just can't seem to make this pun fly.
If you want to have a cat in a city, keep it indoors or walk it leashed. Seriously. Just like with dogs, if they are trained to wear a leash as kittens they have no problem with it.
That's assuming that all of us get our pets when they are young. If you get a pet from a friend/family member when they move, or you adopt one from the local animal shelter, you're pretty much stuck with whatever training the animal recieved when it was young.
We have a wonderful cat that we got full-grown from a shelter. She's friendly, cuddly, has a great personality, and is well-trained regarding all indoor rules (doesn't go on tables/counters, doesn't use potted plants as litter boxes, etc.). She loves to go outside, but she stays pretty much in our backyard. We have yet to have a complaint from the neighbours (and trust me, if she was pissing them off, these are not the kind of neighbours who would keep it to themselves). However, when we got her, I thought I would do the "right thing" and put her in a harness and on a leash when she went outside. After a half-hour struggle to get the damned harness on, when we let the cat outside, she promptly took a hissy fit, then she flopped down on the ground and played the "oh, I am so weak, I cannot lift my own body weight plus this harness and leash" routine for all it was worth. Disgusted with the whole affair, I went inside to clean up some of the scratches. By the time I went to check on the cat (about 5min later), she'd somehow wormed herself out of the harness and we didn't see her again for three days. We went through this whole routine a couple of times, and every single time she was gone for longer afterwards. Only when she wasn't on a leash did our cat come back promptly.
I live in the 'burbs. We have many cats in our neighbourhood, and although every once and a while I do find a cat turd in my garden, for some remarkable reason, I never have rabbits eating the veggies or voles digging up my lawn. Just saying.
Kitty goes out, Kitty comes back in.
Except when Kitty gets run over, or sneaks onto a truck bound for Vladivostok, or urinates on the wrong car, or gets caught by animal control, or...
Most of the cats that I've noticed that have gone missing were indoor cats who for some reason got out. Many outdoor cats come from a long line of cats who have come to grips with the concept of a car. If you live in a smaller city/town or on the outskirts, though, your cat may dissappear due to predators -- but that can happen with or without a leash. And if you havea a collar on your cat with a nametag that has your phone number, you're bound to get the her back from animal control -- for a fee, of course.
But the BSOD comments have to stop. It's so windows 3.1.
If only.
I run a legit version of Windows XP, all the updates installed, with three legit anti-virus/anti-spyware programs (among other software), on a fairly new box. Basically, I've done all of the things that Microsoft has told me to do to keep my computer running smoothly. I still get BSOD's on a semi-regular basis -- sometimes for spontaneous driver conflicts, sometimes for what appears to be no reason at all. I'm not a Windows fan (I only run it 'cause I can't run the software I use without it), but I do agree with the fact that the Windows bashing is getting old. However, BSODs do still happen -- don't think they stopped happening with the old versions of the OS. Occurrences decreased in frequency, sure, but the problem still exists.
BSODs are still a legit problem, and are one of the flaws inherent in Windows, no matter what version.
Personally, I think that parents should stop preparing to send their kids to college, and let them fend for themselves.
Hear, hear!
It is my personal experience that the kids that paid their own way through post-secondary education were much more likely to pay attention to and pass their courses. Nothing says "pass this course the first time through" more than the idea of working for an additional six months at the local McDonalds to pay for that class they have to re-take. Honestly, kids should have to take a year off between high school and post-secondary education and try to live on their own working full-time at minimum wage (if they can even get that much work). That would definitely give people incentive to actually try in school.
On the other side of things, it is my personal observation that the kids who skipped class the most, got drunk on weeknights/weekdays, flunked tests due to lack of studying and didn't bother to hand in assignments were generally the kids whose parents paid their whole way. What's the problem with re-taking an entire year if it's on mom and dad's tab and it just means another year of partying?
Sure, these are generalizations, there are exceptions to every rule. But if people are willing to work hard to go to school, they can get bursaries, scholarships, government assistance, lines of credit, etc. That work ethic continues into the learning ethic, which creates students who are more interested in learning than just passing.
I repeat simple common sense - drink water most of the time. It seems nothing else is safe these days.
I don't know where you get the idea that water is "safe". Hell, here in Ontario, Canada, we had the Walkerton debacle in 2000 wherein people died from E.coli that was circulated through "clean" tap water. And this is in an industrialized nation where we're not supposed to have problems with this kind of crap anymore. God forbid you visit/live in Mexico or Africa or some such where the water quality is worse.
- water can carry harmful bacteria
- artificially created/modified products (such as soda and juice from concentrate) contain chemicals that may kill you
- butter is too high in fat, but margarine contains too many artificial products and can even lead to anal leakage
- sugar is bad for you, but so are artificial sweeteners
- grains are treated with pesticides and other chemicals, and, once processed, are often so robbed of nutrients as to be totally unhealthy
- vegetables are treated with pesticides and other chemicals, and are coated with wax to look pretty on the shelf
- beef can be unsafe due to mad cow disease, and it's also much too fatty
- poultry can be unsafe due to salmonella, and force-fed poultry is often, once again, much too high in fat
- pork is just too high in fat to be healthy, and it also can carry its own share of harmful bacteria
Shall I go on?
I could find links that lead to studies that support all of the previous claims, but anyone who really cares enough can just Google it. What I'm getting at is that nothing is safe. That's why we have an immune system, but it's also why we get sick and die. That's why I've given up on eating "healthy", because nobody can agree on what "healthy" is!
Okay, I've fallen for your lines about downloading and not paying for mp3's "taking money away from artists", that downloading is illegal and immoral and God knows what else. Or maybe I've just gotten tired of trying to find a good copy of a song online. Or I might simply prefer to have a high-quality copy of my favorite album(s) so that, if for some reason my computer should crash, I can convert a new copy to MP3 and lose nothing but a little time.
...
For whatever reason, I buy one of your CD's, pay the $18 CAD or thereabouts for a new release. But this is the computer age, I don't even own a stereo, so I want to play the CD on my computer.
The first thing I notice is that the CD is DRM-ed to death so it's a pain in the ass to convert the songs to MP3 format; so much for listening to the music that I've bought on my iPod. (If I live in Canada, I may have also paid for this music twice, once through the purchase of the CD, and a second time through the levy on my iPod as "blank media".) Oh yeah, and for some reason, neither iTunes nor Winamp will play the CD.
The second thing I notice (because who really reads the EULA?) while researching how to crack the DRM, is that, among other things, if my house is burgled I will have to delete all the mp3's from this disc. (Because, you know, a burglar would spend all that time copying the MP3's from my hard drive instead of stealing the whole damn computer. And man, if I own a laptop, they're just going to leave it on the desk and take my crappy TV instead...) Also, if I don't update the software whenever it prompts me to, I will lose all access to the music that I have purchased. And I can't listen to the music on a work computer, nor can I re-sell the CD that I have just purchased. WTF?
But then my system crashes, and some virus I can't get rid of keeps me from accessing all the data on my hard drives that I haven't backed up in ages (of course). And how did this virus get on my system? Through a root kit that the Sony CD installed without even telling me it was doing so, thank you very much.
Alright, Sony, now you've shot yourself in the foot. You've basically persuaded millions of CD buyers out there (you know, the people who were actually paying for your product?) that it's easier, safer, and plain old less annoying to yoink MP3's from thier favorite website or file-sharing program.
Way to go.
(Idiots.)
What people need to keep in mind is that many users of any given P2P service are located in countries other than the United States. Here in Canada, it is completely legal to download any music we want to. This is why there is a levy on blank media here (tapes, CD's, DVD's, and hard drives too, now, I believe), which is supposed to be used to compensate the artists/industry for "lost revenue".
So really, the "main legal usage" of a P2P network varies from country to country. When you say that "anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure", you're implying that all P2P users are from the United States and are bound by American laws. This is simply untrue. With the Internet being a worldwide phenomenon, "you can't do that, it's illegal!" isn't really a viable argument.
(BTW, I'm not saying that if the people/company who run the network are doing something illegal in their own country, that the network shouldn't be shut down. That's another matter entirely.)
My $0.02 CAD.
Actually, "irregardless" is a word according to Dictionary.com. However, even the dictionary has a side-note stating that it's a term still in dispute "for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term."
'Driven to riot' implies a lack of accountability on the part of the people looting and burning one of history's great civilizations.
These days, everyone is "driven", and there is no sense of personal accountability. People are "driven" towards things by poverty, violence, drugs, alcohol, religion, family, peer pressure... Which totally fails to take into account that people have a choice in their actions. They can choose to say, "No, I will not do this..." Whatever "this" may be. Hell, look at Ghandi. He was "driven" by many factors to protest violently... And yet he never did.
No matter how rich/poor/happy/sad whatever your life is, bad shit can and will happen to you. Most of it probably won't be your fault. But everyone has a choice about how they deal.
A product associated with the Apple brand name fails, and hence it must be a conspiracy? O-kaaay...
Apple took a risk by associating the iTunes branding with another company's cell phone. The phone didn't end up being a big seller -- perhaps because of the 512MB/100 song limit, or because it was bad timing for such a product, or because the market is already saturated with cell phones at $0 down that locks customers into a 2+ year contract.
Why in the world would Apple associate its brand name with an intentional flop? If they really wanted it to fail, they would have let someone else take the risk. It makes no sense to sully your own name... When was the last time that you bought a brand name device when you had already had bad experiences with something of the same brand name? Despite the fact that they were totally different devices, like a portable CD player and a TV, for example.
Additionally, the idea that Apple was trying to sour consumers on the idea of integrated devices seems particularily silly. The iPod itself is an integrated deivce, and becomes more so with every new version. First it just played music. Then it showed pictures. Now you can get ones that also play video. Why in the world would Apply try to convince people not to buy iPods? They'd be shooting themselves in the foot -- on purpose!
I would definitely buy downloadable video for rental costs, although I have to admit that rental prices do vary... Here in Canada, it's about $5 for a new release for two days, and it goes down in price from there ($3 for a 7-day rental, $0.99 for a kid's movie, etc.). Then it wouldn't be a big deal if the file was DRM-ed to death, you didn't expect to keep the movie anyway. However, rental times would have to be modified to allow for download time. When you bring home a movie from the rental outlet, you can watch it as soon as you stick the disc in the machine. Depending on your internet connection, it can take hours, or even days, to download a movie. I'd hope that the time limit would start ticking only upon the successful download of a file.
However, if I actually want to own a movie, I'd still go out and buy a disc instead of downloading it. Hell, for many people, that's how it works for their "illegal" downloads now, too -- you download it so you can watch it once, but if you want to store it, re-watch it at a later date, watch it in high-quality video, watch all the special features, etc. One of the reasons that there are more downloads than movie purchases is that so many of the movies out there are such crap that nobody wants to see them more than once... Okay, that and there are a lot of international shows and movies that aren't available in any given country at any given time.
Oh great. As if those planes that pull banners behind them and drop fliers weren't bad enough. Now we could potentially have high-tech paper airplanes launched en-masse from rooftops that soar/flutter/plunge down and bombard you with ever-changing spam content -- literally! And I thought pop-ups were annoying.
What level of up to moment importance can be assigned to it if it comes two hours later, or never?
You've hit the nail right on the head.
It's not the technology that's the problem, it's some peoples' inability to manage their time and to say "no" to unreasonable demands.
Over the course of your average work day, I use a land line, a cell phone, email, instant messaging, and a fax machine, not to mention actually physically talking to real people. I do not use these tools so that people can have indiscriminate access to me; rather, I use them to have immediate access to information.
All of the above devices have methods of separating the wheat from the chaff. Phones of any kind can have caller ID -- the only people I pick up for are those that I actually want to or have to speak to, like immediate clients or my boss. Everyone else can leave a message, and I go through my voice mail two or three times a day and get back only to the people that I want to speak to.
As for email and IM, well, if it's urgent, you shouldn't be emailing or IM-ing it. I don't care how easily most people are "accessible" these days, you can't assume that someone is a) in front of a computer at all times, and b) availble to answer your messages. And really, that's what subject lines, SPAM filters, and organizational folders are for -- so that you don't have to read everything in its entirety to filter out what you really need to pay attention to!
Communications tools have yet to replace face-to-face meetings entirely, and how would you feel if someone you were talking to was interrupted twenty times in a conversation due to these tools? (And yes, I do hate people that do this. If I am not important enough for you to ignore your cell phone and your blackberry for a few minutes, I should be talking to someone else.) If it's urgent, people will phone, and you will recognize the number -- it's not very often that someone will have an urgent request that you will actually respond to that is related to something you're not immediately working on.
Oh yes, and fax machines are really easy to ignore, I check them maybe once a day, and since 99% of the time it's spam with 1% of the time being invoices, this has never created a problem for me.
Basically, if it's really important, people will phone you or, God forbid, meet you in person. And if you can't tell someone over the phone that you have matters you have to attend to, or you can't tell the person in your office that you have to work on a project, it's not the fault of technology, it's your own wishy-washy-ness. Well, either that or they're actually (gasp!) the people you want/neet to talk to.
It works in reverse, too; I don't expect people to get back to me instantaneously. But I have no problem with that. If I have to talk to someone, I'll phone them, show up in person, or set up a meeting in advance. "Immediately" in the business world does not mean "right now," it really means "as soon as possible".