It's important to remember that comments in a public forum is not the same as a democratic vote. expressed viewpoints on one side or another of a debate in a form like that tend to accumulate to one side or the other because, basically, one person sees the article, has his say (maybe angrily), tells his girlfriend who probably feels the same way, the girlfriend also comments or at least reads it and tells her cousin who probably feels the same, who then tells his friend, who tells his mom... etc etc.
Pretty soon, you have a critical mass of "nay" comments and any "yay" people feel that trying to speak out against all the nay-sayers will be a waste of text. Keep in mind that this is an EXAGGERATION of things that I usually observe on comments on articles related to homosexuality, or abortion, and can't be used to describe all public-comment-forums (either online or offline).
The correct proceedure of speaking out against a policy and actually getting results usually involves writing to your congressperson, joining an activist group or donating time and money, etc.
Just because a large number of nay-sayers found that article and posted doesn't mean that 98% of the POPULATION feels this way. ALL it means is that 98% of the people who commented felt that way.
It isn't a representation of how our "government doesn't listen to us" and it's not fair or statistically sound to miss-read what public comment forums actually show. If 100,00 letters to congress got totally ignored, that would be a different story.
For the record, I'm not a fan of this ruling either.
I predict that in certain respects, ebooks will continue to have commercial difficulties and a lack of popularity until the formats are more universal, and security and copyright protections are better developed and especially better respected by the general public. There's a culture of consumers that see electronic media sort of like a liquid commodity without the same kind of value as a book or a cd. mp3s are still exchanged and shared for free all over the place and until that culture and that way of thinking changes, i don't think that commercial ebooks (like commercially available mp3s) will be as successful as the markets would like them to be.
I believe we're dealing with a very different kind of product (digital products) whose form really isn't compatible with our current consumer culture. I just don't think it's a good match and it will continue to have problems indefinitely unless something in the market or the consumer culture itself changes.
Your Hawaii/birthday example would probably work better if you picked a region that was on the other side of the international date line. Some place like Japan perhaps. A birthday in San Francisco and in Hawaii would fall on the same day for both regions.
I worked in a theater when the Matrix had their pre-view screenings the midnight before openning night, and they didn't sell out. They came close, but we still had tickets available the night it was playing and fans weren't threatening the box offices for tickets (Joss posted a dissapointed post about "certain fans" who behaved badly over the tickets).
I worked in a decent sized town at that time too. A suburb of Portland, OR.
I agree that the trailer is formulaic. That was a marketing strategy to pull in the mainstream "i want to see shit explode" audience.
But the show itself is not formulaic. It subverts a lot of different "sci-fi" and even TV-series-in-general expectations. No vinyl-clad halloween-esque aliens with more make-up than my dead grandfather, no scantily clad crew members who have no real business being scantily clad (Inara's a Companion. Dressing beautifully is part of her job description. and she's never scantily clad anyway), the dialogue is FUNNY and entirely character driven... and the characters are complex rather than based on single opposing traits.
In the "literary" sense, the series really doesn't belong on mainstream tv at all because that's not the kind of thing that gets played on mainstream tv.
Buffy had a fanbase because it had pretty faces, yes. But this series has a fanbase (much bigger and with a higher average IQ than the buffy fanbase) because it's a GOOD series.
Maybe you should too. You're missing an apostrophe before "Cause". (shortened from 'because', of course. )
But you're right. the sentence is poorly written. But if you couldn't understand its basic meaning, you're too dependent on prescriptive grammar for comprehension and maybe you should get out more.:)
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It's important to remember that comments in a public forum is not the same as a democratic vote. expressed viewpoints on one side or another of a debate in a form like that tend to accumulate to one side or the other because, basically, one person sees the article, has his say (maybe angrily), tells his girlfriend who probably feels the same way, the girlfriend also comments or at least reads it and tells her cousin who probably feels the same, who then tells his friend, who tells his mom... etc etc.
Pretty soon, you have a critical mass of "nay" comments and any "yay" people feel that trying to speak out against all the nay-sayers will be a waste of text. Keep in mind that this is an EXAGGERATION of things that I usually observe on comments on articles related to homosexuality, or abortion, and can't be used to describe all public-comment-forums (either online or offline).
The correct proceedure of speaking out against a policy and actually getting results usually involves writing to your congressperson, joining an activist group or donating time and money, etc.
Just because a large number of nay-sayers found that article and posted doesn't mean that 98% of the POPULATION feels this way. ALL it means is that 98% of the people who commented felt that way.
It isn't a representation of how our "government doesn't listen to us" and it's not fair or statistically sound to miss-read what public comment forums actually show. If 100,00 letters to congress got totally ignored, that would be a different story.
For the record, I'm not a fan of this ruling either.
I predict that in certain respects, ebooks will continue to have commercial difficulties and a lack of popularity until the formats are more universal, and security and copyright protections are better developed and especially better respected by the general public. There's a culture of consumers that see electronic media sort of like a liquid commodity without the same kind of value as a book or a cd. mp3s are still exchanged and shared for free all over the place and until that culture and that way of thinking changes, i don't think that commercial ebooks (like commercially available mp3s) will be as successful as the markets would like them to be.
I believe we're dealing with a very different kind of product (digital products) whose form really isn't compatible with our current consumer culture. I just don't think it's a good match and it will continue to have problems indefinitely unless something in the market or the consumer culture itself changes.
Your Hawaii/birthday example would probably work better if you picked a region that was on the other side of the international date line. Some place like Japan perhaps. A birthday in San Francisco and in Hawaii would fall on the same day for both regions.
Reading this thread is making my wrists hurt like a mofo. gah.
STOP TALKING ABOUT WRIST PAIN!
I suppose I could just command+w this window and move on to reading something that won't give me sympathy pains.
But will it sell out in half an hour?
I'm guessing no.
I worked in a theater when the Matrix had their pre-view screenings the midnight before openning night, and they didn't sell out. They came close, but we still had tickets available the night it was playing and fans weren't threatening the box offices for tickets (Joss posted a dissapointed post about "certain fans" who behaved badly over the tickets).
I worked in a decent sized town at that time too. A suburb of Portland, OR.
I agree that the trailer is formulaic. That was a marketing strategy to pull in the mainstream "i want to see shit explode" audience.
But the show itself is not formulaic. It subverts a lot of different "sci-fi" and even TV-series-in-general expectations. No vinyl-clad halloween-esque aliens with more make-up than my dead grandfather, no scantily clad crew members who have no real business being scantily clad (Inara's a Companion. Dressing beautifully is part of her job description. and she's never scantily clad anyway), the dialogue is FUNNY and entirely character driven... and the characters are complex rather than based on single opposing traits.
In the "literary" sense, the series really doesn't belong on mainstream tv at all because that's not the kind of thing that gets played on mainstream tv.
Buffy had a fanbase because it had pretty faces, yes. But this series has a fanbase (much bigger and with a higher average IQ than the buffy fanbase) because it's a GOOD series.
Maybe you should too. You're missing an apostrophe before "Cause". (shortened from 'because', of course. )
:)
But you're right. the sentence is poorly written. But if you couldn't understand its basic meaning, you're too dependent on prescriptive grammar for comprehension and maybe you should get out more.