Re:They aren't so worried about $5 synthetics
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not sure if you noticed, but that article in The Atlantic was written in 1982. (At least, that's the copyright date on the article. The fact that it doesn't mention any events that occurred after 1981 is telling, as well.)
I don't know whether those $1.5 billion worth of diamonds are still sitting in Israeli banks, but I wouldn't bet on it.
You know, why doesn't government ever get labeled as "big" or "greedy" as profiteering corps do, when government is the BIGGEST corporation of them all, and the ONLY one (well, the RIAA is close now) that has the power to use guns to enforce it's will...
You live a sheltered life, doncha? There are quite a lot of people who think the government is big and greedy. They're called Republicans.
This is all just an attempt to take back the coveted title of The Doofus State from California. We reacquired it thanks to our upcoming election. (If Schwarzenegger wins, it's Total Recall, I suppose.)
The concept that you have to schedule a certain amount of time each week, at a specific time
No you don't. VCRs? TiVo?
to watch something generated for the purpose of catching your eyeball and exposing it to advertising
Record it, and skip over the commercials. Or if you want to watch it as it's broadcast, mute the commercials. Or just ignore the commercials, like I do.:)
Besides, I think there's something about the refresh rate that dulls the brain.
LOTR begins when Frodo is 33 and Bilbo is 111. The first chapter concerns with their joint birthday party and Bilbo's departure from the Shire.
Fast-forward 17 years, to when Frodo is 50 and Bilbo is 128. Gandalf shows up in the *spring*, tells Frodo all about the One Ring, and then says, I'll be back by fall (of 3018).
The hobbits have their adventures and return to the Shire around November 1st of the *following* year (3019). Then there's a handful more pages, and in 3021, Frodo, Bilbo, and the Three Keepers (Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel) leave Middle-Earth. Sam returns home shortly thereafter, and *that's* when LOTR ends. Technically, the book encompasses a bit over 20 years, although the bulk of the action occurs within a span of about a year and a half.
<pedantic mode=off>
Re:I won't even see the original release in theatr
on
The Trilogy as One
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· Score: 1
I can one-up you on that. I don't even have a DVD player. Just a 26" CRT TV with no extra sound system or speakers. Ha!
Take Independence Day, for example. Enormous hype, mega opening weekend, and a fizzle after that,
False. The record shows that ID4 had a huge opening weekend, with 20-40% dropoffs per week for several weekends thereafter. This is significantly better than some recent "blockbusters" (like Hulk and Matrix Reloaded) which have been having 50%+ dropoffs per week for the first few weeks. ID4 had much better legs than a lot of mega-hyped blockbusters.
1) The price of movies and condiments are just ludicrous. Prices have triped and quadrupled in the last 15 years.
I don't know if the numbers bear this out, but yes, the cost of going to the movies has definitely gone up in the past 15 years. Whether it's even 3x as expensive as 15 years ago, that I don't know (I don't think that's true; I'm fairly certain movies weren't $3.33 in major metro markets like L.A.; in 1988, it was more like $6 or $6.50). What I wonder is how fast the prices have outpaced the consumer price index.
2) Second run movie houses have become more popular. Why spend $15.00 to see a movie when you can wait 6 weeks and see the same flick for $6.00?
Because all your friends will be talking about the big blockbuster you missed for those six weeks. Which means that if you don't like spoilers, you're screwed. If you like participating in conversations, you're screwed. There's still a lot of reasons to see a movie early on. (Especially if you're really excited to see it, and want to know what's going to happen.) If those things aren't that important to you for a particular movie, sure, there's no reason to wait a while and see it for cheaper. (On the other hand, if you're smart enough to eat cheap before you go to the movie, it's not going to cost you $15 at the first-run place, either.)
3) Home theatre systems have improved to the point where picture quality and sound are really, really good.
True. But it still doesn't compare to the experience of being in a humongous theater, sharing the experience with a few hundred other people. There's something charging about hearing four hundred people (up to 1,200 or so in places like the Chinese) laugh, cheer, groan, or cry, that you can't duplicate in a room with a few of your friends. (Yes, I'm aware of the fact that there are sometimes negative experiences in public theaters, like annoying people talking on cellphones, kicking your chair, babies crying, etc. But that doesn't change the truth of what I said.)
I'll take a stab: the employees lowest on the totem pole are paid the handsomest severances,...
Not a bad idea, but where does the money come from? It's not that uncommon for a company, having done something illegal, to also be in a bad financial position (e.g. they were in a bad financial position, so they did something illegal; or the illegal thing they did backfired and put them in a bad financial position). Then there's the issue of actually figuring out who gets what kind of severance, even if the money is available (and you sure as hell aren't subsidizing this with my tax dollars:) ).
Plus, there's the issue that the company can sell off/give away its assets to the officers' friends/cronies before the ax falls, and once the company is disbanded, the execs reform the company, get their IP and assets back, and are back in business.
Is it bad for the market? No, not really. Because all the competitors who behave legally and ethically swoop in to fill the void.
Assuming this will be true in every case (it won't -- sometimes there might not be anyone who has the resources or the desire to do so, or it might not be quite profitable enough, etc.), there's still the massive disruption in the lives of the potentially hundreds or thousands of people who have just been laid off, even if they did get a severance. And imagine that a lot of those people live in a factory town, where there's not a lot of other jobs available...
Probably the best thing to do in cases of executive corporate malfeasance is to imprison those most responsible for the illegal decisions, allow for a new corporate staff to be chosen by... whoever, the board of directors I guess (if it's a public corporation; if it's private, then the gov't gets to pick someone, yay), legally enjoin the old executives from ever working for that particular corporation again, and let the company continue on under new management.
Some kind of corporate death penalty is an interesting idea, but there's a lot of issues to resolve.
For one thing, what does it mean? The corporation no longer exists? But all the people who comprised it still exist. And if it's a large corporation, all those people are suddenly out of jobs, which is going to have an impact on the economy (not to mention all those peoples' lives).
And even if the corporation is legally dissolved, what's going to keep the people who comprised it from collectively forming a new corporation under a new name, that simply continues the same practices? Some kind of rules that say that two persons from the same executed corporation can't work in the same corporation together? That would be problematic, especially since many of the people laid off from the corporation due to its demise might be looking for new jobs in other corporations in the same business, in the same physical region...
Corporations definitely have too much power, stemming from their effective immortality, but it's not as simple as stretching the "personhood" analogy to its fullest extent. If a corporation's collective actions result in someone's death, do we put everyone in the corporation in jail for 6 months on a charge of involuntary manslaughter?
"They do say, Mrs. M, that insults hurt more than physical pain. They are of course wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork in your head."
The proper response is that Hawash should be RE-TRIED, with proper due process, which is CONSTITUTIONALLY GUARANTEED. He shouldn't let go; but he certainly shouldn't be sentenced based on a confession which was extracted after due process was violated.
Please, "most unpatriotic collection of people ever to come together"? Don't be a fucking jackass. Some of us actually want our Constitutional rights protected, NO MATTER HOW MANY TERRORISTS THERE ARE.
No, fuckwad, the point is that they violated due process with Hawash's case. They violated the Constitution. The entire thing should be thrown out, and Hawash should be re-arrested, re-charged, and given his Constitutional right to due process. THEN let him plead. If he still pleads guilty, fine. If not, let's have a public, open trial, THE WAY THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
Ashcroft and the PATRIOT Act are making a god damn mockery of our legal system.
What the fuck is wrong with you idiots? The point is that THEY VIOLATED HIS DUE PROCESS RIGHTS! Yes, he plead guilty, fine, but we're all suspicious about it because he was imprisoned UNCONSTITUTIONALLY FOR FIVE WEEKS. If he'd had his constitutional right to due process, maybe the outcome would have been different. (As has been pointed out, merely because someone pleads guilty does not mean they actually ARE guilty -- which is the entire fucking POINT of due process, to make sure that suspects aren't coerced into guilty pleas by the government.)
Should his guilty plea be thrown out in this case? Yes, since due process was violated. Do I think he's utterly innocent of any crime? I don't know enough about the case, but I DO know that Hawash should be re-arrested, given normal, CONSTITUTIONAL legal proceedings, and THEN decide what he's going to plead.
What's "apples and oranges" here are the real situation, and your faulty analogy. Teaching someone to drive a car is fundamentally different than teaching someone to murder people and overthrow governments. Claiming that the CIA holds no responsibility at all for Osama's actions is ludicrous. The bulk of the responsibility still lies with Osama, of course, but our government isn't untarnished.
You have the same attitude that a friend of mine did about five years ago. His attitude was that privatization was better than socialization because private enterprise is almost without exception going to provide a better product, more efficiently than the government could.
But what he failed to realize was that the primary goal of government (at least, of democratic government) was not efficiency but rather fairness. One assessment of the government's purpose is that it exists to protect the weak from being oppressed by the strong. Why shouldn't we have entirely privatized law enforcement? After all, those who have more to lose (more money, resources, etc.) would be able to pay more to have it protected. The problem, of course, is that the poor would be left undefended, having no resources with which to protect what little they have (not to mention their lives).
The upshot is that some things should be handled by the government because the goal is fairness, not efficiency, and private enterprise will absolutely not ensure fairness where it matters. The role of government is to provide some minimum standard of living, and those with resources can provide themselves a better standard. (Whether this SHOULD be the role of government is another debate entirely.)
I've been sick of Steve Jobs for years. Glad to see they'll be getting him out of our hair. Maybe he can go inflict his Reality Distortion Field on another country for a change.
I didn't know he'd changed his title from "Interim CEO" to "Developer" though...
I heard about these a while ago. I think I read that Ben Affleck is going to be in one of them. This kind of pisses me off, a millionaire movie star whining about losing money -- like the issue is that simple. Wah, wah, I'm Baffleck, pity me, I only made nineteen million dollars this year instead of twenty-two! Wah!
Wait, he's engaged to J-Lo. I guess we should pity him. Am I the only one who, upon hearing that they had hooked up, felt an overpowering urge to leap onto the nearest table and shout, "NO! BEN! YOU FOOL!"
Take of the Nostalgia Glasses, bub. There were just as many shit games back then as there are now. It's simply been so long that most of them have been forgotten. (The same goes for every field of artistic endeavor, including movies, music, television, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you noticed, but that article in The Atlantic was written in 1982. (At least, that's the copyright date on the article. The fact that it doesn't mention any events that occurred after 1981 is telling, as well.)
I don't know whether those $1.5 billion worth of diamonds are still sitting in Israeli banks, but I wouldn't bet on it.
This is all just an attempt to take back the coveted title of The Doofus State from California. We reacquired it thanks to our upcoming election. (If Schwarzenegger wins, it's Total Recall, I suppose.)
LOTR begins when Frodo is 33 and Bilbo is 111. The first chapter concerns with their joint birthday party and Bilbo's departure from the Shire.
Fast-forward 17 years, to when Frodo is 50 and Bilbo is 128. Gandalf shows up in the *spring*, tells Frodo all about the One Ring, and then says, I'll be back by fall (of 3018).
The hobbits have their adventures and return to the Shire around November 1st of the *following* year (3019). Then there's a handful more pages, and in 3021, Frodo, Bilbo, and the Three Keepers (Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel) leave Middle-Earth. Sam returns home shortly thereafter, and *that's* when LOTR ends. Technically, the book encompasses a bit over 20 years, although the bulk of the action occurs within a span of about a year and a half.
<pedantic mode=off>
I can one-up you on that. I don't even have a DVD player. Just a 26" CRT TV with no extra sound system or speakers. Ha!
Am I the only one who thinks something's wrong when the shiny, pretty UI is indistinguishable from the shiny, pretty desktop image?
jovlinger makes a joke, although for those who don't know, he's referring to the Gambler's Fallacy. At least, I think he is. :)
http://www.greenenergyohio.org/default.cfm?exec=Pa ge.View&pageID=135
If you can find some counter-statistics, please post them. Not arguing, just trying to find the truth. :)
Plus, there's the issue that the company can sell off/give away its assets to the officers' friends/cronies before the ax falls, and once the company is disbanded, the execs reform the company, get their IP and assets back, and are back in business.
Assuming this will be true in every case (it won't -- sometimes there might not be anyone who has the resources or the desire to do so, or it might not be quite profitable enough, etc.), there's still the massive disruption in the lives of the potentially hundreds or thousands of people who have just been laid off, even if they did get a severance. And imagine that a lot of those people live in a factory town, where there's not a lot of other jobs available...Probably the best thing to do in cases of executive corporate malfeasance is to imprison those most responsible for the illegal decisions, allow for a new corporate staff to be chosen by... whoever, the board of directors I guess (if it's a public corporation; if it's private, then the gov't gets to pick someone, yay), legally enjoin the old executives from ever working for that particular corporation again, and let the company continue on under new management.
For one thing, what does it mean? The corporation no longer exists? But all the people who comprised it still exist. And if it's a large corporation, all those people are suddenly out of jobs, which is going to have an impact on the economy (not to mention all those peoples' lives).
And even if the corporation is legally dissolved, what's going to keep the people who comprised it from collectively forming a new corporation under a new name, that simply continues the same practices? Some kind of rules that say that two persons from the same executed corporation can't work in the same corporation together? That would be problematic, especially since many of the people laid off from the corporation due to its demise might be looking for new jobs in other corporations in the same business, in the same physical region...
Corporations definitely have too much power, stemming from their effective immortality, but it's not as simple as stretching the "personhood" analogy to its fullest extent. If a corporation's collective actions result in someone's death, do we put everyone in the corporation in jail for 6 months on a charge of involuntary manslaughter?
"They do say, Mrs. M, that insults hurt more than physical pain. They are of course wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork in your head."
:)
--E. Blackadder, "Sense and Senility"
You mean that kind of fork?
The proper response is that Hawash should be RE-TRIED, with proper due process, which is CONSTITUTIONALLY GUARANTEED. He shouldn't let go; but he certainly shouldn't be sentenced based on a confession which was extracted after due process was violated. Please, "most unpatriotic collection of people ever to come together"? Don't be a fucking jackass. Some of us actually want our Constitutional rights protected, NO MATTER HOW MANY TERRORISTS THERE ARE.
Ashcroft and the PATRIOT Act are making a god damn mockery of our legal system.
Should his guilty plea be thrown out in this case? Yes, since due process was violated. Do I think he's utterly innocent of any crime? I don't know enough about the case, but I DO know that Hawash should be re-arrested, given normal, CONSTITUTIONAL legal proceedings, and THEN decide what he's going to plead.
Furthermore, you certainly CAN compare apples an oranges!
But what he failed to realize was that the primary goal of government (at least, of democratic government) was not efficiency but rather fairness. One assessment of the government's purpose is that it exists to protect the weak from being oppressed by the strong. Why shouldn't we have entirely privatized law enforcement? After all, those who have more to lose (more money, resources, etc.) would be able to pay more to have it protected. The problem, of course, is that the poor would be left undefended, having no resources with which to protect what little they have (not to mention their lives).
The upshot is that some things should be handled by the government because the goal is fairness, not efficiency, and private enterprise will absolutely not ensure fairness where it matters. The role of government is to provide some minimum standard of living, and those with resources can provide themselves a better standard. (Whether this SHOULD be the role of government is another debate entirely.)
I didn't know he'd changed his title from "Interim CEO" to "Developer" though...
Wait, he's engaged to J-Lo. I guess we should pity him. Am I the only one who, upon hearing that they had hooked up, felt an overpowering urge to leap onto the nearest table and shout, "NO! BEN! YOU FOOL!"
Take of the Nostalgia Glasses, bub. There were just as many shit games back then as there are now. It's simply been so long that most of them have been forgotten. (The same goes for every field of artistic endeavor, including movies, music, television, etc.)