Unfortunately, we have given our planet to the people with money and are unwilling to take it back. We elect the incumbent to congress something like 95% of the time but people always complain about how corrupt government is and how badly we need a change.
That's because our congressman is one of the good ones, he said so himself. He sent me a nice little letter in the mail that one time. What a nice guy!
Seriously though, people take people on a one-by-one level as not being evil, and see groups of people as evil; never putting two and two together that the people on a one-by-one basis eventually make up this group of losers. It's the loss of humanity in numbers. Just how people say "people are stupid, except you of course." It's always the exception. "Everyone's so dumb except us, dude." Nah, if everyone is dumb, you are too. And as a culture, as a mob, we are all dumb, and as this culture, as this mob, we all bear some of the responsibility for our stupidity. When the world melts us down it will be our fault: every single one of us lemmings. Every time we were too busy to protest, or too complacent to affect change. It will be every single one of our faults. The overbearing human characteristic: laziness.
I've often wondered this myself, why the preoccupation.
But I'm going to put that off for a more important question. Since factory robots have essentially just replaced peoples' jobs, turning former manufacturing laborers into Walmart workers as they are replaced with machines and Chinese laborers, what happens when there's a robot capable of every job we have on earth. Essentially would everyone just be poor? Modern conveniences are supposed to make our workload easier, but when robots and computers do more to replace workers than they do to enhance our amount of leisure time, where exactly does this trend end?
Couples need to come together and support each other, and we as a society need to recognize the differences and strengths of both mothers and fathers and support them.
Then you end it all with a real manly statement...not. How about ending it this way instead of being PC. Men: regrow your balls and tell that bitch to bring you a sandwich once in a while. It's no coincedence that modern "seduction theory" stems mainly around the idea of reclaiming your manhood. They don't teach you that it's okay to be a man anymore, they teach you that it's terrible thing to be.
If you value the product, then pay for it and don't complain. If it costs too much, then don't buy it. You're not Jean Valjean stealing bread for your family.
It does cost too much, so I don't buy it. =P
I suppose it is stealing, although you aren't taking anything physical. There's not opportunity cost involved. If I download an album instead of buying it, I'm not taking a physical CD off a shelf that could be sold to another. At very most I'm stealing my own potential sale. Most times, that potential sale would've been worth $0 anyway, because I wouldn't have bought the album at the price it was at. It falls into the realm of perhaps cable theft and other petty crime that happens only because you as the consumer have no real control over the market.
I am going to explore the alternatives. I like a lot of bands now though and I'm not going to quit listening to them because the RIAA doesn't like that I'm doing it for free. I'm more musically driven than politically motivated to be honest, and while one might have something to do with the other in this case, the music wins out. I'm going to try to see if there's stuff I like under creative commons, which I'm sure there will be. That's the way music should be, and it's how I'll release my music should I ever make an album.
I say, put up or shut up. If you don't like what the RIAA does, if you think labels only offer music that sucks, if DVDs are overpriced or you don't like the "new release-newer release with extras" cycle, don't respond by taking their product on your own terms. That just says that you do indeed value that product and are willing to pay for it, just not in upfront cash - you are confirming the demand for the product.
What if I do value the product? I like listening to music. I play guitar as well, and I like to play the music I listen to (*gasp*), it's a good way of learning. What I don't like and don't care for is people who are richer than me telling me how they need my 20 bucks. They don't. And I'm about sick of them saying you are gonna get caught filesharing: you won't. The chances of you getting caught filesharing are about the same as the chances of you getting caught in a terrorist attack. They are slim to nil. They are irritated because their stranglehold on the market is loosening, and not only that. It's completely possible to write, perform, produce and distribute yourself without a major label record deal. You might not get fantastically rich, but the option remains. This is all very irritating to them.
I must say, if it weren't for file sharing, I wouldn't even listen to most of the stuff I do anyway. It would've just kept me a small minded listener, buying the latest derivative crap so that I'd be sure I'd actually get my money's worth on the CD.
So lose respect if you want, but there's an alternative to the RIAA, and it's called P2P. The black market is a part of economics too, I guess these asshats didn't pay attention to that part and stuck to the good sounding parts of monopoly and price fixing.
Every concert I've attended and every piece of band merchandise I bought since college has been due to filesharing. Maybe I would've been a nice little trooper in the TRL army, and maybe that's what they wanted for me. But now I know better, and things will never go back to the way they were. It's stealing? Whatever, I bought many a CD that should've been put in the garbage can, and those artists make more money than I ever will in my life. Tell me I owe them a paycheck. I dare you.
The cost of replacing an entire infrastructure based around oil will also be huge. Shell Hydrogen estimates it would take at least $US19 billion to build hydrogen fuel stations in the US.
Yeah, wow, that is a lot to invest in the future when you take into account that: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12 393.htm The cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion. But who needs new fuel when you can cause civil wars in countries instead.
BMI and IQ aren't perfect measurements of their stated goal. They at least provide an approximation though.
It is the people who don't think they mean anything at all usually are either fat or stupid.
This study immediately had me thinking of a girl I know who would definitely disagree with it. However, that girl is both fat and stupid and ready to acknowledge neither.
She once asked me, "you can eat anything you want and not gain a pound?" To which I replied, "Probably, but I don't, and that's why I don't gain anything." She then said something like, "It must be nice to have a fast metabolism, I don't think I have one and I try to excite mine. I drink a lot of water everyday, that's supposed to do it." To which I responded, "I used to run five miles a day, that'll excite your metabolism."
Maybe correlation isn't causation and really there is no true relationship here and it all stems back to something else, but I'll tell you something: obese people tend to be really stupid about the fact first that they are obese, and why they are that way. Many are in denial about the fact that you have to put the ruffles down and jog around the block.
People said the same thing about Cable TV. They'd never pay for something they could get for free... Guess what? Most of you nay sayers now pay for cable. In fact I'd wager ALL of you do.
I never listened to Howard when he was on terrestrial radio but now I do on Sirius. He's funny and there are some interesting interviews. Not all the time mind you but a fair amount of time.
Yep, people said the same thing and so cable did the same thing: promised commercial free television except on networks already broadcast via air. What happened? We ended up with just as many if not more commercials on basic cable stations than we had on the network ones, along with around the same level of censorship and bullshit.
If everyone moved to satellite, I'd be willing to bet that the same thing will happen. Howard Stern already has some commercials, it's only a matter of time before channels would be split up into pay packages, they'd censor the rest and have commercials on near all of the stations. That is, if we actually subscribe. Until they can actually get all the subscribers they want, they'll treat everyone nicely. Just wait until they are satisfied or feel like they've penetrated the market as much as possible. That's when satellite radio becomes just like every other ad-infested censored crud that's already available.
Or you can just bittorrent the movies. This way you can save yourself the trouble of watching their crap advertisements, leaving the house, hacking their DVD to get it to play and enjoy the movie in its entirety free.
In your cynicism you blot out hope, dreams, and just plain silliness just for the hell of it.
You act as if acknowledging these truths makes you somehow want to sit in a corner and cry about it. Perhaps that is how most people feel. I find these truths to be liberating. If nothing you do ever really matters to anyone except yourself it gives you the freedom to do the things you really want to do. Now maybe for most people that's murdering and pillaging and whatever, but for most normal people it is simply things they put off on a daily basis because they are afraid they aren't good enough or something enough.
Magellan and Columbus might have been selfish, yes, but who cares if they were. If they really enjoyed traveling the seas, if it made them feel like they were a big hero man then great. I just wish people wouldn't fool themselves into thinking it signifies something.
Maybe to you enjoying yourself would be sitting in a pub drinking yourself stupid. To be honest, as someone who has done that on occasion I find more constructive activities to be funner, for me, personally. So you might say that knowing these things doesn't actually have an overall effect on what you are doing, but why you are doing it. If your life is a pile of obligations and responsibilities and you see it as attaining some goal or something, forever pushing off happiness for some kind of awesome prize at the pearly gates or something, I'd argue that you are deluding yourself. And people that behave this way are more often the pyschos and lunatics that end up killing innocent people and overall repressing themselves until the world sucks to live in. You don't have to feel you are immortal to do what you enjoy, and what you enjoy doesn't have to be destructive. For most people it isn't. However, you can dream all you want but the remarks I've made are true. To not deal with them is to not deal with reality.
And, without the retailers, they're dead in the water.
Maybe, maybe they are dead in the water. But let's face it, while bricks and mortar presence is sometimes nice and an added bonus, it is not necessarily the best or even a desirable way to deliver all or even most products.
There are some downfalls of online distribution: shipping costs, no instant gratification, etc. But there are many bonuses too: no sales tax, almost unlimited availability.
I think if online stores selling digital versions of media undercut retailers to the point where some retailers eventually go away you might lose some stores, but maybe that'll cut into the proliferation of stores where there used to be social spots and the overall corroding of the build a mini-mall every 10 minutes attitude of Americans in general.
If online shopping is the price I'd have to pay to perhaps not have every square inch of America covered in strip malls featuring the same god awful chain stores just because some bozo thinks it's a good idea to have a starbucks next to a starbucks, I'll gladly pay it.
However, if they let retailers unfairly fix the price of online products simply so they don't undercut them, they completely lose the online market. 12.99 for a non-physical DRMed copy of a movie that might not even be readable should someone decide to change formats really doesn't make me want to buy it, when I can grab the real copy for 14.99. They can whine about piracy all they want, but pirated movies don't contain any DRM at all and for people who want the movie without the restrictions this sometimes becomes the alternative. It's a bonus that they don't have to pay for it either. Online media should be a _cheaper_ alternative because you aren't manufacturing anything, remember? All the media costs should go out the window. Until they do, I doubt many people will chew on that apple, no pun intended.
All in all it _is_ a stupid publicity stunt, and nothing more.
I'd argue that there is a possibility that it is more than a publicity stunt, but rather an overall attitude of not only American, but human sentiment in general.
Someone once answered the question about why people do the things they do in a way that makes sense, why we are so different from the other animals. "We know we die," she said, "and most of what we do is primarily motivated by this knowledge. I believe that honestly comes into play here. Because we know we all die, we have to come up with some way of extending our longevity and our mark on the universe, because we feel we "live on" through this. This Yahoo! stunt, as ridiculous and publicity stuntish this all feels, I believe, is just keeping with this trend.
People seriously need to realize that yes, you are in fact a "mere mortal" and a tiny dot zit on the face of a small planet in a small galaxy of the universe and that yes, you probably aren't the most significant, or at least the only significant thing to happen to the universe and that yes, someday you will die and through the wonder of decay all traces of you and your loved ones will vanish.
People point to history, art, etc. to try to escape these facts. William Shakespeare still lives on, they say. We'll see what use his plays are in a million years. =P
In my honest opinion it is for this reason that we should probably stop kidding ourselves with stunts like this and except the inevitable truth, trying to have a bit of fun and stop being so serious about our worth. Especially trying to beam interplanetary messages from pyramids of ancient civilizations. Am I the only one that first entertained the thought of reading this as "this must be a joke, nobody is that stupid"? Seriously childish.
Aren't we essentially solving problems that do not need solving? I understand that major food processing companies want to save a few pennies and also make crappy food more healthy by doing everything except affecting the taste, but in reality aren't we just kidding ourselves?
Food supply (at least in the west) is a problem long solved. We don't really need any breakthroughs in food technology. Shouldn't they be analyzing the things we do already to our food rather than trying to come up with new ways to save a quarter cent on the production of a pack of potato chips?
Maybe if we spent more time analyzing what we do and less time coming up with advances we don't need, we wouldn't have controversies like those with bovine growth hormone and transfat which comes out as a news item and tells us we've all been poisoning ourselves for years.
I suppose it's the priority of the corporate food enterprises to continue to find cheaper ways to produce things, but cheapness will eventually come at some cost somewhere else. Food is cheap enough here, and if it's unhealthy food people should learn to control their intake rather than the chip itself.
I suppose this is what happens when the FDA is more concerned about corporations than the people it is supposed to protect.
Recently when congress voted not to raise the minimun wage Stewart sarcastically spouted, "the poor in this country have had it easy for way too long."
It's a funny comment, and a true one when taken with sarcasm. I mean, how can a minimum wage increase seriously be voted down? Where's the other side to this issue? It's been far too low for far too long. Even most cashiers are making above the minimum wage. Conservative or not, the minimum wage raise has been long overdue with inflation how it is. I think it should be 10 dollars an hour to be honest. Most factories that have remained in the states pay their workers over that amount, and the only people who would have to give their employees raises would be retail chain stores most of which have money to burn and fast food places, which have no real alternative. Honestly, there's some jobs they can't export so these jobs get minimum wage, so make the minimum wage higher and that's it. The daily show doesn't try to be balanced, it has a viewpoint. If you have an alternative to his arguments that's one thing, but I find that they try to at least find the best opinion in a way that right-wing propaganda programs don't. Republicans on TV hardly even have a thought process, and their arguments which are often easily contradicted by evidence are given way too much air time and usually not properly contradicted. They win the debate because of how the debate is structured rather than the gravity of the argument involved, the daily show is the opposite way.
I don't like DRM so I buy all my music on CD's, but for people who don't mind the DRM, well, that's too bad! We need to stop people from having the option to purchase things how they want, but force them to purchase things how *I* want. Right?
Have you missed something? Because regular CDs have DRM too. You know what doesn't tho? Pirated MP3s.
Wanna restrict how I can buy stuff, I just won't buy it.
Part nostalgia and part not keeping up with the times is what really makes retro popular. While I can't appreciate the latest Rob Zombie offering it doesn't mean I don't like Counterstrike Source... Not to say I don't enjoy kicking up Telengard from time to time but I don't play it as intensely as EQ2.
I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think part of retro popularity is that sometimes things have inherent value. It's the same way that William Shakespeare's plays don't go away after so many years. Now I know that I'm comparing Shakespeare to Pac Man, but bear with me here.
I love listening to the Beatles and the Doors, I was born after these bands were long dead and buried (well maybe not buried in the case of the Doors), I discovered them anew in my own life and formed my own kinship with their recordings.
In the same way the first video game my little nephew ever played (at about 2 or 3 years old) was the first Super Mario Brothers. There are newer, better, more graphically entertaining games available, but my nephew is just as happy playing Super Mario Brothers as he is playing anything else (and he's now a bit older).
I would argue that old games have inherent value, they are classics for a reason. There are a million old games which straight up suck, but they don't get the downloads because nobody cared then and nobody cares now. Just like music, film, plays, books, novels, etc. videogames have retro value because they are inherently entertaining, not because they are the newest technology and the best EFFECTS EVER... Many of today's games that are great graphically will be forgotten quickly after they are released, because they lack the same things that make classics strong. Mario, Pac Man, Duck Hunt and friends will bridge the gap generation after generation because they are as good now as they were then, even if we have better graphics.
There are certain things which defy trendiness because they are good art and good entertainment, and these things will remain when everything else crumbles. People get so concerned with pushing units that they forget these facts in every one of the trades I just mentioned. Some things are eternal, some are rubbish. Those which only have nostalgia value (because it was the only game you had one time as a kid growing up) won't get exceptional attention now just as they didn't then. It's not just being old that makes them popular, it's the fact that they were great.
I don't know that that's necessarily true. There are already wireless devices which can send files back and forth via use of an ad-hoc network, what's to prevent an MP3 player from being one of these devices? It has legitimate uses, especially if you are also able to send video and pictures. Like I said, MP3 players with USB hosts can already provide this functionality through wires. I'd imagine you could set it up to use some type of buddy system or something so you weren't constantly sharing everything you have with everyone as you walk around, but it can't be illegal to make a device that simply sends a file from one device to another, even if that device is an MP3 player.
Your 16 dollar Fossil watch doesn't look 16 dollars better than my cellphone, which includes a clock more accurate than any watch (since it's synced continuously to the towers which are all very accurately set to UTC). Plus you have to have a cheap 16-dollar watch strapped to your wrist, whereas my wrist doesn't have any extra junk on it.
The whole point in having a wristwatch is that it's on your wrist. If I wanted a pocket watch I'd buy one. And that's precisely what a cell phone would replace. As far as accuracy, are you in some kind of time precise situation? I know that if I have to meet someone at 1pm and it's actually 13:01:15, that's not going to be a big deal and it wouldn't be to most of the people who buy watches that are 100x or more expensive either. So your reasoning is invalid for the vast majority of people. I own a cell phone, btw, but I still wear my watch, and it has very little to do with decoration. =P
When I bought the phone, I also bought a Bluetooth headset. I gave up on the Bluetooth pretty quickly: The headset would only run for about five hours before needing to be recharged, and the phone's standby time was cut down massively.
Not to mention you look like some kind of massive dork from a sci-fi movie and are usually perceived by the general public as talking to yourself.
Maybe not for people that want a status symbol, but if you want a reliable watch that looks like a real watch, is durable, and doesn't require a second mortgage for tank metal, fossil definitely works.
People claim that prices are going up on everything and go into debt for things that have little improvement for the value. My brother's 2000 dollar movado doesn't really look 1980 dollars better than my fossil (I actually only paid 16 dollars cuz I worked at a department store at the time) and with the savings I got not paying the extra 1980 to look 10 cents cooler I could easily buy something more useful with my money.
Truly rich people waste money on things they don't need because it doesn't matter to them, everyone else breaks themselves to look rich when they really aren't, and wind up being unable to pay their bills in the process. It's a sickness.
...another company from coming out with sharing via wifi without DRM? I already have the ability to share between two wired MP3 players with my current setup (unless they are iPods), so surely sharing via wifi without restriction can't be far off.
I really hate this popular Slashdot myth that viruses only exist because OSes are designed improperly. No, wrong. Most viruses are just malicious programs that get executed by the user. They don't hack in to the system, the are downloaded with another program. They come in the front door not the back one. There isn't an OS level defense for this short of an Orwellian trusted computing scheme. If I sent you a version of Apache with malicious code in it and you installed it as root, I could do whatever I wanted. Doesn't matter how secure your OS is, you gave it the permissions it needs.
I believe this is definitely true. Most people get viruses out of their own free will and/or stupidity, however, there are ways to make viruses more apparent than other things:
Stop hiding extensions. People are less likely to open a file from an email if it is named hello.jpg.exe and they see that in plain view. Even the dumber of users could figure out this very simple thing. However, Windows likes to hide extensions from the user in order to make everything more "simple" by default, and I'm not so sure if there's even a way to turn off extension hiding at all in the email suites that ship with windows. It is evident that these things are viruses to computer saavy people (different looking icon, etc.) but most people don't tend to notice things like this.
Stop hiding running processes. I understand that you want system protected threads that you can't end, hidden processes, etc. But the best OS is one that is transparent. It's discouraging to have to download another third party registry editor just to get into the even more hidden elements of the registry. I understand that registry hacking is something that's pretty common even among people who don't know what they are doing, but don't hide stuff from the people that are supposed to be using the registry editor. And stop, stop, hiding running processes from administrator users. It's a little bit hard to get something to quit malware wise without first knowing how and where it is running.
Stop legacy support for strange script files which hide their extensions (even when "show extensions" is on. I was appalled to find out that even with show all extensions enabled, there were types of scripts that could be made to look like.jpg if they used certain old script types. (.clp, I don't remember what it was exactly)
Prevent applications from tacking themselves onto other executables not in their space without warning. If an application is trying to edit critical parts of the registry, I'd like to know about this. There should be something that makes sure this happens. If things want to change what extension runs them, etc. this should all be done.
Limit script scope..doc files shouldn't be able to touch things outside of their scope, macro viruses shouldn't be able to harm anything because they shouldn't have access rights. You are dictating the scripting language in this case, quit allowing it to do things you don't want it to ever. Is there even a reason a macro should be able to write to the disk? Why not try a java approach on these things.
I'm sure there are more beefs here that I'm not looking at but would be able to identify if I think about it more. I'm appalled that certain activities (such as simply viewing a page) can cause malware to take over the machine. Honestly, I think that's the major problem with windows today. IE + Windows allows you to gather a whole host of spyware simply by clicking the wrong link.
I'm also irritated by the lack of trust that MS has for the user. I'm sure that nobody really knows what processes are, etc. in a very popular way, but that shouldn't prevent someone who knows what they are doing from seeing everything. The system needs to be more transparent. Stop pretending we can't be trusted with our own computers, and stop with the dumb dialogs on C: drive talking about how editing these files could kill us all. Don't treat us like children because you sell to them.
Because Iranians are terrorists that hate freedom and want nothing more than to destroy everyone and everything. While we are freedom loving, do no wrong Americans who are the only ones who can really be trusted to have nukes and killing machines and video games because obviously we'd never use them maliciously or without being provoked, obviously...
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That's because our congressman is one of the good ones, he said so himself. He sent me a nice little letter in the mail that one time. What a nice guy!
Seriously though, people take people on a one-by-one level as not being evil, and see groups of people as evil; never putting two and two together that the people on a one-by-one basis eventually make up this group of losers. It's the loss of humanity in numbers. Just how people say "people are stupid, except you of course." It's always the exception. "Everyone's so dumb except us, dude." Nah, if everyone is dumb, you are too. And as a culture, as a mob, we are all dumb, and as this culture, as this mob, we all bear some of the responsibility for our stupidity. When the world melts us down it will be our fault: every single one of us lemmings. Every time we were too busy to protest, or too complacent to affect change. It will be every single one of our faults. The overbearing human characteristic: laziness.
I've often wondered this myself, why the preoccupation. But I'm going to put that off for a more important question. Since factory robots have essentially just replaced peoples' jobs, turning former manufacturing laborers into Walmart workers as they are replaced with machines and Chinese laborers, what happens when there's a robot capable of every job we have on earth. Essentially would everyone just be poor? Modern conveniences are supposed to make our workload easier, but when robots and computers do more to replace workers than they do to enhance our amount of leisure time, where exactly does this trend end?
Then you end it all with a real manly statement...not. How about ending it this way instead of being PC. Men: regrow your balls and tell that bitch to bring you a sandwich once in a while. It's no coincedence that modern "seduction theory" stems mainly around the idea of reclaiming your manhood. They don't teach you that it's okay to be a man anymore, they teach you that it's terrible thing to be.
It does cost too much, so I don't buy it. =P
I suppose it is stealing, although you aren't taking anything physical. There's not opportunity cost involved. If I download an album instead of buying it, I'm not taking a physical CD off a shelf that could be sold to another. At very most I'm stealing my own potential sale. Most times, that potential sale would've been worth $0 anyway, because I wouldn't have bought the album at the price it was at. It falls into the realm of perhaps cable theft and other petty crime that happens only because you as the consumer have no real control over the market.
I am going to explore the alternatives. I like a lot of bands now though and I'm not going to quit listening to them because the RIAA doesn't like that I'm doing it for free. I'm more musically driven than politically motivated to be honest, and while one might have something to do with the other in this case, the music wins out. I'm going to try to see if there's stuff I like under creative commons, which I'm sure there will be. That's the way music should be, and it's how I'll release my music should I ever make an album.
What if I do value the product? I like listening to music. I play guitar as well, and I like to play the music I listen to (*gasp*), it's a good way of learning. What I don't like and don't care for is people who are richer than me telling me how they need my 20 bucks. They don't. And I'm about sick of them saying you are gonna get caught filesharing: you won't. The chances of you getting caught filesharing are about the same as the chances of you getting caught in a terrorist attack. They are slim to nil. They are irritated because their stranglehold on the market is loosening, and not only that. It's completely possible to write, perform, produce and distribute yourself without a major label record deal. You might not get fantastically rich, but the option remains. This is all very irritating to them.
I must say, if it weren't for file sharing, I wouldn't even listen to most of the stuff I do anyway. It would've just kept me a small minded listener, buying the latest derivative crap so that I'd be sure I'd actually get my money's worth on the CD.
So lose respect if you want, but there's an alternative to the RIAA, and it's called P2P. The black market is a part of economics too, I guess these asshats didn't pay attention to that part and stuck to the good sounding parts of monopoly and price fixing.
Every concert I've attended and every piece of band merchandise I bought since college has been due to filesharing. Maybe I would've been a nice little trooper in the TRL army, and maybe that's what they wanted for me. But now I know better, and things will never go back to the way they were. It's stealing? Whatever, I bought many a CD that should've been put in the garbage can, and those artists make more money than I ever will in my life. Tell me I owe them a paycheck. I dare you.
Yeah, wow, that is a lot to invest in the future when you take into account that: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12 393.htm The cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion. But who needs new fuel when you can cause civil wars in countries instead.
This study immediately had me thinking of a girl I know who would definitely disagree with it. However, that girl is both fat and stupid and ready to acknowledge neither.
She once asked me, "you can eat anything you want and not gain a pound?" To which I replied, "Probably, but I don't, and that's why I don't gain anything." She then said something like, "It must be nice to have a fast metabolism, I don't think I have one and I try to excite mine. I drink a lot of water everyday, that's supposed to do it." To which I responded, "I used to run five miles a day, that'll excite your metabolism."
Maybe correlation isn't causation and really there is no true relationship here and it all stems back to something else, but I'll tell you something: obese people tend to be really stupid about the fact first that they are obese, and why they are that way. Many are in denial about the fact that you have to put the ruffles down and jog around the block.
So I could see how there could be a relationship.
Must've been a while ago. It's a good thing Superman lived in the 1970s.
Yep, people said the same thing and so cable did the same thing: promised commercial free television except on networks already broadcast via air. What happened? We ended up with just as many if not more commercials on basic cable stations than we had on the network ones, along with around the same level of censorship and bullshit.
If everyone moved to satellite, I'd be willing to bet that the same thing will happen. Howard Stern already has some commercials, it's only a matter of time before channels would be split up into pay packages, they'd censor the rest and have commercials on near all of the stations. That is, if we actually subscribe. Until they can actually get all the subscribers they want, they'll treat everyone nicely. Just wait until they are satisfied or feel like they've penetrated the market as much as possible. That's when satellite radio becomes just like every other ad-infested censored crud that's already available.
Or you can just bittorrent the movies. This way you can save yourself the trouble of watching their crap advertisements, leaving the house, hacking their DVD to get it to play and enjoy the movie in its entirety free.
And as a plus, you aren't supporting the *AAs.
Now is the time for piracy. Screw them all.
Listen, we don't have to get into your personal difficulties. This isn't that kind of place.
You act as if acknowledging these truths makes you somehow want to sit in a corner and cry about it. Perhaps that is how most people feel. I find these truths to be liberating. If nothing you do ever really matters to anyone except yourself it gives you the freedom to do the things you really want to do. Now maybe for most people that's murdering and pillaging and whatever, but for most normal people it is simply things they put off on a daily basis because they are afraid they aren't good enough or something enough.
Magellan and Columbus might have been selfish, yes, but who cares if they were. If they really enjoyed traveling the seas, if it made them feel like they were a big hero man then great. I just wish people wouldn't fool themselves into thinking it signifies something.
Maybe to you enjoying yourself would be sitting in a pub drinking yourself stupid. To be honest, as someone who has done that on occasion I find more constructive activities to be funner, for me, personally. So you might say that knowing these things doesn't actually have an overall effect on what you are doing, but why you are doing it. If your life is a pile of obligations and responsibilities and you see it as attaining some goal or something, forever pushing off happiness for some kind of awesome prize at the pearly gates or something, I'd argue that you are deluding yourself. And people that behave this way are more often the pyschos and lunatics that end up killing innocent people and overall repressing themselves until the world sucks to live in. You don't have to feel you are immortal to do what you enjoy, and what you enjoy doesn't have to be destructive. For most people it isn't. However, you can dream all you want but the remarks I've made are true. To not deal with them is to not deal with reality.
Maybe, maybe they are dead in the water. But let's face it, while bricks and mortar presence is sometimes nice and an added bonus, it is not necessarily the best or even a desirable way to deliver all or even most products.
There are some downfalls of online distribution: shipping costs, no instant gratification, etc. But there are many bonuses too: no sales tax, almost unlimited availability.
I think if online stores selling digital versions of media undercut retailers to the point where some retailers eventually go away you might lose some stores, but maybe that'll cut into the proliferation of stores where there used to be social spots and the overall corroding of the build a mini-mall every 10 minutes attitude of Americans in general.
If online shopping is the price I'd have to pay to perhaps not have every square inch of America covered in strip malls featuring the same god awful chain stores just because some bozo thinks it's a good idea to have a starbucks next to a starbucks, I'll gladly pay it.
However, if they let retailers unfairly fix the price of online products simply so they don't undercut them, they completely lose the online market. 12.99 for a non-physical DRMed copy of a movie that might not even be readable should someone decide to change formats really doesn't make me want to buy it, when I can grab the real copy for 14.99. They can whine about piracy all they want, but pirated movies don't contain any DRM at all and for people who want the movie without the restrictions this sometimes becomes the alternative. It's a bonus that they don't have to pay for it either. Online media should be a _cheaper_ alternative because you aren't manufacturing anything, remember? All the media costs should go out the window. Until they do, I doubt many people will chew on that apple, no pun intended.
I'd argue that there is a possibility that it is more than a publicity stunt, but rather an overall attitude of not only American, but human sentiment in general.
Someone once answered the question about why people do the things they do in a way that makes sense, why we are so different from the other animals. "We know we die," she said, "and most of what we do is primarily motivated by this knowledge. I believe that honestly comes into play here. Because we know we all die, we have to come up with some way of extending our longevity and our mark on the universe, because we feel we "live on" through this. This Yahoo! stunt, as ridiculous and publicity stuntish this all feels, I believe, is just keeping with this trend.
People seriously need to realize that yes, you are in fact a "mere mortal" and a tiny dot zit on the face of a small planet in a small galaxy of the universe and that yes, you probably aren't the most significant, or at least the only significant thing to happen to the universe and that yes, someday you will die and through the wonder of decay all traces of you and your loved ones will vanish.
People point to history, art, etc. to try to escape these facts. William Shakespeare still lives on, they say. We'll see what use his plays are in a million years. =P
In my honest opinion it is for this reason that we should probably stop kidding ourselves with stunts like this and except the inevitable truth, trying to have a bit of fun and stop being so serious about our worth. Especially trying to beam interplanetary messages from pyramids of ancient civilizations. Am I the only one that first entertained the thought of reading this as "this must be a joke, nobody is that stupid"? Seriously childish.
Aren't we essentially solving problems that do not need solving? I understand that major food processing companies want to save a few pennies and also make crappy food more healthy by doing everything except affecting the taste, but in reality aren't we just kidding ourselves?
Food supply (at least in the west) is a problem long solved. We don't really need any breakthroughs in food technology. Shouldn't they be analyzing the things we do already to our food rather than trying to come up with new ways to save a quarter cent on the production of a pack of potato chips?
Maybe if we spent more time analyzing what we do and less time coming up with advances we don't need, we wouldn't have controversies like those with bovine growth hormone and transfat which comes out as a news item and tells us we've all been poisoning ourselves for years.
I suppose it's the priority of the corporate food enterprises to continue to find cheaper ways to produce things, but cheapness will eventually come at some cost somewhere else. Food is cheap enough here, and if it's unhealthy food people should learn to control their intake rather than the chip itself.
I suppose this is what happens when the FDA is more concerned about corporations than the people it is supposed to protect.
It's a funny comment, and a true one when taken with sarcasm. I mean, how can a minimum wage increase seriously be voted down? Where's the other side to this issue? It's been far too low for far too long. Even most cashiers are making above the minimum wage. Conservative or not, the minimum wage raise has been long overdue with inflation how it is. I think it should be 10 dollars an hour to be honest. Most factories that have remained in the states pay their workers over that amount, and the only people who would have to give their employees raises would be retail chain stores most of which have money to burn and fast food places, which have no real alternative. Honestly, there's some jobs they can't export so these jobs get minimum wage, so make the minimum wage higher and that's it. The daily show doesn't try to be balanced, it has a viewpoint. If you have an alternative to his arguments that's one thing, but I find that they try to at least find the best opinion in a way that right-wing propaganda programs don't. Republicans on TV hardly even have a thought process, and their arguments which are often easily contradicted by evidence are given way too much air time and usually not properly contradicted. They win the debate because of how the debate is structured rather than the gravity of the argument involved, the daily show is the opposite way.
Have you missed something? Because regular CDs have DRM too. You know what doesn't tho? Pirated MP3s.
Wanna restrict how I can buy stuff, I just won't buy it.
I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think part of retro popularity is that sometimes things have inherent value. It's the same way that William Shakespeare's plays don't go away after so many years. Now I know that I'm comparing Shakespeare to Pac Man, but bear with me here.
I love listening to the Beatles and the Doors, I was born after these bands were long dead and buried (well maybe not buried in the case of the Doors), I discovered them anew in my own life and formed my own kinship with their recordings.
In the same way the first video game my little nephew ever played (at about 2 or 3 years old) was the first Super Mario Brothers. There are newer, better, more graphically entertaining games available, but my nephew is just as happy playing Super Mario Brothers as he is playing anything else (and he's now a bit older).
I would argue that old games have inherent value, they are classics for a reason. There are a million old games which straight up suck, but they don't get the downloads because nobody cared then and nobody cares now. Just like music, film, plays, books, novels, etc. videogames have retro value because they are inherently entertaining, not because they are the newest technology and the best EFFECTS EVER... Many of today's games that are great graphically will be forgotten quickly after they are released, because they lack the same things that make classics strong. Mario, Pac Man, Duck Hunt and friends will bridge the gap generation after generation because they are as good now as they were then, even if we have better graphics.
There are certain things which defy trendiness because they are good art and good entertainment, and these things will remain when everything else crumbles. People get so concerned with pushing units that they forget these facts in every one of the trades I just mentioned. Some things are eternal, some are rubbish. Those which only have nostalgia value (because it was the only game you had one time as a kid growing up) won't get exceptional attention now just as they didn't then. It's not just being old that makes them popular, it's the fact that they were great.
I don't know that that's necessarily true. There are already wireless devices which can send files back and forth via use of an ad-hoc network, what's to prevent an MP3 player from being one of these devices? It has legitimate uses, especially if you are also able to send video and pictures. Like I said, MP3 players with USB hosts can already provide this functionality through wires. I'd imagine you could set it up to use some type of buddy system or something so you weren't constantly sharing everything you have with everyone as you walk around, but it can't be illegal to make a device that simply sends a file from one device to another, even if that device is an MP3 player.
The whole point in having a wristwatch is that it's on your wrist. If I wanted a pocket watch I'd buy one. And that's precisely what a cell phone would replace. As far as accuracy, are you in some kind of time precise situation? I know that if I have to meet someone at 1pm and it's actually 13:01:15, that's not going to be a big deal and it wouldn't be to most of the people who buy watches that are 100x or more expensive either. So your reasoning is invalid for the vast majority of people. I own a cell phone, btw, but I still wear my watch, and it has very little to do with decoration. =P
Not to mention you look like some kind of massive dork from a sci-fi movie and are usually perceived by the general public as talking to yourself.
Maybe not for people that want a status symbol, but if you want a reliable watch that looks like a real watch, is durable, and doesn't require a second mortgage for tank metal, fossil definitely works.
People claim that prices are going up on everything and go into debt for things that have little improvement for the value. My brother's 2000 dollar movado doesn't really look 1980 dollars better than my fossil (I actually only paid 16 dollars cuz I worked at a department store at the time) and with the savings I got not paying the extra 1980 to look 10 cents cooler I could easily buy something more useful with my money.
Truly rich people waste money on things they don't need because it doesn't matter to them, everyone else breaks themselves to look rich when they really aren't, and wind up being unable to pay their bills in the process. It's a sickness.
...another company from coming out with sharing via wifi without DRM? I already have the ability to share between two wired MP3 players with my current setup (unless they are iPods), so surely sharing via wifi without restriction can't be far off.
I believe this is definitely true. Most people get viruses out of their own free will and/or stupidity, however, there are ways to make viruses more apparent than other things:
I'm sure there are more beefs here that I'm not looking at but would be able to identify if I think about it more. I'm appalled that certain activities (such as simply viewing a page) can cause malware to take over the machine. Honestly, I think that's the major problem with windows today. IE + Windows allows you to gather a whole host of spyware simply by clicking the wrong link.
I'm also irritated by the lack of trust that MS has for the user. I'm sure that nobody really knows what processes are, etc. in a very popular way, but that shouldn't prevent someone who knows what they are doing from seeing everything. The system needs to be more transparent. Stop pretending we can't be trusted with our own computers, and stop with the dumb dialogs on C: drive talking about how editing these files could kill us all. Don't treat us like children because you sell to them.
Because Iranians are terrorists that hate freedom and want nothing more than to destroy everyone and everything. While we are freedom loving, do no wrong Americans who are the only ones who can really be trusted to have nukes and killing machines and video games because obviously we'd never use them maliciously or without being provoked, obviously...