Show me an employer who doesn't mind employees spending all day on the phone making personal calls.
My first job after college was as a computer programmer for the US Federal government. We had a few older employees who rarely did any real work, but spent most of their time making personal calls and talking to other employees who were also avoiding doing any real work. I remember one guy who was close to retirement who honestly only did any real work for about 1-2 weeks a year when they made him escort the Inspector General team around. Another guy who was waiting for retirement used to spend about 2 hours each morning in the bathroom reading the newspaper as he was taking a dump. No, I don't think he had a physical problem that required him to sit on the toilet that long. Reading newspapers at your desk was one of the few things that actually was frowned upon, so he found a way to kill 2 hours every day by going to the toilet and reading his paper there. Although I've never worked for a state government, from what I've heard it's pretty much the same story there. It can be almost impossible to fire government employees, so they just accept that some of the people are going to goof off most of the time. These people rarely get promoted beyond a certain level and at least where I worked, the only people who ever got into management were the people who actually did real work.
SoaP cost $30 million to make. They'll make all their money back in the US box office (or close to it). Then there's the foreign box office (where this may not be remotely hot, but could bring in some cash). Then second-run movies, like college campuses, etc. I work at a college theater (head of ushering), and I'm expecting big crowds to Snakes when we get it (mid-October). That's a lot more money. Lastly, DVDs and DVD rentals. It'll make it's backers a lot of money. It'll have a better return on investment than a lot of other BIG MOVIE blockbusters.
Indeed, this has been correctly modded as "Insightful" as it's probably going to be correct. What people fail to realize is that sometimes you can make up for bad box office with rentals or sales. The first Austin Powers movie actually didn't do too well at the box office, but it became (at the time) the biggest VHS rental of all time. I'm sure the eventual DVD sales (the DVD didn't come out until a few years after the movie premiered) and even some VHS sales were just icing on the cake.
I can only speak for myself, but I just have no interest in SoaP and I'm not sure I even would watch it as a DVD rental. I do think it could find an audience as a DVD rental or in DVD sales as it's the kind of movie that might pick up its audience after a release to theatres, just like the first Austin Powers movie did.
I'm no Stargate fan, but as a fan of the original "Sliders," classic "Doctor Who," "Mystery Science Theater 3000," and other things Scifi "rescued" with great fanfare before unceremoniously killing off, I feel your pain.
I was a fan of Sliders too. I even watched the bad 4th and final season. You SG1 fans might note that Sliders ended in cliffhanger even though the series producers promised to tie up the loose ends of the storylines. Right. They tied up some of them, mostly by killing off old characters, but they ended it in a cliffhanger. I was so angry about this that I still won't watch the show in reruns or on DVD. The series head writer had what would be more or less the equivalent of a blog that ran on the offical Sliders webpage after each first run episode aired. After the series finale aired, he apologized to the fans, but said he was ordered to write a cliffhanger by the producers. Maybe SG1 will end on a better note, but I wouldn't bet on it. SciFi may also order a cliffhanger to set up the inevitable SG1 TV movie a few years down the road.
Amazon is good because it's easy to find exactly what you want, and lots of things similar to exactly what you want. You can really drill down categories.
I've never bought anything from Amazon's auction business. I have bought from their "resellers" and I've had real mixed results. I suspect that some of this may apply to the auction side of the house as well, so it may be worth sharing. Over 2 years ago, I bought an unlocked GSM phone from a reseller at Amazon. The phone was a Nokia model and Nokia's own documentation stated that it was tri-band, which means it has 1 band for the USA and 2 bands for the rest of the world. The reseller never stated that the phone he was selling was an AT&T crippled phone that only contained 2 bands - the normal US band and 1 of the bands used internationally. So potentially if I took the phone to Europe, it might not work if the local service was only available in the missing band. I complained to the reseller immediately and asked for a refund. He ignored my emails for a week, so I contacted Amazon. They refused to get involved and told me to contact the seller, which wasn't working. I protested the charge with my credit card company as it was ridiculously easy to prove that the seller had not disclosed that the phone was crippled and I thought I was buying a tri-band phone. I wrote to the reseller and told him I was protesting the charge and he finally agreed to a refund of my money if I returned the phone.
I had another encounter at Amazon where I wanted to buy an out of print classical CD from a reseller who specializes in used CDs. The price quoted was unusually good, so I jumped on it. I heard nothing from them for over a week, so I wrote and asked why I hadn't received it. They said that they didn't actually have it, but were trying to find it. They never got it. Then I learned that this company doesn't actually have anything in stock, they just list stuff on Amazon as if they have it and then try to acquire it and resell it to you after you place the order. I also found a used bookstore on Amazon who did the same thing of advertising books they didn't actually have. I am more careful now of who I buy anything used from and I pay very careful attention to the feedback of all resellers and look specifically for the negative comments to see if they have valid complaints. In the case of the CD reseller, I complained to Amazon that they didn't actually have anything in stock, despite their numerous listings on Amazon, and Amazon could not care less.
I learned the hard way that if you buy from a reseller at Amazon, they won't back you up if it goes bad. I'm sure they do the same with their auctions. Yes, they get their piece of the business, but they aren't interested at all in helping anyone to resolve disputes. They were very clear to me that any disputes I had were up to me to resolve.
It's not like Beatles and Radiohead albums are hard to come by, both new and used -- who cares if they're sold on iTunes or not? Is there anyone who wants to buy the Beatles catalog who hasn't already purchased them on CD?
Believe it or not, apparently there are people who want to buy the Beatles catalog and haven't bought the CDs. The Beatles have been said to have had millions of tunes downloaded from P2P networks. Since you can't buy the Beatles songs online anywhere, that means that all of those downloads are unauthorized and the group got nothing for those downloads.
With regards to the Beatles, people need to realize that the 2 surviving members are in their 60s and are grandfathers. We joke on Slashdot about Congressmen talking about "that interweb thing", but this is exactly the generation the Beatles are from. Apple Records is run by their long time buddy, Neil Aspinal, who's also in his 60s. This whole "internet thingy" is something they barely comprehend. Then to make matters worse, the whole Beatles brain trust has been convinced for years that "less is more". In the almost 11 years since the 3 volume Anthology came out, we have seen 1 Greatest Hits CD, 1 Yellow Submarine soundtrack CD and 1 remixed Let It Be soundtrack CD. Oh yeah - there was the 2 volume limited edition box sets of the US albums on CD that came out too. That's it. Although I do not agree with them, they are convinced that they less they put out, the more it will sell. It reminds me of Eddie Murphy's old joke about a starving man who is given a cracker. He doesn't say "What's up with only giving me a cracker? I want a steak!". He eats the cracker and says "Man, that was the best cracker I ever had in my life!" The Beatles stuff sells because they hardly put out anything, so people gobble up what little they give them. Believe it or not, there are still unreleased tracks worth releasing from the group, such as the acoustic White Album demos that at one time were rumored to be considered for release but may not actually come out for another decade or longer.
Anyway, Neil Aspinal has stated that the Beatles are now remastering their entire back catalog. Will it be SACD? DVD-Audio? Just regular CD? No one who knows has talked. Neil also said that when the remasters are ready, the songs will be made available for download. However, no time table was given, so I'd so don't expect anything for a few more years. It has taken a very long time for the group to even consider remastering their CDs. Why? Well, part of the reason is that George Martin (their original producer) is still alive and there was some thought that remastering the catalog would mean that George didn't do a very good job the first time around and nobody wanted to insult George. It's a very long story not worth going into, but I think George Martin finally told them that he wasn't opposed to someone remastering the old CDs, but he wasn't going to do it, so that made Paul, Ringo and the widows think it was OK to go ahead.
I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that they "teched-up" rapidly before online etiquette was formed. This has more to do with emotion-driven Korean culture.
I don't have a link, but maybe 2 months ago I read about a similar story in China where an online mob seriously harassed a married woman and a man she was supposedly having an affair with before it became known that the woman's estranged husband made up everything just to get back at her and none of it was true. I'd say it's really an Asian thing as opposed to a Korean thing.
OTOH easyjet are huge. I'm not sure how you could miss them, they pretty much changed the european airline industry.
Your title says it all. Please note that most Americans do not bother to travel outside of North America and as such are unlikely to ever have heard of Easyjet. I'm having a lot of problems with this one as there are billions of people in Asia, Africa and the Americas for whom Easyjet has no impact at all. Changed Europe? Yes. Changed the world? Not so much. Other parts of the world already had budget airlines.
they don't care, because they put security above happy travellers
I fail to see why you think this is a bad thing. I would much rather be safe than happy on a flight. I do give you credit though as it seems that you actually fly. Most of the people here who post about "losing our rights" and so on when flying don't actually travel that way.
Osama Bin Laden is on record for his demands against the Saudi government. His primary goal early in his career was to remove the US presence from Saudi Arabia and especially the holy cities of islam.
The Taliban were not planning to attack any western country - they were quite happy running their own, that is what they had always wanted.
Technically this is all true, but in reality it's not the full picture. The US have been out of Saudi Arabia for several years now. The current president realized a few years ago that the terrorists were never going to stop bitching until the US troops left Saudi Arabia, so he pulled them out. Have you heard even once Bin Laden or one of his cronies say "Thank you for leaving Saudi Arabia"?
Yes, the Taliban had no plans to attack another country - yet. However there were training camps in Afghanistan where the objective was to train people to unleash terrorist actions on western governments. Please do not delude yourself. Bin Laden's goal is quite simply to set up a caliphate, ideally with himself as the caliph. Once that happens, the next goal is to destroy Israel. The final goal is to make holy war with the non-Islamic nations and kill and/or forcibly subjugate the entire world under the caliphate.
On the radio this morning (a Washington, D.C., news station) there was reference to a planned 3 attacks over 3 days. I found that odd--if successful simultaneous detonations were carried out, wouldn't the plotters assume that security would immediately be tightened to the point where the chances of succeeding on subsequent days would be much lower?
Of course it would. Good for you for being one of the few people to realize this. If planes kept blowing up and nobody seemed to understand why, the US would probably at a minimum ban all flights from the country of origin if it was always the same. At worst, it might just shut down the air system to all planes until it felt things were safe, like the days after 9/11.
My point is if DRM gets in my way of copying non-RIAA, non-MPAA, non-[Insert big corp here],... Someone's "Base" is going to be really pissed that they can't record their music because they can't produce CDs of their church's music that they performed.
This is a really good point. Doom9, who runs a website about video related topics (http://www.doom9.org), runs Windows and he has stated that the DRM in Vista will be much worse than anything we have seen yet. It has been alleged that it may even proactively delete files from your PC that it thinks you have no right to have That was all I had to see to convince me that I most certainly will NOT be adopting Vista.
I expect Vista to be a collosal failure. Yes, some businesses will blindly upgrade because "Anything put out by Microsoft must be good!", but Joe Consumer has no interest at all in replacing his perfectly good PC just to get one capable of making the most out of Vista and its insane hardware requirements.
# Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.
Well, I can't say with 100% certainty that this didn't happen, but the problem I have with this is that it relies totally on CBS to "do the right thing". Suppose CBS decided they didn't like President Bush and facts be damned, he had to go. Next they steadfastly insist that the documents are authentic and trump out some paid off "experts" to validate them, leaving the Republicans to argue that the docs are made up. It then gets into a "he said/she said" thing where Bush and his staffers can't totally disprove that the docs aren't made up without admitting that they placed them to begin with, so they have to waste precious time and resources defending against a lie they started secretly. I'm just not sure I can go down this path with you on this one.
# and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.
His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.
I actually live in the state of Georgia, so I can comment on this one. The Washington Post is known for it's left leaning views, so I'm not sure I would bring this out as an "unbiased" source. Cleland was his own worst enemy. Actually this vote, stupid as it was, was not what did him in. Cleland was beaten because of his slavish devotion to the Democratic Party. The Dems opposed a bill creating the Department of Homeland Security because it contained provisions that weakened job protections (think "unions") in the new department. Since the Dems are the party that backs labor unions, opposing such language in the bill was consistent with their viewpoint. Fellow Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller has stated that he told Cleland repeatedly that if he voted against the bill, it would cost him the election in the fall. Cleland, always a true soldier of the Democratic Party and never one to differ from the party line, told Miller that he didn't know what he was talking about. So Cleland voted against the bill, just as the Democratic Party told him to do. Much ado was made about this in the fall campaign and it basically became impossible for Cleland to justify why he was "against America's security", so he lost. Cleland was not a particularly good senator and he paid the price for putting the party first above all. Like it or not, Miller was right and this was simply not a bill you could justify voting against and Cleland paid the price. The article link in the Washington Post refers to another incident that while it did not help Cleland, was not directly responsible for his loss.
10 bucks per CD? Better option is to get the DVD Decrypter and donate a few bucks to the developers:)
Wow, you are more than 1 year behind the times with this post. DVD Decrypter has been dead since early 2005 when Macrovision gave a cease and desist letter to the creator of DVD Decrypter. The reason? DVD Decrypter can be used to remove Macrovision, which is a violation of the DCMA. The creator was forced to stop developing DVD Decrypter and give all source code to Macrovision. I don't know if he was forced to pay a fine to them or not, but he was threatened with legal action and facing the prospect of jail time and/or fines, he accepted their "offer" and gave them the code and removed the software from his website. In fact, the formerly official website now goes straight to Macromedia.
I have read that certain video forums are regularly monitored by Macromedia to see if the developer ever posts anything that in any way can be said to talk about decrypting DVDs or removing Macrovision and if they ever find him saying anything on those topics, they are going to take him to court and try to get him convicted for breaking the DCMA. Given the legal rulings on the subject to date, this is a very realistic possibility. I think he does still participate to a limited extent in video forums, but only on topics that have nothing to do with decrypting DVDs.
If they mean CSS, hasn't that been cracked for, like, years? So it should be *possible* to copy the music. (Of course, if you can't copy the songs with iTunes or WMP, it is protected from most users.)
Yes, they mean CSS. Yes, it has been cracked for years. However most consumers have no idea how to crack it. iTunes and WMP songs can be copied by simply burning them to CD in CD audio format and then copying those versions, not the originals.
Translation for those who haven't figured it out - this "new" format means Dual Disc minus the CD audio side. This has been possible with DVD since day one.
IMDB is rarely ever accurate until after a movie is released.
People connected with Star Trek (not fans, but insiders who actually work for Paramount) have said that it is not true that Damon has been cast. Given that the story line is supposed to either take place at Star Fleet Academy or maybe just afterwards and those at Star Fleet Academy would be 18-22 years old, this seems highly unlikely. Somebody may be pulling IMDB's leg. IMDB does not always get things right and just because they say it's true, that doesn't mean it really is, especially for a film that hasn't even started shooting yet.
Once an essential application Norton? Only in as much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is Windows.
Man, is this the truth. My dad runs Norton and I told him once that I thought that Norton caused more problems than it solves, but he trusts (sigh) Norton. Long story short, just last night as a personal favor I went over to help a retired guy I know who was having trouble with his PC. He also runs Norton and it sucks! He has some crazy Norton program running to warn him about "unsafe" web pages. I was trying to help him with access problems to an online account he had and all this program did was pop up a box on every single account page saying that "This page is unrated." and making him check off one of three boxes (basically - continue, don't go there, go there this time only) AND then enter a password. This is a retired guy who is 73 years old. I can't imagine living like this where you have to click on a box and give a password just to surf the web, but that's how he lives. He doesn't even question the logic of this. I really don't know if he is maybe protecting the PC for his 5 year old granddaughter (why not just not let the kid use it?) or if he thinks it will save him from accidentally going to a "bad" site (he is very religious, by the way).
I feel pretty strongly that friends don't let friends use Norton. I work in IT and I don't know anybody in my field who uses Norton at home. I agree that AVG is better than Norton AV. The only Norton product I like is Ghost.
Re:That's an easy one.
on
IBM Opts for AMD
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· Score: 2, Informative
Your post seems to imply that AMD's stock price went down because of the Conroe and that the market has decided that the Conroe will crush AMD. That's misleading. Intel has recently slashed prices quite dramatically and initiated a new price war with AMD. That's the real cause of the stock price drop as margins in both companies are go down. The effects of new technology on Wall Street's thinking takes a little while to sink in. They're not nearly as quick as Slashdot.
Quite right. And please remember that the stock market also believed until a month or two ago that SCO was worth more than $4 a share and they STILL believe that it's worth over $2 a share. I don't think that I have to explain to anyone on Slashdot that the fact that this stock still has any value at all is a good indication that Wall Street really does not understand "this technology thingy" very well.
Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING. Let competition give us what we want. Competition crushed AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the U.S. Competition crushed the BBSes that hung around while ISPs gave users more information and quicker. Competition crushed the modem to be replaced by 8 different ways to connect to other computers. Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper. Let it crush more so we get more for less.
I consider myself a Republican, but I'm going to say something against the party line - the free market does NOT solve all ills! Where exactly is this competition of which you speak? Tell that to the masses of Americans who do not live in large towns and have only source for broadband. Where exactly do they go when their local broadband provider charges them AND Google and friends more?
Guys like you always spout off the same tired nonsense - "If company A charges me too much for broadband, then I'll go to company B!" What exactly do you when there is no company B in your small town?
There are things in life in which it is useful to have government regulation. There are things in which it is useful to not have government regulation. I feel sorry for you that you are yet another person too blind to see that. You are going to get your wish. It's clear that Net Nuetrality is dead and for better or worse (probably worse) we're going to have to live with that.
By the way, AOL and Prodigy are both still around. I don't know about Compuserve. In the case of AOL, I think it wasn't just competition that killed them but other factors. 1) Increasing technical knowledge by their customers who finally realized that there was more to the internet than AOL and its hand holding. 2) Increasing desire of Americans to move to broadband with the realization that AOL didn't really offer any value for the extra money if they already had broadband. It's one thing to pay AOL for a dial up connection. It's something else to pay for broadband AND then pay for AOL on top of that. 3) AOL's prices weren't very good compared to the competition. 4) AOL's very unpopular mail campaigns may have, in fact, turned off potential customers. 5) AOL's terrible reputation for customers being unable to cancel service surely was a huge negative. If you're a 22 year old graduate on your own for the first time are you going to sign up with a service that makes it essentially impossible to cancel? Probably not.
The technically superior standard almost never wins in the US.
We chose CDMA over GSM (only just now starting to change)
This is arguable for a couple of points. First of all, the majority of mobile phone providers in the US chose out of their own free will not to provide GSM and instead to pay Qualcomm dubious patent royalties for CDMA. I think that this was a really stupid decision, but that's how we do things in America. If the rest of the world does something one way, we will find another way to do it just to be different. Secondly, Cingular is now the US's largest mobile phone provider (T-Mobile also does GSM), so I think the marketplace has shown, belatedly, that GSM won here too.
Based on the strict copyright laws in place on DVD's and any supposed "intellectual property" (an oxy-moron if ever there was one), how is this possible? Simply making the project non-profit excapes culpability for trademark and copyright infringement?
Sigh. You're new to this whole thing aren't you? It's pretty obvious from the rest of your post that you're not really into this Star Wars thing are you? Basically, that powers that control the Star Wars (this means George Lucas) and Star Trek franchises (this means Paramount) have a deal that they don't sue fan films as long as the people who make them don't make a dime on them. That's the deal. You don't like it? You don't make a film. I am amazed that they even allow these films at all under these conditions as I think 10 years ago nobody would have agreed to let fans make such films under any conditions.
Of course the real reason that the project can't be for profit, is that the fan made movie would gross more than all three of the latest prequels combined revenues no doubt, proving that Hollywood and Lucas has it's head up it's ass.
Well, you've obviously never watched these films. Star Wars: Revelations, which is arguably the best of the Star Wars fan films, has very good special effects (thanks to CGI) and mostly lousy acting. There are several Star Trek ones too. The best known are probably Hidden Frontier (http://www.hiddenfrontier.com) and New Voyages (http://www.newvoyages.com). Hidden Frontier is about 6-7 years old now. It uses green screens to get the "realistic" (relatively speaking) backgrounds on the show and make it look Star Trek-ish, but the acting is very poor. The only guy on the show who really can act is Larry LaVerne, who according to IMDB got a handful of brief roles on some TV shows in the past. Some, but not all, of his co-workers have improved over the years (the lady who plays Captain Shelby comes to mind), but if these guys were working for pay, they would starve! New Voyages has probably the best acting of the bunch with most, but not all, of the cast being competent. The guy who plays McCoy is an exception, but he's still better than many of the Hidden Frontier crew. Even the people associated with all of these shows say that while they are fun to do, nobody has yet "crossed over" and gotten real work in Hollywood. Star Wars: Revelations was made mostly to try to break the effects people into Hollywood rather than intending to turn the actors into working Hollywood actors and I honestly don't know if those guys got work or not. Nobody who has acted on these fan films has gotten a break from them.
I suppose they do serve a purpose as it's a way for fans starved for more Star Wars and Star Trek to get more entertainment, although not professional grade, from those franchises. I'm not a lawyer, but to be fair I think that Lucas and Paramount have done the best they can and honestly, if some of these things were official productions, they might be detrimental to the franchises. New Voyages is the only fan production I've seen that even comes close to professional standards and even their pilot episode was not really any better than other fan films, although their next episode was excellent.
I have no way to know if this is true or not. Let's say it is. One of the things that constantly amazes me is how so many Europeans see the world in black and white with no shades of gray and how they have really interesting causes that become really important to them. Case in point - the constant Israel/Palestinian problems. A more objective person might see blame on both sides, yet just below, we have a post with a lot of mod points (so far) that talks about killing Israelis. Folks there's plenty of blame to go on both sides, but some are just too blind to see it. Another Eurotrash cause is the problems in Chechnya. A lot of Europeans conveniently overlook the acts of terrorism (Beslan school massacre) on the part of the Chechens and put 100% of the blame on the Russians. Again, there's plenty of blame for both sides. It really saddens me that this idea seems lost on a lot of Europeans and they have a great knack for siding with the group that resorts to terrorism. Say what you will about the Israelis and the Russians and they are not innocents in their conflicts, but they also aren't sending suicide bombers to the enemy.
I feel pretty confident that Jani is neither Jewish nor Palestinian and probably not very religious. Honestly, what on earth does this conflict have to do with him? Yet it has consumed him and controlled him. Truly sad.
Why can't the USA take up a loser pays legal system - in countries where such a system exists, the incidence if frivolous lawsuits are nowhere near the level they are in the USA.
I can answer this because my best friend is a lawyer and I have put this very question to him. This is NOT what he told me, but what I got from reading between the lines in what he said.
Lawyers in the USA fear this. This approach WILL drive down lawsuits, which reduces their income. The argument against this, which my friend gave me, is that "innocent, wronged people" (usually this involves an extreme example of medical malpractice, such as leaving an instrument in a patient after surgery) will be afraid to go to court when they have been wronged because they might lose and would become bankrupt. Lawyers love the current system because there is no financial disincentive for suing over everything and maybe sometimes they get lucky and win a fortune.
Or DMX, who compared the music business to legalized slavery.
I just wanted to add that a couple of years ago, some US Congressman (sadly, I don't remember who it was) said that the music business was like a bank that owned a mortgage on a house and after the mortgage was paid off, the bank still owned the house. I thought that was probably the most perceptive view of how the music business works that I have ever heard.
Not a real fan of Babylon 5, but give rise to hope that someday, Firefly will get similar treatment. (Why SciFi didn't pick up that series after FOX dumped it, I'll never know.)
Best guesses why SciFi didn't want Firefly: 1) Production costs were too high. 2) Production costs weren't unreasonable for a show of this type, but SciFi didn't have the money for another series with this kind of costs. Please keep in mind that Battlestar Gallactica has little in the way of "eye candy", which really helps to keep its costs down. 3) Realization that despite the fact that Firefly fans were truly devoted to the show, there just weren't enough of them. The box office returns on the movie (I don't even remember the name of it) should have been proof of this.
Given what SciFi did to Sliders, which at one time was a good show, I wouldn't bet on Firefly remaining as good as it supposedly was when Fox ran it. Everyone seems to forget that Sliders just got worse and worse on SciFi. The series final was so bad that I don't care if there is ever another episode. I won't watch it. I won't even watch Sliders in reruns or rent the DVDs, this how pissed off I still am at how the series finale went down. SciFi could have just as easily have destroyed Firefly if they had bought it.
Finally, we wouldn't be the first. After World War I, they lost over 60,000 citizens. They felt that the freedoms their soldiers fought for shouldn't be thrown away. As a result, they implemented mandatory voting, and it's worked well for them so far, not to mention the voter turnout increase from 59% to over 95%.
Um, who exactly are they ? I can't believe you got 5 points for a post that requires us to be mind readers. What is the population of this mysterious country? Do you think that just maybe it might be easier to vote or make voting mandatory in a country with a smaller population?
Slashdot Mirror
Show me an employer who doesn't mind employees spending all day on the phone making personal calls.
My first job after college was as a computer programmer for the US Federal government. We had a few older employees who rarely did any real work, but spent most of their time making personal calls and talking to other employees who were also avoiding doing any real work. I remember one guy who was close to retirement who honestly only did any real work for about 1-2 weeks a year when they made him escort the Inspector General team around. Another guy who was waiting for retirement used to spend about 2 hours each morning in the bathroom reading the newspaper as he was taking a dump. No, I don't think he had a physical problem that required him to sit on the toilet that long. Reading newspapers at your desk was one of the few things that actually was frowned upon, so he found a way to kill 2 hours every day by going to the toilet and reading his paper there. Although I've never worked for a state government, from what I've heard it's pretty much the same story there. It can be almost impossible to fire government employees, so they just accept that some of the people are going to goof off most of the time. These people rarely get promoted beyond a certain level and at least where I worked, the only people who ever got into management were the people who actually did real work.
SoaP cost $30 million to make. They'll make all their money back in the US box office (or close to it). Then there's the foreign box office (where this may not be remotely hot, but could bring in some cash). Then second-run movies, like college campuses, etc. I work at a college theater (head of ushering), and I'm expecting big crowds to Snakes when we get it (mid-October). That's a lot more money. Lastly, DVDs and DVD rentals. It'll make it's backers a lot of money. It'll have a better return on investment than a lot of other BIG MOVIE blockbusters.
Indeed, this has been correctly modded as "Insightful" as it's probably going to be correct. What people fail to realize is that sometimes you can make up for bad box office with rentals or sales. The first Austin Powers movie actually didn't do too well at the box office, but it became (at the time) the biggest VHS rental of all time. I'm sure the eventual DVD sales (the DVD didn't come out until a few years after the movie premiered) and even some VHS sales were just icing on the cake.
I can only speak for myself, but I just have no interest in SoaP and I'm not sure I even would watch it as a DVD rental. I do think it could find an audience as a DVD rental or in DVD sales as it's the kind of movie that might pick up its audience after a release to theatres, just like the first Austin Powers movie did.
I'm no Stargate fan, but as a fan of the original "Sliders," classic "Doctor Who," "Mystery Science Theater 3000," and other things Scifi "rescued" with great fanfare before unceremoniously killing off, I feel your pain.
I was a fan of Sliders too. I even watched the bad 4th and final season. You SG1 fans might note that Sliders ended in cliffhanger even though the series producers promised to tie up the loose ends of the storylines. Right. They tied up some of them, mostly by killing off old characters, but they ended it in a cliffhanger. I was so angry about this that I still won't watch the show in reruns or on DVD. The series head writer had what would be more or less the equivalent of a blog that ran on the offical Sliders webpage after each first run episode aired. After the series finale aired, he apologized to the fans, but said he was ordered to write a cliffhanger by the producers. Maybe SG1 will end on a better note, but I wouldn't bet on it. SciFi may also order a cliffhanger to set up the inevitable SG1 TV movie a few years down the road.
Amazon is good because it's easy to find exactly what you want, and lots of things similar to exactly what you want. You can really drill down categories.
I've never bought anything from Amazon's auction business. I have bought from their "resellers" and I've had real mixed results. I suspect that some of this may apply to the auction side of the house as well, so it may be worth sharing. Over 2 years ago, I bought an unlocked GSM phone from a reseller at Amazon. The phone was a Nokia model and Nokia's own documentation stated that it was tri-band, which means it has 1 band for the USA and 2 bands for the rest of the world. The reseller never stated that the phone he was selling was an AT&T crippled phone that only contained 2 bands - the normal US band and 1 of the bands used internationally. So potentially if I took the phone to Europe, it might not work if the local service was only available in the missing band. I complained to the reseller immediately and asked for a refund. He ignored my emails for a week, so I contacted Amazon. They refused to get involved and told me to contact the seller, which wasn't working. I protested the charge with my credit card company as it was ridiculously easy to prove that the seller had not disclosed that the phone was crippled and I thought I was buying a tri-band phone. I wrote to the reseller and told him I was protesting the charge and he finally agreed to a refund of my money if I returned the phone.
I had another encounter at Amazon where I wanted to buy an out of print classical CD from a reseller who specializes in used CDs. The price quoted was unusually good, so I jumped on it. I heard nothing from them for over a week, so I wrote and asked why I hadn't received it. They said that they didn't actually have it, but were trying to find it. They never got it. Then I learned that this company doesn't actually have anything in stock, they just list stuff on Amazon as if they have it and then try to acquire it and resell it to you after you place the order. I also found a used bookstore on Amazon who did the same thing of advertising books they didn't actually have. I am more careful now of who I buy anything used from and I pay very careful attention to the feedback of all resellers and look specifically for the negative comments to see if they have valid complaints. In the case of the CD reseller, I complained to Amazon that they didn't actually have anything in stock, despite their numerous listings on Amazon, and Amazon could not care less.
I learned the hard way that if you buy from a reseller at Amazon, they won't back you up if it goes bad. I'm sure they do the same with their auctions. Yes, they get their piece of the business, but they aren't interested at all in helping anyone to resolve disputes. They were very clear to me that any disputes I had were up to me to resolve.
It's not like Beatles and Radiohead albums are hard to come by, both new and used -- who cares if they're sold on iTunes or not? Is there anyone who wants to buy the Beatles catalog who hasn't already purchased them on CD?
Believe it or not, apparently there are people who want to buy the Beatles catalog and haven't bought the CDs. The Beatles have been said to have had millions of tunes downloaded from P2P networks. Since you can't buy the Beatles songs online anywhere, that means that all of those downloads are unauthorized and the group got nothing for those downloads.
With regards to the Beatles, people need to realize that the 2 surviving members are in their 60s and are grandfathers. We joke on Slashdot about Congressmen talking about "that interweb thing", but this is exactly the generation the Beatles are from. Apple Records is run by their long time buddy, Neil Aspinal, who's also in his 60s. This whole "internet thingy" is something they barely comprehend. Then to make matters worse, the whole Beatles brain trust has been convinced for years that "less is more". In the almost 11 years since the 3 volume Anthology came out, we have seen 1 Greatest Hits CD, 1 Yellow Submarine soundtrack CD and 1 remixed Let It Be soundtrack CD. Oh yeah - there was the 2 volume limited edition box sets of the US albums on CD that came out too. That's it. Although I do not agree with them, they are convinced that they less they put out, the more it will sell. It reminds me of Eddie Murphy's old joke about a starving man who is given a cracker. He doesn't say "What's up with only giving me a cracker? I want a steak!". He eats the cracker and says "Man, that was the best cracker I ever had in my life!" The Beatles stuff sells because they hardly put out anything, so people gobble up what little they give them. Believe it or not, there are still unreleased tracks worth releasing from the group, such as the acoustic White Album demos that at one time were rumored to be considered for release but may not actually come out for another decade or longer.
Anyway, Neil Aspinal has stated that the Beatles are now remastering their entire back catalog. Will it be SACD? DVD-Audio? Just regular CD? No one who knows has talked. Neil also said that when the remasters are ready, the songs will be made available for download. However, no time table was given, so I'd so don't expect anything for a few more years. It has taken a very long time for the group to even consider remastering their CDs. Why? Well, part of the reason is that George Martin (their original producer) is still alive and there was some thought that remastering the catalog would mean that George didn't do a very good job the first time around and nobody wanted to insult George. It's a very long story not worth going into, but I think George Martin finally told them that he wasn't opposed to someone remastering the old CDs, but he wasn't going to do it, so that made Paul, Ringo and the widows think it was OK to go ahead.
I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that they "teched-up" rapidly before online etiquette was formed. This has more to do with emotion-driven Korean culture.
I don't have a link, but maybe 2 months ago I read about a similar story in China where an online mob seriously harassed a married woman and a man she was supposedly having an affair with before it became known that the woman's estranged husband made up everything just to get back at her and none of it was true. I'd say it's really an Asian thing as opposed to a Korean thing.
OTOH easyjet are huge. I'm not sure how you could miss them, they pretty much changed the european airline industry.
Your title says it all. Please note that most Americans do not bother to travel outside of North America and as such are unlikely to ever have heard of Easyjet. I'm having a lot of problems with this one as there are billions of people in Asia, Africa and the Americas for whom Easyjet has no impact at all. Changed Europe? Yes. Changed the world? Not so much. Other parts of the world already had budget airlines.
they don't care, because they put security above happy travellers
I fail to see why you think this is a bad thing. I would much rather be safe than happy on a flight. I do give you credit though as it seems that you actually fly. Most of the people here who post about "losing our rights" and so on when flying don't actually travel that way.
Osama Bin Laden is on record for his demands against the Saudi government. His primary goal early in his career was to remove the US presence from Saudi Arabia and especially the holy cities of islam.
The Taliban were not planning to attack any western country - they were quite happy running their own, that is what they had always wanted.
Technically this is all true, but in reality it's not the full picture. The US have been out of Saudi Arabia for several years now. The current president realized a few years ago that the terrorists were never going to stop bitching until the US troops left Saudi Arabia, so he pulled them out. Have you heard even once Bin Laden or one of his cronies say "Thank you for leaving Saudi Arabia"?
Yes, the Taliban had no plans to attack another country - yet. However there were training camps in Afghanistan where the objective was to train people to unleash terrorist actions on western governments. Please do not delude yourself. Bin Laden's goal is quite simply to set up a caliphate, ideally with himself as the caliph. Once that happens, the next goal is to destroy Israel. The final goal is to make holy war with the non-Islamic nations and kill and/or forcibly subjugate the entire world under the caliphate.
On the radio this morning (a Washington, D.C., news station) there was reference to a planned 3 attacks over 3 days. I found that odd--if successful simultaneous detonations were carried out, wouldn't the plotters assume that security would immediately be tightened to the point where the chances of succeeding on subsequent days would be much lower?
Of course it would. Good for you for being one of the few people to realize this. If planes kept blowing up and nobody seemed to understand why, the US would probably at a minimum ban all flights from the country of origin if it was always the same. At worst, it might just shut down the air system to all planes until it felt things were safe, like the days after 9/11.
My point is if DRM gets in my way of copying non-RIAA, non-MPAA, non-[Insert big corp here],... Someone's "Base" is going to be really pissed that they can't record their music because they can't produce CDs of their church's music that they performed.
This is a really good point. Doom9, who runs a website about video related topics (http://www.doom9.org), runs Windows and he has stated that the DRM in Vista will be much worse than anything we have seen yet. It has been alleged that it may even proactively delete files from your PC that it thinks you have no right to have That was all I had to see to convince me that I most certainly will NOT be adopting Vista.
I expect Vista to be a collosal failure. Yes, some businesses will blindly upgrade because "Anything put out by Microsoft must be good!", but Joe Consumer has no interest at all in replacing his perfectly good PC just to get one capable of making the most out of Vista and its insane hardware requirements.
# Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.
Well, I can't say with 100% certainty that this didn't happen, but the problem I have with this is that it relies totally on CBS to "do the right thing". Suppose CBS decided they didn't like President Bush and facts be damned, he had to go. Next they steadfastly insist that the documents are authentic and trump out some paid off "experts" to validate them, leaving the Republicans to argue that the docs are made up. It then gets into a "he said/she said" thing where Bush and his staffers can't totally disprove that the docs aren't made up without admitting that they placed them to begin with, so they have to waste precious time and resources defending against a lie they started secretly. I'm just not sure I can go down this path with you on this one.
# and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.
His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.
I actually live in the state of Georgia, so I can comment on this one. The Washington Post is known for it's left leaning views, so I'm not sure I would bring this out as an "unbiased" source. Cleland was his own worst enemy. Actually this vote, stupid as it was, was not what did him in. Cleland was beaten because of his slavish devotion to the Democratic Party. The Dems opposed a bill creating the Department of Homeland Security because it contained provisions that weakened job protections (think "unions") in the new department. Since the Dems are the party that backs labor unions, opposing such language in the bill was consistent with their viewpoint. Fellow Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller has stated that he told Cleland repeatedly that if he voted against the bill, it would cost him the election in the fall. Cleland, always a true soldier of the Democratic Party and never one to differ from the party line, told Miller that he didn't know what he was talking about. So Cleland voted against the bill, just as the Democratic Party told him to do. Much ado was made about this in the fall campaign and it basically became impossible for Cleland to justify why he was "against America's security", so he lost. Cleland was not a particularly good senator and he paid the price for putting the party first above all. Like it or not, Miller was right and this was simply not a bill you could justify voting against and Cleland paid the price. The article link in the Washington Post refers to another incident that while it did not help Cleland, was not directly responsible for his loss.
10 bucks per CD? Better option is to get the DVD Decrypter and donate a few bucks to the developers :)
Wow, you are more than 1 year behind the times with this post. DVD Decrypter has been dead since early 2005 when Macrovision gave a cease and desist letter to the creator of DVD Decrypter. The reason? DVD Decrypter can be used to remove Macrovision, which is a violation of the DCMA. The creator was forced to stop developing DVD Decrypter and give all source code to Macrovision. I don't know if he was forced to pay a fine to them or not, but he was threatened with legal action and facing the prospect of jail time and/or fines, he accepted their "offer" and gave them the code and removed the software from his website. In fact, the formerly official website now goes straight to Macromedia.
I have read that certain video forums are regularly monitored by Macromedia to see if the developer ever posts anything that in any way can be said to talk about decrypting DVDs or removing Macrovision and if they ever find him saying anything on those topics, they are going to take him to court and try to get him convicted for breaking the DCMA. Given the legal rulings on the subject to date, this is a very realistic possibility. I think he does still participate to a limited extent in video forums, but only on topics that have nothing to do with decrypting DVDs.
If they mean CSS, hasn't that been cracked for, like, years? So it should be *possible* to copy the music. (Of course, if you can't copy the songs with iTunes or WMP, it is protected from most users.)
Yes, they mean CSS. Yes, it has been cracked for years. However most consumers have no idea how to crack it. iTunes and WMP songs can be copied by simply burning them to CD in CD audio format and then copying those versions, not the originals.
Translation for those who haven't figured it out - this "new" format means Dual Disc minus the CD audio side. This has been possible with DVD since day one.
IMDB is rarely ever accurate until after a movie is released.
People connected with Star Trek (not fans, but insiders who actually work for Paramount) have said that it is not true that Damon has been cast. Given that the story line is supposed to either take place at Star Fleet Academy or maybe just afterwards and those at Star Fleet Academy would be 18-22 years old, this seems highly unlikely. Somebody may be pulling IMDB's leg. IMDB does not always get things right and just because they say it's true, that doesn't mean it really is, especially for a film that hasn't even started shooting yet.
Once an essential application Norton? Only in as much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is Windows.
Man, is this the truth. My dad runs Norton and I told him once that I thought that Norton caused more problems than it solves, but he trusts (sigh) Norton. Long story short, just last night as a personal favor I went over to help a retired guy I know who was having trouble with his PC. He also runs Norton and it sucks! He has some crazy Norton program running to warn him about "unsafe" web pages. I was trying to help him with access problems to an online account he had and all this program did was pop up a box on every single account page saying that "This page is unrated." and making him check off one of three boxes (basically - continue, don't go there, go there this time only) AND then enter a password. This is a retired guy who is 73 years old. I can't imagine living like this where you have to click on a box and give a password just to surf the web, but that's how he lives. He doesn't even question the logic of this. I really don't know if he is maybe protecting the PC for his 5 year old granddaughter (why not just not let the kid use it?) or if he thinks it will save him from accidentally going to a "bad" site (he is very religious, by the way).
I feel pretty strongly that friends don't let friends use Norton. I work in IT and I don't know anybody in my field who uses Norton at home. I agree that AVG is better than Norton AV. The only Norton product I like is Ghost.
Your post seems to imply that AMD's stock price went down because of the Conroe and that the market has decided that the Conroe will crush AMD. That's misleading. Intel has recently slashed prices quite dramatically and initiated a new price war with AMD. That's the real cause of the stock price drop as margins in both companies are go down. The effects of new technology on Wall Street's thinking takes a little while to sink in. They're not nearly as quick as Slashdot.
Quite right. And please remember that the stock market also believed until a month or two ago that SCO was worth more than $4 a share and they STILL believe that it's worth over $2 a share. I don't think that I have to explain to anyone on Slashdot that the fact that this stock still has any value at all is a good indication that Wall Street really does not understand "this technology thingy" very well.
Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING. Let competition give us what we want. Competition crushed AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the U.S. Competition crushed the BBSes that hung around while ISPs gave users more information and quicker. Competition crushed the modem to be replaced by 8 different ways to connect to other computers. Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper. Let it crush more so we get more for less.
I consider myself a Republican, but I'm going to say something against the party line - the free market does NOT solve all ills! Where exactly is this competition of which you speak? Tell that to the masses of Americans who do not live in large towns and have only source for broadband. Where exactly do they go when their local broadband provider charges them AND Google and friends more?
Guys like you always spout off the same tired nonsense - "If company A charges me too much for broadband, then I'll go to company B!" What exactly do you when there is no company B in your small town?
There are things in life in which it is useful to have government regulation. There are things in which it is useful to not have government regulation. I feel sorry for you that you are yet another person too blind to see that. You are going to get your wish. It's clear that Net Nuetrality is dead and for better or worse (probably worse) we're going to have to live with that.
By the way, AOL and Prodigy are both still around. I don't know about Compuserve. In the case of AOL, I think it wasn't just competition that killed them but other factors.
1) Increasing technical knowledge by their customers who finally realized that there was more to the internet than AOL and its hand holding.
2) Increasing desire of Americans to move to broadband with the realization that AOL didn't really offer any value for the extra money if they already had broadband. It's one thing to pay AOL for a dial up connection. It's something else to pay for broadband AND then pay for AOL on top of that.
3) AOL's prices weren't very good compared to the competition.
4) AOL's very unpopular mail campaigns may have, in fact, turned off potential customers.
5) AOL's terrible reputation for customers being unable to cancel service surely was a huge negative. If you're a 22 year old graduate on your own for the first time are you going to sign up with a service that makes it essentially impossible to cancel? Probably not.
The technically superior standard almost never wins in the US.
We chose CDMA over GSM (only just now starting to change)
This is arguable for a couple of points. First of all, the majority of mobile phone providers in the US chose out of their own free will not to provide GSM and instead to pay Qualcomm dubious patent royalties for CDMA. I think that this was a really stupid decision, but that's how we do things in America. If the rest of the world does something one way, we will find another way to do it just to be different. Secondly, Cingular is now the US's largest mobile phone provider (T-Mobile also does GSM), so I think the marketplace has shown, belatedly, that GSM won here too.
Based on the strict copyright laws in place on DVD's and any supposed "intellectual property" (an oxy-moron if ever there was one), how is this possible? Simply making the project non-profit excapes culpability for trademark and copyright infringement?
Sigh. You're new to this whole thing aren't you? It's pretty obvious from the rest of your post that you're not really into this Star Wars thing are you? Basically, that powers that control the Star Wars (this means George Lucas) and Star Trek franchises (this means Paramount) have a deal that they don't sue fan films as long as the people who make them don't make a dime on them. That's the deal. You don't like it? You don't make a film. I am amazed that they even allow these films at all under these conditions as I think 10 years ago nobody would have agreed to let fans make such films under any conditions.
Of course the real reason that the project can't be for profit, is that the fan made movie would gross more than all three of the latest prequels combined revenues no doubt, proving that Hollywood and Lucas has it's head up it's ass.
Well, you've obviously never watched these films. Star Wars: Revelations, which is arguably the best of the Star Wars fan films, has very good special effects (thanks to CGI) and mostly lousy acting. There are several Star Trek ones too. The best known are probably Hidden Frontier (http://www.hiddenfrontier.com) and New Voyages (http://www.newvoyages.com). Hidden Frontier is about 6-7 years old now. It uses green screens to get the "realistic" (relatively speaking) backgrounds on the show and make it look Star Trek-ish, but the acting is very poor. The only guy on the show who really can act is Larry LaVerne, who according to IMDB got a handful of brief roles on some TV shows in the past. Some, but not all, of his co-workers have improved over the years (the lady who plays Captain Shelby comes to mind), but if these guys were working for pay, they would starve! New Voyages has probably the best acting of the bunch with most, but not all, of the cast being competent. The guy who plays McCoy is an exception, but he's still better than many of the Hidden Frontier crew. Even the people associated with all of these shows say that while they are fun to do, nobody has yet "crossed over" and gotten real work in Hollywood. Star Wars: Revelations was made mostly to try to break the effects people into Hollywood rather than intending to turn the actors into working Hollywood actors and I honestly don't know if those guys got work or not. Nobody who has acted on these fan films has gotten a break from them.
I suppose they do serve a purpose as it's a way for fans starved for more Star Wars and Star Trek to get more entertainment, although not professional grade, from those franchises. I'm not a lawyer, but to be fair I think that Lucas and Paramount have done the best they can and honestly, if some of these things were official productions, they might be detrimental to the franchises. New Voyages is the only fan production I've seen that even comes close to professional standards and even their pilot episode was not really any better than other fan films, although their next episode was excellent.
I have no way to know if this is true or not. Let's say it is. One of the things that constantly amazes me is how so many Europeans see the world in black and white with no shades of gray and how they have really interesting causes that become really important to them. Case in point - the constant Israel/Palestinian problems. A more objective person might see blame on both sides, yet just below, we have a post with a lot of mod points (so far) that talks about killing Israelis. Folks there's plenty of blame to go on both sides, but some are just too blind to see it. Another Eurotrash cause is the problems in Chechnya. A lot of Europeans conveniently overlook the acts of terrorism (Beslan school massacre) on the part of the Chechens and put 100% of the blame on the Russians. Again, there's plenty of blame for both sides. It really saddens me that this idea seems lost on a lot of Europeans and they have a great knack for siding with the group that resorts to terrorism. Say what you will about the Israelis and the Russians and they are not innocents in their conflicts, but they also aren't sending suicide bombers to the enemy.
I feel pretty confident that Jani is neither Jewish nor Palestinian and probably not very religious. Honestly, what on earth does this conflict have to do with him? Yet it has consumed him and controlled him. Truly sad.
Why can't the USA take up a loser pays legal system - in countries where such a system exists, the incidence if frivolous lawsuits are nowhere near the level they are in the USA.
I can answer this because my best friend is a lawyer and I have put this very question to him. This is NOT what he told me, but what I got from reading between the lines in what he said.
Lawyers in the USA fear this. This approach WILL drive down lawsuits, which reduces their income. The argument against this, which my friend gave me, is that "innocent, wronged people" (usually this involves an extreme example of medical malpractice, such as leaving an instrument in a patient after surgery) will be afraid to go to court when they have been wronged because they might lose and would become bankrupt. Lawyers love the current system because there is no financial disincentive for suing over everything and maybe sometimes they get lucky and win a fortune.
Or DMX, who compared the music business to legalized slavery.
I just wanted to add that a couple of years ago, some US Congressman (sadly, I don't remember who it was) said that the music business was like a bank that owned a mortgage on a house and after the mortgage was paid off, the bank still owned the house. I thought that was probably the most perceptive view of how the music business works that I have ever heard.
Not a real fan of Babylon 5, but give rise to hope that someday, Firefly will get similar treatment. (Why SciFi didn't pick up that series after FOX dumped it, I'll never know.)
Best guesses why SciFi didn't want Firefly:
1) Production costs were too high.
2) Production costs weren't unreasonable for a show of this type, but SciFi didn't have the money for another series with this kind of costs. Please keep in mind that Battlestar Gallactica has little in the way of "eye candy", which really helps to keep its costs down.
3) Realization that despite the fact that Firefly fans were truly devoted to the show, there just weren't enough of them. The box office returns on the movie (I don't even remember the name of it) should have been proof of this.
Given what SciFi did to Sliders, which at one time was a good show, I wouldn't bet on Firefly remaining as good as it supposedly was when Fox ran it. Everyone seems to forget that Sliders just got worse and worse on SciFi. The series final was so bad that I don't care if there is ever another episode. I won't watch it. I won't even watch Sliders in reruns or rent the DVDs, this how pissed off I still am at how the series finale went down. SciFi could have just as easily have destroyed Firefly if they had bought it.
Finally, we wouldn't be the first. After World War I, they lost over 60,000 citizens. They felt that the freedoms their soldiers fought for shouldn't be thrown away. As a result, they implemented mandatory voting, and it's worked well for them so far, not to mention the voter turnout increase from 59% to over 95%.
Um, who exactly are they ? I can't believe you got 5 points for a post that requires us to be mind readers. What is the population of this mysterious country? Do you think that just maybe it might be easier to vote or make voting mandatory in a country with a smaller population?