he gets the offer and turns it down, that's fine, but That's a big assumption on your part. The video is pretty solid evidence that the kid was a pretty big fan of Star Wars. He hasn't come out and said that he doesn't like it anymore, so there's no serious reason to believe that he's stopped liking it. He may have been ridiculed a lot, but if that automatically makes a kid drop his unpopular interests, then we'd have no computer programmers now. Plus, he'd be in a major motion picture. As I mentioned before, that's pretty cool anyway.
I never said he authorized the video's exploitation on the internet, but I checked it again and you're right about the school. I had heard that he took it to school, but apparently it was filmed there and he left it in the video camera.
The main point I'm trying to make, though, is that the kid probably does still like Star Wars, and may want to get into the movie. It would certainly be an experience. If he doesn't want to, he can turn the offer down when he gets it, but it's still a good effort on the part of the people involved in the petition.
He was seriously going to put N'Sync in the last movie, I believe. They filmed it and everything. If he'll go that far with them, I don't see any problem with adding some little kid that loves Star Wars into a small scene in the film.
Anyway, little guest appearances and director's-friend-cameos happen all the time in major films. They're just not played up like they are in Kevin Smith movies.
I don't understand your logic here. I mean, the kid is famous on the net for taping himself in his basement pretending he was some Jedi knight or something running around with his lightsaber. Then he brought this tape of him flailing around to his school to show off to his friends. If you need to refresh your memory on this, download the video and watch it again. Then tell me what makes you think this kid wouldn't absolutely love being in a Star Wars movie. Hell, I think it would be pretty cool to be in a Star Wars movie and I hate Star Wars.
And if I were that kid, I wouldn't tape myself pretending I was a martial arts master from a sci-fi movie then bring it to school so everyone can see it. At that point, you're pretty much asking for whatever you get.
What's wrong with passwords? I love passwords! They're so fun to memorize. Especially when they belong to other people.
Seriously, though, not everyone thinks like your average computer geek. For most of us, passwords and other alphanumeric sequences are simple to memorize. For many other people, even phone numbers can be very difficult. Not that geeks are necessarily better (okay, we are, but that's beside the point), we're just skilled at soaking up random information. Other people have skills in other areas. We shouldn't really expect everyone to think like us.
Hell, I remember back when people started talking about this "world wide web" thing. I eventually downloaded Mosaic to try it out, but it was too much of a bother to run slirp on my shell account and get the damn browser running on my Mac II to really bother.
Well, generally the idea is to extend the useful lifetime by slowing the aging process while you are young. It would in fact be a lot easier to make a person live as a 20 year old for many more years than to make someone live as an 80 year old for a few decades. Just give them a few super-antioxidants or whatever, as well as some medications that aid in cellular regeneration, and they'll stop getting old so quickly. When they're already old, the stuff won't likely help so much.
Well, according to Godwin's law, it's likely that SCO has been compared to Nazis already, thereby comparisons to SCO will be equivalent, of course signalling the end of useful conversation.
Wait, wait, applying that logic to Godwin's law again means that anything ever discussed on the internet, which has therefore been compared to Nazis, will be rendered equivalent to Nazis in the readers' minds, thereby activating Godwin's law whenever it is brought up in conversation, signalling that the conversation is over. Therefore, anytime anything ever is mentioned on the internet, any subsequent debate on the subject is pointless, so any thread on any subject is disallowed. So the internet is rendered ultimately useless as a medium for the exchange of ideas.
I understand that it's a misconception that nobody working at Fry's knows anything. The people in the back in the computer component section, for example, are quite knowledgeable. I also have a couple of friends in the software section that are able to answer all sorts of technical questions in addition to being quite skilled salespeople. Nevertheless, there are very good reasons that this negative view of the chain continues, and it's mostly due shoddy way in which the chain is run.
The first and most blatant point I can think of is that unless an employee is in a position that is directly responsible for responding to customer questions on a subject, the company doesn't require any knowledge from them whatsoever. This applies even to something as simple as the layout of the store. Half the people working there can't give you the correct aisle for any particular item they stock. This is something that even supermarkets can accomplish, so it really lowers the customer's view of the store.
Also, because the store is so big and sprawling, and employees have a tendency to wander, many times the knowledgeable employee you encounter will be in a different area. My friend in software is often asked a question in the cell phone aisle or the CDROM section, and since these aren't his areas, he often isn't able to answer. This only adds to the idea most people have that nobody knows anything.
The other reason I know is that Fry's pays very little for most jobs. Even the skilled employees earn minimum wage plus a small commission. This generally attracts poor high school and college students like my friend for the technical positions, and unskilled workers that have trouble getting other jobs for everything else. A lot people at the local store are only marginally fluent in English. I mean, it's good that they're working, especially in this economy, but it doesn't come off as very useful to your average customer trying to find a new video card or soldering iron.
On a different subject, I agree that Fry's is more Linux-aware than a lot of other computer stores. Their Linux software section is small compared to the rest of the software, but they have quite a few distros available, along with some useful programs. They even sell stuffed Tux penguins at a few places. I leave it to the same influence that gets them good manga and anime DVDs. Either they listen to their customers (kind of doubtful in my mind) or the geeky college students that get promoted to managerial positions have extra influence when it comes to making orders.
I'm guessing you haven't heard of Fry's before. The entire store chain is run horribly. The employees as a whole don't know anything about computers. They're also often quite rude. They regularly repackage returned items and place them on the shelf without testing them. It's just a terrible, terrible store that by all rights should have gone out of business long ago.
But it hasn't. Against all common sense, it's incredibly popular. It's reputation as a crappy and incompetently run chain is eclipsed by its reputation as a geek Mecca. I go there at least once a week, whether I want to buy anything or not, just so I can look around or hang out. The place is huge, it sells -everything- at reasonable prices, and they have the most liberal return policy I've ever seen.
Basically, you can go to one store, buy any computer hardware you can think of down to transistors and blank motherboards, any sort of electronics, music, DVDs (my girlfriend picks up all her anime here), magazines, video games, candy, soda, chips, and of course porn. And less expensive than pretty much anywhere else. It's gotten to the point where most people consider the crappy service an amusing and essential part of the store experience, as much so as the kitschy store themes straight out of Disneyland in the 1970s.
This reminds me, I haven't been there since last week. I'll have to drop by again soon.
This practice really has to stop. I'm glad someone is finally addressing the problem. You're just wandering through Fry's, pick up a network card, and next thing you know, some company representative jumps at you with a pointed stick. A friend of mine lost an eye. I swear.
This is perhaps the most frightening news I've read in years. Now that robots will be able to feast on our very blood, there is nothing that can stop them! We must listen to Seanbaby and fight back against the robot scourge before it is too late!
Yeah, I hear you. Flock of Seagulls rocks! And whatever happened to U2 anyway? I guess they just faded back to obscurity with all the other one-hit wonders.
Yeah, the Wherehouse in my area shutdown recently too. I hadn't been there in years, and in passing by I remembered why. They had practically nothing interesting there, all the racks being filled with multiple copies of a narrow selection of the most generic popular artists for way too much money.
Actually, I take that back. When I went over again on the last day of their sale I found a lot of unusual CDs on the shelf. Mostly what nobody in their right mind would buy without heavy discounting. Menudo for 75 cents? Count me in!
You know, different people have different opinions. There is a group saying that music today sucks and there is also a group that downloads a lot of today's music. They are not necessarily the same group. In fact, from the evidence it's quite likely that they aren't.
But then again, I find it quite amusing when people like to complain of humanity's hypocrisy. "People plead for peace while they go to war! People look for a way to help the homeless while they lay everyone off! People hate Jennifer Lopez but they always go to see her movies! People say that chocolate is the best ice cream flavour, but the goddamn Baskin Robins is always running out of mint chocolate chip! Argh!"
There is such a thing as a difference in opinion, you know.
Yeah, it really sucks. Who would want to buy a new Britney Spears or Avril Lavigne CD when all the cursing and explicit lyrics have been bleeped out? It ruins the artistic integrity?
Speak to your parents, ask them what their parents thought of the music they listened to when they were young. Fact of life: as people grow older, they begin to hate whatever the popular music of the time is, and wish that the "good old days" would return, along with "talented artists".
I agree in theory, except that now I'm seeing this attitude from a lot 20- to 25-year-olds. In fact, I'm quite surprised that at 27 you still find a lot of new music out there that you like.
I'm not sure whether the problem is because of over-marketing like many people say it is. I always figured it was just a lull in musical genres right now, and have tried to pay attention for new sounds. It also probably has to do with the fact that more and more of the major artists seem to be targeted toward the 13-17 crowd.
I'd like to think that it's just a phase, and in the next few years we'll hear the next Nirvana, NWA, Led Zepplin, Sex Pistols, Jimi Hendrix, or what have you. I guess we'll see.
I couldn't agree with you more. To illustrate your point, I'll tell a little story.
A few years ago, a Norwegian friend of mine sent me an mp3 of a song by a Swedish cross-genre folk band, Hedningarna. He was curious about whether an American would like its particular sound. I thought it was pretty cool, and added it to my music playlist, which I keep running in the background while I'm on the computer.
In the ensuing couple of weeks, the song came several times on the player. Each time I listened to it, I'd notice something new that was musically unusual or especially interesting about it. After a while, I really, really started to like the sound. I ordered the CD off cdnow.com, and liked it so much that I left it in my car CD player for weeks at a time.
I started looking for more information about the band as I ended up purchasing more of their albums. It turned out that there was a whole style of music like theirs, dubbed "Nordic Roots." I found several other bands similar to Hedningarna, such as Hoven Droven, Garmarna, and Sorten Muld.
My entire musical taste changed because of these bands. I went around playing them for everyone I knew, and most of my friends were very impressed. I'm a total Nordic Roots evangelist now, and I'd never have known it existed if it weren't this one mp3.
The "I don't buy CDs because nothing original has been released in the past 5 years" argument has many flaws to it.
As you say, there are still some good CDs out there if you work to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are a lot of bands from more than 5 years ago still releasing music, many of which didn't magically start sucking when everything else did. There are also some very good bands that started more recently, but you usually have to check the smaller labels for them.
The big argument I have against it, though, is that most of the cds in print have been out for more than five years, and even if everything did hypothetically begin to bite at that point, I'm sure there are still a few CDs from before then that music fans would like to buy. I know that most of the CDs I've purchased in the last few years have been relatively old. Either my horizons are expanding or the bland new music has made me desperate, but I've run into a lot of old CDs that I suddenly find I like enough to buy. Hell, I heard Bush's "Come Down" on the radio the other day and am ashamed to admit that I actually kind of enjoyed it.
For example, there was a paper in the 1980s IIRC reporting on evidence for psi phenomena (and a theory connecting it to quantum mechanics) whose results have never been duplicated.
It's really funny how often people take new age or paranormal phenomena and try to give it scientific justification through quantum physics. It reminds me of how every superhero origin story in old comics would be due to radiation. You can use complicated science that isn't very understood at the time to explain practically anything.
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he gets the offer and turns it down, that's fine, but That's a big assumption on your part. The video is pretty solid evidence that the kid was a pretty big fan of Star Wars. He hasn't come out and said that he doesn't like it anymore, so there's no serious reason to believe that he's stopped liking it. He may have been ridiculed a lot, but if that automatically makes a kid drop his unpopular interests, then we'd have no computer programmers now. Plus, he'd be in a major motion picture. As I mentioned before, that's pretty cool anyway.
I never said he authorized the video's exploitation on the internet, but I checked it again and you're right about the school. I had heard that he took it to school, but apparently it was filmed there and he left it in the video camera.
The main point I'm trying to make, though, is that the kid probably does still like Star Wars, and may want to get into the movie. It would certainly be an experience. If he doesn't want to, he can turn the offer down when he gets it, but it's still a good effort on the part of the people involved in the petition.
It was confirmed by Lynne Hale from Lucasfilm, actually. Here's an article I found about them being cut. The geeks didn't like it, apparently.
I think they mean "to-stupid-for-the-correct-words dept,"
He was seriously going to put N'Sync in the last movie, I believe. They filmed it and everything. If he'll go that far with them, I don't see any problem with adding some little kid that loves Star Wars into a small scene in the film.
Anyway, little guest appearances and director's-friend-cameos happen all the time in major films. They're just not played up like they are in Kevin Smith movies.
I don't understand your logic here. I mean, the kid is famous on the net for taping himself in his basement pretending he was some Jedi knight or something running around with his lightsaber. Then he brought this tape of him flailing around to his school to show off to his friends. If you need to refresh your memory on this, download the video and watch it again. Then tell me what makes you think this kid wouldn't absolutely love being in a Star Wars movie. Hell, I think it would be pretty cool to be in a Star Wars movie and I hate Star Wars.
And if I were that kid, I wouldn't tape myself pretending I was a martial arts master from a sci-fi movie then bring it to school so everyone can see it. At that point, you're pretty much asking for whatever you get.
What's wrong with passwords? I love passwords! They're so fun to memorize. Especially when they belong to other people.
Seriously, though, not everyone thinks like your average computer geek. For most of us, passwords and other alphanumeric sequences are simple to memorize. For many other people, even phone numbers can be very difficult. Not that geeks are necessarily better (okay, we are, but that's beside the point), we're just skilled at soaking up random information. Other people have skills in other areas. We shouldn't really expect everyone to think like us.
Hell, I remember back when people started talking about this "world wide web" thing. I eventually downloaded Mosaic to try it out, but it was too much of a bother to run slirp on my shell account and get the damn browser running on my Mac II to really bother.
Wow. Bringing in the Nazis on the first sentence of your response. That's probably a new record. Anyway, according to Godwin's Law, you lose.
Well, generally the idea is to extend the useful lifetime by slowing the aging process while you are young. It would in fact be a lot easier to make a person live as a 20 year old for many more years than to make someone live as an 80 year old for a few decades. Just give them a few super-antioxidants or whatever, as well as some medications that aid in cellular regeneration, and they'll stop getting old so quickly. When they're already old, the stuff won't likely help so much.
Well, according to Godwin's law, it's likely that SCO has been compared to Nazis already, thereby comparisons to SCO will be equivalent, of course signalling the end of useful conversation.
Wait, wait, applying that logic to Godwin's law again means that anything ever discussed on the internet, which has therefore been compared to Nazis, will be rendered equivalent to Nazis in the readers' minds, thereby activating Godwin's law whenever it is brought up in conversation, signalling that the conversation is over. Therefore, anytime anything ever is mentioned on the internet, any subsequent debate on the subject is pointless, so any thread on any subject is disallowed. So the internet is rendered ultimately useless as a medium for the exchange of ideas.
But I already knew that.
The going rate is minimum wage plus commission, actually. And that's for the good jobs.
I understand that it's a misconception that nobody working at Fry's knows anything. The people in the back in the computer component section, for example, are quite knowledgeable. I also have a couple of friends in the software section that are able to answer all sorts of technical questions in addition to being quite skilled salespeople. Nevertheless, there are very good reasons that this negative view of the chain continues, and it's mostly due shoddy way in which the chain is run.
The first and most blatant point I can think of is that unless an employee is in a position that is directly responsible for responding to customer questions on a subject, the company doesn't require any knowledge from them whatsoever. This applies even to something as simple as the layout of the store. Half the people working there can't give you the correct aisle for any particular item they stock. This is something that even supermarkets can accomplish, so it really lowers the customer's view of the store.
Also, because the store is so big and sprawling, and employees have a tendency to wander, many times the knowledgeable employee you encounter will be in a different area. My friend in software is often asked a question in the cell phone aisle or the CDROM section, and since these aren't his areas, he often isn't able to answer. This only adds to the idea most people have that nobody knows anything.
The other reason I know is that Fry's pays very little for most jobs. Even the skilled employees earn minimum wage plus a small commission. This generally attracts poor high school and college students like my friend for the technical positions, and unskilled workers that have trouble getting other jobs for everything else. A lot people at the local store are only marginally fluent in English. I mean, it's good that they're working, especially in this economy, but it doesn't come off as very useful to your average customer trying to find a new video card or soldering iron.
On a different subject, I agree that Fry's is more Linux-aware than a lot of other computer stores. Their Linux software section is small compared to the rest of the software, but they have quite a few distros available, along with some useful programs. They even sell stuffed Tux penguins at a few places. I leave it to the same influence that gets them good manga and anime DVDs. Either they listen to their customers (kind of doubtful in my mind) or the geeky college students that get promoted to managerial positions have extra influence when it comes to making orders.
I'm guessing you haven't heard of Fry's before. The entire store chain is run horribly. The employees as a whole don't know anything about computers. They're also often quite rude. They regularly repackage returned items and place them on the shelf without testing them. It's just a terrible, terrible store that by all rights should have gone out of business long ago.
But it hasn't. Against all common sense, it's incredibly popular. It's reputation as a crappy and incompetently run chain is eclipsed by its reputation as a geek Mecca. I go there at least once a week, whether I want to buy anything or not, just so I can look around or hang out. The place is huge, it sells -everything- at reasonable prices, and they have the most liberal return policy I've ever seen.
Basically, you can go to one store, buy any computer hardware you can think of down to transistors and blank motherboards, any sort of electronics, music, DVDs (my girlfriend picks up all her anime here), magazines, video games, candy, soda, chips, and of course porn. And less expensive than pretty much anywhere else. It's gotten to the point where most people consider the crappy service an amusing and essential part of the store experience, as much so as the kitschy store themes straight out of Disneyland in the 1970s.
This reminds me, I haven't been there since last week. I'll have to drop by again soon.
This practice really has to stop. I'm glad someone is finally addressing the problem. You're just wandering through Fry's, pick up a network card, and next thing you know, some company representative jumps at you with a pointed stick. A friend of mine lost an eye. I swear.
This is perhaps the most frightening news I've read in years. Now that robots will be able to feast on our very blood, there is nothing that can stop them! We must listen to Seanbaby and fight back against the robot scourge before it is too late!
Yeah, I hear you. Flock of Seagulls rocks! And whatever happened to U2 anyway? I guess they just faded back to obscurity with all the other one-hit wonders.
Yeah, the Wherehouse in my area shutdown recently too. I hadn't been there in years, and in passing by I remembered why. They had practically nothing interesting there, all the racks being filled with multiple copies of a narrow selection of the most generic popular artists for way too much money.
Actually, I take that back. When I went over again on the last day of their sale I found a lot of unusual CDs on the shelf. Mostly what nobody in their right mind would buy without heavy discounting. Menudo for 75 cents? Count me in!
And yes, I see that my post repeats itself. It's one of the benefits of ADHD, you see.
You know, different people have different opinions. There is a group saying that music today sucks and there is also a group that downloads a lot of today's music. They are not necessarily the same group. In fact, from the evidence it's quite likely that they aren't.
But then again, I find it quite amusing when people like to complain of humanity's hypocrisy. "People plead for peace while they go to war! People look for a way to help the homeless while they lay everyone off! People hate Jennifer Lopez but they always go to see her movies! People say that chocolate is the best ice cream flavour, but the goddamn Baskin Robins is always running out of mint chocolate chip! Argh!"
There is such a thing as a difference in opinion, you know.
Yeah, it really sucks. Who would want to buy a new Britney Spears or Avril Lavigne CD when all the cursing and explicit lyrics have been bleeped out? It ruins the artistic integrity?
Pfah! Complete sentences? For the weak!
Speak to your parents, ask them what their parents thought of the music they listened to when they were young. Fact of life: as people grow older, they begin to hate whatever the popular music of the time is, and wish that the "good old days" would return, along with "talented artists".
I agree in theory, except that now I'm seeing this attitude from a lot 20- to 25-year-olds. In fact, I'm quite surprised that at 27 you still find a lot of new music out there that you like.
I'm not sure whether the problem is because of over-marketing like many people say it is. I always figured it was just a lull in musical genres right now, and have tried to pay attention for new sounds. It also probably has to do with the fact that more and more of the major artists seem to be targeted toward the 13-17 crowd.
I'd like to think that it's just a phase, and in the next few years we'll hear the next Nirvana, NWA, Led Zepplin, Sex Pistols, Jimi Hendrix, or what have you. I guess we'll see.
I couldn't agree with you more. To illustrate your point, I'll tell a little story.
A few years ago, a Norwegian friend of mine sent me an mp3 of a song by a Swedish cross-genre folk band, Hedningarna. He was curious about whether an American would like its particular sound. I thought it was pretty cool, and added it to my music playlist, which I keep running in the background while I'm on the computer.
In the ensuing couple of weeks, the song came several times on the player. Each time I listened to it, I'd notice something new that was musically unusual or especially interesting about it. After a while, I really, really started to like the sound. I ordered the CD off cdnow.com, and liked it so much that I left it in my car CD player for weeks at a time.
I started looking for more information about the band as I ended up purchasing more of their albums. It turned out that there was a whole style of music like theirs, dubbed "Nordic Roots." I found several other bands similar to Hedningarna, such as Hoven Droven, Garmarna, and Sorten Muld.
My entire musical taste changed because of these bands. I went around playing them for everyone I knew, and most of my friends were very impressed. I'm a total Nordic Roots evangelist now, and I'd never have known it existed if it weren't this one mp3.
The "I don't buy CDs because nothing original has been released in the past 5 years" argument has many flaws to it.
As you say, there are still some good CDs out there if you work to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are a lot of bands from more than 5 years ago still releasing music, many of which didn't magically start sucking when everything else did. There are also some very good bands that started more recently, but you usually have to check the smaller labels for them.
The big argument I have against it, though, is that most of the cds in print have been out for more than five years, and even if everything did hypothetically begin to bite at that point, I'm sure there are still a few CDs from before then that music fans would like to buy. I know that most of the CDs I've purchased in the last few years have been relatively old. Either my horizons are expanding or the bland new music has made me desperate, but I've run into a lot of old CDs that I suddenly find I like enough to buy. Hell, I heard Bush's "Come Down" on the radio the other day and am ashamed to admit that I actually kind of enjoyed it.
For example, there was a paper in the 1980s IIRC reporting on evidence for psi phenomena (and a theory connecting it to quantum mechanics) whose results have never been duplicated.
It's really funny how often people take new age or paranormal phenomena and try to give it scientific justification through quantum physics. It reminds me of how every superhero origin story in old comics would be due to radiation. You can use complicated science that isn't very understood at the time to explain practically anything.