Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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@jpetty
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton, the first Latina in chief?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe head an off day. Maybe your comment says more about the state of journalism in this country than it does about Mr. Rodriguez' skills - I think we can all agree that real journalism left the building long ago. Regardless, if this is, as someone else put it, the best they can do, I wouldn't be surprised to see that Salon got bought by the Washington Post or the Tribune Corporation.
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Jericho just got lucky
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Networks don't listen to fans any more, not if they are smart. It's now possible for 2 kids sitting in the basement with an ice bong and a MacBook to successfully impersonate 131,000 people who want to bring back "Who's the Boss?" This is why they invested all that money in Serenity, only to discover that people can adopt multiple personalities on the Internet (who knew?). It would take a lot more than 40,000 pounds of peanuts to get them to repeat that mistake, even if they really like peanuts.
No, Jericho is back because they already had episodes written for it. If it postpones them having to import TV from Japan for even 1 day, it will be money well spent.
Science fiction is hard. Even psuedo-science fiction like Star Wars, the kind with no actual science, needs a lot of internal consistency in order to work, and most writers aren't up to it. Star Trek (all versions) was famous for being incredibly inconsistent, and got worse through the years in spite of being Lord of the Rings-like in terms of external reference materials. Lost revels in its inconsistency, tries (apparently very successfully) to make its most glaring weakness into its biggest strength. Maybe the key to truly legendary TV is to give your fanboys something to fight about.
Real science fiction writers spend years developing the universes their stories take place in. TV writers do a treatment, and if it gets picked up they have weeks to crank out a finished product. Even the best writers aren't going to be able to do anything substantial under those circumstances.
Reality TV... why not call it what it really is, which is "TV for actors who aren't good enough to get real acting jobs, so we don't have to pay them"? We used to have real reality TV. It was called documentaries. It ran on PBS. Nobody watched it. People don't watch TV to observe reality, they watch TV to escape it. Otherwise we'd have a show where single mothers of 2 try to feed their families on minimum wage incomes while food prices are going up by 12%, with the winner being the one who's kids lose the least amount of weight.
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Would Microhoo be X-Box or BOB?
[Read the article: Yahoo tells Microsoft to make like a banana]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]MS is kicking ass in the game console arena. Yes, they sell the units at a loss. So does Sony, believe it or not. The money is in the games. Just like HP sells its inkjets at cost. The guy who started all this at MS had a 6 year plan, and they are right on schedule. End game is that Sony leaves the game console market forever, which seems like it could actually happen - next gen X-box arrives in about a year and a half, PS4 is 5 years away now if they ever build it. The design cycle is the key, and Sony can't keep up. PS4 will actually be 2 generations behind by the time it hits the shelves.
There is a problem with them sticking to being a software company - they can't grow very much. All the real growth in that market is with people who can't afford to spend much on a computer or who live in countries that ignore software piracy. Unless something truly new comes along, and we've been waiting for that for 5 years now, the computer industry is basically mature. The internet is maturing as well, and there are a finite number of clicks out there. If Google keeps 65% of them locked up, which is possible but I think unlikely, the only way to grow share is through acquisition.
BTW, Yahoo did not simply make a counteroffer. They ran to AOL/Time-Warner of all places looking for a white knight. If there is anyone in the world who could completely fuck Yahoo! up it's those guys. Gates and Balmer probably can't stop laughing. If Yahoo! does sell to those guys, MS gets to pick up a substantial chunk of their market share when they tank (and tank they will) and keep their $44 billion. Maybe they planned it this way.
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It's not the cause. It's not even a symptom.
[Read the article: How the Web pushes politics further left, further right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's an enabler.
It's none of a Californian's fucking business who the representative from Wilmington, Delaware is. He represents the people of Wilmington, and if those good people don't have a problem with telecom immunity or abortion or blue laws or what have you then they have every right to re-elect the guy.
The problem is campaign financing. It's always campaign financing, and it always will be as long as we have campaign financing because that will always be code for bribery and corruption. The question is not why people in Texas care who gets elected in Maryland, it's why do the laws of Maryland (or any other state) allow people from other states to influence their elections.
We are supposed to be a Union of several independently governed states. That was the plan laid out by the Really Smart Guys 240 years ago, and nothing good has come from deviating from that plan. As it is, we may as well hang it up and change our name to the United State (which I didn't realize how Orwellian that name was until I typed it).
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I don't know
[Read the article: Should we vote like Hot or Not?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Our elections officials have already shown us that they can't count. Now you want them to multiply and divide...