foxit

I can't believe the parent got downvoted so badly. Did people think being dyslexic was an insult? It's not.

- Not saying this is what's happening here, but people tend to idealize the time they personally first arrived at a new community as being the most interesting, the most respectful, the most entertaining, the best of times.

- Familiarity breeds contempt. The more time you spend communicating with the same people, the less reverentially you view their thoughts.

- Communities evolve, particularly if the thing through which the participants got together evolves. This place is all about innovation.

I'd imagine the traffic's growing:

- When new arrivals show up in sufficient numbers that they overrun the environment in which they'd have been able to properly assimilate in fewer numbers, the environment changes.

- Anthropology 101 teaches us that larger numbers of humans interact with each other differently than smaller numbers. Moderation and forum policies have to evolve with the numbers to maintain civility and intelligent discourse. Still, because larger groups communicate differently than smaller groups, it'll never have the exact same feel, no matter what. It can, however, have the same intellectual value.

1) Find innovative ways to reduce production costs. Production is expensive. Unimaginably so. This can be things like: a) Redesign physical set equipment. Ex: Set lights are expensive; a single light can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Design a new light that takes advantage of modern LEDs or something, or that can be deconstructed to serve multiple lighting functions (beyond what exists today). b) Design automation to replace physical support crew on the set. Payroll is an enormous cost. Ex: Invent a tracking system that would make the boom mic not require a person to physically move it around to follow the actors. Yes, mechanization would eliminate jobs - such is the nature of creative destruction. c) Innovation in use of set design and photography to make things look much more expensive than they are. A shining example of this was how Orson Welles shot Citizen Kane. Another example is what Spielberg did with the nonfunctional shark in Jaws. For those two, you're probably going to have to check out a book to learn how they did it. And more recently the impressive-looking but cheap sets and photography in Underworld (2003). These directors did unbelievably good things with constraints. Find a way to systemize this. To study what could be made cheaper, look at films that cost way too much, and see how each shot could've been cut down to bare bones - the absolute minimum dollar amount required to make the exact same look and effect.

The most choking example of waste I've ever personally witnessed was on the set of Van Helsing (2004) in Prague. The entirety of Old Town Square was cleared, about a hundred security held people out around the perimeter, and giant cranes and lights lit a scene of Hugh Jackman leaping in the air. What was the end product that appeared in the movie, you ask? A two-second shot of Jackman leaping in the air above some cobblestone. The whole thing could've been accomplished on a 10' by 10' mockup of cobblestone in a studio, or a cobblestone street somewhere cheaper to rent the entirety of than the Old Town Square of Prague.

2) As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, marketing costs are gargantuan. You have to get eyeballs on your enjoyable entertainment. I watch independent film. The difficulty of going into a little-known film, even one that's received some good notice, is that I generally don't know a thing about it. People enjoy trailers. Create trailers. Once production is complete, making a trailer for it is essentially free - it requires the software you used to edit the film and your own time and effort. Run strings of trailers for unknown films on IFC. Run a 30-minute block of 30 to 45 second teasers with links to the film's site, where you have the 2 1/2 minute trailer and more information. Get eyeballs on productions. Right now getting eyeballs on productions is forbiddingly expensive. Revolutionize it. Cheapen it.

I don't think innovating other entertainment will kill Hollywood any faster. You have to innovate the film industry itself. Every human culture throughout history has enjoyed watching performers enact a story, of some kind or another. Moving pictures of performers enact a story isn't going anywhere in popularity. There's a reason it's such a profitable industry. Technology has advanced to the state it's in today where moving pictures of performers enacting stories are easily viewed the world over, but I don't think you should think about changing the type of entertainment so much as the mechanics of the medium.

I'd much rather paint a giant target on the MPAA's back. But disrupt Hollywood and you disrupt the MPAA. Make them toothless.

Here's two specific targets: Creative Artists Agency and the Screen Actors Guild. Good luck.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/01/15/1937259/progra...

Perhaps it's valid to note that the story provoked polarized reactions and thoughts, and thus better avoid putting each other down for those reactions.

We got calls from idiots perpetually asking us to sign up with them - through many, many requests to knock it off. It's the phone equivalent of the spam Airbnb got pinned on last year. The especially stupid part was that we already were.

I'll grant their review system is set up from the get-go to be the best of anyone out there.

VRBO's sucktitude is summed up quite nicely by clicking on any state:

New Feature Alert! You can now see the availability for each property in the search results. Simply enter a date range and hit the "Apply" button.

Yes, that's a new feature. They didn't have it before. But they'd like us to pay $600 to be listed for a year.

One of the worst travel mishaps is accidentally double-booking a space. This is something that happened with frequency in the old old days - prior to the rise of large hotel chains - often enough that it is a plot device often seen in books and old movies. The protagonist finds they have to quickly arrange another place to stay, hijinks ensue.

Since hotel chains have come along, double-booking has become almost unheard of. They have many identical rooms, they're overbooked counting on people not showing up, as airlines do. But with this slight reversion (people are sick of generic hotels with little character and few amenities; the rush to stay in houses and apartments commences) the nightmare of double-booking is a possibility for the traveler once again.

On reviews via the vacation rental sites: Nobody is happy with the current review system at the vacation rental sites. Nobody. Search the http://community.homeaway.com forums to see the owners' side of this. The owners feel HomeAway is geared far too much toward helping the guests, who aren't the ones paying big bucks to use the site. The guests feel the company isn't allowing their voice to be heard when there's a true problem. As in this instance, good guests find they can't properly review a property. And good owners find they can't stop a wayward review from appearing on the listing they paid a lot of money upfront for. Both ends of this are exploited by the few bad apples - the owners and guests who lie for their own ends.

Yelp's model of reviews, on the other hand, has its own similar problems. Fair reviews by genuinely happy or pissed off customers end up filtered. Unfair, spammy reviews (whether owner plants or one pissed customer writing 12 reviews) don't get filtered. There is no 100% way to get around this. The companies whose websites accept, review, and host these reviews have to do the best they can, and keep working at perfecting the filtering mechanisms.

Having said all that, I think the author has a right to be pissed off. Finding you have no place to stay because the owner made a mistake is a nightmare. And he should be able to say to others looking at the property that the owner made a mistake and double-booked him (but paid him back on the spot - obviously, situations exist where the owner gets snippy and refuses: new level of nightmare). The fact that he can't state this publicly is a fault in HA's review system. But they also have a point - that's all he could say, because all that happened was that his space was double-booked. He didn't actually stay there.

What's the solution? I don't know. In a matter of dispute, a dispute resolution where an agreed upon statement of fact could be posted in the reviews might work. The place this idea would fall down is when dealing with the true psychos - the liars who are out to take your money (on the owning side), the liars who are out to threaten you into giving their money back (on the guest side).

For decades, my family has considered various members to have been "ripped apart" by drug and alcohol abuse. As it turns out, some were self-medicating, such as the schizophrenic who went undiagnosed and unmedicated for so many years it caused irreparable damage to his brain. Others were survivors of terrible abuse who drank, used drugs, and engaged in other rote addictive behaviors to shut out the pain and demons.* While more complicated than the more physical, medical problem of schizophrenia, the fact that these mental health concerns have also gone undiagnosed and untreated is the reason the substance abuse continues.

Addiction and addictive behaviors, whether involving substance or not (and there are many horribly destructive addictive behaviors that have nothing whatsoever to do with mind-altering and/or harmful substances) are not what we were taught to think by scare tactics in school. I see a lot of commentary throughout this thread that indicates a lot of people are educated in an adult manner on the topics of addiction and substance abuse, which is great. Getting there is a bit of a challenge, though, and one you have to undertake personally. Public policy regarding drug awareness, unfortunately, still revolves around cheap scare tactics.

* Homeless street addicts use substance to stop the voices in their heads or escape great mental pain. The substances are not where the problem originated. They're simply the way the person has of dealing with those problems.

This isn't about desired ranking. If your highly useful, popular site gets blacklisted from appearing on Google at all, there better be a damned good reason.