Broken Toys

Can someone enlighten me as to whether the ads on Xbox Live are localized by IP address or universally delivered?

I would hate to think of Support Obama ads appearing in the 25 other countries where the service is available. If it happened to be the case, how far would that be from yet another case of American imperialism on the prowl?

Apparently my basic cable package includes the Obama channel, which is his campaign ads 24/7.

“Blame the current financial crisis on Democrats based on things the Democrats said in 2003?”

Did someone type a post in invisible text here? Or is this an instruction TOO blame the democrats and the question mark is a typo?

We have one question about localized advertising, a comment on campaign finance, one more about excessive advertising for a campaign… then a comment arguing with no one tell us not to delude our selves… I’m confused.

I will buy any game, and pay any price, that lets me see Bob Barr or Gravel ads while I headshot aliens through a sniper rifle.

The potential here is only beginning to emerge.

Turlow the XBox does localize content. As for EA’s Ad software I do not know.

D-One, you’ve got it wrong. First of all, the House of Representatives do not have filibusters because of rules placed in 1842. Only the Senate has the options for filibusters.

In 2003, the Republicans had the majority with 51 seats, compared to 49 for the Democrats.
They would need 60 votes to invoke cloture (ending a filibuster) (3/5ths of the Senate). 51 isn’t enough strictly along party lines.

For a rules change, they’d need 67 votes (2/3rds of the Senate), and if they can’t get 60, how are they supposed to get 67?

Now, if you’ll listen to me I’ll explain what happened with housing and Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.

None of it started out as any form of great evil plan by either side. Understand that the Republicans want to go too far with deregulation, and the Dems want to go to far the other way with regulation.

It started out with the Republicans doing just what they wanted, and they went too far with deregulation. This allowed the lending institutions to do things without enough oversight.

Because of this, they did things they shouldn’t be doing, making allot of bad loans. This was because the Democrats pushed for a noble cause, housing the poor. But there’s a problem when the costs can’t be paid, and the Republicans recognized this, what they themselves had done.

17 times since 2003 President Bush sent things to Congress to address this problem. But every time, the Democrats and a small number of Republicans, in their efforts to protect the lower classes, blocked his efforts. (Bush could have written a bill himself, but after Iraq the Dems would have eaten him alive as the “big brother” trying to kill the little guy. That would have caused the whole Iraq war to fall apart, and Iran and Al Qaeda would now be all over Iraq.)

Once the Republicans deregulated it too much, the Democrats found out how they could use that to promote their own thing, and it just went way to far, and by the time the Democrats realized how bad it really was (because they didn’t believe the Republicans and Bush), they started covering their arses because it was they who had carried it even farther, and because suddenly, everyone realized too how certain people had abused their position in Enron like fashion to rake in huge amounts of money, and because these same people were making very large donations to those same Democrats.

And now, the shit has hit the fan for us all.

Personally, I think it’s not really something big and insidious so much as Obama having way too much money to spend. Think about what I said about the Obama channel back there: virtually nobody who wasn’t already an Obama groupie would tune into a channel solely to watch his campaign ads. The benefit to the candidate can’t possibly add up to more than a few thousand votes from the pool of people who tuned in for 2-3 minutes out of perturbed curiosity.

Oh yes, as far as I can see, children’s programming has gone down for quite a while. Even as recently as ten years ago, the material you could find on PBS, for instance, was light-years ahead of commercial TV, and if anything, the situation is probably worse now. If some network exec hasn’t gotten an idea to set a reality show in kindergarten, I certainly hope they don’t read this blog.

And that’s not to mention all the advertising spliced into the programming itself. The Province of Quebec set a standard twenty years ago by passing a law banning advertising aimed specifically at children under the age of 13; it was promptly taken to court by — who else? — a toy company claiming it was a constitutional violation of freedom of expression. The law still stands; you’d put broadcasts of kids’ shows from Quebec and the US side by side, and it would seem like day and night. It might be the same dreck, but at least the direct link between show and product is broken.

The actual message of a show is a touchier issue altogether.