TBH, I’m just a scared idiot.

One of my friends is a Pulitzer-nominated dude whose CC got hacked, or whatever it was.

This is probably going to sound lame as hell, but I’m that type of caveman who hates giving out their CC# online. Any advice?

I tried to install from the dev’s site last year, but was told I was lacking some critical file it needed to run. Googled it up and it was hard to tell where the file was supposed to come from, or where I could get a clean, legit copy. :S

I think it was an MS file, FWIW.

This is from 1969:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kQcuhoZD0Y

I wouldn’t be surprised if the original joke goes back to the silent movie era.

Best webcomic I’ve read in a while. The intrinsic hilarity of the situation was ridiculously refreshing compared to the usual ‘straining to come up with something funny / clever.’

People glom onto the only entity bothering to do benchmarks/reviews/ratings/whatever, or at least the only popular one, even if the system is totally bogus.

I don’t get any of this, really. MetaCritic and IMDB are also huge, and use alternate weighting systems, I believe. You can also just google the movie and underneath the ‘big three reviewers,’ there’ll be a bunch more quality review sites, like NYT, The Guardian, Ebert’s site and so forth.

So for anyone who wants to get a spectrum of opinions, it’s really not that hard. Not unlike how one should get reliable news.

Brand recognition and memory triggers is what big brand ads are about.

Cleanex, Hoover, Coke, most cologne/perfume ads, Old Spice…

Late reply, but-- the above makes much sense to me when it comes to inexperienced / first-time buyers of a product. And/or buyers who simply get in to a rut and keep buying that product without trying anything else out.

But for everyone else, I would think they sample enough tissues, sodas, perfumes, etc to gain an understanding of the ins & outs of a product, settling on choices which best represent their favorites / desired price point. For bigger-cost stuff like vacuum cleaners, I’m thinking people in this group also learn to use review resources to evaluate best choices rather than buy a Hoover just because some ads ran.

So what does this all mean? Aside from overlap between these two groups, that there’s enough revenue being produced by the former childlike group such that ad systems can afford to almost completely ignore the latter, more adult group…?