Here are some things about our world which have always puzzled me. Perhaps my lovely readers can answer a few questions?
• Why is it they always dispatch a fire truck with an ambulance? (Or maybe it’s the other way around? I know it’s one of those …)
• Why are there so many different kinds of toner cartridges for the same model of printer, and does it really matter if you use a 98 black instead of a 96 black? What happens if you use a different number?
• How come when I have two televisions on the same exact channel they will sometimes show different commercials at the same time? I used to buy advertising for a regional travel destination years and years ago and when I bought TV airtime, no one ever said you were only getting a portion of the televisions tuned into that channel during a timeslot. You were supposedly getting them all. Has that changed?
• Why is there so much Spam? Is anyone really clicking on “Christina Aguilera undressed” of “Lindsay Lohan panty drop” and then deciding, yeah I’ll buy some Viagra from these people? Really? Aren’t we a little savvier than that? For that matter, what is the point of computer viruses — other than cyberterrorism, of course? Why send out e-mails telling people their IRS refund check has bounced just to infect some stranger’s computer with a hard-driving melting worm? Just for shits and giggles? Is there some other purpose to this stuff? Are they stealing information from your hard drive and sending it back to the criminals?
I’m sure I will think of some other questions but right now those are the main ones.
I thought of another one:
• Where does ABu Dhabi get its money from? There is no oil there … and I remember reading that 30 years ago it was basically a sand patch home to Bedouins. Now it’s the Arab Riviera popoulated by Eurotrash and Sheiks. Where did they get their money from?
Beale, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. But I did hear that “60 Minutes” is looking to fill a little spot at the end of the program from time to time.
Beats the hell out of me.
JzB now seriously hell-deficient
Abu Dhabi is where all the cute kittens go. (see:Nermal)( Unless they come to your house.)
• How come when I have two televisions on the same exact channel they will sometimes show different commercials at the same time? I used to buy advertising for a regional travel destination years and years ago and when I bought TV airtime, no one ever said you were only getting a portion of the televisions tuned into that channel during a timeslot. You were supposedly getting them all. Has that changed?”
Actually, this question is so confusing it’s impossible to answer. Specifically, what to you mean by “channel”? If both your televisions are hooked to the same cable, for example, and tuned to the same channel you’re going to get exactly the same programming on a selected channel, commercials included. If one television is hooked to the cable and the other to an antennae and you have them both tuned to, for example, channel 15, you’re probably getting two completely different programming streams. The cable company has a “head end” where it receives the local television signals over an antennae and the non-local signals from satellite dishes, routes them all into boxes which allow them to reassign these signals to whatever channels they want, and then sends them to your house. So, you local ABC affiliate might be on channel 8 (which will be the frequency the FCC licensed that station to use in that market) if you use an antennae but channel 5 if you use cable, and almost everyone hates this as you’ll be on channel 5 and the logo on the screen says “WILM 8”).
To make it even more confusing, you could be watching a network feed (for example, “General Hospital” on the local affiliate’s designated channel on your cable box, but have another ABC affiliate tuned in on your other television (usually the networks prohibit cable companies from doing this precisely so they can more accurately divvy up the markets for selling advertising, but some systems will have more than one network affiliate) so even though you’re seeing “General Hospital” simultaneously on both televisions you’re not watching the same channel or programming feed and you’ll most likely see different local commercials.
Program feeds (what we think of as a television channel) originate at some remote building, usually in another state, are sent to a satellite, and then received by either a television station, a cable company or directly by the consumer (the little dishes you see attached to people’s homes). If it’s received by a television station, that station has the option to insert programming/commercials over the network programming and then it transmits the signal directly to the cable company (which usually receives it, reassigns it to another channel, and then sends it out over the cable) and the consumer (who uses a conventional antennae).
If you’ve hooked two televisions to the same cable or cable receiver or to the same antennae, tuned them to the same channel and watched it as the identical program was playing on both televisions but then the commercials were different you’ve either witnessed a miracle or something revolutionary has happened since I left the industry ten years ago.
If you were buying television time for advertisements, you were buying them in any of a number of different ways: You may have been buying it from a local affiliate, in which case you were buying access to only their audience (only the people in their market (designated Area of Dominant Influence, or ADI) and the only people who saw it were those tuned to, for example, Channel 8 in Monroe either using their home antennae or the cable. But advertising agencies use complex systems and “buyers”, people who can tailor “media buys” to specific audiences. For example, you could designate programs that attract specific demographics within a specific region (the networks and some cable networks have separate satellite feeds for specific areas, such as “NBC West”). And some cable networks allow cable companies to “insert” their own advertising into their programming feed (“local avails).
And mistakes are made and fraud does exist. Agencies and stations sometimes sell the same time slot to more than one advertiser, and if you’re not monitoring the feed (watching the program your ad is supposed to be in) how would you ever know? So advertisers actually have to employ people to watch television and log when their ads run and on what station. Not all of it, just a statistical sample, I believe.
When I was in my last year of grad school I was the “on-air switcher” (the television equivalent of a radio dj – I sat at a board and watched a clock and loaded tapes and switched to different feeds at specific times and logged it all). One Monday morning at 6am after a particularly hard weekend of writing I simply feel asleep at the board (I was the only person in the building from 4:30 to 8am) for an hour. When I woke up I panicked. We were transmitting snow. I quickly found my place in the log and loaded the program I was supposed to be running and started it and waited for the phone to ring and hear my boss say (“What the hell is going on down there?!). But it didn’t ring. No one who really mattered or cared was watching. So after awhile I just “fudged” the log to cover up my dead air time. I suspect every DJ can report a similar experience.
If both your televisions are hooked to the same cable, for example, and tuned to the same channel you’re going to get exactly the same programming on a selected channel, commercials included.
We have a satellite so they are hooked up to different satellite boxes but there’s just one satellite on our roof. One would THINK that you’d get the same programming, commericals included, but I learned that you don’t. I’ve determined that it’s always local advertising. But I will have our den and kitchen TV on the exact same channel and it’s showing the exact same programming until a local ad comes on, and then it’s different ads.
I’m not sure how they can even DO that. I think you explained it in your answer, which I will have to read again. And probably a third time, too.
🙂
Just cause I’m in that kind of mood:
Abu Dhabi is the banking center of the Middle East. That emirate does have some oil, but mostly it’s by becoming experts at moving oil money around under the strict Islamic banking rules. That and Jim Davis making it famous.
But how did it get that way?
Dubai is the major regional financial center. Close by is Abu Dhabi, which is a lesser rival for banking business.
Abu Dhabi still has oil, Dubai does not. Both are part of the United Arab Emirates and there is ample revenue sharing between emirates with oil and those without.
The Middle East is awash with oil revenues. Dubai became a major financial center as oil countries became reticent at putting all their investments in Europe, the US and Asia as they did in the past.
Dubai made itself a financial and business center by liberalizing its banking, business, tax and immigration laws to attract foreign investment. And it made itself attractive to Western professionals through less draconian social restrictions than its neighbors (alcohol regulations, treatment of women).
The fire truck with ambulance is partly because of public safety liability issues and partly because of union agreements.
Abu Dhabi is the Switzerland of the middle east. It is also the only place that would tolerate a piece of shit like Dick Cheney–without arresting him.
There is so much spam because America’s doublewide denizens, Hawaiians and, particularly, American Samoans LOVE the stuff; or did you mean something else?
re: spam… If one in a million people are dumb enough to click on a link, then you had better sent out a billion links…
re: ambulance and fire truck… in my fair city, there are more fire departments than ambulance bases, so a medically trained first responder fire truck/rescue squad is sent to all medical calls in case the ambulance is a few minutes behind…
I think you’re confusing Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates, and has most of the oil (~90%). Dubai has some oil, but has pushed hard to invest it in non-oil industries because the emir (dunno which one) realized it wouldn’t last forever. It’s close to the Straits of Hormuz so it has some advantage as a shipping hub.
There’s so much spam because the incremental cost of producing it is nil.
There are different page-count toner cartridges for the model I have. I haven’t done the numbers one which is a better deal because I don’t use my printer much.
I think you’re confusing Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Oh you know what I think you’re right … either way ….
• Why is it they always dispatch a fire truck with an ambulance? (Or maybe it’s the other way around? I know it’s one of those …)
Best guesses –
the old folks have lobbied the city council to require that because it makes them feel safer. They send a police car too in my town.
those departments actually use that as leverage in their annual budget requests: “We responded to X number of emergency calls last year,,,”
Ambulance is generally medical-only. The fire department has the stuff for breaking through doors/wrenching cars open if necessary, so the fire truck goes at the same time as the ambulance and turns back if people on the scene determine their skills/equipment are not needed.
OK thanks everyone … now, can anyone tell me about the toner cartridge thing?
like others have said above, abu dhabi does have oil, it’s dubai that doesn’t have much (although it has some). and like others have said above, dubai got rich by becoming a banking/financial center for much of the middle east.
what others have not said is that a lot of dubai’s business is with iran. essentially, US companies can bounce deals through dubai using foreign subsidiaries to avoid falling under US sanctions. by becoming the middle man for those transactions, dubai is essentially getting rich by laundering iran’s oil wealth, and then taking that wealth and investing it in the foreign markets. that investment money sloshing around in dubai is what allowed it to become a major financial/banking center fr the world.
IIRC Halliburton is now based in Dubai, no? Or maybe it’s the UAE…
haliburton is based in dubai and the UAE, just like i live in pennsylvania and the USA. dubai is one of the seven emirates that make up the united arab emirates (the UAE= dubai, abu dhabi, sharjah, ras al-khaimah, ajman, fujairah, and umm al-qaiwain–i think that most americans have only heard of the first two)
If I recall correctly, Ink Cartridge numbers indicate the shape/model of the cartridge, the type color and quality of the ink, and how much ink is actually in the cartridge. So, in your example, the difference between 98 and 96 black might be that 98 can print more sheets. Or 96 might give a better tone and image.
You have to be careful using carts not specified as friendly for your printer as ‘different models of cartridge’ usually means it uses different leads and wiring that your printer won’t recognise, even if the two appear to be the same shape.
I’m not sure if there is a rhythm or reason to the numbering scheme itself, but that’s what the numbers themselves mean.
THANK YOU!
What is very annoying but the whole thing is that certain numbers are packaged (black & color) and if you buy the package it’s cheaper than buying the cartridges separately. But I didn’t know if I could buy the package as it’s a different number.
OT [and posted here rather than in your more recent post, to avoid {even more blatant} impropriety]:
In case you hadn’t seen it already, you might be interested in this interesting story of family-embiggening, whose main character is a former denizen of that thar “biblical belt buckle” y’all live in (former AL politician, to be more specific).
He’s taken the concept of advancement of international relations to the max, and demonstrated that this Great Country does not have to spread The Seed of Democracy and The Fetus of Freedom by military arms sales alone.
If I couldn’t life about this stuff I’d go ahead and shoot myself. Them ‘uns need to keep that belt buckled!
Life = laugh, oops, I’m catching the Rick Perry’s.
I worked for a market research company for a while and we had the ability to cut out commercials and substitute others to specific cable customers in the coverage area, using proprietary cable boxes, to test how well a particular spot did or didn’t work for our clients. This was 30 years ago, I think every delivery system can do that nowadays.
Geez some of the commenter are cynical about the fire truck/ambulance thing. It’s not a union or budgeting ploy. If it’s strictly a medical call, generally a fire truck won’t respond, but if it’s a fire/accident or other situation in which a fire truck would be useful, there is always a good possibility that there will be injuries, hence an ambulance (often several since an ambulance can only transport one patient at a time, so you need one ambulance per patient). PD is sent when there could be danger to the fire/ems crew, such as a drunk individual, domestic violence, a fight, etc. (We had PD come out with us just the other night to respond to a drunk incident. Ended up not needing them, but it’s nice to know they would have been their if the patient had been a belligerent drunk. We almost need to call a wagon to do a forcible entry (knock the door down) because nobody would answer and the police couldn’t get in touch with the 24 hour maintenance office at the complex). If you just dispatch one unit and it takes them 5-10 min to arrive, then they have to call for a second, which again takes another 5-10 min to arrive; it’s just better in an emergency where time can be of the essence to send both units upfront and if one is not needed, they can be cleared en route. Likewise, if we arrive on scene and suspect we’ll need another unit that hasn’t been dispatched (for instance, a very large patient we won’t be able to lift onto the truck by ourselves) it’s better to call for another unit RIGHT THEN instead of waiting til you’re ready to load and having to sit around and wait.
Dolphin:
That may be true in your neck of the woods but up here, the rescue and fire units roll on practically every call. It is a union/safety issue for sure up here.
Here too. You never see one without the other. Never.