Wasting time is (unfortunately) devilishly easy.

I've heard before that the #1 useage of the internet is porn (cue "The Internet is for Porn" from Avenue Q). I don't know if that's true, or how you'd gather those statistics, since you can measure page hits, but not how long someone's actively using a site- or at least not on an internet-wide scale.

However, I think everyone would agree that the #1 use for the internet is wasting time. Add up all the porn time, plus game time, plus youtube time, plus facebook, myspace, xanga, friendster, cyworld time, blog time, and you probably log a lot more hours than actual useful sites, such as E-Trades or Bank of America or something like that.

I would say that the internet is possibly the biggest distraction since...well...I can't think of anything remotely comparable.

In fact, I can't even imagine what people used to DO before the internet. How did you find out your news? How did you research papers? How did you talk to your friends?

I mean, we just take it for granted that we can turn on our little Thinkpads or Macbooks or whatever and talk to people who live on the other side of the world. We're used to typing in a word into our Google toolbars and pulling up thousands of pages of information about that word. Whenever a major event happens in the world, we know within, at most, 10 minutes.

A century ago, that same information could take days, even weeks, to reach us.

We're ridiculous, spoiled, lazy- and possibly the smartest people in the world, just because we CAN know things in a blink of an eye.

Of course, just because we can know doesn't mean we necessarily do, but the fact that we have the ability to learn anything we want to know gives us a huge advantage over everyone else.

So next you're wasting your time on the Internet, pat yourself on the back. Every second you spend expands your knowledge far past anything your ancestors could have dreamed of.

My favorite company....

Have I mentioned that I really don't like the College Board? They make up tests to stress teenagers out and have the gall to charge exorbiant prices for them. They've got us so freaked out that there's a whole industry thriving on trying to calm us down through guidebooks, tutoring, etc.

Do you have any idea how much money College Board makes out of stressing teenagers out?
Let's do a little math.

How many tests does the good, motivated student take in order to get into college?
Well, there's the SAT, which most people take at least twice, two SAT IIs, the PSAT, and let's say 4 AP tests.
So, that's $43 (x2), $20 (x2), $13, and $84 (x4), which totals to a nice and tidy

$475!!!

And that's not counting the $20 late fees, $21 change fees if you need to change where you're taking your test, the $50 in-depth score reports for the overacheiving student.

Let's assume that all of the people who applied to Harvard last year took at least the number of tests mentioned above (although most probably took more). How much money did College Board make off of just the applicants to Harvard last year?
475 x 22,796= $10,828,100!

Yes, that's right, folks, College Board made over ten million dollars (and this is a conservative estimate) on just the applicants to Harvard last year.

And did I mention that College Board is a non-profit organization?

And since I'm blogging...

I find it extremely entertaining how my generation, me included, has absolutely no respect for copyrights whatsoever.

I realized this when I was on Youtube trying to find an episode of the office, but all of them had been taken off. I got really angry before I realized that technically it isn't legal for me to be watching copyrighted material on Youtube, anyways. It belongs to someone else. But I'm so used to having everything right at my fingertips that I have the gall to actually get angry when I can't find any stolen material.

Wow.

However, with the wonderful Internet, there's absolutely no way companies can stop us from copyright infringement. Every time they find one contraband website, a new one pops up.

I think this would be an appropriate time for companies to start saying, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

If they would just post all of their episodes online for free on their own website, they would have control over their material and could still advertise and all that jazz. If the official website's right there, why would I waste brain/finger power on looking for another viewing spot?

And it wouldn't hurt their DVD sales, either, because people who buy season DVDs of the Office don't buy them because they want to watch one episode every few months; they buy them because they want easy access to their show on a nice big television screen with all of the extras and deleted scenes and other such goodies.

Same goes for music- have a few songs posted on the internet- not for downloading, just for streaming- to satisfy your casual listener, and then promote albums and such so that more serious fans can go buy them. You could also make a tidy bundle off of sound advertisements that play every few songs.

So, oxymoronically enough, the solution to internet piracy is actually to post more free stuff. Who knew?

I guess I'll blog again

Ok, so sickness has struck my household, and I'm trying to figure out where it came from. There are many possible webs of contagion because pretty much everyone I've talked to in the past couple of weeks has been sick. For instance:
Gym class buddy
Friend who I am with constantly
Little Brother
Violin Teacher
A certain insane avian
Chorus girl

So, how, with this constant exposure, how could I NOT get sick? It's not my immune system...it's the world!