Somebody want to up Regulus's meds and then explain that a) there are no cavemen. b) He isn't a caveman. c) the commercial he's bitching about is precisely a spoof of the kind of identity politics he has such a problem with.
The commercial that insults my intelligence and pisses me off is the current Mac series in which they compare today's Mac to the PC - the PC of 20 years ago. Who is this commercial aimed at? Current Mac partisans - most of whom know nothing about PCs and don't care to learn - already own Macs and if they buy new computers they will also be Macs. Current PC owners know that 80% of the claims about PCs made in these ads are bullshit, and therefore have no reason believe their claims about Macs. Am I supposed to switch because I want to identify with a glib and ignorant hipster instead of a dull, pear-shaped loser? Do I want to buy from a company that basically
sees me as a dull, pear-shaped loser? Is this Mac's attempt to break out of its eternal status as a niche product, a cult success that is more fashion than technology? They should be careful what they wish for. If the Mac ever becomes truly mainstream, they'll lose their last real advantage over the PC - the fact that there are fewer (not "no") virus and spyware attacks against the Mac. Nobody writes viruses for the Mac for the same reason they didn't used to try to find security holes in Firefox and still don't bother to attack Groupwise e-mail - not enough users to make the effort worth it. As Firefox has grown in popularlity as a "safe" alternative to IE, there have been more and more security issues with it. It was never
inherently safer than IE, it just wasn't attracting anybody's attention. If anybody seriously thinks that OS X (or Linux, for that matter) are so secure that they could stand up to the kind of dedicated efforts to crack them that face Microsoft (many of them the work of OS X and Linux partisans
) is living in a dream world.
As for the commercials - sorry, Mac. I'm neither so ignorant nor so lacking in self-esteem for this approache to work with me. Now I have to go back to editing a Thanksgiving video with Pinnacle Avid software on my WinXP notebook.
Regards,
Joe
But as for me, since I'm a W.A.S.P. "Mainstream Majority" member, all the complaining I or anyone else would do would mean absolutely nothing to the Company or the Media. 
(I just wanted to see if there were any more of you out there that agree with me that many Commercials are Offensive! 
