He's got a house in Los Angeles, as well as London, and lives most of the time on the road. "Coming to America" for him is trivial. He probably went wherever his doctor recommended.
> so you have to subscribe to a whole bunch of them to get what you want.
Nah, if you aren't willing to pirate, just subscribe to services on a rotating basis. When you run out of interesting stuff on one service, cancel and go to the next. By the time you run out of services, and go back to the first, it should have some new content.
The marginal cost of showing a film is near zero, assuming it is not sold out and they would have to add another screen. In other words, the cost to the theater is about the same if there is one person in the room, or all the seats are filled. So whatever amount of extra customers they can get in the theater, who will buy drinks and snacks (which is where they make most of their profit) is good. With digital projectors, there isn't even any film wear, like you get with physical film prints. The main costs are the capital and overhead of the building, and staff, which are nearly the same for a full house vs an empty house
I haven't seen a movie in a theater for about a decade now. First Off-rental DVDs got cheaper than a ticket, and they came with extras besides the movie. Then broadband got fast enough to download them. Sharing a big room with kids using their smartphones isn't much of an attraction either.
Many of the people who go to movie theaters these days are young, and don't have much disposable income. They also are tech-savvy, and will latch on to cheats in a heartbeat.
This will likely end up being called FaceCoin, because two syllables is easy to say.
There isn't yet a cryptocoin called this, but I expect one will be created in a day. Then Facebook will have to buy them out to get the name. Call it coin-squatting.
I seem to remember a Dilbert book "How to build a better life by stealing office supplies".
The summary didn't mention "envy" as a reason. The disparity in pay and wealth has grown a lot in the last few decades. Contrast Jeff Bezos with an Amazon warehouse worker, or the Walton family vs Walmart clerks. CEOs have always made more than line staff, but the ratio has increased greatly.
One time, Atiyah walked into a bar, and ordered a beer. After he had finished it, he then ordered half a beer. Some time later, he ordered a quarter of a beer. The bartender asks him "Why are you ordering that way?". Atiyah says "I know my limits..."
Various estimates are that 20% of the US economy is "underground". They care about this, because their job is to collect taxes on it. The underground economy can be divided into two parts. The first is the "black market", which is illegal activity (drugs, prostitution, etc.) and unreported. The second is the "off the books" sector. This is otherwise legal activity, but unreported to the government. That includes everything from hair salon tips to the guys who mow your grass and are paid in cash.
Since this activity is unreported, it is hard to get data about it. What economists generally do is look at things like total business sales (i.e. people need food and other necessities no matter how they get money for it), and compare that to reported income on returns.
This discriminates against the "unbanked". About a third of US adults (including my long-term tenant), don't have a bank account, much less a credit card. There are many reasons for this - bounced a check/overdrew an account in the past, medical or job problems, etc. And for low income people, bank accounts can be expensive. BoA charges a service fee of $12 a month for balances below $1500. So my tenant just gets a money order to pay the rent, cause it is cheaper.
Paper money states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Once you have accepted a service, such as from a hair salon or restaurant, you now owe a debt until it is paid. So they should have to take cash, even though it may upset their business methods.
The value of a bitcoin is how useful it is to transfer money from point A to point B. It's like the cost of a UPS shipping label, or a Western Union money transfer fee. The bitcoin fee part is your cost and hassle to convert from your local currency, and then send the funds to the destination.
This is what a financial bubble looks like after it pops. Should be no surprise to anyone who has studied the phenomenon. We had the dotcom bubble around 2000, and the housing bubble in 2007, and many more before that.
No, I grew up in the '60's, when newsstands with paper newspapers, magazines, and comics were all over the place. But comics were too short for me, I preferred reading paperbacks.
Yes, they did. I live about one town north of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, where many of the Marvel films are done, so we get a lot of movie news. Due to his age, they would do Stan's scenes for three or four films at once, so he didn't have to travel as much. His home was in Los Angeles. Also, the live-action shooting is typically 8 months to a year in advance of theater release, because all the special effects take time to do. The live-action has to come first, so they can synchronize the CGI around them. So they may have several more films "in the can" with his scenes.
Note: "in the can" is archaic since reels of film in metal containers aren't used any more. It's all digital now, so I guess "on the hard drive" is more correct.
I met him once in the guest suite at Dragoncon in Atlanta, where I was also a guest speaker. His personality in real life was exactly the same as he's featured in the Marvel films.
This shouldn't be surprising, since it is the same stuff the bigger gravel comes from. If there is not enough of the dust, we can just crush the rock finer until there is.
Check out the Venus of Willendorf, from about 30,000 years ago. It's a fat carved stone statuette, but this was an ice age, so fat was sexy (built-in insulation). I consider it Neolithic porn.
Note that very few of our ancestors actually lived in caves. Most of them lived in nests, huts, or other temporary shelters. But such outdoor structures don't leave any evidence after tens of thousands of years, and caves do.
I propose "UBA", Universal Basic Automation. Automated factories that make stuff people need and want *and also make copies of themselves*. Thus you don't have to make a factory for everyone, just a few to start with. Then they make copies until there are enough for everyone. The factories would be owned by the people they make stuff for, the way my electric company and credit union are member-owned. This eliminates political meddling. I don't know how to run an electric utility or a bank, but I don't have to. The respective corporations hire people who do, who are usually also customers of the corporations they work for.
This paper goes into details on why such an approach is needed and feasible: https://drive.google.com/open?... Its a fairly long read.
> "Find one original experimental study which shows a direct, causative link between CO2 and temperature increase."
The temperature of Venus (863 F) is much higher than can be accounted for by being closer to the Sun. It gets 91% more sunlight, and basic thermodynamics says the equilibrium temperature should be 17.6% higher on the Kelvin scale, so 353 K = 80 C = 175 F. Therefore early science fiction stories assumed it was cloudy because it was hot and steamy, but people might be able to live near the poles. The first probes that got there found this was not at all right. The surface pressure is 90.8 times Earth's, and it is 96.5% CO2. Carbon Dioxide being a greenhouse gas, it traps infrared heat, warming the planet to the temperature I noted.
Mercury is much closer to the Sun, and gets 3.5 times as much sunlight, but is airless, and therefore is somewhat cooler than Venus, even at equatorial noon when it is hottest.
Prior to the mid-2000's, coal represented 50% of US electricity production. It is now 30%, a reduction of 40% from what it was, or 20% of total electric production. Three-quarters of the shift was due to cheap Natural Gas, and one quarter due to new solar and wind. Nuclear and hydroelectric have been steady at 20 and ~6% of US electricity, because we haven't built or retired much of either the last decade. Hydro is somewhat variable by year because it depends on rainfall to till the reservoirs. The California drought, for example, cut into what they could produce.
Half a dozen midwest coal plants are expected to shut down in the next year. They continue to lose to Natural Gas, solar, and wind, which are all substantially cheaper these days. The change isn't all at once, because it takes time and money to replace half the US's generating capacity. If prices stay where they are, in another 15 years, coal will be gone. This naturally upsets people in the coal mining and coal burning industries. So they are doing everything they can to prevent it, including bribes, um, I mean, campaign contributions, to certain politicians.
Commercial package shippers do things like running packages through a scanner or a chemical sniffer to prevent this exact problem. An air taxi won't have that kind of equipment on-board.
Hail one of these flying taxis, load a bomb in the passenger seat, tell it where to go. Smartphone triggers the bomb when GPS tells it "you have arrived at your destination".
Lass's Law can function if a collection of smart tools can produce the parts to copy themselves. Factories that produce machine tools and robots already use their own products to make more of them, so it is feasible in principle that a starter set of those and other needed machines can make a copy on a time scale of ~18 months.
Slashdot Mirror
He's got a house in Los Angeles, as well as London, and lives most of the time on the road. "Coming to America" for him is trivial. He probably went wherever his doctor recommended.
TEST Please ignore. DanielRavenNest. Testing Testing 1 2 3.
> so you have to subscribe to a whole bunch of them to get what you want.
Nah, if you aren't willing to pirate, just subscribe to services on a rotating basis. When you run out of interesting stuff on one service, cancel and go to the next. By the time you run out of services, and go back to the first, it should have some new content.
The marginal cost of showing a film is near zero, assuming it is not sold out and they would have to add another screen. In other words, the cost to the theater is about the same if there is one person in the room, or all the seats are filled. So whatever amount of extra customers they can get in the theater, who will buy drinks and snacks (which is where they make most of their profit) is good. With digital projectors, there isn't even any film wear, like you get with physical film prints. The main costs are the capital and overhead of the building, and staff, which are nearly the same for a full house vs an empty house
I haven't seen a movie in a theater for about a decade now. First Off-rental DVDs got cheaper than a ticket, and they came with extras besides the movie. Then broadband got fast enough to download them. Sharing a big room with kids using their smartphones isn't much of an attraction either.
Many of the people who go to movie theaters these days are young, and don't have much disposable income. They also are tech-savvy, and will latch on to cheats in a heartbeat.
This will likely end up being called FaceCoin, because two syllables is easy to say.
There isn't yet a cryptocoin called this, but I expect one will be created in a day. Then Facebook will have to buy them out to get the name. Call it coin-squatting.
I seem to remember a Dilbert book "How to build a better life by stealing office supplies".
The summary didn't mention "envy" as a reason. The disparity in pay and wealth has grown a lot in the last few decades. Contrast Jeff Bezos with an Amazon warehouse worker, or the Walton family vs Walmart clerks. CEOs have always made more than line staff, but the ratio has increased greatly.
One time, Atiyah walked into a bar, and ordered a beer. After he had finished it, he then ordered half a beer. Some time later, he ordered a quarter of a beer. The bartender asks him "Why are you ordering that way?". Atiyah says "I know my limits..."
Various estimates are that 20% of the US economy is "underground". They care about this, because their job is to collect taxes on it. The underground economy can be divided into two parts. The first is the "black market", which is illegal activity (drugs, prostitution, etc.) and unreported. The second is the "off the books" sector. This is otherwise legal activity, but unreported to the government. That includes everything from hair salon tips to the guys who mow your grass and are paid in cash.
Since this activity is unreported, it is hard to get data about it. What economists generally do is look at things like total business sales (i.e. people need food and other necessities no matter how they get money for it), and compare that to reported income on returns.
http://businessresearcher.sage...
This discriminates against the "unbanked". About a third of US adults (including my long-term tenant), don't have a bank account, much less a credit card. There are many reasons for this - bounced a check/overdrew an account in the past, medical or job problems, etc. And for low income people, bank accounts can be expensive. BoA charges a service fee of $12 a month for balances below $1500. So my tenant just gets a money order to pay the rent, cause it is cheaper.
Paper money states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Once you have accepted a service, such as from a hair salon or restaurant, you now owe a debt until it is paid. So they should have to take cash, even though it may upset their business methods.
The value of a bitcoin is how useful it is to transfer money from point A to point B. It's like the cost of a UPS shipping label, or a Western Union money transfer fee. The bitcoin fee part is your cost and hassle to convert from your local currency, and then send the funds to the destination.
This is what a financial bubble looks like after it pops. Should be no surprise to anyone who has studied the phenomenon. We had the dotcom bubble around 2000, and the housing bubble in 2007, and many more before that.
No, I grew up in the '60's, when newsstands with paper newspapers, magazines, and comics were all over the place. But comics were too short for me, I preferred reading paperbacks.
Yes, they did. I live about one town north of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, where many of the Marvel films are done, so we get a lot of movie news. Due to his age, they would do Stan's scenes for three or four films at once, so he didn't have to travel as much. His home was in Los Angeles. Also, the live-action shooting is typically 8 months to a year in advance of theater release, because all the special effects take time to do. The live-action has to come first, so they can synchronize the CGI around them. So they may have several more films "in the can" with his scenes.
Note: "in the can" is archaic since reels of film in metal containers aren't used any more. It's all digital now, so I guess "on the hard drive" is more correct.
> He seemed like a great character himself.
I met him once in the guest suite at Dragoncon in Atlanta, where I was also a guest speaker. His personality in real life was exactly the same as he's featured in the Marvel films.
Stone dust, the remains from rock crushing for gravel, has already been tested for concrete. It works fine:
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
This shouldn't be surprising, since it is the same stuff the bigger gravel comes from. If there is not enough of the dust, we can just crush the rock finer until there is.
Check out the Venus of Willendorf, from about 30,000 years ago. It's a fat carved stone statuette, but this was an ice age, so fat was sexy (built-in insulation). I consider it Neolithic porn.
Note that very few of our ancestors actually lived in caves. Most of them lived in nests, huts, or other temporary shelters. But such outdoor structures don't leave any evidence after tens of thousands of years, and caves do.
I propose "UBA", Universal Basic Automation. Automated factories that make stuff people need and want *and also make copies of themselves*. Thus you don't have to make a factory for everyone, just a few to start with. Then they make copies until there are enough for everyone. The factories would be owned by the people they make stuff for, the way my electric company and credit union are member-owned. This eliminates political meddling. I don't know how to run an electric utility or a bank, but I don't have to. The respective corporations hire people who do, who are usually also customers of the corporations they work for.
This paper goes into details on why such an approach is needed and feasible: https://drive.google.com/open?...
Its a fairly long read.
> "Find one original experimental study which shows a direct, causative link between CO2 and temperature increase."
The temperature of Venus (863 F) is much higher than can be accounted for by being closer to the Sun. It gets 91% more sunlight, and basic thermodynamics says the equilibrium temperature should be 17.6% higher on the Kelvin scale, so 353 K = 80 C = 175 F. Therefore early science fiction stories assumed it was cloudy because it was hot and steamy, but people might be able to live near the poles. The first probes that got there found this was not at all right. The surface pressure is 90.8 times Earth's, and it is 96.5% CO2. Carbon Dioxide being a greenhouse gas, it traps infrared heat, warming the planet to the temperature I noted.
Mercury is much closer to the Sun, and gets 3.5 times as much sunlight, but is airless, and therefore is somewhat cooler than Venus, even at equatorial noon when it is hottest.
> Wait, what?
The grandparent post is somewhat confused.
Prior to the mid-2000's, coal represented 50% of US electricity production. It is now 30%, a reduction of 40% from what it was, or 20% of total electric production. Three-quarters of the shift was due to cheap Natural Gas, and one quarter due to new solar and wind. Nuclear and hydroelectric have been steady at 20 and ~6% of US electricity, because we haven't built or retired much of either the last decade. Hydro is somewhat variable by year because it depends on rainfall to till the reservoirs. The California drought, for example, cut into what they could produce.
Half a dozen midwest coal plants are expected to shut down in the next year. They continue to lose to Natural Gas, solar, and wind, which are all substantially cheaper these days. The change isn't all at once, because it takes time and money to replace half the US's generating capacity. If prices stay where they are, in another 15 years, coal will be gone. This naturally upsets people in the coal mining and coal burning industries. So they are doing everything they can to prevent it, including bribes, um, I mean, campaign contributions, to certain politicians.
Commercial package shippers do things like running packages through a scanner or a chemical sniffer to prevent this exact problem. An air taxi won't have that kind of equipment on-board.
You need to ask Dame Judi Dench.
Great, just what we need. Stealth flying bombs.
Hail one of these flying taxis, load a bomb in the passenger seat, tell it where to go. Smartphone triggers the bomb when GPS tells it "you have arrived at your destination".
Lass's Law can function if a collection of smart tools can produce the parts to copy themselves. Factories that produce machine tools and robots already use their own products to make more of them, so it is feasible in principle that a starter set of those and other needed machines can make a copy on a time scale of ~18 months.