Or are movies going from the big screen to DVD faster and faster? I swear that some of the movies seem to hit DVD before they've hardly left the theater!
An August release for LotR isn't that spectacular. That's roughly 7+ months after theatrical release. The magic number for DVD releases nowadays is 6 months (it used to be unheard of, now it's more and more regular).
Either way, I'm waiting until the November release.:)
BTW, I assume you were just writing in haste, but it was the Jews and others killed in gas chambers, not the Nazis.:-) About 1500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, not 3000.
Oops on both counts (major oops about the Nazis!). You're right, I was writing too quickly.
My hand isn't raised about Andersonville Georgia (time for a Google search).
It's called a synonym. For most people, this is the best way to refer to the events that are synonymous with "9/11". I'm all for this, since most news articles related to the economy have been redudantly referring to "the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center" or some such, often reminding us that airplanes were used to demolish the buildings, etc., which is a bit insulting to the readership's intelligence. We don't need to be reminded what happened on 9/11. Just saying "since 9/11", or "because of 9/11" has sufficient meaning in itself.
This is not trivializing the events. We often use shorthand versions of every event to easily communicate it and sum it up in one or two words. If I say the following, you will know exactly what I mean, and you shouldn't believe that I'm trivializing these events: Gulf War, Holocaust, Columbine, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Dresden, Y2K, T(H)GSB, etc.
Or do we need to say: The War where we liberated Kuwait against Saddam Hussein, the events in which millions of Nazis were killed in gas chambers and kept in concentration camps, the school shooting in Colorado where two students killed a dozen other students, the surprise attack by the Japanese which killed 3000+ Americans, the two Japanese cities that the US dropped atomic bombs which led to the treaty that ended World War II, the massive conventional bombing in Germany that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, the Year 2000 (or its associated "bug"), The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout which protests the behavior of Slashdot editors against posters and moderators, etc.
Just to put some perspective into things, Space Quest III was made in 1989. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, before the BSoD became a household term (it is documented to have existed since Windows 2.0, but who actually used it?). So yeah, they were a bit ahead of their time.
It's the Oh-Look-Shiny-Things attention span again. I don't think my eyes are capable of rolling back far enough in my head in response to this hypocracy.
If you release a Beta that's a stand-alone game, why would the tester every buy the full product when it comes out?
Simple, you just include one or two levels, just like every other game demo back to the days of Wolfenstein have done. One or two levels of single-player play is only fun for the first 30 minutes, making you go out and buy it. On the other hand, just the single level of Return to Castle Wolfenstein in multiplayer has had me addicted to it for 4 solid months (yeah, call me a sicko for playing the same multi-player map over and over again, but it's still fun). Yeah, maybe I'll actually buy the game soon, but to me, the multiplayer level has more replay value than if it was only a single-player level.
Equation for momentum: m_a*v_a + m_b*v_b = m_a*v_a' + m_b*v_b'
The LHS is initial velocities, and RHS is final velocities. Since an asteroid collision would likely be a plastic collision (i.e., object stick together), the final velocities for objects A & B would be the same. Assume that the moon's velocity is zero, since we are determining the relative change in velocity. Thus you would get an equation like thus to find the final velocity of both objects combined:
Where m_moon = 7.35E22 kg. Assume that v_asteroid = 10km/s, and in order to get a significant change in the moon's velocity (say 1 m/s), the asteroid would need to be going 7.35E18 m/s. If the asteroid was the same density as the moon (3340 kg/m^3), then that would mean a spherical asteroid of a diameter of 16 km. (assuming that I did that all right).
Pretty big asteroid, I think a global killer is considered to be a 1 km long asteroid. Recalculate the above equation for different assumptions.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
I think it's just that Americans have a healthy fear of nuclear power, ever since Chernobyl and Three Miles Island. Yes, in those incidences, there were some big mistakes made that caused a loss in control of the safe generation of nuclear power, and we all understand that newer, state-of-the-art facilities can help prevent such events from occuring again. But we're still talking about a much riskier, and much more potentially catastrophic consequences from using nuclear power compared to fossil fuels. A nuclear engineer may be comfortable with their design, but a typical citizen, citing history and precendence, will not be comfortable having a nuclear plant anywhere near their home. And until the alternatives prove themselves to be much more hazardous in the public mind than nuclear power, this will continue to be the sentiment. This isn't necessarily ignorance, I think of it as a healthy fear.
And besides the potential for catastrophic accidents, there's also the issue with the disposal of depleted uranium rods. Where are you going to store these things for 10,000 years? The government is having enough problems right now (e.g., Yucca Mountain, Nevada) trying to store the current amount of nuclear waste that it generates; do we think this will get any easier if we increase the waste we generate for nuclear power generation? Not only are people having issues for where to store the stuff (even in as sparse of states as Nevada), they also are worried about the transportation of it (even if they do say that they are stored in strong containers). Granted, there is a little bit of paranoid behaviour here, but should we just trust the government and forget about it? We're just getting reports about nuclear fallout from testings in the 50's being more significant than what once was believed. What may be popular scientific belief right now may turn out to be not-quite-true in the future, or may actually be just propoganda for a government to get the dirty deeds done for as cheap as possible.
Until something happens that makes fossil fuels not as attractive as nuclear power, we will continue to burn hydrocarbons for our power.
Re:Another "Too Cool to Be Useful" cooler
on
PC Fan of the Future?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's about moving the air better, not faster. If flowrate is all the matters, then we would just stick huge fans on our heatsinks that spin at a bazillion RPM. Overclockers are gravitating towards the whiney Delta fans just because it gives them faster air flow; sure, if you increase flowrate, you'll get more turbulent airflow to force air through the entire heatsink, not leaving any static air "pockets." But is this really the most efficient way to do this? Forcing turbulent air through your heatsink? It comes at the cost of noise, electricity, and fan life. Larger fans aren't really an option, since the 60mm form factor is prevalent in the CPU industry right now and for the forseable future.
Getting better, more uniform airflow that can circulate the entire heatsink without increasing RPM is the best way to go, and improves performance while reducing noise, per the design at the product page linked from the article.
And making heatsinks bigger just isn't an option. Yes, more surface area helps, but as you increase the distance of the thermal transfer material (Al or Cu), it's effectiveness drops. Making very thin fins makes much more delicate and expensive heatsinks. There is already a surge of copper heatsinks on the market, and their surface area can't be improved too much because of their mallability (bends easily). Also, with processor dies shrinking, the ability for larger heatsinks to transfer heat from such a small surface area is reduced. The only way to improve upon this is for CPU manufacturers to spread out their die sizes, or reduce heat output with each new stepping, which won't happen because of wafer costs. So much centralized heat on such a small surface area just makes newer heatsink designs pointless.
Re:interesting, I thought submersables used this
on
PC Fan of the Future?
·
· Score: 2
Generally, I would think that the electric motors for these pumps are in a separate casing than where the impellers are, and the power from the motor is transmitted through a shaft to the impellers through the center of the pump. The motors are typically the bottom section of the pump, so that water flows freely above the impeller section to the surface. When looking at a submersible pump, you can see that there are almost two distinct cylinders above another (in vertical applications), with a strainer to prevent solids from entering the pump situated in the middle.
Gads, finally. That's what kills most of the flowrate on these fans, especially the current variety of Y.S. Tech fans. These fans' centers are easily 1.5 inches in diameter, a fairly large area for a static air pocket to sit underneath, right above where the chip die of the CPU is.
This is why dual-fan HSF setups primarily dominated, especially back when slot CPUs were still popular: you didn't have that static area of air. Sure, you had a hell of a lot more airflow from two fans, but one can argue that a lot of the kinetic energy is lost when air from the two fans collide.
Either way, this is a great improvement for CPU fans. Bravo, Y.S. Tech, it looks like you're taking the crown back from Delta (which is just more RPM, albeit much more noisy, for better performance).
Re: Thought 1: When I started reading "Piece of...", I sort of expected to see a different s-word to follow.;)
Re: Thought 2: I was just thinking something. What is easier to reverse-engineer, a device that is made up of a bunch of clunky routines all stringed together, or a device with well defined "objects" in an organized heirarchy? Wouldn't OFS be easier to emulate than NTFS? IANAFSP, but it would seem to me, at least theoretically, that something that is better organized would actually be easier to duplicate elsewhere. The first analogy that pops to my mind is trying to understand an assembly program versus a C++ program.
Don't forget about the massive overhead needed, thus driving another round of hardware upgrades.
Current hardware is already quite capable of handling operating system changes and abstractions like this. Win2k/XP is already using a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for device drivers (which are the arguably most important part of the OS for performance and stability) without much problems. Both home and business applications run just as well as their older OS counterparts with current hardware. No, "current hardware" doesn't mean you need a 2GHz P4 with 512MB of Rambus. 1GHz with 256MB of SDR or DDR will do just fine for heafty applications, and 800MHz with 128MB will suffice for average home use. Not to mention that CPUs, RAM and hard drives are at such insanely low price compared to just a couple of years ago.
If Microsoft expects to have backwards compatibility and maintain connectivity to older machines, one would assume (yes, assumptions don't always hold up when trying to logically predict what Microsoft will do, but just humor me) that the protocols for file sharing will still accept connections to machines with older versions of Windows, and samba should still be able to connect to an MS O/S with OFS. Now, there may be extensions to their protocol to support the newer features of OFS, but they probably won't break connectivity to Win9x/NT boxen.
Afterall, we all know that Microsoft worries about backwards compatibility, just from seeing things like how long DOS has lasted in Windows.
Wow, I almost forgot that I had one of these more than 10 years ago (one of the Surefire pistols). That has got to be one of my funnest toys... but it would have been funner if I had like two or three of those, so that my sister or parents could have stood a chance against me.:(
Financially, football events maybe pay for PART of their cost, but is only a drop in the bucket; okay, now some of the less popular varsity players get to wear equipment that isn't falling apart on them, they can pay for the electricity to light up the statium during evening games, and a portion of the bus costs to take the players to away games (the school usually makes some sort of agreement, such as a 50-50 split in costs, with the football team... this is primarily why sometimes only football teams can afford busses for their players). This is basically the extent that home football game tickets "pays for itself." The coaches' salaries, some equipment, field maintenance, etc., is paid for by the school.
Besides the financial cost, which is only part of the concern of those who believe that sports are considered too important, is that psychologically, the school is built around the idea that popularity is equivalent to how much effort goes into the major team sports like football and basketball. Administrators want their school to look good to the community, and want the fame of having state-wide or national mention; basically, the school administration want an ego boost. All smaller events and activities hardly get any mention, such as during a principal's speech (how many times have you heard a principal congratulate a tennis team, or a group of architectural/mechanical drafting students who win at drafting competitions?).
And academically, sometimes the hiring process of teachers isn't exactly in the best interest of the students. Often, a school will look for math or science teachers who can double as a coach. Even if you get one of the greatest teachers of math, they will be trumped by someone will less math knowledge but knows how to coach football, basketball, wrestling, etc. Then we're all supposed to be surprised that students become disillusioned in their academics because their teacher cannot provide any practical examples of the subject they are teaching, because they have absolutely no experience in the field, except for those rare cases where they can describe how a football travels on a parabolic path.
I guess part of the reason that academics aren't stressed is that graduating students who move on to be successful in college and their future careers do not bring as much notice and attention to the high school, where a constant money stream and praise for a football team can immortalize the school's fame year after year. This, in my opinion, is unfortunate. Administrators are putting less faith into academic achievement and career success than physical achievement through sports (anybody seen the movie "October Sky?").
It's 2.20:1 because the whole movie (both "real world" and "computer world" scenes) were shot in 65mm, the quality of which you can really notice on the real world scenes.
I don't think the argument is that the Web will disappear or not be used anymore, but that its content-to-noise ratio will worsen. In its beginnings, the WWW had mostly academic documents, which could be considered high-quality and accurate information. As the number of Internet users has grown, there is a greater percentage of garbage compared to useful information. We now have annoying pop-ups, DoS'ed IRC servers, messageboard full of flamefests, etc. Internet advertising companies are now spreading themselves thin over millions of Web pages, causing advertising revenue for each of the Web sites to fall drastically. Various big Web sites are disappearing because they cannot afford their bandwidth, and free file downloads are becoming more scarce (the exceptions are large networks like ZDNet, or servers that cater to limited groups like Linux... but when Linux REALLY picks up, will we still have the same access to free FTP mirrors?).
If you look at it that way, the future of the Web looks kinda bleak.
except that the overheads for showing on one screen are probably less than for 5 smaller ones; e.g. you only need one projectionist, you can probably get by with fewer ticket collectors etc.
I doubt they have a projectionist for each of the screens in the multiplex theaters. From what it seems like to me, they just jump from screen to screen before the movie is supposed to start, start up the reel, and make any adjustments before moving on to the next screen. This means that if things go wrong during a showing, it won't be fixed until someone charges out of their seat to the customer service booth to let them know that the movie is fscked up. Sometimes they'll forget to do things like turn on the lights for the next group of people to be able to see where they're going to get to their seat. And I doubt they're paying the projectionist more for the multiple screens that they're in charge of (the typical trend of increasing "productivity" by adding more responsibilities to the same person without increasing their pay).
And ticket collectors are no biggie. If you have 10x the number of screens, theaters only need to hire up to 2x as many collectors. If there are going to be long lines, so be it. They're going to wait, they already paid for their tickets, so why bother adding more collectors? Same goes for the cashiers (even if they haven't already paid, they've already put the effort to try to find parking amongst the hundreds of parking spots).
The trend I've seen are exactly like the parent post describes: a multitude of screens, with only around two or three of them being big screens with the best surround sound systems for the top movies of the week, with the rest of the screens being smaller room with mediocre (or sometimes horrible) sound systems for the lesser grossing movies of the week. More screens, but not more service. Customers are just cattle. Charge exorbetant amounts of money at the consession stands. Also, don't bother opening up the theater until 5 minutes before the first showing, and don't bother getting the soda or slushie machines working until after the first 50 customers try to order their drinks.
I would hope that a surveying department would have surveying equipment available for checkout. When I took four geology classes in college, I was able to borrow Brunton compasses (which cost a few hundred dollars) from the department, and only had to purchase smaller, cheaper items like a rock pick and magnifying lense. I shouldn't be expected to have to invest hundreds of dollars on equipment I might not have to use ever again (who says everyone taking Photoshop classes will use Photoshop for work afterwards?), or can just use a future company's equipment or software licenses so I don't have to dish out the money. Afterall, equipment manufacturers and software companies make the majority of their profits from businesses, not individuals.
Also, it's much easier to sell back a textbook than say your Photoshop Academic license. Try selling an Academic license on eBay, it'll get stomped on. And a lot of people have this thing for shrink-wrapped, brand-new software boxes. If a class is going to use a piece of software, the best way for the college to have some sort of agreement with the company for student licenses that last for only the duration of the class. I got to use engineering software like Matlab and MathCAD this way, without having to pay a dime for them.
Now granted, many people will have future uses for the tools of their trade that they pick up in college. Some will try to do freelance work, and will need their own license. The vast majority of graduates, though, will head to companies that will have all the software licensed for them and all their equipment available to them. You're already investing in your education, why do you have to invest (or throw away) more money into something that will be provided for you anyway? This is especially economically unsound when you consider that money is more sparse for the typical college student (who's future employment is uncertain, especially for their lack of experience) than the well-to-do employed person with many years of experience and a 401k account.
I don't see why so many people are suprised at this new Blade Runner DVD version, since it was originally supposed to be released on November 2000, but was delayed because of Ridley Scott's commitments to movies he was making at the time.
This new DVD is badly needed. There has been only one Blade Runner DVD released to date, and that's the Director's Cut, which was released back in March 1997, which is very short on features. At that time, it was worth its price tag, but with the new Special Edition DVD being in the works for the past two years is hardly a good buy for the money.
So let's stop whining about the good movies that were originally released five years ago when a new edition with way more features is released.
Yes, they do. However, they also chose to offer services as part of the price of the software for people to play Blizzard games over the Internet with TCP/IP, which is an open standard for network connections. Any connection can be emulated by figuring out the packet format, so that almost all servers and clients can be recreated for cross-platform compatibility.
So, if they're going to play on the TCP/IP field, they'll either have to figure out a better way to protect their connections, or realize that they'll just have to let other servers emulate their own.
And let me point out that Blizzard openly has said in their various games (like Diablo manuals) that part of the price of their game goes towards pay for the Battle.net servers. That means that if you're a legitimate owner of a Blizzard game, you get to play on the servers you payed for. If you're a pirate, guess what? You can't play on *their* servers. Blizzard doesn't pay for these other rogue servers, so they aren't having pirates sucking their own access. Also, Battle.net servers are where the brunt of all players are at, since they are the official servers and come automatically configured in your game. Playing on BnetD means dealing with less players, and perhaps unstable servers that can disappear at a moment's notice, since there is no single company making sure that they're running properly. You get what you pay for.
Lastly, let me point out again that Blizzard points out that we pay for the servers in the price of the game... and if the servers are down or extremely laggy (which happens often), then the value of the service has degraded below our expectation. If a legitimate gamer is unsatisfied with their multiplayer experience, they should be able to have the freedom to choose a non-Blizzard server to find. Blizzard should be happy about this, since it helps: 1) reduce load on Battle.net servers, and therefore ensuring better connectivity on their server, 2) provide many more choices in servers than Blizzard can afford to pay for, and 3) retain players for future Blizzard games purchase. For instance, I stopped playing Diablo II because of server problems, which can affect my buying decision for future games. Why should I buy Warcraft III if I expect the servers to still be sucky? If BnetD is an option, that could sway me to purchase Warcraft III. I understand that those who know about BnetD don't make up a large percentage of Blizzard's customers, but it is so significant, and they shouldn't assume that they can just alienate a minority to enhance revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, I'm waiting until the November release. :)
My hand isn't raised about Andersonville Georgia (time for a Google search).
This is not trivializing the events. We often use shorthand versions of every event to easily communicate it and sum it up in one or two words. If I say the following, you will know exactly what I mean, and you shouldn't believe that I'm trivializing these events: Gulf War, Holocaust, Columbine, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Dresden, Y2K, T(H)GSB, etc.
Or do we need to say: The War where we liberated Kuwait against Saddam Hussein, the events in which millions of Nazis were killed in gas chambers and kept in concentration camps, the school shooting in Colorado where two students killed a dozen other students, the surprise attack by the Japanese which killed 3000+ Americans, the two Japanese cities that the US dropped atomic bombs which led to the treaty that ended World War II, the massive conventional bombing in Germany that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, the Year 2000 (or its associated "bug"), The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout which protests the behavior of Slashdot editors against posters and moderators, etc.
Which versions do you prefer?
Just to put some perspective into things, Space Quest III was made in 1989. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, before the BSoD became a household term (it is documented to have existed since Windows 2.0, but who actually used it?). So yeah, they were a bit ahead of their time.
It's the Oh-Look-Shiny-Things attention span again. I don't think my eyes are capable of rolling back far enough in my head in response to this hypocracy.
The LHS is initial velocities, and RHS is final velocities. Since an asteroid collision would likely be a plastic collision (i.e., object stick together), the final velocities for objects A & B would be the same. Assume that the moon's velocity is zero, since we are determining the relative change in velocity. Thus you would get an equation like thus to find the final velocity of both objects combined:
Where m_moon = 7.35E22 kg. Assume that v_asteroid = 10km/s, and in order to get a significant change in the moon's velocity (say 1 m/s), the asteroid would need to be going 7.35E18 m/s. If the asteroid was the same density as the moon (3340 kg/m^3), then that would mean a spherical asteroid of a diameter of 16 km. (assuming that I did that all right).Pretty big asteroid, I think a global killer is considered to be a 1 km long asteroid. Recalculate the above equation for different assumptions.
And besides the potential for catastrophic accidents, there's also the issue with the disposal of depleted uranium rods. Where are you going to store these things for 10,000 years? The government is having enough problems right now (e.g., Yucca Mountain, Nevada) trying to store the current amount of nuclear waste that it generates; do we think this will get any easier if we increase the waste we generate for nuclear power generation? Not only are people having issues for where to store the stuff (even in as sparse of states as Nevada), they also are worried about the transportation of it (even if they do say that they are stored in strong containers). Granted, there is a little bit of paranoid behaviour here, but should we just trust the government and forget about it? We're just getting reports about nuclear fallout from testings in the 50's being more significant than what once was believed. What may be popular scientific belief right now may turn out to be not-quite-true in the future, or may actually be just propoganda for a government to get the dirty deeds done for as cheap as possible.
Until something happens that makes fossil fuels not as attractive as nuclear power, we will continue to burn hydrocarbons for our power.
Getting better, more uniform airflow that can circulate the entire heatsink without increasing RPM is the best way to go, and improves performance while reducing noise, per the design at the product page linked from the article.
And making heatsinks bigger just isn't an option. Yes, more surface area helps, but as you increase the distance of the thermal transfer material (Al or Cu), it's effectiveness drops. Making very thin fins makes much more delicate and expensive heatsinks. There is already a surge of copper heatsinks on the market, and their surface area can't be improved too much because of their mallability (bends easily). Also, with processor dies shrinking, the ability for larger heatsinks to transfer heat from such a small surface area is reduced. The only way to improve upon this is for CPU manufacturers to spread out their die sizes, or reduce heat output with each new stepping, which won't happen because of wafer costs. So much centralized heat on such a small surface area just makes newer heatsink designs pointless.
Generally, I would think that the electric motors for these pumps are in a separate casing than where the impellers are, and the power from the motor is transmitted through a shaft to the impellers through the center of the pump. The motors are typically the bottom section of the pump, so that water flows freely above the impeller section to the surface. When looking at a submersible pump, you can see that there are almost two distinct cylinders above another (in vertical applications), with a strainer to prevent solids from entering the pump situated in the middle.
This is why dual-fan HSF setups primarily dominated, especially back when slot CPUs were still popular: you didn't have that static area of air. Sure, you had a hell of a lot more airflow from two fans, but one can argue that a lot of the kinetic energy is lost when air from the two fans collide.
Either way, this is a great improvement for CPU fans. Bravo, Y.S. Tech, it looks like you're taking the crown back from Delta (which is just more RPM, albeit much more noisy, for better performance).
Re: Thought 2: I was just thinking something. What is easier to reverse-engineer, a device that is made up of a bunch of clunky routines all stringed together, or a device with well defined "objects" in an organized heirarchy? Wouldn't OFS be easier to emulate than NTFS? IANAFSP, but it would seem to me, at least theoretically, that something that is better organized would actually be easier to duplicate elsewhere. The first analogy that pops to my mind is trying to understand an assembly program versus a C++ program.
Afterall, we all know that Microsoft worries about backwards compatibility, just from seeing things like how long DOS has lasted in Windows.
Wow, I almost forgot that I had one of these more than 10 years ago (one of the Surefire pistols). That has got to be one of my funnest toys... but it would have been funner if I had like two or three of those, so that my sister or parents could have stood a chance against me. :(
Besides the financial cost, which is only part of the concern of those who believe that sports are considered too important, is that psychologically, the school is built around the idea that popularity is equivalent to how much effort goes into the major team sports like football and basketball. Administrators want their school to look good to the community, and want the fame of having state-wide or national mention; basically, the school administration want an ego boost. All smaller events and activities hardly get any mention, such as during a principal's speech (how many times have you heard a principal congratulate a tennis team, or a group of architectural/mechanical drafting students who win at drafting competitions?).
And academically, sometimes the hiring process of teachers isn't exactly in the best interest of the students. Often, a school will look for math or science teachers who can double as a coach. Even if you get one of the greatest teachers of math, they will be trumped by someone will less math knowledge but knows how to coach football, basketball, wrestling, etc. Then we're all supposed to be surprised that students become disillusioned in their academics because their teacher cannot provide any practical examples of the subject they are teaching, because they have absolutely no experience in the field, except for those rare cases where they can describe how a football travels on a parabolic path.
I guess part of the reason that academics aren't stressed is that graduating students who move on to be successful in college and their future careers do not bring as much notice and attention to the high school, where a constant money stream and praise for a football team can immortalize the school's fame year after year. This, in my opinion, is unfortunate. Administrators are putting less faith into academic achievement and career success than physical achievement through sports (anybody seen the movie "October Sky?").
It's 2.20:1 because the whole movie (both "real world" and "computer world" scenes) were shot in 65mm, the quality of which you can really notice on the real world scenes.
Short answer here: Yes, it's 2.20:1 anamorphic. And it's THX certified to boot.
If you look at it that way, the future of the Web looks kinda bleak.
And ticket collectors are no biggie. If you have 10x the number of screens, theaters only need to hire up to 2x as many collectors. If there are going to be long lines, so be it. They're going to wait, they already paid for their tickets, so why bother adding more collectors? Same goes for the cashiers (even if they haven't already paid, they've already put the effort to try to find parking amongst the hundreds of parking spots).
The trend I've seen are exactly like the parent post describes: a multitude of screens, with only around two or three of them being big screens with the best surround sound systems for the top movies of the week, with the rest of the screens being smaller room with mediocre (or sometimes horrible) sound systems for the lesser grossing movies of the week. More screens, but not more service. Customers are just cattle. Charge exorbetant amounts of money at the consession stands. Also, don't bother opening up the theater until 5 minutes before the first showing, and don't bother getting the soda or slushie machines working until after the first 50 customers try to order their drinks.
The movie theaters are in a sad, sad state.
Also, it's much easier to sell back a textbook than say your Photoshop Academic license. Try selling an Academic license on eBay, it'll get stomped on. And a lot of people have this thing for shrink-wrapped, brand-new software boxes. If a class is going to use a piece of software, the best way for the college to have some sort of agreement with the company for student licenses that last for only the duration of the class. I got to use engineering software like Matlab and MathCAD this way, without having to pay a dime for them.
Now granted, many people will have future uses for the tools of their trade that they pick up in college. Some will try to do freelance work, and will need their own license. The vast majority of graduates, though, will head to companies that will have all the software licensed for them and all their equipment available to them. You're already investing in your education, why do you have to invest (or throw away) more money into something that will be provided for you anyway? This is especially economically unsound when you consider that money is more sparse for the typical college student (who's future employment is uncertain, especially for their lack of experience) than the well-to-do employed person with many years of experience and a 401k account.
This new DVD is badly needed. There has been only one Blade Runner DVD released to date, and that's the Director's Cut, which was released back in March 1997, which is very short on features. At that time, it was worth its price tag, but with the new Special Edition DVD being in the works for the past two years is hardly a good buy for the money.
So let's stop whining about the good movies that were originally released five years ago when a new edition with way more features is released.
So, if they're going to play on the TCP/IP field, they'll either have to figure out a better way to protect their connections, or realize that they'll just have to let other servers emulate their own.
And let me point out that Blizzard openly has said in their various games (like Diablo manuals) that part of the price of their game goes towards pay for the Battle.net servers. That means that if you're a legitimate owner of a Blizzard game, you get to play on the servers you payed for. If you're a pirate, guess what? You can't play on *their* servers. Blizzard doesn't pay for these other rogue servers, so they aren't having pirates sucking their own access. Also, Battle.net servers are where the brunt of all players are at, since they are the official servers and come automatically configured in your game. Playing on BnetD means dealing with less players, and perhaps unstable servers that can disappear at a moment's notice, since there is no single company making sure that they're running properly. You get what you pay for.
Lastly, let me point out again that Blizzard points out that we pay for the servers in the price of the game... and if the servers are down or extremely laggy (which happens often), then the value of the service has degraded below our expectation. If a legitimate gamer is unsatisfied with their multiplayer experience, they should be able to have the freedom to choose a non-Blizzard server to find. Blizzard should be happy about this, since it helps: 1) reduce load on Battle.net servers, and therefore ensuring better connectivity on their server, 2) provide many more choices in servers than Blizzard can afford to pay for, and 3) retain players for future Blizzard games purchase. For instance, I stopped playing Diablo II because of server problems, which can affect my buying decision for future games. Why should I buy Warcraft III if I expect the servers to still be sucky? If BnetD is an option, that could sway me to purchase Warcraft III. I understand that those who know about BnetD don't make up a large percentage of Blizzard's customers, but it is so significant, and they shouldn't assume that they can just alienate a minority to enhance revenue.