Meanwhile, DC continues to show there is no move too desperate that they won't risk alienating their fans in the quest for the dollar.
(Note: Not multiple dollars, they'll do it for just 1....)
What dollars? Wasn't the original Watchmen a huge financial bust? Along the lines of the studio guys saying they'd never do an R-Rated Comic movie again?
Maybe, but there is another distinction here that I don't think is getting enough attention. Unlike Napster, or Limewire, Or Kazzaa, or Torrents, or [insert whatever's next here] where people are just sharing things, as I understand it the people who sourced the copyrighted material could actually make money by posting the stuff. In order for you to actually collect, Megaupload had to know where to send the check. The government now has lots of MegaUpload's records. It seems to me that there could be an argument that everyone who profited this way is subject to the same sort of RICO prosecutions that they typically use for mobsters. Maybe winnable, maybe not, but probably strong enough to get past the threshold that you need to bring charges and begin the legal process. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is certainly a possibility that MegaUpload will be found not guilty and then who's going to refund the costs, recover the data and refund the lost user fees??
Yes, but there's an equal possiblity that Kim Dotcom will just withdraw all the money, bury most of it in a hole in the desert, and spend the rest on Blow and Hookers before he ends up in jail. It's pretty typical for a Court to freeze assets that appear to have come from illegal activity pending trial for just this reason. If you come back not-guilty, you typically get your money back. That's when the Income Tax Evasion trials typically start...
Welcome to the cloud. If your data is more valuable than the storage space it's written to, then keep your own copy. In this case, it was the government that precipitated the shutdown of a service provider, so everybody's looking to blame them. Who are you going to blame when market dynamics cause a company to just go bankrupt? This reminds me of the outcry that happened when they finally put a bullet in (I believe it was) GeoCities.
Anyway... I think it is silly to assume that anyone would require a broadband Internet connection in order to play games on a console. That's just silly to cut that much market out.
Is it? How much money is there in households that don't have broadband by now? Granted, there's some people with money who live out in the boonies where it isn't available, but my guess is there's a high correlation between the most profitable customers who buy new release games, and people who have broadband. Remember, if you buy something used, or steal it from your neighbor, EA doesn't care about you, because you give them no money.
Also, cut and pasting an Amazon.com really long, annoying code into Steam or Origin is a heck of a lot less annoying than typing one in using a XBox 360 or PS3 controller. I don't actually see a lot of people putting up with this.
These are easily solved technical problems. For instance, consider if the manufacturer printed the code as a QR code on a 5"x5" piece of paper that you just hold up in front of a Kinect.
The sales that will be lost are not the initial ones but the subsequent ones where gamers are applying their trade-in value to lower the cost.
Except that that's also the wrong way to thing about it. After Gamestop or whoever gives you that credit for your used game, they don't take it out back and set it on fire. They sell it to someone else, at a discounted price. Compare that to Steam, where you can go and buy old games for like $10 or $20 (Which I generally find to be a better value than the used console games at the Used Game stores). The publishers get a big hunk of that money. Consider If you trade in Awesome Game 2, and Get a credit for Awesome Game 3, from EA's point of view, vs if you just buy Awesome Game 3. They make the same amount of money on Awesome Game 3, but lose the ability to sell Awesome Game 2 at a discount to someone who would buy it via Steam or similar.
Ultimately, the distribution cost via digital is almost negligible. Expect EA to price games based on formula P * Q = R where P is price per game, Q is quantity sold, and R is revenue. There's some P which results in a maximum R. Then, factor in the sales they'll make after release, where P decreases over time. These are where the real advantage for publishers come in with one-time buys, as this revenue is icing on the cake. Eventually, they then sell the whole thing to some 3rd party for a lump sum, like Microsoft does with its old Flight Sim / AOE titles.
It can be both. That depends a lot on the dose. In small, well controlled doses, Warfarin (Coumadin) is an anti-coagulant used in people with blood clots. In large doses it is, quite literally, rat poision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfarin
The thing is, I think we're all assuming they mean 500 Mb/s of radio bandwidth. If they're storing the data internally on hard drives or other media, and brining it back, that may be a bit different. Still, the data needs to be stored and processed to be useful, which means it is being processed somewhere. My guess is that the drones have some level of radio bandwidth for real-time operation, and then also are capable of brining back higher resolution information for post-processing.
Obviously military hardware is going to be better than the cisco I just bought for my cable modem, but given I have trouble actually getting sustained 150Mbps 12 feet away through clear air from fixed antennas with no restrictions for weight or power consumption, I have serious doubts about the viability of including a reliable 500Mbps radio link into a moving drone many miles away through bad weather.
yeah. Also, what's with the elipsis (...) ? As in... From Space? I mean, that's kind of what you expect, right? I mean, he's a god-damn astronaut. If you wrote a headline that says Astronaut Takes Picture... From The Sea Floor, that might require an elipsis. Or maybe "Plumber Takes Picture... From Space " that would be cool. Or maybe even if it was something you wouldn't expect an astronaut to do. Like "Astronaut helps Stranded Motorist Change Tire... From Space." I can see that. But I just don't get the use of... here. I mean even that crazy chick astronaut who had a car full of duct tape and pepper spray didn't get an... in her headlines.
Except that you're charging the capacitor from your voltage source, then discharging the charge to ground. It's like saying a bucket is lossless in terms of water, except that you're filling up from a faucet, and pouring it down the drain.
Did you just seriously say that talking on the phone is better than risking dying?
I'm seriously saying that 'X'-ing is better than the risk 'Y' of dying, for cases where the benefit of X is sufficiently large, and the risk Y is sufficiently small. Average samples for percieved and measured values of X and Y across the population, and set a threshold. Everything above the threshold is legal, and everything below it isn't. For example, shooting guns on your property in most rural areas of the US is legal. Shooting guns on your property in most urban areas of the US is not.
There's always going to be assholes no sense of self preservation (or care about others). We can't let them do whatever they want. And there's always going to be cowards who are afraid of everything and would outlaw every risk in order to improve their own safety. We can't let them restrict our freedoms. Somewhere between the "Protecting my rights" crowd, and the "What about the children" crowd, lies the balance.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't.
In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
Holding-back half of the mail for a day just means that the USPS would need more warehousing, and more operatives to stack and de-stack that mail
True, there is a cost of holding mail. But the current resources would be sufficient when mail volume drops in half. The USPS is not continuous delivery. They hold your mail now for up to 1 day. Eventually, they'll hold it for up to two days. They also hold mail now on Sundays, which doesn't seem to be causing them too much trouble. They actively want to eliminate saturdays.
less efficient routes for the delivery vehicles because they have to drive past off-day locations to reach on-day locations.
Only if you don't understand operations management. You wouldn't do something stupid like even/odd addresses, side of the street, etc. You'd segment by entire neighborhoods around your hub (post office) to minimize non-delivery distance. Take a look at the way that the sanitation department runs garbage trucks. Like the post office, they all start out from one hub, and use the same trucks to cover multiple routes. The number of trucks, number of employees, and number of routes is based upon the volume of garbage generated, and how long you're willing to let it sit.
The same number of vehicles would be required because the same volume of mail would be delivered each day.
That's the rub. It won't be the same volume of mail every day. It's dropping every year. We may see a bump some year in the future, but don't read it as a recovery of the post office; it will be a return to economic normal, as the past few years have deteriorated faster than expected due to a slow economy.
It would not benefit them in any way and would probably add cost. The current mail delivery system is predicated on not backing-up vast quantities of mail anywhere in the system.
The quantities will not be vast in the future...
Mail volume is dropping every year. When it gets to half of what it is now, expect to see alternate day delivery.
You're just making things up out of whole cloth. What mental disease possesses you?
An unnatural fixation on charts and graphs. The one I'm looking at right now is a chart of first class mail volume. If you don't believe me, I have some NFLX to sell you...
Qwikster could have been profitable. But it's saturated, which would have made it an income stock, not a growth stock. And nobody wants to be an income stock, because it's not sexy. In the long term the Disc by mail will be doomed by changes in 1st class mail. A stamp is going to 45 cents next year. Saturday delivery is doomed. And eventually the USPS will go to alternate day delivery to nearly half the number of carriers and trucks it needs. Redbox will be the way of the future, for the media of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, DC continues to show there is no move too desperate that they won't risk alienating their fans in the quest for the dollar.
(Note: Not multiple dollars, they'll do it for just 1....)
What dollars? Wasn't the original Watchmen a huge financial bust? Along the lines of the studio guys saying they'd never do an R-Rated Comic movie again?
Maybe, but there is another distinction here that I don't think is getting enough attention. Unlike Napster, or Limewire, Or Kazzaa, or Torrents, or [insert whatever's next here] where people are just sharing things, as I understand it the people who sourced the copyrighted material could actually make money by posting the stuff. In order for you to actually collect, Megaupload had to know where to send the check. The government now has lots of MegaUpload's records. It seems to me that there could be an argument that everyone who profited this way is subject to the same sort of RICO prosecutions that they typically use for mobsters. Maybe winnable, maybe not, but probably strong enough to get past the threshold that you need to bring charges and begin the legal process. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is certainly a possibility that MegaUpload will be found not guilty and then who's going to refund the costs, recover the data and refund the lost user fees??
Yes, but there's an equal possiblity that Kim Dotcom will just withdraw all the money, bury most of it in a hole in the desert, and spend the rest on Blow and Hookers before he ends up in jail. It's pretty typical for a Court to freeze assets that appear to have come from illegal activity pending trial for just this reason. If you come back not-guilty, you typically get your money back. That's when the Income Tax Evasion trials typically start...
Welcome to the cloud. If your data is more valuable than the storage space it's written to, then keep your own copy. In this case, it was the government that precipitated the shutdown of a service provider, so everybody's looking to blame them. Who are you going to blame when market dynamics cause a company to just go bankrupt? This reminds me of the outcry that happened when they finally put a bullet in (I believe it was) GeoCities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_peroxide
Anyway... I think it is silly to assume that anyone would require a broadband Internet connection in order to play games on a console. That's just silly to cut that much market out.
Is it? How much money is there in households that don't have broadband by now? Granted, there's some people with money who live out in the boonies where it isn't available, but my guess is there's a high correlation between the most profitable customers who buy new release games, and people who have broadband. Remember, if you buy something used, or steal it from your neighbor, EA doesn't care about you, because you give them no money.
Also, cut and pasting an Amazon.com really long, annoying code into Steam or Origin is a heck of a lot less annoying than typing one in using a XBox 360 or PS3 controller. I don't actually see a lot of people putting up with this.
These are easily solved technical problems. For instance, consider if the manufacturer printed the code as a QR code on a 5"x5" piece of paper that you just hold up in front of a Kinect.
The sales that will be lost are not the initial ones but the subsequent ones where gamers are applying their trade-in value to lower the cost.
Except that that's also the wrong way to thing about it. After Gamestop or whoever gives you that credit for your used game, they don't take it out back and set it on fire. They sell it to someone else, at a discounted price. Compare that to Steam, where you can go and buy old games for like $10 or $20 (Which I generally find to be a better value than the used console games at the Used Game stores). The publishers get a big hunk of that money. Consider If you trade in Awesome Game 2, and Get a credit for Awesome Game 3, from EA's point of view, vs if you just buy Awesome Game 3. They make the same amount of money on Awesome Game 3, but lose the ability to sell Awesome Game 2 at a discount to someone who would buy it via Steam or similar.
Ultimately, the distribution cost via digital is almost negligible. Expect EA to price games based on formula P * Q = R where P is price per game, Q is quantity sold, and R is revenue. There's some P which results in a maximum R. Then, factor in the sales they'll make after release, where P decreases over time. These are where the real advantage for publishers come in with one-time buys, as this revenue is icing on the cake. Eventually, they then sell the whole thing to some 3rd party for a lump sum, like Microsoft does with its old Flight Sim / AOE titles.
I'm interested in converting 2D video to Stereoscopic 3D video
George Lucas, is that you?
It can be both. That depends a lot on the dose. In small, well controlled doses, Warfarin (Coumadin) is an anti-coagulant used in people with blood clots. In large doses it is, quite literally, rat poision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warfarin
And how do you plan to crucify the patients who do not take the full course of antibiotics they are prescribed?
I assume he plans to use nails. Is that how pretty much everybody does it?
The thing is, I think we're all assuming they mean 500 Mb/s of radio bandwidth. If they're storing the data internally on hard drives or other media, and brining it back, that may be a bit different. Still, the data needs to be stored and processed to be useful, which means it is being processed somewhere. My guess is that the drones have some level of radio bandwidth for real-time operation, and then also are capable of brining back higher resolution information for post-processing.
Obviously military hardware is going to be better than the cisco I just bought for my cable modem, but given I have trouble actually getting sustained 150Mbps 12 feet away through clear air from fixed antennas with no restrictions for weight or power consumption, I have serious doubts about the viability of including a reliable 500Mbps radio link into a moving drone many miles away through bad weather.
Yeah. Damn it people! This is just rocket science, not brain surgery!
That's tails plural. one for dust, one for gas ;)
yeah. Also, what's with the elipsis (...) ? As in ... From Space? I mean, that's kind of what you expect, right? I mean, he's a god-damn astronaut. If you wrote a headline that says Astronaut Takes Picture ... From The Sea Floor, that might require an elipsis. Or maybe "Plumber Takes Picture ... From Space " that would be cool. Or maybe even if it was something you wouldn't expect an astronaut to do. Like "Astronaut helps Stranded Motorist Change Tire ... From Space." I can see that. But I just don't get the use of ... here. I mean even that crazy chick astronaut who had a car full of duct tape and pepper spray didn't get an ... in her headlines.
Cool picture, though.
Is it a researcher's job to make a profit? The point of research is to learn something new, whether it works or not.
Ray Stanz:
I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.
Except that you're charging the capacitor from your voltage source, then discharging the charge to ground. It's like saying a bucket is lossless in terms of water, except that you're filling up from a faucet, and pouring it down the drain.
Sigh. If only the bad got slashdotted with the good...
In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
That only lasted a few days though. Then the next version of PunkBuster was released, and all those guys got banned.
Did you just seriously say that talking on the phone is better than risking dying?
I'm seriously saying that 'X'-ing is better than the risk 'Y' of dying, for cases where the benefit of X is sufficiently large, and the risk Y is sufficiently small. Average samples for percieved and measured values of X and Y across the population, and set a threshold. Everything above the threshold is legal, and everything below it isn't. For example, shooting guns on your property in most rural areas of the US is legal. Shooting guns on your property in most urban areas of the US is not.
There's always going to be assholes no sense of self preservation (or care about others). We can't let them do whatever they want. And there's always going to be cowards who are afraid of everything and would outlaw every risk in order to improve their own safety. We can't let them restrict our freedoms. Somewhere between the "Protecting my rights" crowd, and the "What about the children" crowd, lies the balance.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't.
In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
The radar absorbant paint alone is a huge windfall for Iran...
Holding-back half of the mail for a day just means that the USPS would need more warehousing, and more operatives to stack and de-stack that mail
True, there is a cost of holding mail. But the current resources would be sufficient when mail volume drops in half. The USPS is not continuous delivery. They hold your mail now for up to 1 day. Eventually, they'll hold it for up to two days. They also hold mail now on Sundays, which doesn't seem to be causing them too much trouble. They actively want to eliminate saturdays.
less efficient routes for the delivery vehicles because they have to drive past off-day locations to reach on-day locations.
Only if you don't understand operations management. You wouldn't do something stupid like even/odd addresses, side of the street, etc. You'd segment by entire neighborhoods around your hub (post office) to minimize non-delivery distance. Take a look at the way that the sanitation department runs garbage trucks. Like the post office, they all start out from one hub, and use the same trucks to cover multiple routes. The number of trucks, number of employees, and number of routes is based upon the volume of garbage generated, and how long you're willing to let it sit.
The same number of vehicles would be required because the same volume of mail would be delivered each day.
That's the rub. It won't be the same volume of mail every day. It's dropping every year. We may see a bump some year in the future, but don't read it as a recovery of the post office; it will be a return to economic normal, as the past few years have deteriorated faster than expected due to a slow economy.
It would not benefit them in any way and would probably add cost. The current mail delivery system is predicated on not backing-up vast quantities of mail anywhere in the system.
The quantities will not be vast in the future... Mail volume is dropping every year. When it gets to half of what it is now, expect to see alternate day delivery.
You're just making things up out of whole cloth. What mental disease possesses you?
An unnatural fixation on charts and graphs. The one I'm looking at right now is a chart of first class mail volume. If you don't believe me, I have some NFLX to sell you...
Or fuck, go out and yell at the government or the banks.
Actually, they're doing that. With sit ins, and tents, and pepper spray, and all the fixins...
Qwikster will be profitable. Oh, wait...
Qwikster could have been profitable. But it's saturated, which would have made it an income stock, not a growth stock. And nobody wants to be an income stock, because it's not sexy. In the long term the Disc by mail will be doomed by changes in 1st class mail. A stamp is going to 45 cents next year. Saturday delivery is doomed. And eventually the USPS will go to alternate day delivery to nearly half the number of carriers and trucks it needs. Redbox will be the way of the future, for the media of the past.