Loosely speaking, Gross profit = Sales revenue minus Cost-of-goods-sold.
Net Profit = (Revenue + all-other-income) minus (COGS + all-other-expenses)
But that's only for the company you have a contract with, nothing to do with box-office. Call them Shonky Films. Shonky is a subsidiary of Film Embezzlement Corp. FEC will set up an "advertising" subsidiary, a "production" subsidiary, "distribution", "merchandise", etc. You don't have a contract with any of these.
The "advertising" subsidiary might contract out the actual promotion to an actual marketing company, but it will charge Shonky Films orders of magnitude more. Likewise, Shonky will sell merchandising rights to the "merchandising" subsidiary for vastly less than it's worth. The "merchandising" sub will sign the actual individual deals with toy makers, fast-food giants, etc, for the true commercial value.
And so on. The net effect is that Shonky Films' revenue is artificially lowered, its costs are artificially raised. The actual profits from the films are shifted to subsidiaries owned by FEC, being shared between FEC's shareholders and cocaine blowjobs for the execs.
First people said, "Make sure you get a written contract or they won't pay you!" Later, "Make sure you get a % of the profits!" Then they said, "Make sure you get a % of the profits AND merchandising!" Finally they said, "Make sure that's GROSS profit!" And you still don't fucking get paid.
(Sigh. I know there's a lame Niemöller rip-off lurking in there somewhere. Just don't.)
So now what can people do? They're being cheated on gross profit. I see two options, 1. make sure your contract has a pass-it-on clause. You get % gross profits from Shonky Films plus from every single contractor it signs with, and every single contractor they sign with, and so on...
Or 2. Have a buy-back clause. You have the right to buy the film (and-all-rights-and-privileges-thereof-free-of-all-encumbrances) for 5 times the "gross" figure they use to calculate your percentage-of-gross...
$62,000 was 7.5 of the Gross???? That means the trilogy only took in $826,000?
...so the family-trust would be able to buy the trilogy outright for $4m.
Send a large fuel depot and then we have a truck that can send cargo down to the surface and then return. [...] BTW, the fact that this was done so quickly, hints to me that this is the second vehicle. I am guessing that the first vehicle IS the new shepard.
Err, I think you may have run off with the fairies a little there. Read TFA and watch the videos, this is a low-mass low-funding mini-mission to demonstrate technology/techniques. If it gets fully funded, it'll launch on a regular old off-the-shelf Atlas, and it won't come back. It's a lovely project, and I hope they get fully funded, but it's not a major mission.
Upon landing the robot will deploy and walk on the surface performing [...] science of opportunity (i.e. using existing sensors on the robot or small science instruments); and simple student experiments.
The mission is about inspiration, streamlining agency practices and processes and using unconventional partnerships, and building a workforce and demonstrating technologies to enable the continuation of human exploration beyond low earth orbit.
So your contention is that we should send a humanoid robot to the moon, because hand tools have been developed to fit the human form? Got news for you buddy, this robot isn't going up there with a Ryobi power drill and a Craftsman toolbox.
Actually the R2 robo-torso (in TFA) was built for the ISS, so it was intended to work in an environment designed for human EVAs. Hence all the grips, parts, tools, and distances between them, etc, were built to human scale.
Sending a teleoperated R2 torso plus legs to the moon is intended to lower costs by reusing existing work, not designing an entirely new teleoperated rover. Also, it's a wonderfully general purpose design, if your mission goals are changed part way through development.
Plus you develop a type of technology, an expertise in humanoid robots and teleoperation, that will assist in future missions where you are mixing human and robot missions.
I'm objecting to your argument that you can, in effect, only judge a religion by what it's done in the last decade. The GGP (Copponex) had a range of Christian sins, ranging from 800AD to WWII, that gives you a pretty good feel for the "standard" behaviour of a religion's followers, unless something has happened to "reset the clock".
And nothing has happened in the last ten years to suggest that Christians in general have started acting more like Christ and less like, well, Christians.
So NASA are helping a young technology company to test a hab design which, if it works, will save NASA money in the long term and increase in-space capability.
If we don't have an active and funded unmanned space exploration mission, we can't do manned missions. Sending manned missions ahead without investigating the environment that people are going to have to deal with is tantamount to sending them on suicide missions.
Yeah, but suicide missions in space!
Seriously, the problem is that while you can't have a manned mission without an unmanned science program, not only can you have an unmanned program without a manned one, but a decent unmanned program renders your manned program unnecessary.
This is what annoys me about NASA's patronising pretending-to-be-doing-science on the ISS. (And before that, the shuttle.) The ISS's one and only purpose is to practice having people in space, not researching, practising. Take assembly. NASA's astronauts are now so well trained at zero-g assembly/repair, they pulled 12hr EVA shifts on the last Hubble repair mission. That's scary-good.
The manned space program should only ever be judged by how well it advances the manned space program. That's it. Not growing tadpoles, or crystals. Not collecting rocks. Not searching for fossils on Mars. If you don't care about advancing manned spaceflight, then there is no other reason to fund it.
By that standard. Constellation was crap. Even if it was fully funded, even if it worked, it had no long-term potential. The unnamed Obama plan is better. If it works, we have commercial manned LEO flight, orbital fuel depot technology, plus a general-purpose long duration ship capable of getting to an asteroid (and hence anywhere in the inner solar system.) It gives a future administration the tools to say, yes, return to the moon. You'd only need a lunar lander. The rest is built. That's a cheap mission.
And if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than with the Constellation plan.
(You say "organic matter" but I'm assuming you mean "biological matter". "Organic" doesn't mean alive.)
Originally, the idea was that life formed on a planet, once, and was blasted into space by meteor impacts, drifted to infect other planets. Rinse, repeat.
These days, the originators are all fringe science woo-woo.
A better modern form is the idea that prokaryotic life developed in the star-forming nebula that gave rise to our solar system. (Or even the one that begat the galaxy.) Lots of different places for weird chemistry, from gas, dust/ice grains, to planetesimals; with temperatures from near background to way-too-much, plus stars igniting and causing shockwaves which stir everything around. Ebbing and flowing for billions of years.
You're right that it only defers the moment of origin. But it defers it by a bucketload.
School is not work, school (i.e. getting knowledge) is what gets you from no payment into eventually getting payed and into better payscales. And that's a lesson you'll have to learn sooner or later.
Except, isn't that exactly what these token payments are teaching kids? Study, improve your situation. Study more, get more reward. Sure, not an abstract reward like "bettering yourself", or "enhancing your long-term potential", but then these are kids, they have the attention spans of gnats. Study for a whole term, to get a prize at the end is a huge reward-delay.
Haven't you seen those child-dev psych tests? Kids learn delayed-gratification around 3-4 years old for short-term concrete rewards like "I can give you one chocolate piece now, or five when I come back in five minutes." Below a certain age, that sounds like "you can have chocolate now, or not have chocolate now." They physically cannot conceive of the idea of sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
With more abstract concepts, like "getting out of the shit-hole you live in", you can't expect even teens to have developed an adult mindset towards bettering themselves that frankly most adults don't seem to have.
I believe the greatest utility of this kind of program won't be the raised grades/attendance, etc, but in exercising and strengthening that delayed-gratification part of their brains. It is probably more valuable to them than anything else they'll learn.
If minimum launch costs are, as timmarhy claims above, $20,000/kg. Then water in LEO is worth $20M/tonne. Likewise oxygen, any basic propellant, etc. If you can deliver such volatiles from non-terrestrial sources to LEO for less than $20M/tonne, you have a market.
And by supplying that market, you grow new markets, by allowing applications that are currently impossible: Reusable-refuelable upper-stages. Satellite refuelling and refurbishment. Commercial/tourist space-stations.
And technology like reusable upper-stages means your own costs come down, which lowers the price for everyone else, opening up new markets, developing new technologies... Cascading infrastructure development. The tools that build tools. That's what space exploration needs.
Okay Stephen here is how it works: every time an Australian hits the black list they post the URL on a wiki somewhere so if anybody needs some porn or the libaral party website or whatever they just follow the link from there and access it through a russian VPN? Simple? Okay.
Won't work. ACMA can ban material which links to banned material. So the linker becomes banned, too.
When the filter trial list wiki-leaked, the wikileak page was banned; and when someone on a chat-site in Aus talked about it and included a link to wikileaks, that was deemed illegal and they got a take-down order. For posting a link to a page with links to pages, some of which had illegal material or links to it.
Your filter-wiki would just be banned for hosting illegal material. After which even a link to the wiki would get you banned if you're overseas, or taken down if you're local. They can recurse as far as you can. Plus one.
Of course, in Westminster parliamentary politics, resigning from the front bench is often the first move in positioning yourself to challenge for the leadership of the party...
I'm curious how these filters work. That is, how you can get around them. Everyone shouts "VPNs! Encrypted Proxies!" but do you have to go that far. Are they just names-level filters? Can they be bypassed by manually setting your DNS to google/OpenDNS? Or via a hosts file or directly typing the pinged numerical IP. Do they block http: but not ftp: ?
Not just the NZ filter. But also the UK and trialled Aust filter. Has anyone had a chance to actually throw rocks at a filtered account?
Any system that allows you to show your vote outside the voting-booth runs the risk of vote-buying. "I'll give anyone $20 each if they show me they voted for the FLM Party."
I've often wondered if Civ would work if the subsequent branches of each option on the tech tree were semi-random. A different "universe" created for each game; you wouldn't know what lay ahead.
For example, is a universe technological or magical, with corresponding unit types. Do psychic powers exist in a particular universe, and how early are they discoverable. Genetic engineering, discovered early enough, affecting unit types. etc.
You end up selling something like the WOW client, but not charging the WOW subscription. Bad business model. If you are going to carry so much load on the servers, you might as well MMORPG and charge a sub.
The question is whether or not the GPS UI is distracting the driver's attention [...] Research consistently demonstrates that humans suck at multitasking. Worse, they suck at multitasking to a much greater degree than they think they do.
FTFS: "He contrasts [...] his own habit of dimming the display and using the audio commands for guidance."
Didn't BMW do some research into turn-by-turn voice guidance? And found that it increased drivers' accident rates by several times. In other words, the tech editor has solved his problem of a cluttered display, with a solution that is proven to be more dangerous.
(From memory, the research also showed that the effect was worse the further the sat-nav's voice was from your own. Such as a male driver with a "female" sat-nav. So BMW patented a system whereby the sat-nav learns your vocal patterns and adjusts to mimic you. (Presumably you can't patent just turning the fucking voice guidance off.))
Slashdot Mirror
Dumb dumb dumb, dumb d'dumb...
"Gross profit" != "Gross box-office revenue."
Loosely speaking, Gross profit = Sales revenue minus Cost-of-goods-sold.
Net Profit = (Revenue + all-other-income) minus (COGS + all-other-expenses)
But that's only for the company you have a contract with, nothing to do with box-office. Call them Shonky Films. Shonky is a subsidiary of Film Embezzlement Corp. FEC will set up an "advertising" subsidiary, a "production" subsidiary, "distribution", "merchandise", etc. You don't have a contract with any of these.
The "advertising" subsidiary might contract out the actual promotion to an actual marketing company, but it will charge Shonky Films orders of magnitude more. Likewise, Shonky will sell merchandising rights to the "merchandising" subsidiary for vastly less than it's worth. The "merchandising" sub will sign the actual individual deals with toy makers, fast-food giants, etc, for the true commercial value.
And so on. The net effect is that Shonky Films' revenue is artificially lowered, its costs are artificially raised. The actual profits from the films are shifted to subsidiaries owned by FEC, being shared between FEC's shareholders and cocaine blowjobs for the execs.
First people said, "Make sure you get a written contract or they won't pay you!" Later, "Make sure you get a % of the profits!" Then they said, "Make sure you get a % of the profits AND merchandising!" Finally they said, "Make sure that's GROSS profit!" And you still don't fucking get paid.
(Sigh. I know there's a lame Niemöller rip-off lurking in there somewhere. Just don't.)
So now what can people do? They're being cheated on gross profit. I see two options, 1. make sure your contract has a pass-it-on clause. You get % gross profits from Shonky Films plus from every single contractor it signs with, and every single contractor they sign with, and so on...
Or 2. Have a buy-back clause. You have the right to buy the film (and-all-rights-and-privileges-thereof-free-of-all-encumbrances) for 5 times the "gross" figure they use to calculate your percentage-of-gross...
$62,000 was 7.5 of the Gross????
That means the trilogy only took in $826,000?
...so the family-trust would be able to buy the trilogy outright for $4m.
I'm sorry, but what is an 'astronaught'?
"None of the above"
Send a large fuel depot and then we have a truck that can send cargo down to the surface and then return. [...] BTW, the fact that this was done so quickly, hints to me that this is the second vehicle. I am guessing that the first vehicle IS the new shepard.
Err, I think you may have run off with the fairies a little there. Read TFA and watch the videos, this is a low-mass low-funding mini-mission to demonstrate technology/techniques. If it gets fully funded, it'll launch on a regular old off-the-shelf Atlas, and it won't come back. It's a lovely project, and I hope they get fully funded, but it's not a major mission.
Upon landing the robot will deploy and walk on the surface performing [...] science of opportunity (i.e. using existing sensors on the robot or small science instruments); and simple student experiments.
The mission is about inspiration, streamlining agency practices and processes and using unconventional partnerships, and building a workforce and demonstrating technologies to enable the continuation of human exploration beyond low earth orbit.
So your contention is that we should send a humanoid robot to the moon, because hand tools have been developed to fit the human form? Got news for you buddy, this robot isn't going up there with a Ryobi power drill and a Craftsman toolbox.
Actually the R2 robo-torso (in TFA) was built for the ISS, so it was intended to work in an environment designed for human EVAs. Hence all the grips, parts, tools, and distances between them, etc, were built to human scale.
Sending a teleoperated R2 torso plus legs to the moon is intended to lower costs by reusing existing work, not designing an entirely new teleoperated rover. Also, it's a wonderfully general purpose design, if your mission goals are changed part way through development.
Plus you develop a type of technology, an expertise in humanoid robots and teleoperation, that will assist in future missions where you are mixing human and robot missions.
I'm objecting to your argument that you can, in effect, only judge a religion by what it's done in the last decade. The GGP (Copponex) had a range of Christian sins, ranging from 800AD to WWII, that gives you a pretty good feel for the "standard" behaviour of a religion's followers, unless something has happened to "reset the clock".
And nothing has happened in the last ten years to suggest that Christians in general have started acting more like Christ and less like, well, Christians.
So the last sixteen hundred years of Christianity don't define what "Christian" means, nor do the last hundred years, only the last ten?
So NASA are helping a young technology company to test a hab design which, if it works, will save NASA money in the long term and increase in-space capability.
And this is a bad thing, because?
If we don't have an active and funded unmanned space exploration mission, we can't do manned missions. Sending manned missions ahead without investigating the environment that people are going to have to deal with is tantamount to sending them on suicide missions.
Yeah, but suicide missions in space!
Seriously, the problem is that while you can't have a manned mission without an unmanned science program, not only can you have an unmanned program without a manned one, but a decent unmanned program renders your manned program unnecessary.
This is what annoys me about NASA's patronising pretending-to-be-doing-science on the ISS. (And before that, the shuttle.) The ISS's one and only purpose is to practice having people in space, not researching, practising. Take assembly. NASA's astronauts are now so well trained at zero-g assembly/repair, they pulled 12hr EVA shifts on the last Hubble repair mission. That's scary-good.
The manned space program should only ever be judged by how well it advances the manned space program. That's it. Not growing tadpoles, or crystals. Not collecting rocks. Not searching for fossils on Mars. If you don't care about advancing manned spaceflight, then there is no other reason to fund it.
By that standard. Constellation was crap. Even if it was fully funded, even if it worked, it had no long-term potential. The unnamed Obama plan is better. If it works, we have commercial manned LEO flight, orbital fuel depot technology, plus a general-purpose long duration ship capable of getting to an asteroid (and hence anywhere in the inner solar system.) It gives a future administration the tools to say, yes, return to the moon. You'd only need a lunar lander. The rest is built. That's a cheap mission.
And if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than with the Constellation plan.
(You say "organic matter" but I'm assuming you mean "biological matter". "Organic" doesn't mean alive.)
Originally, the idea was that life formed on a planet, once, and was blasted into space by meteor impacts, drifted to infect other planets. Rinse, repeat.
These days, the originators are all fringe science woo-woo.
A better modern form is the idea that prokaryotic life developed in the star-forming nebula that gave rise to our solar system. (Or even the one that begat the galaxy.) Lots of different places for weird chemistry, from gas, dust/ice grains, to planetesimals; with temperatures from near background to way-too-much, plus stars igniting and causing shockwaves which stir everything around. Ebbing and flowing for billions of years.
You're right that it only defers the moment of origin. But it defers it by a bucketload.
School is not work, school (i.e. getting knowledge) is what gets you from no payment into eventually getting payed and into better payscales. And that's a lesson you'll have to learn sooner or later.
Except, isn't that exactly what these token payments are teaching kids? Study, improve your situation. Study more, get more reward. Sure, not an abstract reward like "bettering yourself", or "enhancing your long-term potential", but then these are kids, they have the attention spans of gnats. Study for a whole term, to get a prize at the end is a huge reward-delay.
Haven't you seen those child-dev psych tests? Kids learn delayed-gratification around 3-4 years old for short-term concrete rewards like "I can give you one chocolate piece now, or five when I come back in five minutes." Below a certain age, that sounds like "you can have chocolate now, or not have chocolate now." They physically cannot conceive of the idea of sacrifice now for a greater reward later.
With more abstract concepts, like "getting out of the shit-hole you live in", you can't expect even teens to have developed an adult mindset towards bettering themselves that frankly most adults don't seem to have.
I believe the greatest utility of this kind of program won't be the raised grades/attendance, etc, but in exercising and strengthening that delayed-gratification part of their brains. It is probably more valuable to them than anything else they'll learn.
Maybe they'll outsource it?
Volatiles.
If minimum launch costs are, as timmarhy claims above, $20,000/kg. Then water in LEO is worth $20M/tonne. Likewise oxygen, any basic propellant, etc. If you can deliver such volatiles from non-terrestrial sources to LEO for less than $20M/tonne, you have a market.
And by supplying that market, you grow new markets, by allowing applications that are currently impossible: Reusable-refuelable upper-stages. Satellite refuelling and refurbishment. Commercial/tourist space-stations.
And technology like reusable upper-stages means your own costs come down, which lowers the price for everyone else, opening up new markets, developing new technologies... Cascading infrastructure development. The tools that build tools. That's what space exploration needs.
Okay Stephen here is how it works: every time an Australian hits the black list they post the URL on a wiki somewhere so if anybody needs some porn or the libaral party website or whatever they just follow the link from there and access it through a russian VPN? Simple? Okay.
Won't work. ACMA can ban material which links to banned material. So the linker becomes banned, too.
When the filter trial list wiki-leaked, the wikileak page was banned; and when someone on a chat-site in Aus talked about it and included a link to wikileaks, that was deemed illegal and they got a take-down order. For posting a link to a page with links to pages, some of which had illegal material or links to it.
Your filter-wiki would just be banned for hosting illegal material. After which even a link to the wiki would get you banned if you're overseas, or taken down if you're local. They can recurse as far as you can. Plus one.
Wow, he really is Open.
Of course, in Westminster parliamentary politics, resigning from the front bench is often the first move in positioning yourself to challenge for the leadership of the party...
I'm curious how these filters work. That is, how you can get around them. Everyone shouts "VPNs! Encrypted Proxies!" but do you have to go that far. Are they just names-level filters? Can they be bypassed by manually setting your DNS to google/OpenDNS? Or via a hosts file or directly typing the pinged numerical IP. Do they block http: but not ftp: ?
Not just the NZ filter. But also the UK and trialled Aust filter. Has anyone had a chance to actually throw rocks at a filtered account?
After all how are you to know whether a site is mearly slashdotted or being blocked?
You can always just check.
where I live, there are already kids setting up local wireless mesh networks to share their music collections and other stuff around.
One of the few good things about censorship, it does lead to more technically and politically literate kiddies.
Any system that allows you to show your vote outside the voting-booth runs the risk of vote-buying. "I'll give anyone $20 each if they show me they voted for the FLM Party."
I've often wondered if Civ would work if the subsequent branches of each option on the tech tree were semi-random. A different "universe" created for each game; you wouldn't know what lay ahead.
For example, is a universe technological or magical, with corresponding unit types. Do psychic powers exist in a particular universe, and how early are they discoverable. Genetic engineering, discovered early enough, affecting unit types. etc.
Every new game would be a "new game".
You end up selling something like the WOW client, but not charging the WOW subscription. Bad business model. If you are going to carry so much load on the servers, you might as well MMORPG and charge a sub.
No, I've only heard about it.
undoing retarded mod. sorry.
The question is whether or not the GPS UI is distracting the driver's attention [...] Research consistently demonstrates that humans suck at multitasking. Worse, they suck at multitasking to a much greater degree than they think they do.
FTFS: "He contrasts [...] his own habit of dimming the display and using the audio commands for guidance."
Didn't BMW do some research into turn-by-turn voice guidance? And found that it increased drivers' accident rates by several times. In other words, the tech editor has solved his problem of a cluttered display, with a solution that is proven to be more dangerous.
(From memory, the research also showed that the effect was worse the further the sat-nav's voice was from your own. Such as a male driver with a "female" sat-nav. So BMW patented a system whereby the sat-nav learns your vocal patterns and adjusts to mimic you. (Presumably you can't patent just turning the fucking voice guidance off.))