The interesting thing is that the terms of service that were agreed to warned users of impending doom, and they ran head-long into this and only started complaining after that doom came to pass. What better way of warning users to not break the rules should there be? Google+ was meant to be location and identity based to resist the tragedy of anonymity from ruining it. Just see the Google Finance forums if you need any evidence that anonymity (or at least the disguising of a name that empowers users to be total dickwads) is a recipe for disaster. Hell, don't even leave slashdot, just have a look around at the discourse coming from those who post anon or with throw-away usernames, and those that post with established (if not real) names.
The nose is stuck, it would seem. If the government hadn't gotten involved they would likely be still playing WoW, and not in jail for selling their kids.
ya this story has been making it's rounds for about a week on the internet and I can't find any real world source for it. It's like the story appeared out of no where and then just proliferated itself.
But, did it sell its offspring to further its gaming habit? If not, it's not really living up to the hype is it?
The fact that the Shuttle was still flying in 2011 isn't just a testament to its longevity. It's a sad reminder that, at least for now, human spaceflight is at the mercy of the schizophrenia that is the American political process.
American human space flight...
The International Space Station would *not* exist in any similar way if it were left to the Russians, the ESA, JAXA, etc. Humans are up there right now thanks to American demand. Sure, humans from other countries' space programs have gone there, but how many cosmonauts do you think there would be if it weren't for the desire to compete with the USA? Human spaceflight would be massively different (and almost nonexistent) if it weren't for American involvement. So yes, human spaceflight is by and large at the whim of the US budgeting and appropriations process.
The value is about 12 cents a DVD-R nowadays, and heck, if you have a 8 GB or larger USB thumb drive most any laptop treats it like good old fashioned solid media anyway and you can reuse it like a hundred thousand times... Nah, the value to Apple in *not* having "solid media" is the fact that the aforementioned technologies are no longer useful to skirt paying them the $30 "fix whats broken" tax on all the shiny Apple toys out there. And I say that as someone who is fairly fond of OS X.
The problem is that ultra-portable screens arent very common. NEC made one that seems to be discontinued, so apparently the answer to the question of "do people really want a dual screen laptop setup?" is a resounding no. Personally, i would probably buy (or rather, convince my employer to buy) a ultra-portable, maybe even battery powered LCD screen that was the same size or a little larger than the screen on my laptop. That way, I could have a reasonable two-screen setup on the road.
Back to the premise of this article: a guy wants a two-screen setup to do movie grade video editing on the road. If he is such a hot shot, he would get a Pelican case and have it fitted with slots for a nice compact PC and two nice monitors, and then pay a bellhop to carry it around and tip him extra if he unpacks the components onto the desk in his room. His under-powered laptop and two screens that need to be used from a generous distance (far too close to use the keyboard) are kind of a joke.
Woa, woa, woa, relax guy! The US still has enough nukes to turn the whole of Iran into glass and after that they would still have enough left over to turn Argentina into a huge sinkhole; and this is without spending an extra 700 billion.
As for defense of the homeland, a few well placed bunker busters would be quite enough to calm down any saber-rattling nation. Plus, the simple fact of staying home and not meddling would also reduce animosity towards the nation.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan are where the US should cut costs though.
You know Chavez is from Venezuela, right? Not sure where the attitude against Argentina came from, but they are some ok dudes... Is your map of South America maybe upside down?
"The consensus among military officials and bipartisan security experts is that nuclear reductions enhance US national security" citation needed for that.
I can't imagine cutting back while NK and Iran are arming up. Even Hugo Chavez is talking about going nuclear now. How does leaving us at the mercy of our enemies enhance our security? I'd like as much as the next person for nukes to go away entirely, but this Jimmy Carter attitude that the rest of the world is a cute cuddly place is horribly misguided.
Stop Iraq, Libya and Afghan wars. There is your savings and cost reductions. Keep our military strong here at home to DEFEND us.
Yeah, peace through strength! Amiright? Actually, if you RTFA you would see that the argument goes something like this: If all the big players agree to a NPT, they can all agree to take a strong stance *together* against other countries that don't agree with the NPT. What good is having 3000 nukes instead of 2000 nukes when all your enemy needs is just one to inflict serious damage on your nation? If we don't stand with the international community, we can't expect that our military is going to be able to shoulder policing the whole world for threats until the end of time. We will run out of money way before that happens. Oh wait, we already did run out of money. But can we figure out how to maintain security in a world where our military doesn't outnumber all other nations' combined? Hint: "More is better" is not the answer.
If there's one thing we can count on foreigners for, it's leaving out context. I am going to just go ahead and assume that the "Carla" you refer to is "Carla's Salon, Boutique and Meeting Place for the Transgender Community" and leave it at that. I am sure they thank you for your support.
You're right, it should have read: "In a letter to fellow bureaucratic brother-from-another-party Harry Reid and one-eyed king of the blind minority Mitch McConnell..."
While the source of this data is obviously biased, I wonder where the stimulus money was actually spent. Think what a trillion dollars actually is. A new aircraft carrier costs ~10 billion dollars, planes double that cost, meaning that the country could have purchased 50 with the stimulus (we currently have 11). In todays dollars the Apollo program cost 150 billion meaning that we could duplicate it six times with a trillion dollars. A highway bridge near where I live is being replaced for a cost of 300 million, thus a trillion dollars could have replaced that bridge 3000 times. It could have paid the 14 million unemployed, $35000 a year for two years. Where did it go, and what did it do?
There wasn't a trillion dollars "Dedicated to stimulus of the economy through government spending", so starting with this is severely begging the question.
Most of the money those who criticize government spending call "stimulus" was spent on issuing loans or buying equity in banks and other institutions, or on tax cuts, or on extensions of things like unemployment benefits (covering some of those 14 million your heart bleeds for.)
Of the $200 billion spent or so spent on "spending", yes most of it was probably wasted. But hey, at least those damn Saudis didn't get it... Or did they?
How hard is it to take the bulbs to your local Lowes or Home Depot? Both offer CFL recycling. What? You didn't know that? Gee, it sure is hard to find answers to questions. Better just sit around blindly criticizing, it sure is doing wonders for our nation.
I didn't say that I don't recycle them... I said that I doubt that most people are recycling them. Learn to respond to what people actually wrote.
Anecdotal check and mate.
Wow, I must concede to your superior debating skills you clever guy with such wit and insightful comments. You've run logical rings around me, you smug little shit.
I simply agreed that I've had a bunch of them fail on me in a short period of time, and for the extra costs, it feels like I'm not saving any actual money. Especially when it costs around $5 for one of the things around here. If that fails in a month or two, it goes a long way to wiping out any savings from reduced consumption, if not actually costing me money in the long run. So, based on my direct experience, I am not personally convinced that this is a better way to go.
So please, go to hell and find someone else's leg to hump.
Let me know if you want any free bulbs. I have a bag of 100w equivalent bulbs that i took out of service after about 5 years of perfect use, because I switched to two-blub fixtures and the 2x100w bulbs were just too damn much light. After 10 years of using CF bulbs, I have had more gather up due to fixture obsolescence (about 6) than I have had fail and need recycled (3 so far) in a house with about 15 CF fixtures. Yes, several bulbs are 10 years old and still work perfectly.
And if you want to mince facts, a 100w replacement saves 75 w/hr as it's used (running at 25w), and if you paid $5 for the bulb and would have spent $.50 on a comparable incandescent, making up $4.51 takes exactly 462 hours at $.13/kwh which is a pretty competitive rate for most areas. How long does it take you to accumulate 462 hours of on-time? A decade? Really?
You could stand to improve (and correctly label) your sarcasm. Your phrasing doesn't lead one to believe your "account to be unreliable or hearsay", nor yet "an interesting story about a real incident", but to be wholly invented for rhetorical purposes. Therefore, not an anecdote. Sorry, but you'll have to take your move back and try again.
Sadly, that wasn't sarcastic. Believe it or not, it's my honest anecdote. And in case the labeling is unclear, this is too *not sarcasm*. What is it with the internet being more sarcastic than it isn't? (this rhetoric brought to you by the letters f and u)
(assuming any externalities are accounted for some way...)
Haaaahahahahahahahaha. Because the market is *great* at accounting for externalities, isn't it? Gaahahahahahaha. Let's go ahead and lump pollution in the "assume this natural resource issue will solve itself" category. Baahahahahaha. Good one!
Hey, a bunch of kids from Africa called, they wanted to know who they can thank for the brain damage caused by all the lead vapor laden exhaust fumes they breathed. Should I take a message? Oh, and a school of Blue Walleye called, wait no they didn't they are extinct thanks to the free market externality accounting system, which in case you haven't seen it is a garbage can labeled "AMF YOYO".
I have had several CFL's fail within months, completely destroying any potential long-term savings.
I'm in the same boat... given the massive increase in cost, and the claims for bulb life... even one or two failures basically means you've wiped out any savings for the next decade or so. Which means as soon as they start dying anywhere less than the claimed lifespan, you start replacing with old school bulbs.
And do they really think anyone is properly disposing of these bulbs?
They might think it, but I seriously doubt people are doing it.
I'm definitely not impressed so far with actual bulb life vs claimed.
How hard is it to take the bulbs to your local Lowes or Home Depot? Both offer CFL recycling. What? You didn't know that? Gee, it sure is hard to find answers to questions. Better just sit around blindly criticizing, it sure is doing wonders for our nation.
And to everyone who insists on the anecdotal "well this one CFL i bought burned out after only a few months" I will go ahead and throw in: "well I keep incandescents or halogens in the 'entertaining' spaces of my house, and the bulbs simply *never* last more than a year (and these are the nice sylvania or GE bulbs that go for $1-$5 each). They must all be trash. Any savings by using incandescents/halogens is pointless!"
If it's anything like the movies, a search warrant allows police to search property by any means necessary. So no, they can't force you to open a safe, but they can certainly force the safe open (which, for a safe almost any private citizen can afford, is not terribly challenging.) The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables. Getting access to it isn't a matter of will, its a matter of effort (years and years of crunching, even for a massive supercomputer.) As long as the only way to unlock the encryption is in your head, they can't legally force it out.
Taking stock of the 30 years of the shuttle program. I mean, I would like to know the benefits directly linked to the decades of this program.
The stock should include among other metrics; how much tax payer dollars have been sunk into the program, how else these dollars could have been used, what benefits we've obtained as a nation, any missed opportunities and other benefits if any. Specifically, I would like to see tangible things that can directly be attributed to the presence of the shuttle program.
Here's my take: There is not much we have benefited. I other words, the USA would not be that worse of if the shuttle program never existed.
You are *so* right. With the approximately $200 billion that we spent on almost 30 years of space science, we could have bought: One failed insurance company!
Oh wait, we did. Yeah, given the choice between owning a failed insurance company (AIG in case you hadn't guessed), and contributing 30 years of spaceflight to the world, I think I am going to have to go with the shuttle program on this one.
Why not just leave the shuttle there? It went up with just 4 astronauts, surely a soyuz capsule can bring them back. Let's just leave the shuttle there as a large-scale escape pod and science area. Why not do that with all the shuttles? Do we really need that many of them showing up in museums? Is the shuttle any less space-worth over the long term than the rest of the ISS?
It looks like you're having a nuclear meltdown. Would you like help?
o Get help with shutting down the reactor o Just shut down the reactor without help o Don't show me this tip again
If that's the pop-up tip for someone starting off a broadcast email with the words "Nobody panic, everything is under control" then maybe it would have actually helped in a few nuclear events in recent history. Human error (or moreover, lack of timely intervention) is almost always the culprit, and not any sort of insurmountable hardware or software malfunction.
$15 a month for what (for most people) amounts to hundreds of hours of entertainment *per month* is a steal...
Wow (no pun intended)! Hundreds of hours a month. Like maybe 200? Most people spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes per day playing WoW? I guess most people who play that game have ABSOLUTELY no life. Even if "hundreds of hours" means just 100, that's 3 hours and 20 minutes every day of the month. Most people who have a full-time job and a family (or any social life outside of "the box" of your PC screen) probably don't average more than 2 hours a day.
I'd like you to quote some studies contradicting the notion that the average full-on WoW player is in-game for less than 3.3 hours a day... I have known a lot of people who play WoW, and 40+ hours/week seemed to be the minimum (for those with a job) and 80+ hours/week seemed to be about right for anyone without a job. Anyone who dropped below that level was in the "trying to quit" category and usually either went off cold turkey, or went right back to playing for 6+ hours/day 7 days/week.
When I first heard about this, I was actually excited. I never really got into MMO's much (I did play some MUD's back in the day pretty addictively). I've tried out a few, like Eve Online and City of Heroes, but usually got bored with them after a while (Guild Wars was the only one I played for any length of time). People keep raving about WoW, and I've been tempted to try it out a few times. But paying $50, plus buying a bunch of expansion packs, *ON TOP OF* $15 a month?!?!? Christ, why don't I just give them my house too?
$15 a month for what (for most people) amounts to hundreds of hours of entertainment *per month* is a steal... But you are right, for casual users this is too far in the other direction, the likelihood of getting bored to death when all you can do is start a character and level them to 20 is pretty high. Why not just dust off Elder Scrolls?
Ugh... That could take... HOURS! We have no problem dealing with things as trivial as securitized mortgages on exchanges that price-correct in a few milliseconds. Something as special as finding true love deserves at least that level of sophistication. I say bring on the market makers. (mostly because I am already married, and hence my only interest is the academic spectacle of such a well-recorded sociological system.)
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing is that the terms of service that were agreed to warned users of impending doom, and they ran head-long into this and only started complaining after that doom came to pass. What better way of warning users to not break the rules should there be? Google+ was meant to be location and identity based to resist the tragedy of anonymity from ruining it. Just see the Google Finance forums if you need any evidence that anonymity (or at least the disguising of a name that empowers users to be total dickwads) is a recipe for disaster. Hell, don't even leave slashdot, just have a look around at the discourse coming from those who post anon or with throw-away usernames, and those that post with established (if not real) names.
The nose is stuck, it would seem. If the government hadn't gotten involved they would likely be still playing WoW, and not in jail for selling their kids.
ya this story has been making it's rounds for about a week on the internet and I can't find any real world source for it. It's like the story appeared out of no where and then just proliferated itself.
But, did it sell its offspring to further its gaming habit? If not, it's not really living up to the hype is it?
The fact that the Shuttle was still flying in 2011 isn't just a testament to its longevity. It's a sad reminder that, at least for now, human spaceflight is at the mercy of the schizophrenia that is the American political process.
American human space flight...
The International Space Station would *not* exist in any similar way if it were left to the Russians, the ESA, JAXA, etc. Humans are up there right now thanks to American demand. Sure, humans from other countries' space programs have gone there, but how many cosmonauts do you think there would be if it weren't for the desire to compete with the USA? Human spaceflight would be massively different (and almost nonexistent) if it weren't for American involvement. So yes, human spaceflight is by and large at the whim of the US budgeting and appropriations process.
epic. lol. must. stop. laughing. am. choking on. lunch................ .
Nah.
There's still value in solid media.
The value is about 12 cents a DVD-R nowadays, and heck, if you have a 8 GB or larger USB thumb drive most any laptop treats it like good old fashioned solid media anyway and you can reuse it like a hundred thousand times... Nah, the value to Apple in *not* having "solid media" is the fact that the aforementioned technologies are no longer useful to skirt paying them the $30 "fix whats broken" tax on all the shiny Apple toys out there. And I say that as someone who is fairly fond of OS X.
Add to your list:
"4. Those who don't have the foresight to book a hotel room with a nice wall mount LCD in the room that can easily be used as a second monitor."
I have stayed at a few hotels that have decent 720p or 1080p LCD screens, surely if this guy is a big shot movie editor he can afford to stay in one.
The problem is that ultra-portable screens arent very common. NEC made one that seems to be discontinued, so apparently the answer to the question of "do people really want a dual screen laptop setup?" is a resounding no. Personally, i would probably buy (or rather, convince my employer to buy) a ultra-portable, maybe even battery powered LCD screen that was the same size or a little larger than the screen on my laptop. That way, I could have a reasonable two-screen setup on the road.
Back to the premise of this article: a guy wants a two-screen setup to do movie grade video editing on the road. If he is such a hot shot, he would get a Pelican case and have it fitted with slots for a nice compact PC and two nice monitors, and then pay a bellhop to carry it around and tip him extra if he unpacks the components onto the desk in his room. His under-powered laptop and two screens that need to be used from a generous distance (far too close to use the keyboard) are kind of a joke.
There is so much wrong with this post I don't know where to begin. It's like you picked a handful a meme and got everything about it wrong.
Or, he was going for a "Dumb and Dumber" reference and got everything about it *right*...
Woa, woa, woa, relax guy! The US still has enough nukes to turn the whole of Iran into glass and after that they would still have enough left over to turn Argentina into a huge sinkhole; and this is without spending an extra 700 billion.
As for defense of the homeland, a few well placed bunker busters would be quite enough to calm down any saber-rattling nation. Plus, the simple fact of staying home and not meddling would also reduce animosity towards the nation.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan are where the US should cut costs though.
You know Chavez is from Venezuela, right? Not sure where the attitude against Argentina came from, but they are some ok dudes... Is your map of South America maybe upside down?
"The consensus among military officials and bipartisan security experts is that nuclear reductions enhance US national security" citation needed for that.
I can't imagine cutting back while NK and Iran are arming up. Even Hugo Chavez is talking about going nuclear now. How does leaving us at the mercy of our enemies enhance our security? I'd like as much as the next person for nukes to go away entirely, but this Jimmy Carter attitude that the rest of the world is a cute cuddly place is horribly misguided.
Stop Iraq, Libya and Afghan wars. There is your savings and cost reductions. Keep our military strong here at home to DEFEND us.
Yeah, peace through strength! Amiright? Actually, if you RTFA you would see that the argument goes something like this: If all the big players agree to a NPT, they can all agree to take a strong stance *together* against other countries that don't agree with the NPT. What good is having 3000 nukes instead of 2000 nukes when all your enemy needs is just one to inflict serious damage on your nation? If we don't stand with the international community, we can't expect that our military is going to be able to shoulder policing the whole world for threats until the end of time. We will run out of money way before that happens. Oh wait, we already did run out of money. But can we figure out how to maintain security in a world where our military doesn't outnumber all other nations' combined? Hint: "More is better" is not the answer.
If there's one thing we can count on foreigners for, it's leaving out context. I am going to just go ahead and assume that the "Carla" you refer to is "Carla's Salon, Boutique and Meeting Place for the Transgender Community" and leave it at that. I am sure they thank you for your support.
Harry Reid is a Democrat, not a Republican
You're right, it should have read: "In a letter to fellow bureaucratic brother-from-another-party Harry Reid and one-eyed king of the blind minority Mitch McConnell..."
That looks right.
While the source of this data is obviously biased, I wonder where the stimulus money was actually spent. Think what a trillion dollars actually is. A new aircraft carrier costs ~10 billion dollars, planes double that cost, meaning that the country could have purchased 50 with the stimulus (we currently have 11). In todays dollars the Apollo program cost 150 billion meaning that we could duplicate it six times with a trillion dollars. A highway bridge near where I live is being replaced for a cost of 300 million, thus a trillion dollars could have replaced that bridge 3000 times. It could have paid the 14 million unemployed, $35000 a year for two years. Where did it go, and what did it do?
There wasn't a trillion dollars "Dedicated to stimulus of the economy through government spending", so starting with this is severely begging the question.
Most of the money those who criticize government spending call "stimulus" was spent on issuing loans or buying equity in banks and other institutions, or on tax cuts, or on extensions of things like unemployment benefits (covering some of those 14 million your heart bleeds for.)
Of the $200 billion spent or so spent on "spending", yes most of it was probably wasted. But hey, at least those damn Saudis didn't get it... Or did they?
I didn't say that I don't recycle them ... I said that I doubt that most people are recycling them. Learn to respond to what people actually wrote.
Wow, I must concede to your superior debating skills you clever guy with such wit and insightful comments. You've run logical rings around me, you smug little shit.
I simply agreed that I've had a bunch of them fail on me in a short period of time, and for the extra costs, it feels like I'm not saving any actual money. Especially when it costs around $5 for one of the things around here. If that fails in a month or two, it goes a long way to wiping out any savings from reduced consumption, if not actually costing me money in the long run. So, based on my direct experience, I am not personally convinced that this is a better way to go.
So please, go to hell and find someone else's leg to hump.
Let me know if you want any free bulbs. I have a bag of 100w equivalent bulbs that i took out of service after about 5 years of perfect use, because I switched to two-blub fixtures and the 2x100w bulbs were just too damn much light. After 10 years of using CF bulbs, I have had more gather up due to fixture obsolescence (about 6) than I have had fail and need recycled (3 so far) in a house with about 15 CF fixtures. Yes, several bulbs are 10 years old and still work perfectly.
And if you want to mince facts, a 100w replacement saves 75 w/hr as it's used (running at 25w), and if you paid $5 for the bulb and would have spent $.50 on a comparable incandescent, making up $4.51 takes exactly 462 hours at $.13/kwh which is a pretty competitive rate for most areas. How long does it take you to accumulate 462 hours of on-time? A decade? Really?
You could stand to improve (and correctly label) your sarcasm. Your phrasing doesn't lead one to believe your "account to be unreliable or hearsay", nor yet "an interesting story about a real incident", but to be wholly invented for rhetorical purposes. Therefore, not an anecdote. Sorry, but you'll have to take your move back and try again.
Sadly, that wasn't sarcastic. Believe it or not, it's my honest anecdote. And in case the labeling is unclear, this is too *not sarcasm*. What is it with the internet being more sarcastic than it isn't? (this rhetoric brought to you by the letters f and u)
(assuming any externalities are accounted for some way...)
Haaaahahahahahahahaha. Because the market is *great* at accounting for externalities, isn't it? Gaahahahahahaha. Let's go ahead and lump pollution in the "assume this natural resource issue will solve itself" category. Baahahahahaha. Good one!
Hey, a bunch of kids from Africa called, they wanted to know who they can thank for the brain damage caused by all the lead vapor laden exhaust fumes they breathed. Should I take a message? Oh, and a school of Blue Walleye called, wait no they didn't they are extinct thanks to the free market externality accounting system, which in case you haven't seen it is a garbage can labeled "AMF YOYO".
I'm in the same boat ... given the massive increase in cost, and the claims for bulb life ... even one or two failures basically means you've wiped out any savings for the next decade or so. Which means as soon as they start dying anywhere less than the claimed lifespan, you start replacing with old school bulbs.
They might think it, but I seriously doubt people are doing it.
I'm definitely not impressed so far with actual bulb life vs claimed.
How hard is it to take the bulbs to your local Lowes or Home Depot? Both offer CFL recycling. What? You didn't know that? Gee, it sure is hard to find answers to questions. Better just sit around blindly criticizing, it sure is doing wonders for our nation.
And to everyone who insists on the anecdotal "well this one CFL i bought burned out after only a few months" I will go ahead and throw in: "well I keep incandescents or halogens in the 'entertaining' spaces of my house, and the bulbs simply *never* last more than a year (and these are the nice sylvania or GE bulbs that go for $1-$5 each). They must all be trash. Any savings by using incandescents/halogens is pointless!"
Anecdotal check and mate.
If it's anything like the movies, a search warrant allows police to search property by any means necessary. So no, they can't force you to open a safe, but they can certainly force the safe open (which, for a safe almost any private citizen can afford, is not terribly challenging.) The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables. Getting access to it isn't a matter of will, its a matter of effort (years and years of crunching, even for a massive supercomputer.) As long as the only way to unlock the encryption is in your head, they can't legally force it out.
This is my humble request:
Taking stock of the 30 years of the shuttle program. I mean, I would like to know the benefits directly linked to the decades of this program.
The stock should include among other metrics; how much tax payer dollars have been sunk into the program, how else these dollars could have been used, what benefits we've obtained as a nation, any missed opportunities and other benefits if any. Specifically, I would like to see tangible things that can directly be attributed to the presence of the shuttle program.
Here's my take: There is not much we have benefited. I other words, the USA would not be that worse of if the shuttle program never existed.
You are *so* right. With the approximately $200 billion that we spent on almost 30 years of space science, we could have bought: One failed insurance company!
Oh wait, we did. Yeah, given the choice between owning a failed insurance company (AIG in case you hadn't guessed), and contributing 30 years of spaceflight to the world, I think I am going to have to go with the shuttle program on this one.
Why not just leave the shuttle there? It went up with just 4 astronauts, surely a soyuz capsule can bring them back. Let's just leave the shuttle there as a large-scale escape pod and science area. Why not do that with all the shuttles? Do we really need that many of them showing up in museums? Is the shuttle any less space-worth over the long term than the rest of the ISS?
It looks like you're having a nuclear meltdown. Would you like help?
o Get help with shutting down the reactor
o Just shut down the reactor without help
o Don't show me this tip again
If that's the pop-up tip for someone starting off a broadcast email with the words "Nobody panic, everything is under control" then maybe it would have actually helped in a few nuclear events in recent history. Human error (or moreover, lack of timely intervention) is almost always the culprit, and not any sort of insurmountable hardware or software malfunction.
$15 a month for what (for most people) amounts to hundreds of hours of entertainment *per month* is a steal...
Wow (no pun intended)! Hundreds of hours a month. Like maybe 200? Most people spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes per day playing WoW? I guess most people who play that game have ABSOLUTELY no life. Even if "hundreds of hours" means just 100, that's 3 hours and 20 minutes every day of the month. Most people who have a full-time job and a family (or any social life outside of "the box" of your PC screen) probably don't average more than 2 hours a day.
I'd like you to quote some studies contradicting the notion that the average full-on WoW player is in-game for less than 3.3 hours a day... I have known a lot of people who play WoW, and 40+ hours/week seemed to be the minimum (for those with a job) and 80+ hours/week seemed to be about right for anyone without a job. Anyone who dropped below that level was in the "trying to quit" category and usually either went off cold turkey, or went right back to playing for 6+ hours/day 7 days/week.
When I first heard about this, I was actually excited. I never really got into MMO's much (I did play some MUD's back in the day pretty addictively). I've tried out a few, like Eve Online and City of Heroes, but usually got bored with them after a while (Guild Wars was the only one I played for any length of time). People keep raving about WoW, and I've been tempted to try it out a few times. But paying $50, plus buying a bunch of expansion packs, *ON TOP OF* $15 a month?!?!? Christ, why don't I just give them my house too?
$15 a month for what (for most people) amounts to hundreds of hours of entertainment *per month* is a steal... But you are right, for casual users this is too far in the other direction, the likelihood of getting bored to death when all you can do is start a character and level them to 20 is pretty high. Why not just dust off Elder Scrolls?
Ugh... That could take... HOURS! We have no problem dealing with things as trivial as securitized mortgages on exchanges that price-correct in a few milliseconds. Something as special as finding true love deserves at least that level of sophistication. I say bring on the market makers. (mostly because I am already married, and hence my only interest is the academic spectacle of such a well-recorded sociological system.)