I think autopsies are a perfect first problem to solve. First, you can keep the corpse intact which makes the autopsies less distasteful to the family (assuming they want a viewing). Second, you get a lot more data about the tissues as they are intact at the time of the scan. Third, you keep a lot more detailed data than pictures and/or a videotape and a recording from the technician - you can review the data anytime you want.
And, finally, if there turn out to be some adverse tissue effects from the scanners, their patients aren't really going to mind all that much.
I desperately want to love the iPhone, I really do. I have an iPod Touch, and it's the freakin' cat's meow in terms of a useful little handheld minicomputer.
But, despite the smaller screen, I prefer my Blackberry for a phone and mobile data access device. It's a more practical, if far less sexy, solution.
I'm on AT&T, and my "decent app" for Google Voice is, surprise surprise, Google Voice. A real, honest-to-God native application with visual voicemail, integrated outbound GV dialing from my native address book, etc.
Of course, my phone isn't Apple Pie, it's Blackberry Cobbler. Google Voice is readily available in RIM's "Application World".
Why would AT&T give Google the cold shoulder on the iPhone and yet allow it on the Blackberry?
Simple - this is not AT&T's decision, and there's no logical reason to think AT&T is at all involved in the Google Voice decision because the current decision is largely ineffective from AT&T's point of view.
If AT&T honestly cared about Google Voice, they could easily disallow connections to the Google Voice servers on their network for all platforms. It's one network change for them.
They don't need to strongarm Apple into blocking the app, and such a solution only affects a percentage of their customers anyway.
AT&T has far more effective and simpler tools at their disposal if they really have a problem with Google Voice.
I don't think it was market pressures, it was the THREAT of new government policy. Which is fine, a company acting nicey-nicey is a company acting nicey-nicey, but the threat needs to remain.
MMS uses the "voice" side of the protocol like SMS does. VoIP uses data. Completely different issues, even though the two share the same frequency and protocol, because voice should always be prioritized over data. That means VoIP might blow big steaming monkey chunks in quality, and might affect web browsing and email, but should actually take load OFF the voice network.
When MMS interferes, it does so because MMS uses the voice protocols and is competing with other voice apps, like SMS and, well, people making noises to communicate. So when you send someone that 5MB video attachment of you saving and saying "hi" over MMS instead of sending a 1KB SMS "Hi!", it chews up a lot of voice capacity. If you send the selfsame attachment over email, it is sent as data and isn't quite such a problem.
Plus, VoIP is a more steady-flow, low-bandwidth usage. Many of the codecs work just fine on 14.4k dialup modem connections. That means that you'd need about 5-10 simultaneous VoIP customers to use the same kind of bandwidth that one person watching YouTube would take. Admittedly, the VoIP connection would generally be more sustained, but it takes a lot more VoIPers to overload the data side of a tower.
You can make regular calls on one of those things? Wow, whoda thunk it. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that, and I know a few people who have iPhones.
Google Voice would actually be good for AT&T, as it would have people using more airtime minutes (if you call from your AT&T phone to another AT&T phone using Google Voice, you BOTH use minutes - calls routed through Google Voice are not "Mobile-to-Mobile" or whatever AT&T calls it).
Google Voice does not include any VoIP capability, and actually uses almost no data. Google Voice is approved for the AT&T network - I use it all the time on my AT&T Blackberry.
The one thing Google Voice DOES do is a visual-voicemail-like capability, and I suspect Apple doesn't like that. In fact, they initially rejected Google Voice because it "duplicated existing functionality on the phone" or somesuch (I think what they feared was that someone would see that they could get Visual Voicemail without needing an iPhone, and would buy a better phone when they renewed).
Now, I can see AT&T objecting because (for example) I'm not locked into an AT&T contract for my primary telephone number. People call my Google Voice number knowing that Google Voice knows how to get ahold of me. They neither know nor care what phone I happen to be using to receive their call, nor what the telephone number is at that line. They've called ME, not my cell phone or my VoIP line or my work number or my Vonage line. And if I miss the call, I have exactly one voicemail box to check, which sends me email and is accessible through my Blackberry.
If I decide to drop this cell phone, I simply log into Google Voice and remove the cell phone from the list of phones to ring.
It also means I can potentially use fewer minutes, because if I'm home and all of my phones ring, I'll choose the VoIP line. Given that I have over 3,500 rollover minutes, I don't see this as a big loss on AT&T's part. But it might be for some who like to go over and incur those oh-so-tasty overage charges AT&T loves.:)
Yes, though I don't know if the caps apply unless you tether the phone to a laptop or desktop.
VoIP doesn't take a massive amount of data, of course, but if you use a lot of minutes it can add up. I'm sure AT&T will only allow some of the lower codecs, not the high-bandwidth ones. I've had pretty decent VoIP conversations on as little as 15 kilobits per second symmetric connections (about 2 kilobytes), or about half the available speed of your average dialup modem. The connection was a tad scratchy and it's wasn't crystal-clear audio, but the voices were easily clear enough to make out and have a chat.
I was thinking (and I may be wrong, because I'm on a corporate plan with no caps) that consumer plans were uncapped unless you bought tethering, the assumption being that once you tether your cell to a real computer, you'll start pulling/pushing a lot more data so they wanted to put in caps.
I can certainly see AT&T implementing some sort of data usage cap in the very near future, maybe they'll set something up where you can opt in to use VoIP in return for accepting a cap. That would allow them to implement a cap without making a one-sided change to the contract (if you want Skype, you must accept the cap, if you don't want the cap you can continue under your current contract that does not allow VoIP).
Hopefully, if they DO implement a cap, it'll be pretty reasonable. The current cap for tethered plans is about 5 GB. That's actually quite a lot of VoIP minutes at anything resembling a reasonable codec.
Because a quick stint around the Hot Air Circuit could have made him some fast bucks. If the parents had managed the interviews and money correctly for the kid, there would probably have been enough for a personal trainer for a year or so (weight loss and confidence gain) and enough left over for a nice deposit into the kid's college fund.
Plus, if the kid had managed to compose himself well while on-air (flailing around with a stick really doesn't tell us much about his personality), he might have leveraged that later for a small side career acting, or whatever.
The parents' reaction was protective, understandable, and unfortunate.
The OP never claimed he was a huge supporter of the fan community.
He said Lucas is a huge supporter of "projects like this", which is true. Anything that feeds StarWarsMania is a good thing for continuing sales of DVDs and plastic crap, so it's in Lucas' best interest to support such projects.
However, direct infringements on things which do not increase sales, such as replicas, are not in Lucas' best interest, therefore he goes after them.
Lucas is a businessman, who has a franchise that is making him shedloads of money. He also happens to be a very accomplished businessman. Anything that increases interest in his franchise in a way that might increase sales of DVDs and PlastiCrap, whether it uses LucasArts materials or not, is a good thing and gets the "Lucas Thumbs Up". Anything that does not increase that while using LucasArts materials gets the "Lucas Lawyer Lightsaber up your Ass".
I can't imagine they could be used for anything nefarious, but then again pulling a record every three seconds could be a trial run for a Denial of Service attack, or any one of a number of scenarios.
The account was set up with an anticipated load to be shared amongst multiple actual users, and the actual load turned out to be orders of magnitude higher than anticipated and all going to a cloud server account instead of being saved off for individual use. That is, at least, odd enough to justify some investigation as to who wants all that data and why. Once the FBI determined it was RECAP-related, there was no longer anything to investigate.
I don't know if the fee system is ingrained that deeply. If enough people decide they want it completely free (as in "funded directly by tax revenues instead of user fees") I'm sure Congress would be more than happy to oblige and raise your taxes to pay for it.
Well, it all depends. The information is "freely" available as in "free as in speech". You can go on PACER any time you want and download anything you want.
However, PACER itself is not (or at least not fully) tax-funded, so it's not "free as in beer". There is a user fee involved if you want to download the originals off the PACER system, which funds the system and makes the documents accessible. Once you have a copy of a document, you are free to do anything you want with it including share the document with anyone you want, which is why groups like RECAP can re-share any documents they've paid for or had donated to them.
This one is an interesting case, because the library access was initially set up so people could do free searches for small numbers of records, expecting a small number of hits. When the number of hits started skyrocketing, the government got suspicious as to who was collecting all of the documents and why. The FBI started an investigation, and it sounds like they discovered that nothing illegal was going on after all and dropped it. I'd say the number of hits on the system was enough to raise suspicion and justify a further look into what was going on, but that's one man's opinion.
While I applaud Aaron's efforts on behalf of RECAP, the net result was the publication of a few million files (good) and the shutting down of the free access to PACER at libraries due to what PACER obviously thought of as abuse (not so good).
If everyone expects/gets access to all PACER documents for free, then there won't be any money going into PACER to pay to scan the documents, organize them, and make them available. Then PACER will either cease to exist, or require additional taxpayer funding to continue since they won't be making any funds from user fees.
I'm not saying that complete taxpayer funding is a BAD idea, only that it is not how PACER is funded at this time. RECAP's initial approach was to collect donations to get "first copies" of a bunch of records from PACER then make them freely available to all (or to ask people to donate "first copies" they'd already purchased). So PACER was making revenue, and everyone was happy.
>>>The only way the 9 symbol address makes sense is if it is some kind of special code instead of a gate address. After all, the ship is moving around all the time, so normally it's gate address would also be changing all the time too.
As to this bit, I think gates are all addressed absolutely. So you can take a specific ring to a new place, install it, and it'll still have the same Gate address. Its gate address wouldn't change just because you moved it.
Otherwise, all the gates would be useless given orbits, Galactic movement and expansion, etc...
I suspect the 9th chevron is like a Country code, indicating that the Gate may be found in hyperspace (just like the 8th chevron was for something in another galaxy)?
My first thought the instant they introduced the issue - hey, Fat Gamer Boy found a bubblegum dispenser full of these little "point of view" cameras - have one of them bump against the CLOSE button - may even be time to fly the little gizmo out, but best to leave it there in case they ever come up with a way to repair the windshield on the shuttle, that way they can open the hatch back up...
I had a similar experience when canceling service with a web hosting provider (lowestcosthost.com). They started out OK. and I finally decided to prepay for a year to get a slight discount. A few weeks later, their service rapidly became abysmal, to the point where email would go down for hours, then instead of dealing with the issue they'd just reboot the email server and clear the email buffers on the way back up (losing any email that was in queue). This happened three times in the same month, and I finally called it quits.
After posting a number of requests for help on retrieving the lost email on their help forums and getting no response, I finally vented about their incompetence on their customer forums, whereupon all of my help requests and negative comments were deleted, several were replaced with "EXCELLENT HOST A+++", and I got a nasty letter from someone saying I wasn't a customer any more and I could just piss off and they were keeping my prepaid annual fee thankyouverymuch.
Unfortunately, I had my domain registered through them as well, and had to wait the better part of a month before they finally "abandoned" it and I was able to snap it back up.
So two lessons learned: Never register your domain with your web hosting provider, and never prepay for a year.
The answer is much more complicated than that. There's the concept of price resistance.
Say the publisher gets $30 for a copy (to keep the economics simple). That means that there is $30 profit and $30 overhead per unit. Call sales 1000 units for simple math, and they make $30,000.
If the manufacturer decides they want more money, they charge more. If they bump it up to $70 they'll get $40 profit per unit However, at $70, there are fewer people who are willing to buy the game. So they might get $40 per unit, but if they sell 30% fewer units, they make less money in the end. $28,000 to be precise (700 units at $40 profit).
At $50, they might cut their profits down to $20 a pop, but if they manage to sell twice as many, they make a lot more money. 20,000 units @ $20 profit = $40,000
With a lot of consumer goods, the price has little to do with the cost. The price is whatever the seller thinks will optimize profits, and there's practically a whole branch of mathematics and voodoo to determine that price point. Voodoo math that is full of experimentation with prices, surveys, feedback, and gobs of good old historical data.
These numbers also drive another important factor - the cost of development, which has to be taken out of the per-unit profit until it's paid for and actual profit starts coming in, at which point the game developer considers it a success. The price point of the game is often set before the game goes into development, and in some part determines how much money goes into development. So the tail wags the dog, in a way. A well-run company will set a budget based on how many units they think they'll sell, and that will determine the effort that goes into making it.
Digital distribution changes a lot of things on the surface, but doesn't really change the calculations - only the numbers that go into them. It allows the price point to be set based almost solely on development costs. Those costs are not zero, of course, but it allows per-unit profit to start paying for development almost immediately. And the price point changes depending on people's perception of the advantages of holding a shiny box in their hands (or, for some, how fast they can get the game - a download model can have its own perks for users, which they will pay for).
I can see manufacturers going for a three-tier model in the near future:
1. Prerelease download - game is sold as a download the instant the game goes "Gold" and is released to manufacturing. Higher price point, but early gamers will want this (RTM to Retail can take several weeks), so they'll pay. This will be the most expensive version, and the most profitable, but will appeal only to a small subset of customers.
2. Normal release - game is sold at retail outlet. Today's model, at today's prices.
3. Download Edition - game is sold as a download, bypassing the printing and manufacturing costs, with a somewhat reduced price. Captures those who don't quite want it at the retail price point, and are willing to sacrifice printed materials and a CD to lower the price. You'll siphon off a few "Normal release" customers at this price, but these sales may actually be more profitable due to the reduced manufacturing cost.
Basically, #1 replaces the long lines at retail stores and people paying thousands of dollars for a resale version on eBay. The manufacturer would get to capture all that demand for maximum profit.
Gears is open-source software. If you implement it and Google decides they want to go another way with it, you can fork.
In fact, Google seems to be going out of their way to collaborate with open source developers (no doubt to get the free development, but it also means that they cannot, for example, start withdrawing support for all browsers but Chrome).
This is, possibly, an "Embrace" and "Extend", but I don't see how Google could turn Gears into an "Extinguish" except by making it so superior to everything else that everyone wants to use only Gears.
And that's not "Extinguish", that's "Make a better mousetrap".
"Extinguish" worked (to a point) for Microsoft with (for example) FrontPage and IIS. You could port your existing pages into FrontPage with almost no changes, then the Frontpage made it so frakkin easy to add Microsoft-IE-specific extensions that everyone did it. So now you have a boatload of sites that are ONLY accessible in IE.
I don't see Gears going this way. First, Google's made it support a lot of browsers and platforms. Second, the project's open source so anyone can extend it to any platform or browser they want.
Gears appears to be like the.NET framework, only Google is actively involved in making sure it works on a lot of platforms and browsers and they've released the source code so no one "owns" it exclusively.
I don't thumb my nose at anyone, seriously. The $600 joke was based on a serious ad I saw on Nashbar for a $600 pair of cycling shoes that cut 2 grams off the weight.:)
I use baskets because that's what the bike came with and that's what I have the budget for. They worked OK for 1000 miles last summer. Probably not ideal, but I can sustain about 15MPH in Maine's hilly terrain...
I'd like to try out a better bike, clipless, etc, but I can afford what I've got and it got the job done.
And I only hit 39 a couple of times. I usually coast down that hill and the bike is rock solid up to about 35. I do appreciate your concern.
Upgrade to a USB 2.0 modem, and you'll be able to transfer that 56K datastream so much, err, faster...
Glad to see that 3.0 is coming out, but with hard drive speeds the way they are I fear that it's like overclocking a CPU used by an office worker. You're just going to have that many more "make idle" cycles per second.
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I think autopsies are a perfect first problem to solve. First, you can keep the corpse intact which makes the autopsies less distasteful to the family (assuming they want a viewing). Second, you get a lot more data about the tissues as they are intact at the time of the scan. Third, you keep a lot more detailed data than pictures and/or a videotape and a recording from the technician - you can review the data anytime you want.
And, finally, if there turn out to be some adverse tissue effects from the scanners, their patients aren't really going to mind all that much.
I desperately want to love the iPhone, I really do. I have an iPod Touch, and it's the freakin' cat's meow in terms of a useful little handheld minicomputer.
But, despite the smaller screen, I prefer my Blackberry for a phone and mobile data access device. It's a more practical, if far less sexy, solution.
I'm on AT&T, and my "decent app" for Google Voice is, surprise surprise, Google Voice. A real, honest-to-God native application with visual voicemail, integrated outbound GV dialing from my native address book, etc.
Of course, my phone isn't Apple Pie, it's Blackberry Cobbler. Google Voice is readily available in RIM's "Application World".
Why would AT&T give Google the cold shoulder on the iPhone and yet allow it on the Blackberry?
Simple - this is not AT&T's decision, and there's no logical reason to think AT&T is at all involved in the Google Voice decision because the current decision is largely ineffective from AT&T's point of view.
If AT&T honestly cared about Google Voice, they could easily disallow connections to the Google Voice servers on their network for all platforms. It's one network change for them.
They don't need to strongarm Apple into blocking the app, and such a solution only affects a percentage of their customers anyway.
AT&T has far more effective and simpler tools at their disposal if they really have a problem with Google Voice.
I don't think it was market pressures, it was the THREAT of new government policy. Which is fine, a company acting nicey-nicey is a company acting nicey-nicey, but the threat needs to remain.
MMS uses the "voice" side of the protocol like SMS does. VoIP uses data. Completely different issues, even though the two share the same frequency and protocol, because voice should always be prioritized over data. That means VoIP might blow big steaming monkey chunks in quality, and might affect web browsing and email, but should actually take load OFF the voice network.
When MMS interferes, it does so because MMS uses the voice protocols and is competing with other voice apps, like SMS and, well, people making noises to communicate. So when you send someone that 5MB video attachment of you saving and saying "hi" over MMS instead of sending a 1KB SMS "Hi!", it chews up a lot of voice capacity. If you send the selfsame attachment over email, it is sent as data and isn't quite such a problem.
Plus, VoIP is a more steady-flow, low-bandwidth usage. Many of the codecs work just fine on 14.4k dialup modem connections. That means that you'd need about 5-10 simultaneous VoIP customers to use the same kind of bandwidth that one person watching YouTube would take. Admittedly, the VoIP connection would generally be more sustained, but it takes a lot more VoIPers to overload the data side of a tower.
You can make regular calls on one of those things? Wow, whoda thunk it. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that, and I know a few people who have iPhones.
Google Voice would actually be good for AT&T, as it would have people using more airtime minutes (if you call from your AT&T phone to another AT&T phone using Google Voice, you BOTH use minutes - calls routed through Google Voice are not "Mobile-to-Mobile" or whatever AT&T calls it).
Google Voice does not include any VoIP capability, and actually uses almost no data. Google Voice is approved for the AT&T network - I use it all the time on my AT&T Blackberry.
The one thing Google Voice DOES do is a visual-voicemail-like capability, and I suspect Apple doesn't like that. In fact, they initially rejected Google Voice because it "duplicated existing functionality on the phone" or somesuch (I think what they feared was that someone would see that they could get Visual Voicemail without needing an iPhone, and would buy a better phone when they renewed).
Now, I can see AT&T objecting because (for example) I'm not locked into an AT&T contract for my primary telephone number. People call my Google Voice number knowing that Google Voice knows how to get ahold of me. They neither know nor care what phone I happen to be using to receive their call, nor what the telephone number is at that line. They've called ME, not my cell phone or my VoIP line or my work number or my Vonage line. And if I miss the call, I have exactly one voicemail box to check, which sends me email and is accessible through my Blackberry.
If I decide to drop this cell phone, I simply log into Google Voice and remove the cell phone from the list of phones to ring.
It also means I can potentially use fewer minutes, because if I'm home and all of my phones ring, I'll choose the VoIP line. Given that I have over 3,500 rollover minutes, I don't see this as a big loss on AT&T's part. But it might be for some who like to go over and incur those oh-so-tasty overage charges AT&T loves. :)
Yes, though I don't know if the caps apply unless you tether the phone to a laptop or desktop.
VoIP doesn't take a massive amount of data, of course, but if you use a lot of minutes it can add up. I'm sure AT&T will only allow some of the lower codecs, not the high-bandwidth ones. I've had pretty decent VoIP conversations on as little as 15 kilobits per second symmetric connections (about 2 kilobytes), or about half the available speed of your average dialup modem. The connection was a tad scratchy and it's wasn't crystal-clear audio, but the voices were easily clear enough to make out and have a chat.
I was thinking (and I may be wrong, because I'm on a corporate plan with no caps) that consumer plans were uncapped unless you bought tethering, the assumption being that once you tether your cell to a real computer, you'll start pulling/pushing a lot more data so they wanted to put in caps.
I can certainly see AT&T implementing some sort of data usage cap in the very near future, maybe they'll set something up where you can opt in to use VoIP in return for accepting a cap. That would allow them to implement a cap without making a one-sided change to the contract (if you want Skype, you must accept the cap, if you don't want the cap you can continue under your current contract that does not allow VoIP).
Hopefully, if they DO implement a cap, it'll be pretty reasonable. The current cap for tethered plans is about 5 GB. That's actually quite a lot of VoIP minutes at anything resembling a reasonable codec.
Because someone would have to redo JarJar. And that's just wrong, no matter what.
Because a quick stint around the Hot Air Circuit could have made him some fast bucks. If the parents had managed the interviews and money correctly for the kid, there would probably have been enough for a personal trainer for a year or so (weight loss and confidence gain) and enough left over for a nice deposit into the kid's college fund.
Plus, if the kid had managed to compose himself well while on-air (flailing around with a stick really doesn't tell us much about his personality), he might have leveraged that later for a small side career acting, or whatever.
The parents' reaction was protective, understandable, and unfortunate.
The OP never claimed he was a huge supporter of the fan community.
He said Lucas is a huge supporter of "projects like this", which is true. Anything that feeds StarWarsMania is a good thing for continuing sales of DVDs and plastic crap, so it's in Lucas' best interest to support such projects.
However, direct infringements on things which do not increase sales, such as replicas, are not in Lucas' best interest, therefore he goes after them.
Lucas is a businessman, who has a franchise that is making him shedloads of money. He also happens to be a very accomplished businessman. Anything that increases interest in his franchise in a way that might increase sales of DVDs and PlastiCrap, whether it uses LucasArts materials or not, is a good thing and gets the "Lucas Thumbs Up". Anything that does not increase that while using LucasArts materials gets the "Lucas Lawyer Lightsaber up your Ass".
Somehow, the image of a Klingon doing "Dickish Air Quotes" has just made my morning. Takes my mind off the back pain for a few seconds. Thank you.
I can't imagine they could be used for anything nefarious, but then again pulling a record every three seconds could be a trial run for a Denial of Service attack, or any one of a number of scenarios.
The account was set up with an anticipated load to be shared amongst multiple actual users, and the actual load turned out to be orders of magnitude higher than anticipated and all going to a cloud server account instead of being saved off for individual use. That is, at least, odd enough to justify some investigation as to who wants all that data and why. Once the FBI determined it was RECAP-related, there was no longer anything to investigate.
I don't know if the fee system is ingrained that deeply. If enough people decide they want it completely free (as in "funded directly by tax revenues instead of user fees") I'm sure Congress would be more than happy to oblige and raise your taxes to pay for it.
Well, it all depends. The information is "freely" available as in "free as in speech". You can go on PACER any time you want and download anything you want.
However, PACER itself is not (or at least not fully) tax-funded, so it's not "free as in beer". There is a user fee involved if you want to download the originals off the PACER system, which funds the system and makes the documents accessible. Once you have a copy of a document, you are free to do anything you want with it including share the document with anyone you want, which is why groups like RECAP can re-share any documents they've paid for or had donated to them.
This one is an interesting case, because the library access was initially set up so people could do free searches for small numbers of records, expecting a small number of hits. When the number of hits started skyrocketing, the government got suspicious as to who was collecting all of the documents and why. The FBI started an investigation, and it sounds like they discovered that nothing illegal was going on after all and dropped it. I'd say the number of hits on the system was enough to raise suspicion and justify a further look into what was going on, but that's one man's opinion.
While I applaud Aaron's efforts on behalf of RECAP, the net result was the publication of a few million files (good) and the shutting down of the free access to PACER at libraries due to what PACER obviously thought of as abuse (not so good).
If everyone expects/gets access to all PACER documents for free, then there won't be any money going into PACER to pay to scan the documents, organize them, and make them available. Then PACER will either cease to exist, or require additional taxpayer funding to continue since they won't be making any funds from user fees.
I'm not saying that complete taxpayer funding is a BAD idea, only that it is not how PACER is funded at this time. RECAP's initial approach was to collect donations to get "first copies" of a bunch of records from PACER then make them freely available to all (or to ask people to donate "first copies" they'd already purchased). So PACER was making revenue, and everyone was happy.
>>>The only way the 9 symbol address makes sense is if it is some kind of special code instead of a gate address. After all, the ship is moving around all the time, so normally it's gate address would also be changing all the time too.
As to this bit, I think gates are all addressed absolutely. So you can take a specific ring to a new place, install it, and it'll still have the same Gate address. Its gate address wouldn't change just because you moved it.
Otherwise, all the gates would be useless given orbits, Galactic movement and expansion, etc...
I suspect the 9th chevron is like a Country code, indicating that the Gate may be found in hyperspace (just like the 8th chevron was for something in another galaxy)?
Stargate IPV6? :)
My first thought the instant they introduced the issue - hey, Fat Gamer Boy found a bubblegum dispenser full of these little "point of view" cameras - have one of them bump against the CLOSE button - may even be time to fly the little gizmo out, but best to leave it there in case they ever come up with a way to repair the windshield on the shuttle, that way they can open the hatch back up...
Maybe the 9th chevron deals with objects in hyperspace, and objects in hyperspace might need a clear point of origin to resolve.
In which case, it does beg the question of "why Earth", other than geocentricity on the part of the writers. Possibly the ship originated from Earth?
I had a similar experience when canceling service with a web hosting provider (lowestcosthost.com). They started out OK. and I finally decided to prepay for a year to get a slight discount. A few weeks later, their service rapidly became abysmal, to the point where email would go down for hours, then instead of dealing with the issue they'd just reboot the email server and clear the email buffers on the way back up (losing any email that was in queue). This happened three times in the same month, and I finally called it quits.
After posting a number of requests for help on retrieving the lost email on their help forums and getting no response, I finally vented about their incompetence on their customer forums, whereupon all of my help requests and negative comments were deleted, several were replaced with "EXCELLENT HOST A+++", and I got a nasty letter from someone saying I wasn't a customer any more and I could just piss off and they were keeping my prepaid annual fee thankyouverymuch.
Unfortunately, I had my domain registered through them as well, and had to wait the better part of a month before they finally "abandoned" it and I was able to snap it back up.
So two lessons learned: Never register your domain with your web hosting provider, and never prepay for a year.
>>>Say the publisher gets $30 for a copy
Clarification: Say the publisher gets $30 PROFIT for a copy by selling the unit at $60 with a $30 overhead.
The answer is much more complicated than that. There's the concept of price resistance.
Say the publisher gets $30 for a copy (to keep the economics simple). That means that there is $30 profit and $30 overhead per unit. Call sales 1000 units for simple math, and they make $30,000.
If the manufacturer decides they want more money, they charge more. If they bump it up to $70 they'll get $40 profit per unit However, at $70, there are fewer people who are willing to buy the game. So they might get $40 per unit, but if they sell 30% fewer units, they make less money in the end. $28,000 to be precise (700 units at $40 profit).
At $50, they might cut their profits down to $20 a pop, but if they manage to sell twice as many, they make a lot more money. 20,000 units @ $20 profit = $40,000
With a lot of consumer goods, the price has little to do with the cost. The price is whatever the seller thinks will optimize profits, and there's practically a whole branch of mathematics and voodoo to determine that price point. Voodoo math that is full of experimentation with prices, surveys, feedback, and gobs of good old historical data.
These numbers also drive another important factor - the cost of development, which has to be taken out of the per-unit profit until it's paid for and actual profit starts coming in, at which point the game developer considers it a success. The price point of the game is often set before the game goes into development, and in some part determines how much money goes into development. So the tail wags the dog, in a way. A well-run company will set a budget based on how many units they think they'll sell, and that will determine the effort that goes into making it.
Digital distribution changes a lot of things on the surface, but doesn't really change the calculations - only the numbers that go into them. It allows the price point to be set based almost solely on development costs. Those costs are not zero, of course, but it allows per-unit profit to start paying for development almost immediately. And the price point changes depending on people's perception of the advantages of holding a shiny box in their hands (or, for some, how fast they can get the game - a download model can have its own perks for users, which they will pay for).
I can see manufacturers going for a three-tier model in the near future:
1. Prerelease download - game is sold as a download the instant the game goes "Gold" and is released to manufacturing. Higher price point, but early gamers will want this (RTM to Retail can take several weeks), so they'll pay. This will be the most expensive version, and the most profitable, but will appeal only to a small subset of customers.
2. Normal release - game is sold at retail outlet. Today's model, at today's prices.
3. Download Edition - game is sold as a download, bypassing the printing and manufacturing costs, with a somewhat reduced price. Captures those who don't quite want it at the retail price point, and are willing to sacrifice printed materials and a CD to lower the price. You'll siphon off a few "Normal release" customers at this price, but these sales may actually be more profitable due to the reduced manufacturing cost.
Basically, #1 replaces the long lines at retail stores and people paying thousands of dollars for a resale version on eBay. The manufacturer would get to capture all that demand for maximum profit.
Gears is open-source software. If you implement it and Google decides they want to go another way with it, you can fork.
In fact, Google seems to be going out of their way to collaborate with open source developers (no doubt to get the free development, but it also means that they cannot, for example, start withdrawing support for all browsers but Chrome).
This is, possibly, an "Embrace" and "Extend", but I don't see how Google could turn Gears into an "Extinguish" except by making it so superior to everything else that everyone wants to use only Gears.
And that's not "Extinguish", that's "Make a better mousetrap".
"Extinguish" worked (to a point) for Microsoft with (for example) FrontPage and IIS. You could port your existing pages into FrontPage with almost no changes, then the Frontpage made it so frakkin easy to add Microsoft-IE-specific extensions that everyone did it. So now you have a boatload of sites that are ONLY accessible in IE.
I don't see Gears going this way. First, Google's made it support a lot of browsers and platforms. Second, the project's open source so anyone can extend it to any platform or browser they want.
Gears appears to be like the .NET framework, only Google is actively involved in making sure it works on a lot of platforms and browsers and they've released the source code so no one "owns" it exclusively.
I don't thumb my nose at anyone, seriously. The $600 joke was based on a serious ad I saw on Nashbar for a $600 pair of cycling shoes that cut 2 grams off the weight. :)
I use baskets because that's what the bike came with and that's what I have the budget for. They worked OK for 1000 miles last summer. Probably not ideal, but I can sustain about 15MPH in Maine's hilly terrain...
I'd like to try out a better bike, clipless, etc, but I can afford what I've got and it got the job done.
And I only hit 39 a couple of times. I usually coast down that hill and the bike is rock solid up to about 35. I do appreciate your concern.
Upgrade to a USB 2.0 modem, and you'll be able to transfer that 56K datastream so much, err, faster...
Glad to see that 3.0 is coming out, but with hard drive speeds the way they are I fear that it's like overclocking a CPU used by an office worker. You're just going to have that many more "make idle" cycles per second.
No, that one runs at PlaidMBPS.
^^^ Just for the record, I used the word "unladen" to see if anyone would take the bait.
We have a winner! :)