Hollywood accounting is designed so that movies just barely break even. If any movie makes a 'net profit', then they have to pay money to people who have 'net points' royalties. It is similar to the contracts that musicians sign with music studios.
Most of the money for a movie goes to affiliated companies that make huge profits for the moneymen while the accounting ledgers for the movie itself rack up negative numbers.
There are no odd-numbered Star Trek movies. The movies are numbered Star Trek II, Star Trek IV, Star Trek VI. Anybody who tells you any different is an Enemy Of The Federation (probably one of Blake's VII).
The Alt.Cyberpunk.Chatsubo Anthology, a bunch of Gibson fanfic from the usenet group of the same name, cost $200 to publish at iUniverse (another subsidy POD publisher like xLibris). It has earned that out in royalties, meaning it has sold more copies than there are authors. It is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and whatever brick&mortar stores chose to stock it (or you can have them order it with the ISBN 0595213332). Or the "Information Wants To Be Free" crowd can read the entire archives on Google and pick what they want and save $20. (POD books are typically in Trade Paperback size, but are about 50% more expensive than conventional printing--triple that of Mass Market, but cheaper than hardback). Or you can cherry pick a couple of mine here and here.
The reason why Oklahoma is in favor of cheap space and Texas throws regulatory roadblocks in front of it whenever it can is here. Once you have your snout in the federal trough, it is hard to pull it out.
Back in the Apple II/Commodore/Altair days, programmers (who else was there?) used to tune a radio to a dead band and place it by the computer as a debugging aid. You can tell a lot by listening to the EMI that a computer put out. Infinite loops caused a continuous tone, different stages of processing produced different characteristics in the static, etc.
There were also programs designed just to place music on the radio with their EMI.
I recently installed a couple of sticks of RAM in my Mac. It literally took less than 2.5 minutes (150 seconds) between the time the disk stopped spinning to the time I pushed the power button to turn it back on. And I wasn't hurrying or being hasty.
As a Russian told a NASA adminstrator, "just because you pay $20 for a bolt doesn't mean it's a $20 bolt."
There's no physical law that says stuff has to go up on the shuttle at $15k/lb, especially if the Russians are involved. They do have rockets of their own that are cheap enough for tourist flights.
Hawking's speech synthesizer has lots of pre-formed sentences. It required two keystrokes for 'Please excuse the American accent.'
It is probably easier for him to hit a few keystrokes to speak the canned paragraph, rather than laboriously type a similar paragraph from scratch, omitting the explanation of the Planck time.
I didn't know there was any mystery about spinning eggs standing up. I haven't read the Nature paper, but here is a simple explanation (for those who have had second year physics).
A spinning body has both angular momentum and rotational energy. For a given amount of rotational energy, it has the lowest angular momentum when its mass is closest to the spin axis, and the largest angular momentum when its mass is farthest from the spin axis. These correspond to the spin axis aligned with the length of the egg, and across the egg, respectively.
When you start an egg spinning on its side on a tabletop, it is in its largest angular momentum state for that particular amount of rotational energy.
Because the egg is not a perfectly symmetric ellipsoid, and because of reality, the point of contact with the table at any given time is not perfectly aligned with the spin axis. This causes a force which gives a torque that reduces the angular momentum. If the egg also slipped across the surface, it would lose energy due to dynamic friction, but the energy loss is minimal if the friction makes the contact point roll along.
The egg now has reduced angular momentum but unchanged rotational energy, and to compensate it has to bring its mass closer to its axis, which it does by bringing its long axis closer to its spin axis, i.e. standing up. This also reduces the rotational energy of the egg by converting some of it into potential energy (the center of gravity of the egg is raised) which helps bring things into balance.
I have seen many other rubber band machine guns. (Although none this nice, none that fire a full gross of bands, and none that are priced as if they were built by defense contractors.)
Here is another brand of rubber band machine gun. You can only load 24 bands at a time, but the clips make it rapidly reloadable. And at less than $20, you can afford to arm your entire skirmish line.
On the other hand, most rubber band fights are won or lost in the first few seconds. Brief controlled bursts are more effective than spray and pray.
I have seen shows where this has obviously been done. The particular movie I remember was 'Starship Troopers'. Vast ponderously moving spaceships, except that every second or so they jerked forward about a tenth of a second's worth.
Not that it was a bad thing to get that stinker over faster.
This feature would be a great addition to Tivo, with a speed control on the remote to let you adjust the pace of a show. If the writers only had 17 minutes of script to fill the 23 minutes of a sitcom (sans commercials and credits), then speeding it up would give you the ability to compensate for the director's instructions to slow the dialogue and extend the laugh tracks.
Most shows could be watched in half the airtime, leaving more of our precious lifetimes to read/.
This is not evidence of quantum gravity, as the term is usually used.
Instead, the neutron is in a quantum state in a potential well. The fact that the potential well is due to gravity, rather than electrical or some other force, has nothing to do with the quantum nature of gravity itself.
Quantum gravity would be if the gravitational force itself were quantized, rather than the neutron state.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a great achievement in a difficult experimental field, which can be used to test fundamental physics including theories of gravity. It merely means that the/. headline is misleading.
A similar DOD funding of civilian plant, in exchange for the right to comandeer it during war, is already in place. Many jetliners are partially paid for by the DOD on the condition that they will be available for troop transport.
The article would have been more credible if it were honest.
E.g. It talks about the record company initially being out of pocket $500k ($250k production & propaganda, $250k advance royalties to artists). The company wholesales the record for $10 out of which come $2 for pressing, shipping, and mechanical rights, leaving $8. It then states that $2.25 goes to the artist as royalties so the record company gets only $5.75 to amortize its initial $500k, requiring the sales of 87k units before it breaks even.
Did you notice that? Pretty slippery. The artists don't get the $2.25, it goes directly to the record companies until the advance earns out. So the record company makes $8 in marginal profit on the first 111k of sales, and is in the black after 62.5k unit sales.
By the time the artists start earning royalties beyond the advance (111k units) the record company has made $390k in net profits. After that, the royalty-reduced $5.75 profit is acceptable if they can't find another way to gouge the artists.
This ignores the fact that the pressing and distribution costs go to companies that are probably related to the record company, and make profits of their own. It reminds me of Hollywood accounting, where if any movie, especially a blockbuster, makes a net profit (leading to money actually being paid to someone who has monkey points) it means that somebody didn't do their job right and will never work in this town again.
Of course, there always has to be a villain in the piece. OOOHHH THOSE SCUMMY SONGWRITERS!!! They're the reason music costs so much. Burn them!!!
"Microsoft apologizes for *offensive* thesaurus errors"
Microsoft Mexico has an on-line Spanish-language thesaurus that has caused
quite a stir. For example, the word "Indian" was equated with "man-eater"
and "savage"; "Western" with "Aryan", "white", and "civilized"; "lesbian"
with "pervert" and "depraved person". Microsoft Mexico has apologized, and
is rushing in a language expert from their software development center in
Ireland. [Source: *The Boston Globe*, 6 July 1996, p.58.]
but nobody even seems to care about the fact that Anthrax has been confirmed in New York City.
The victim apparently received suspicious mail containing a white powder.
No word on whether the mail was encrypted, but just in case, we have to ban PGP and other terrorist tools. If it saves just one life, isn't it worth it? Think of the children!
Except that the checkboxes say Automatically decode binhex files, they don't say... and execute them without warning. The first would be a nice feature. The second is a security hole of Gatesian proportions.
They would NEVER admit that APL was hard to maintain.
But you don't have to maintain an APL program. If, for instance, there was a bug in the operating system kernel, and it were written in APL, you would just re-write it. How hard is it to rewrite one line of code?
Slashdot Mirror
Hollywood accounting is designed so that movies just barely break even. If any movie makes a 'net profit', then they have to pay money to people who have 'net points' royalties. It is similar to the contracts that musicians sign with music studios.
Most of the money for a movie goes to affiliated companies that make huge profits for the moneymen while the accounting ledgers for the movie itself rack up negative numbers.
There are no odd-numbered Star Trek movies. The movies are numbered Star Trek II, Star Trek IV, Star Trek VI. Anybody who tells you any different is an Enemy Of The Federation (probably one of Blake's VII).
The Alt.Cyberpunk.Chatsubo Anthology, a bunch of Gibson fanfic from the usenet group of the same name, cost $200 to publish at iUniverse (another subsidy POD publisher like xLibris). It has earned that out in royalties, meaning it has sold more copies than there are authors. It is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and whatever brick&mortar stores chose to stock it (or you can have them order it with the ISBN 0595213332).
Or the "Information Wants To Be Free" crowd can read the entire archives on Google and pick what they want and save $20. (POD books are typically in Trade Paperback size, but are about 50% more expensive than conventional printing--triple that of Mass Market, but cheaper than hardback).
Or you can cherry pick a couple of mine here and here.
The reason why Oklahoma is in favor of cheap space and Texas throws regulatory roadblocks in front of it whenever it can is here. Once you have your snout in the federal trough, it is hard to pull it out.
No, Xcor has a rocket-propelled airplane running that they are using as a testbed for their space program.
This is a duplicate of Monday's /.
Lithotripsy is the use of shock waves from external explosions focussed on e.g., a kidney stone, to break it up.
How it works.
There were also programs designed just to place music on the radio with their EMI.
As other people have said (-1 redundant):
Wait until next week for the new machines.
Max out your RAM by buying from a third party.
I recently installed a couple of sticks of RAM in my Mac. It literally took less than 2.5 minutes (150 seconds) between the time the disk stopped spinning to the time I pushed the power button to turn it back on. And I wasn't hurrying or being hasty.
As a Russian told a NASA adminstrator, "just because you pay $20 for a bolt doesn't mean it's a $20 bolt."
There's no physical law that says stuff has to go up on the shuttle at $15k/lb, especially if the Russians are involved. They do have rockets of their own that are cheap enough for tourist flights.
Over a year ago I read an interview with Venter where the journalist asked if his DNA was among that being sequenced. He implied that it was.
Hawking's speech synthesizer has lots of pre-formed sentences. It required two keystrokes for 'Please excuse the American accent.'
It is probably easier for him to hit a few keystrokes to speak the canned paragraph, rather than laboriously type a similar paragraph from scratch, omitting the explanation of the Planck time.
A spinning body has both angular momentum and rotational energy. For a given amount of rotational energy, it has the lowest angular momentum when its mass is closest to the spin axis, and the largest angular momentum when its mass is farthest from the spin axis. These correspond to the spin axis aligned with the length of the egg, and across the egg, respectively.
When you start an egg spinning on its side on a tabletop, it is in its largest angular momentum state for that particular amount of rotational energy.
Because the egg is not a perfectly symmetric ellipsoid, and because of reality, the point of contact with the table at any given time is not perfectly aligned with the spin axis. This causes a force which gives a torque that reduces the angular momentum. If the egg also slipped across the surface, it would lose energy due to dynamic friction, but the energy loss is minimal if the friction makes the contact point roll along.
The egg now has reduced angular momentum but unchanged rotational energy, and to compensate it has to bring its mass closer to its axis, which it does by bringing its long axis closer to its spin axis, i.e. standing up. This also reduces the rotational energy of the egg by converting some of it into potential energy (the center of gravity of the egg is raised) which helps bring things into balance.
The eventual result is an egg standing on end.
I have seen many other rubber band machine guns. (Although none this nice, none that fire a full gross of bands, and none that are priced as if they were built by defense contractors.)
Here is another brand of rubber band machine gun. You can only load 24 bands at a time, but the clips make it rapidly reloadable. And at less than $20, you can afford to arm your entire skirmish line.
On the other hand, most rubber band fights are won or lost in the first few seconds. Brief controlled bursts are more effective than spray and pray.
Not that it was a bad thing to get that stinker over faster.
This feature would be a great addition to Tivo, with a speed control on the remote to let you adjust the pace of a show. If the writers only had 17 minutes of script to fill the 23 minutes of a sitcom (sans commercials and credits), then speeding it up would give you the ability to compensate for the director's instructions to slow the dialogue and extend the laugh tracks.
Most shows could be watched in half the airtime, leaving more of our precious lifetimes to read /.
Instead, the neutron is in a quantum state in a potential well. The fact that the potential well is due to gravity, rather than electrical or some other force, has nothing to do with the quantum nature of gravity itself.
Quantum gravity would be if the gravitational force itself were quantized, rather than the neutron state.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a great achievement in a difficult experimental field, which can be used to test fundamental physics including theories of gravity. It merely means that the /. headline is misleading.
A similar DOD funding of civilian plant, in exchange for the right to comandeer it during war, is already in place. Many jetliners are partially paid for by the DOD on the condition that they will be available for troop transport.
There have been 2 previously mapped out chromosomes (#21 and #22), so this is the third to be mapped out.
They are looking for instances of 'AI', not 'artificial intelligence'.
The article would have been more credible if it were honest.
E.g. It talks about the record company initially being out of pocket $500k ($250k production & propaganda, $250k advance royalties to artists). The company wholesales the record for $10 out of which come $2 for pressing, shipping, and mechanical rights, leaving $8. It then states that $2.25 goes to the artist as royalties so the record company gets only $5.75 to amortize its initial $500k, requiring the sales of 87k units before it breaks even.
Did you notice that? Pretty slippery. The artists don't get the $2.25, it goes directly to the record companies until the advance earns out. So the record company makes $8 in marginal profit on the first 111k of sales, and is in the black after 62.5k unit sales.
By the time the artists start earning royalties beyond the advance (111k units) the record company has made $390k in net profits. After that, the royalty-reduced $5.75 profit is acceptable if they can't find another way to gouge the artists.
This ignores the fact that the pressing and distribution costs go to companies that are probably related to the record company, and make profits of their own. It reminds me of Hollywood accounting, where if any movie, especially a blockbuster, makes a net profit (leading to money actually being paid to someone who has monkey points) it means that somebody didn't do their job right and will never work in this town again.
Of course, there always has to be a villain in the piece. OOOHHH THOSE SCUMMY SONGWRITERS!!! They're the reason music costs so much. Burn them!!!
The victim apparently received suspicious mail containing a white powder.
No word on whether the mail was encrypted, but just in case, we have to ban PGP and other terrorist tools. If it saves just one life, isn't it worth it? Think of the children!
Except that the checkboxes say Automatically decode binhex files, they don't say ... and execute them without warning. The first would be a nice feature. The second is a security hole of Gatesian proportions.
But you don't have to maintain an APL program. If, for instance, there was a bug in the operating system kernel, and it were written in APL, you would just re-write it. How hard is it to rewrite one line of code?