What a good idea. Infrequent users may not be the largest source of income, but something is better than nothing, and a few bucks falls into impulse purchasing where you don't even need to think to spend it, so people will spend if they want that service immediately. Happy customers are also good at returning.
Mandatory what? It's not mandatory. If you don't own a TV and don't stream Live shows on iPlayer (BBC's streaming service), you don't need a TV license. Also as far as I know, you don't need a radio license. Checked wikipedia on that, abolished in 1971 for radios. If you watch BBC iPlayer tv post-broadcast time, you don't need a license. Anyway, I'll take the BBC any day over most American ad-infested overpriced channels.
I don't know about you but my clutch is where my left foot is. Touching the clutch is part of driving the vehicle over here. Press clutch to disengage gearbox. Everyone who drives a manual over here knows that.
If a vehicle is expecting to be towing something, because the owner has gone and had a tow bar fitted (they don't generally come as standard in the UK iirc unless it's a goods vehicle anyway), or works where the vehicle will need to be towing something then the owner has usually gone out and got a third plate for affixing to the back of the towed thing. It's trivial to go and get a third plate for the purposes of towing something, if you have a tow bar, you know you may be towing in the future, you get a plate. This is a somewhat non-issue.
How are the Samsungs for noise? I found the Caviars nice and quiet, which is good with a few of them near by. As long as they're not Barracuda loud, at least.
Annoyingly I've just had 2 AAKS drives of slightly different ages die on me this week, though they have had good mileage of consistent usage for 4 years. I prefer them to my old Barracudas, which rattled away like a screw in a tin can. Annoyingly prices are still uncomfortably steep for me to replace them so I'll have to hope the two I have left will keep going. I don't see why they'd all die at the same time, but who knows.
Yeah I think we call them Banks, and they don't take a cut. The Post Office will convert your change too for free. Those machines exist but since there's more Post Offices than auto-sorter machines that steal 10%, I think people go to the Post Office instead.
It's possible that they are non-consumer because they can't be produced at the same volume as demanded by a consumer-space product, so a production speed or cost issue. Perhaps they are technologically inferior to a typical phone screen in terms of fill rate and response times relative to their cost (i.e. not worth getting something like that for its cost compared to a samsung screen). They may be excellent screens for what they are designed for, but may not have so much of a product market here, where battery life gains are less critical and utility/features/coolness beats readability for average joe.
The thing is, if IBM patents the planet, eventually the whole system will implode and they'll lose value. So having a big pile of patents will be worthless and all the money thrown at them, as well as fighting them is gone with no value. I don't think we're quite as critical mass yet, but I expect it will happen eventually. The destruction of the patent/copyright system I'd think would be the next global commercial crisis after this financial one, I hope. But that's just me being a cynic.
I believe they're adding a nickname system for replacement of the whole RealID thing for gamer friends that you don't know IRL. I think they called it BattleTag, read the preview a little while ago but here's what I remember:
Essentially:
battle.net account - account all your games are tied to, login for WoW, SCII, D3 etc.
RealID - aimed at people you know, handles cross comms between games - you add them once and then you see/can chat with them in other games, lets you see friends of friends too.
BattleTag - hand out to guildies and random gamers who you don't hate, to communicate without them knowing your real name, email etc. Should have been added with RealID communication stuff, still in testing I think.
Some things might be a bit sketchy in explanation but that's what the bits are I think.
Maybe. But total Market domination is certainly a feature of capitalism. Once you hit that point the only way out is to break it down carefully or nationalise it. You can't have a monopoly for profit ultimately without screwing over your population. You can regulate to prevent it getting dug in that deep and keep competition open but there are lines that get crossed that are almost irreversible.
This is a fundamental property of capitalism: when a corporation gets lucky it can dominate the market so strongly that when it gets unlucky it gets bailed out by the tax payers.
Good point, on another note I wonder if there is a maximum attainable amount of natural renewable energy sources before capturing them (and thus dissipating the energy) becomes detrimental to the planetary existence as a whole such as limiting wind/tidal motion to ineffective lows. Maybe that amount or energy is so high it's almost irrelevant because we should be off the planet by then.
Energy will still be a major cost I think, in the form of electricity. Of course we could probably try to defeat that with nuclear power, or at least reduce the cost of electricity towards costless levels. I'm not sure what the cost of creation vs value of energy produced is of a nuclear powerplant today. I figure it must be worth still building more as we never stopped at one. If you can move the cost of energy down to near zero levels, we really are sorted.
Excellent point, I honestly hadn't considered how vastly different the idea of an explosion vs surface displacement was when it came to moving something like water. Now my sensationalist statements seem quite daft. Would it be possible then that an underwater nuclear explosion would be less devastating than an overground one due to absorption of energy by the water?
I wasn't quite being as literal with the touch of a button statement, just the idea that it can be used is terrifying enough. You could probably drop it in the sea and create a tidal wave so big it would cover a medium sized country. It wouldn't just reduce navies near by, it would eradicate anything near the entire ocean.
I for one am glad I have only existed (for all intents and purposes) post cold war, which does make me a young-ling compared to some of you lot, but everyone should know about what could have happened. I always believe history is there to be told, known and learned from. I certainly appreciate not living in a radioactive mud pit. In fact I certainly appreciate existing.
A bunker buster, providing your bunker is within a few hundred miles or so. It was a city leveller. This is the bomb you drop to lose, not win. Noone should have that much destructive power at the touch of a button. The idea of it being used is beyond scary.
I don't know, that'd be about 80-odd people at $40k. It's not impossible to think he has a small workforce and overheads to run an office or something similar. $3.5M really isn't that much money if you have a few employees too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sshhh, don't tell them.
What a good idea. Infrequent users may not be the largest source of income, but something is better than nothing, and a few bucks falls into impulse purchasing where you don't even need to think to spend it, so people will spend if they want that service immediately. Happy customers are also good at returning.
Want Metro, pay for it
Oh no man, that shit so bad you get it for free...
Mandatory what? It's not mandatory. If you don't own a TV and don't stream Live shows on iPlayer (BBC's streaming service), you don't need a TV license. Also as far as I know, you don't need a radio license. Checked wikipedia on that, abolished in 1971 for radios. If you watch BBC iPlayer tv post-broadcast time, you don't need a license. Anyway, I'll take the BBC any day over most American ad-infested overpriced channels.
I don't know about you but my clutch is where my left foot is. Touching the clutch is part of driving the vehicle over here. Press clutch to disengage gearbox. Everyone who drives a manual over here knows that.
Don't go to Europe then.
This is nothing new, see London Congestion Charge false fines.
Londoner then?
If a vehicle is expecting to be towing something, because the owner has gone and had a tow bar fitted (they don't generally come as standard in the UK iirc unless it's a goods vehicle anyway), or works where the vehicle will need to be towing something then the owner has usually gone out and got a third plate for affixing to the back of the towed thing. It's trivial to go and get a third plate for the purposes of towing something, if you have a tow bar, you know you may be towing in the future, you get a plate. This is a somewhat non-issue.
How are the Samsungs for noise? I found the Caviars nice and quiet, which is good with a few of them near by. As long as they're not Barracuda loud, at least.
Annoyingly I've just had 2 AAKS drives of slightly different ages die on me this week, though they have had good mileage of consistent usage for 4 years. I prefer them to my old Barracudas, which rattled away like a screw in a tin can. Annoyingly prices are still uncomfortably steep for me to replace them so I'll have to hope the two I have left will keep going. I don't see why they'd all die at the same time, but who knows.
Yeah I think we call them Banks, and they don't take a cut. The Post Office will convert your change too for free. Those machines exist but since there's more Post Offices than auto-sorter machines that steal 10%, I think people go to the Post Office instead.
It's possible that they are non-consumer because they can't be produced at the same volume as demanded by a consumer-space product, so a production speed or cost issue. Perhaps they are technologically inferior to a typical phone screen in terms of fill rate and response times relative to their cost (i.e. not worth getting something like that for its cost compared to a samsung screen). They may be excellent screens for what they are designed for, but may not have so much of a product market here, where battery life gains are less critical and utility/features/coolness beats readability for average joe.
The thing is, if IBM patents the planet, eventually the whole system will implode and they'll lose value. So having a big pile of patents will be worthless and all the money thrown at them, as well as fighting them is gone with no value. I don't think we're quite as critical mass yet, but I expect it will happen eventually. The destruction of the patent/copyright system I'd think would be the next global commercial crisis after this financial one, I hope. But that's just me being a cynic.
I believe they're adding a nickname system for replacement of the whole RealID thing for gamer friends that you don't know IRL. I think they called it BattleTag, read the preview a little while ago but here's what I remember:
Essentially: battle.net account - account all your games are tied to, login for WoW, SCII, D3 etc.
RealID - aimed at people you know, handles cross comms between games - you add them once and then you see/can chat with them in other games, lets you see friends of friends too.
BattleTag - hand out to guildies and random gamers who you don't hate, to communicate without them knowing your real name, email etc. Should have been added with RealID communication stuff, still in testing I think.
Some things might be a bit sketchy in explanation but that's what the bits are I think.
Can't tell if serious...
or just monkeying around.
Maybe. But total Market domination is certainly a feature of capitalism. Once you hit that point the only way out is to break it down carefully or nationalise it. You can't have a monopoly for profit ultimately without screwing over your population. You can regulate to prevent it getting dug in that deep and keep competition open but there are lines that get crossed that are almost irreversible.
This is a fundamental property of capitalism: when a corporation gets lucky it can dominate the market so strongly that when it gets unlucky it gets bailed out by the tax payers.
Good point, on another note I wonder if there is a maximum attainable amount of natural renewable energy sources before capturing them (and thus dissipating the energy) becomes detrimental to the planetary existence as a whole such as limiting wind/tidal motion to ineffective lows. Maybe that amount or energy is so high it's almost irrelevant because we should be off the planet by then.
Or wooden shoes in the gears, if you wanna go for some real old-school sabotage.
Clogs in the cogs and beers in the gears?
Energy will still be a major cost I think, in the form of electricity. Of course we could probably try to defeat that with nuclear power, or at least reduce the cost of electricity towards costless levels. I'm not sure what the cost of creation vs value of energy produced is of a nuclear powerplant today. I figure it must be worth still building more as we never stopped at one. If you can move the cost of energy down to near zero levels, we really are sorted.
Excellent point, I honestly hadn't considered how vastly different the idea of an explosion vs surface displacement was when it came to moving something like water. Now my sensationalist statements seem quite daft. Would it be possible then that an underwater nuclear explosion would be less devastating than an overground one due to absorption of energy by the water?
I wasn't quite being as literal with the touch of a button statement, just the idea that it can be used is terrifying enough. You could probably drop it in the sea and create a tidal wave so big it would cover a medium sized country. It wouldn't just reduce navies near by, it would eradicate anything near the entire ocean.
I for one am glad I have only existed (for all intents and purposes) post cold war, which does make me a young-ling compared to some of you lot, but everyone should know about what could have happened. I always believe history is there to be told, known and learned from. I certainly appreciate not living in a radioactive mud pit. In fact I certainly appreciate existing.
A bunker buster, providing your bunker is within a few hundred miles or so. It was a city leveller. This is the bomb you drop to lose, not win. Noone should have that much destructive power at the touch of a button. The idea of it being used is beyond scary.
I don't know, that'd be about 80-odd people at $40k. It's not impossible to think he has a small workforce and overheads to run an office or something similar. $3.5M really isn't that much money if you have a few employees too.