Not at all. This is still self-authorization. He would have needed to do a third party check - enter your full name and ssn, and then do a credit check to verify whether or not the user's employer was either DirecTV or one of their publicly known retained firms.
I didn't even know they made something like that. Of course, I've always gotten rated speeds, too (though not always at peak times, as expected). I just grabbed the incoming line off the demark, split the signal with a $1 phone splitter, ran one side to the DSL modem and fed the other side onto the phone lines, through a single DSL filter. Heck, the equipment in the welcome box was enough to do that. Plus, I had a spare (or three) filters, just in case.
It's been this way on the last 4 houses I've owned (on both coasts). There's nothing magical on the Telco side - just use the customer side and everybody will be happy.
$55 billion in 2 years? Sure, that sounds impressive, but what about the losses to piracy? Hm?
5 billion people in the world 2.5 billion don't own a computer 250 million buy Vista 200 million buy office
So, that's 2.75B copies* of Vista at $100 ea, plus 2.3B copies of Office at $150 each for $620 BILLION in lost revenue to pirates. I feel sorry for all the microsoft investors out there who will have to deal with the 565 billion in losses, and the virtual crippling one of the biggest players in the IT market. It's shameful, I tell you, and the BSA should do everything in it's power - and beyond it's power - to see that this travesty doesn't occur!
*We're assuming that there will be a reasonable number of folks who obtain Vista illegally twice in the two years (for patches, upgrades, and such), and feel that they should be counted as two lost license sales.
It's kind of cool technology, but is it a solution in search of a problem?
I think you've really identified the issue here. It's got fanstastic "wow" power, but when you sit down to figure out where it can/will be used, the applications seem so be pretty narrow in scope. I could see it as part of a POS system, or in a cube farm for non-technical types. It might have been a real contender if the server-terminal system popular 20-30 years ago hadn't devolved into a 2GHz machine on every desk. It might make a neat HT client, but that's a niche market to begin with, and it's going to need a big investment in software to get it running. Maybe it's a good terminal for medical facilities, or possibly for secure environments.
As for price...it's middling I'd say. A little much for dropping in every cube, but not too much in a high-dollar installation.
Now, if they'd move this to a Power Over Wireless, that'd be really neat (it's a joke, folks. no you don't have to laugh).
Did anyone else find it interesting that the MPAA only singled out porn ads when they talked about the ads used to make revenue. Why not just say "ads" and leave the christian-right fluff out of the press release? I'd say its because they are in an uphill battle, they know it, and they know that only a smear campaign that tries to mobilize the vocal religious minority will help them in the capitols. They're not fighting copyright infrigers, they're fighting porn pushers, and you'd better hide the women and children - for their safety of course....Well, ya got trouble, my friend - Right here, I say trouble right here in Sweden (River City)...
No matter how hard may wish for it, the/. polls move at their own pace (speed has previously been clocked between glacial and tectonic, but there is a lot of randomness to it). It's useless to try and make them move any faster.
Though, to be quite honest, "breasts" might be a somewhat appropriate poll choice, assuming that it is (they are?) as stand in for the porn industry.
Well, by standard, I didn't mean gov't mandated, but rather "what you're likely to get when you are offered a non-executive employment" at a typical US company. Some start you at 1 week, very few will start you higher. The US Federal Gov't has one of the best, with 13 days/yr vacation + 13 days sick leave when you start, escalating to 19.5 days vacation after 3 years, and 26 days after 12 (15?) years. You don't get paid out for leave not used, but you can carry over up to 30 days of vacation from one year to the next. There are 10 federal holidays. Most companies will honor between 6 (cheapskates, like me) and 10, with many being 9 or 10. Many employers will not accrue vacation/sick for the probationary period (90-180 days), but you clearly got screwed on the holidays. Just about everybody I know gets holidays from day 2 on the job. Well, except part timers, who typically get no benefits whatsoever. I happen to pay my part timers for their "typical" hours for that day.
Nope, that's what got me to click through. Unfortunately, it sounds like another [application for people younger than I am]. *shrug* The early clickers got the real message: nothing to see here...
US standard issue is 2 weeks plus between 1 and 2 weeks of "sick" leave. 3 weeks total if you're employer has changed to PTO (personal time off, a way to reward healthy singles and childless couples). Most employees in larger (>50) companies can earn more vacation with seniority, about a day extra per year, which adds up to 1 week to the base 2 weeks. There are exceptions, of course, on both extremes, but that's about the typical here. It allows a week's holiday and the odd three-day weekend. Not enough, imho.
Me? Oh, I get zero paid days off. I run a small engineering firm, and when I'm not at my desk (and not reading/., of course;-) I'm not getting paid a single cent. Actually, I get negative pay, since I have to pay rent, insurance, and power bills even when I 'm not making money. The difference, I suppose, is that I can blow of a half an hour of work on/., and know how much it really cost me. I also make more, per hour, when I'm actually working, than my salaried counterparts. (Note: I still don't get paid enough, imho, but hey - that's life.)
When they want to build the largest dam in the world (which is an engineering marvel that will put out as much electricity as 15 nuclear power plants combined), they just do it, and don't worry about the environmental, social, or historical implications.
You missed one - they're also (mostly) ignoring that it crosses a significant fault line. I've yet to hear how they are going to address this. But, hey, that's progress, right? Didn't I also hear last night on NPR that they're just now recognizing that one of their rivers (yangtze, I believe) is going to be "dead" in just five years given the state, and increasing, pollution dumped into it? Progress, indeed!
Of course not, that would be silly. What the government is saying is that Verizon can stand at the door and take money from the organization to allow you in, as well as charge the guests a ticket fee. The government just happens to get a kickback - oh, excuse me, tax - on that revenue.;-)
Sorry, I'm not buy that. No, seriously, a tax deduction is me (a taxpayer) paying someone else to do something the government want's to have happen. I may as well pay for the work and prevent the corporation play nanny. For-profit institutions are not exactly the bastions of moralilty.
Also, workers who don't do much work, and can't be channeled and refined into performing specific repeptitve tasks, just aren't efficient.
Finally, you can't pay [kids these days] enough to keep them out of trouble. The more you pay them to keep them good most of the time, the bigger trouble they're able to get into when they aren't being paid. No, you can't pay them enough to keep them on a leash all the time.
I'd be in favor of euthanizing all the troublemakers, but it's not always the kids fault. Euthanizing a good number of the parents these days...well, that has merit, but there just isn't enough space to kill and bury all the bad parents out there without major health hazards to the rest of the population.
. . .
Wow, I really shouldn't have come into work today. I've gotten a lot done, but my cynisim has really hit a local peak. Better work myself back down before everybody comes back tomorrow.
I'm not sure which is worse, that it's $1.50 for a game of pool, or that you have to work for an hour at the local minimum wage to afford to play four games of pool (after taxes, of course). Around me, minimum wage is still $5.15 an hour, which is less than it costs the governement (with its 2 million member group) to cover the cost of health insurance (employee and gov't parts, i.e. total cost).
I'm not singling you out...nobody seems to be winning here. There seems to be quite a compression of wages and costs for many goods, and I'm not certain that it isn't due in part to taxes, part to the increase in "service" costs which add to the cost of goods. $20,000 for a video game? You're right, there's no payback at $.50 a game. Seems almost odd that in a field (computers) where hardware is constantly getting cheaper in actual, not just adjusted, dollars there is this great increase in console price.
You are correct, everybody expects things to be as cheap as they used to be or cheaper, while expecting to get paid more. Productivity "gains" due to autmation seem to be transparent. Either the consumer expectation gets higher due to the automation, or the automation costs nearly as much as the productivity gains you realize. My view has changed quite a bit since I've started my own business, and I look at a lot of stores in my small town and wonder how they keep the doors open.
Yeah, the frog will certainly jump out of the pot if you put the heat on high. As someone corrupt enough to be the mayor of a large city, you'd think he would be smarter than that. Start with the felons and immigrants, move on to the state dependents (welfare recipients) and employees, then work your way up to everybody.
I will grant you that things of this scale do not fit the paradigm of everyday items (aka "everyone owns a washing machine"). But to dismiss some of these items is just asking for trouble.
Compute the resonance frequency of a device 60,000 miles long.
Which mode would you like to excite? Things don't always fail at the first resonant frequency. Many/most do, which makes the others that much more spectacular (and unexpected, I might add).
What danger to airplanes? Are you envisioning something that's going to randomly and rapidly maraud across the surface of the Earth or something?
Of course not. Not until it snaps due to a flaw or an unforseen event. I'm not saying that there will be a plane flying around when the string goes pop (note, I said "when" not "if"). That chance is very, very remote - you know, like large-comet-impacting-Jupiter remote. On the flip side of that argument, luckily, nobody has any reason to intentionally try and fly an airplane into such a structure. That's why planes never fly into buildi... oh, right.
For instance, what you probably think happens if there is a cut near the ground is the exact opposite of what happens, because your intuition is not set up for these kinds of problems.
So what happens when the fiber is severed in low earth orbit? There's a lot of money tied up in communications satellites, and the companies who own them would be pretty pissed off to lose them. Not to mention the public outcry if the loss of a major bird or two interupts their viewing of the World Series.
Even more interesting is what you're going to do with all the low earth orbit satellites. There are lots of them out there, and they'll be travelling at up to 7km/s relative the fiber (perpendicular to the strand axis, esp. for polar orbits). Not all of them are active (LAGEOS and similar passive reflectors come to mind), and will no be able to correct their orbits. No matter how thin the strand, eventually their paths will cross.
Your intuition is worthless. Nothing personal; mine is too. Having studied the topics involved I can say I understand some of this stuff intellectually, but I can't say I understand it in my gut. But I do know not to trust my gut in this domain.
(For what it's worth, similar concerns apply w.r.t. nanotechnology. Your intuition about how things work does not do very well at that scale. Our brains function at the in-between scale we all live and work in, and does not do well outside of that domain.)
Yes, when you deal with orbital dynamics, the x, y, and z we deal with on the ground doesn't apply anymore. In addition to the article, there is one other thing that will keep the space elevator from happening in the lifetime of my children: safety. I've mentioned it above, but this sort of thing is going to have to be safe. No, I take that back, it's going to have to have a proven failure rate of zero. Too many things can go wrong, and the publics tolerance for failure is so thin - well, it makes a carbon nanotube thickness seem large. I think the political hurdles are larger than the technological ones - and that's saying quite a lot.
Edwards, who is president and founder of the Dallas-based company Carbon Designs, shrugs off the controversy, and says that with adequate funding he could make cables at or above the 62-GPa benchmark in just three years.
Well, hell, with adequate funding, I can promise you that I can capture, move, and place in earth orbit an asteroid with huge deposits of precious metals, ready for you to strip mine for sale on earth, and of course we can start in less than 3 years. Just give my council a call and he'll go over the necessary non-disclosures before we talk about how many zeros to include in that funding check.
Sounds like a poster for a rock album. Oh, right, it was - except I can't find a reference. It was for a band back in the late 80s - name rock band, iirc (though, clearly my memory is failing). Anyone remember the poster?
I can't think of a single innovative high-tech center that wasn't anchored on a world-class research university. Thereby hangs another cultural sine qua non, you have to have professors willing to start companies as opposed to growing beards and getting pompous.
That's partially true. You have to have a university, because that's where smart people get paid a good salary to work half a dozen hours a week for their "paycheck", and the rest of the time tinker around with thier pet projects until, occasionally, one of them hits upon a "good idea" which they can then sell. Normally, the university will keep paying them their full salary to pursue their future retirement plan for most of the normal time they'd spend doing work for the researh projects at the university. Eventually, if the "good idea" is good enough, they'll leave and become rich and famous. And the university will smile like a proud father and point to the fabulous things their (former) staff have created, and make the parents shelling out six figures for an undergraduate degree hope that their little boy or little girl will get thier shot at becoming rich and famous, too.
Actually, it was ebay, and probably $5-7 was for shipping. At the time, a few years ago, "real" copies were north of $80, so it was a relative bargain. It's no masterpiece, but the kid like it. *shrug* We'll probably spring for the 2-disc "Mr. Eisner needs a new boat" version coming out this fall, just to get better picture and audio quality.
It is quite true. I grab Good Eats and Americas Test Kitchen (foodie, what can I say), plus some movies I don't have or aren't released on DVD (Club Paradise, among others). I also record the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but just so I have something fun to watch if I happen to come home for lunch. I've got a HD Tivo, and have found that most things still aren't good enough in HD to make it worth my time. I almost pride myself on the fact that I don't have a clue who stars in what tv show nowadays. There's just so little worth trading 40 mintues (oops - almost said "an hour") of my time.
On the other hand, there's good stuff out there for kids. You'd be amazed how much fun it is to sit down with them and watch Boomerang. Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, Johnny Quest (my daughter is 3-1/2), Superfriends, Flintstones - she gets a kick out of them and its fun to watch the stuff from when I was a kid. It makes for a nice 20 minute break from playing outside, or as a short transition time from a busy/hot activity to a quiet one, like meals or naps.
As for new programs for the little one - take a look at Little Einsteins, Backyardigans, and Charlie and Lola. The last one is a ten minute short (now they're doing doubles to make it fit in a normal time slot) about a young girl and her older brother. They've nailed the 3-5 year old psyche, and it's fun to watch. I've made a disc of almost all of the episodes, and my daughter has made a bit of a ritual out of getting watching one before she goes to bed. The first two don't offer much for adults (a bit annoying at times), but if you can stand Dora, you'll be pretty happy with them.
It is rather foolish. They could certainly reduce the cost for sales in non-adjacent countries and still be okay due to postal costs. You won't be flipping a $5 DVD to the US for a profit if ebay only nets you $9, even if the disc is legitimate.
2 yuan a day...that's about 25 cents US, right? Even at a movie a day NetFlix here in the states can't compete. Still, would you pay 60 yuan for a genuine copy with the extras (well, the ones you want, at least)? It's not uncommon to find a disc in the US for $12, and I would think the cost to ship via air would be more than $4, preserving the "lucrative" western market.
I may be dead wrong, but I still think people will buy the polished, official version if the availability is similar and the cost differential is minimal (20-30% for inexpensive items).
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. This is still self-authorization. He would have needed to do a third party check - enter your full name and ssn, and then do a credit check to verify whether or not the user's employer was either DirecTV or one of their publicly known retained firms.
I didn't even know they made something like that. Of course, I've always gotten rated speeds, too (though not always at peak times, as expected). I just grabbed the incoming line off the demark, split the signal with a $1 phone splitter, ran one side to the DSL modem and fed the other side onto the phone lines, through a single DSL filter. Heck, the equipment in the welcome box was enough to do that. Plus, I had a spare (or three) filters, just in case.
It's been this way on the last 4 houses I've owned (on both coasts). There's nothing magical on the Telco side - just use the customer side and everybody will be happy.
$55 billion in 2 years? Sure, that sounds impressive, but what about the losses to piracy? Hm?
5 billion people in the world
2.5 billion don't own a computer
250 million buy Vista
200 million buy office
So, that's 2.75B copies* of Vista at $100 ea, plus 2.3B copies of Office at $150 each for $620 BILLION in lost revenue to pirates. I feel sorry for all the microsoft investors out there who will have to deal with the 565 billion in losses, and the virtual crippling one of the biggest players in the IT market. It's shameful, I tell you, and the BSA should do everything in it's power - and beyond it's power - to see that this travesty doesn't occur!
*We're assuming that there will be a reasonable number of folks who obtain Vista illegally twice in the two years (for patches, upgrades, and such), and feel that they should be counted as two lost license sales.
It's kind of cool technology, but is it a solution in search of a problem?
I think you've really identified the issue here. It's got fanstastic "wow" power, but when you sit down to figure out where it can/will be used, the applications seem so be pretty narrow in scope. I could see it as part of a POS system, or in a cube farm for non-technical types. It might have been a real contender if the server-terminal system popular 20-30 years ago hadn't devolved into a 2GHz machine on every desk. It might make a neat HT client, but that's a niche market to begin with, and it's going to need a big investment in software to get it running. Maybe it's a good terminal for medical facilities, or possibly for secure environments.
As for price...it's middling I'd say. A little much for dropping in every cube, but not too much in a high-dollar installation.
Now, if they'd move this to a Power Over Wireless, that'd be really neat (it's a joke, folks. no you don't have to laugh).
Did anyone else find it interesting that the MPAA only singled out porn ads when they talked about the ads used to make revenue. Why not just say "ads" and leave the christian-right fluff out of the press release? I'd say its because they are in an uphill battle, they know it, and they know that only a smear campaign that tries to mobilize the vocal religious minority will help them in the capitols. They're not fighting copyright infrigers, they're fighting porn pushers, and you'd better hide the women and children - for their safety of course. ...Well, ya got trouble, my friend - Right here, I say trouble right here in Sweden (River City)...
Yeah, like Sweden! Oh, right...sorry.
No matter how hard may wish for it, the /. polls move at their own pace (speed has previously been clocked between glacial and tectonic, but there is a lot of randomness to it). It's useless to try and make them move any faster.
Though, to be quite honest, "breasts" might be a somewhat appropriate poll choice, assuming that it is (they are?) as stand in for the porn industry.
Well, by standard, I didn't mean gov't mandated, but rather "what you're likely to get when you are offered a non-executive employment" at a typical US company. Some start you at 1 week, very few will start you higher. The US Federal Gov't has one of the best, with 13 days/yr vacation + 13 days sick leave when you start, escalating to 19.5 days vacation after 3 years, and 26 days after 12 (15?) years. You don't get paid out for leave not used, but you can carry over up to 30 days of vacation from one year to the next. There are 10 federal holidays. Most companies will honor between 6 (cheapskates, like me) and 10, with many being 9 or 10. Many employers will not accrue vacation/sick for the probationary period (90-180 days), but you clearly got screwed on the holidays. Just about everybody I know gets holidays from day 2 on the job. Well, except part timers, who typically get no benefits whatsoever. I happen to pay my part timers for their "typical" hours for that day.
Nope, that's what got me to click through. Unfortunately, it sounds like another [application for people younger than I am]. *shrug* The early clickers got the real message: nothing to see here...
US standard issue is 2 weeks plus between 1 and 2 weeks of "sick" leave. 3 weeks total if you're employer has changed to PTO (personal time off, a way to reward healthy singles and childless couples). Most employees in larger (>50) companies can earn more vacation with seniority, about a day extra per year, which adds up to 1 week to the base 2 weeks. There are exceptions, of course, on both extremes, but that's about the typical here. It allows a week's holiday and the odd three-day weekend. Not enough, imho.
/., of course ;-) I'm not getting paid a single cent. Actually, I get negative pay, since I have to pay rent, insurance, and power bills even when I 'm not making money. The difference, I suppose, is that I can blow of a half an hour of work on /., and know how much it really cost me. I also make more, per hour, when I'm actually working, than my salaried counterparts. (Note: I still don't get paid enough, imho, but hey - that's life.)
Me? Oh, I get zero paid days off. I run a small engineering firm, and when I'm not at my desk (and not reading
When they want to build the largest dam in the world (which is an engineering marvel that will put out as much electricity as 15 nuclear power plants combined), they just do it, and don't worry about the environmental, social, or historical implications.
You missed one - they're also (mostly) ignoring that it crosses a significant fault line. I've yet to hear how they are going to address this. But, hey, that's progress, right? Didn't I also hear last night on NPR that they're just now recognizing that one of their rivers (yangtze, I believe) is going to be "dead" in just five years given the state, and increasing, pollution dumped into it? Progress, indeed!
Pretty amazing that we even had music, drama, and literature even before the invention of the respective recording technologies, isn't it.
Of course not, that would be silly. What the government is saying is that Verizon can stand at the door and take money from the organization to allow you in, as well as charge the guests a ticket fee. The government just happens to get a kickback - oh, excuse me, tax - on that revenue. ;-)
b a nice chunky tax deduction
Sorry, I'm not buy that. No, seriously, a tax deduction is me (a taxpayer) paying someone else to do something the government want's to have happen. I may as well pay for the work and prevent the corporation play nanny. For-profit institutions are not exactly the bastions of moralilty.
Also, workers who don't do much work, and can't be channeled and refined into performing specific repeptitve tasks, just aren't efficient.
Finally, you can't pay [kids these days] enough to keep them out of trouble. The more you pay them to keep them good most of the time, the bigger trouble they're able to get into when they aren't being paid. No, you can't pay them enough to keep them on a leash all the time.
I'd be in favor of euthanizing all the troublemakers, but it's not always the kids fault. Euthanizing a good number of the parents these days...well, that has merit, but there just isn't enough space to kill and bury all the bad parents out there without major health hazards to the rest of the population.
.
.
.
Wow, I really shouldn't have come into work today. I've gotten a lot done, but my cynisim has really hit a local peak. Better work myself back down before everybody comes back tomorrow.
I'm not sure which is worse, that it's $1.50 for a game of pool, or that you have to work for an hour at the local minimum wage to afford to play four games of pool
(after taxes, of course). Around me, minimum wage is still $5.15 an hour, which is less than it costs the governement (with its 2 million member group) to cover the cost of health insurance (employee and gov't parts, i.e. total cost).
I'm not singling you out...nobody seems to be winning here. There seems to be quite a compression of wages and costs for many goods, and I'm not certain that it isn't due in part to taxes, part to the increase in "service" costs which add to the cost of goods. $20,000 for a video game? You're right, there's no payback at $.50 a game. Seems almost odd that in a field (computers) where hardware is constantly getting cheaper in actual, not just adjusted, dollars there is this great increase in console price.
You are correct, everybody expects things to be as cheap as they used to be or cheaper, while expecting to get paid more. Productivity "gains" due to autmation seem to be transparent. Either the consumer expectation gets higher due to the automation, or the automation costs nearly as much as the productivity gains you realize. My view has changed quite a bit since I've started my own business, and I look at a lot of stores in my small town and wonder how they keep the doors open.
Yeah, the frog will certainly jump out of the pot if you put the heat on high. As someone corrupt enough to be the mayor of a large city, you'd think he would be smarter than that. Start with the felons and immigrants, move on to the state dependents (welfare recipients) and employees, then work your way up to everybody.
I will grant you that things of this scale do not fit the paradigm of everyday items (aka "everyone owns a washing machine"). But to dismiss some of these items is just asking for trouble.
Compute the resonance frequency of a device 60,000 miles long.
Which mode would you like to excite? Things don't always fail at the first resonant frequency. Many/most do, which makes the others that much more spectacular (and unexpected, I might add).
What danger to airplanes? Are you envisioning something that's going to randomly and rapidly maraud across the surface of the Earth or something?
Of course not. Not until it snaps due to a flaw or an unforseen event. I'm not saying that there will be a plane flying around when the string goes pop (note, I said "when" not "if"). That chance is very, very remote - you know, like large-comet-impacting-Jupiter remote.
On the flip side of that argument, luckily, nobody has any reason to intentionally try and fly an airplane into such a structure. That's why planes never fly into buildi... oh, right.
For instance, what you probably think happens if there is a cut near the ground is the exact opposite of what happens, because your intuition is not set up for these kinds of problems.
So what happens when the fiber is severed in low earth orbit? There's a lot of money tied up in communications satellites, and the companies who own them would be pretty pissed off to lose them. Not to mention the public outcry if the loss of a major bird or two interupts their viewing of the World Series.
Even more interesting is what you're going to do with all the low earth orbit satellites. There are lots of them out there, and they'll be travelling at up to 7km/s relative the fiber (perpendicular to the strand axis, esp. for polar orbits). Not all of them are active (LAGEOS and similar passive reflectors come to mind), and will no be able to correct their orbits. No matter how thin the strand, eventually their paths will cross.
Your intuition is worthless. Nothing personal; mine is too. Having studied the topics involved I can say I understand some of this stuff intellectually, but I can't say I understand it in my gut. But I do know not to trust my gut in this domain.
(For what it's worth, similar concerns apply w.r.t. nanotechnology. Your intuition about how things work does not do very well at that scale. Our brains function at the in-between scale we all live and work in, and does not do well outside of that domain.)
Yes, when you deal with orbital dynamics, the x, y, and z we deal with on the ground doesn't apply anymore. In addition to the article, there is one other thing that will keep the space elevator from happening in the lifetime of my children: safety. I've mentioned it above, but this sort of thing is going to have to be safe. No, I take that back, it's going to have to have a proven failure rate of zero. Too many things can go wrong, and the publics tolerance for failure is so thin - well, it makes a carbon nanotube thickness seem large. I think the political hurdles are larger than the technological ones - and that's saying quite a lot.
FTFA:
Edwards, who is president and founder of the Dallas-based company Carbon Designs, shrugs off the controversy, and says that with adequate funding he could make cables at or above the 62-GPa benchmark in just three years.
Well, hell, with adequate funding, I can promise you that I can capture, move, and place in earth orbit an asteroid with huge deposits of precious metals, ready for you to strip mine for sale on earth, and of course we can start in less than 3 years. Just give my council a call and he'll go over the necessary non-disclosures before we talk about how many zeros to include in that funding check.
I would say that the (seemingly) years of hype and vapor leading up to the release of such a so-so product is what clinched it's spot.
Kind of like your first sexual experience...oh, sorry, this is slashdot...well, let me just say - don't set your expectations too high.
Sounds like a poster for a rock album. Oh, right, it was - except I can't find a reference. It was for a band back in the late 80s - name rock band, iirc (though, clearly my memory is failing). Anyone remember the poster?
I can't think of a single innovative high-tech center that wasn't anchored on a world-class research university. Thereby hangs another cultural sine qua non, you have to have professors willing to start companies as opposed to growing beards and getting pompous.
That's partially true. You have to have a university, because that's where smart people get paid a good salary to work half a dozen hours a week for their "paycheck", and the rest of the time tinker around with thier pet projects until, occasionally, one of them hits upon a "good idea" which they can then sell. Normally, the university will keep paying them their full salary to pursue their future retirement plan for most of the normal time they'd spend doing work for the researh projects at the university. Eventually, if the "good idea" is good enough, they'll leave and become rich and famous. And the university will smile like a proud father and point to the fabulous things their (former) staff have created, and make the parents shelling out six figures for an undergraduate degree hope that their little boy or little girl will get thier shot at becoming rich and famous, too.
Actually, it was ebay, and probably $5-7 was for shipping. At the time, a few years ago, "real" copies were north of $80, so it was a relative bargain. It's no masterpiece, but the kid like it. *shrug* We'll probably spring for the 2-disc "Mr. Eisner needs a new boat" version coming out this fall, just to get better picture and audio quality.
It is quite true. I grab Good Eats and Americas Test Kitchen (foodie, what can I say), plus some movies I don't have or aren't released on DVD (Club Paradise, among others). I also record the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but just so I have something fun to watch if I happen to come home for lunch. I've got a HD Tivo, and have found that most things still aren't good enough in HD to make it worth my time. I almost pride myself on the fact that I don't have a clue who stars in what tv show nowadays. There's just so little worth trading 40 mintues (oops - almost said "an hour") of my time.
On the other hand, there's good stuff out there for kids. You'd be amazed how much fun it is to sit down with them and watch Boomerang. Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, Johnny Quest (my daughter is 3-1/2), Superfriends, Flintstones - she gets a kick out of them and its fun to watch the stuff from when I was a kid. It makes for a nice 20 minute break from playing outside, or as a short transition time from a busy/hot activity to a quiet one, like meals or naps.
As for new programs for the little one - take a look at Little Einsteins, Backyardigans, and Charlie and Lola. The last one is a ten minute short (now they're doing doubles to make it fit in a normal time slot) about a young girl and her older brother. They've nailed the 3-5 year old psyche, and it's fun to watch. I've made a disc of almost all of the episodes, and my daughter has made a bit of a ritual out of getting watching one before she goes to bed. The first two don't offer much for adults (a bit annoying at times), but if you can stand Dora, you'll be pretty happy with them.
It is rather foolish. They could certainly reduce the cost for sales in non-adjacent countries and still be okay due to postal costs. You won't be flipping a $5 DVD to the US for a profit if ebay only nets you $9, even if the disc is legitimate.
2 yuan a day...that's about 25 cents US, right? Even at a movie a day NetFlix here in the states can't compete. Still, would you pay 60 yuan for a genuine copy with the extras (well, the ones you want, at least)? It's not uncommon to find a disc in the US for $12, and I would think the cost to ship via air would be more than $4, preserving the "lucrative" western market.
I may be dead wrong, but I still think people will buy the polished, official version if the availability is similar and the cost differential is minimal (20-30% for inexpensive items).