What are you talking about? Two of those are correct, they just got the scale wrong. Energy has gotten much more expensive than in 1997, but not enough that it's causing massive problems in developed countries, yet. Why do you think energy-efficient appliances and vehicles are so popular now?
Yes I made a typo, and if/. let me edit a post I would.
This is an excellent point here. Why doesn't Slashdot allow you to edit posts anyway? Reddit does. Slashdot's UI is so inferior to Reddit's it's not even funny.
RP isn't perfect, but he's the only non-corrupt, non-corporatist candidate on the Republican side. On the Democrat side in '08, they had Dennis Kucinich, who would make a great candidate IMO, and again is pretty obviously non-corrupt and non-corporatist (the establishment in Cleveland tried to have him assassinated even, for not going along with their privatization plan), which you can't say about Obama.
$30 a ticket? Is that all they cost in the UK? That's pretty cheap these days! Over here in the US, I can't expect to get into a concert for less than $60 after the ticket price and Ticketbastard "convenience fees".
You're making the mistake of assuming that people in high public positions are just as dumb as people who become violent criminals. They can be just as sociopathic, yes, but violent criminals usually have no education and no impulse control. Those who reach high positions in government and business are usually pretty smart, well educated, and have very good impulse control.
Upon further reading, I don't see how my statements contradict the Wikipedia page at all. Maybe you should read more before spouting off and looking like an idiot. Arizona's primaries are indeed "open"; there's no check to make sure you're a "party member", you just have to declare an affiliation a certain amount of time before the election with the state government, and then they'll send you a ballot for that party's primaries. From the Wikipedia page for "Primary Election": "Open primary.[3] All voters can take part in an open primary and may cast votes on a ballot of any party. The party may require them to express their support to the party's values and pay a small contribution to the costs of the primary."
This is what we have, with the caveat that you have to sign up for a particular party a certain amount of time beforehand (whenever you register to vote, since the deadline for voter registration is one or two months or so before voting starts). There's no contribution required, nor any requirement to "express their support to the party's values".
I honestly don't care what Wikipedia says here; what I told you is how elections are handled here. If you don't register with one of the parties a certain amount of time before the election, you CANNOT vote in that party's (D or R) primary.
Registering independent is a bad idea; it means you aren't allowed to vote in the primaries (at least in AZ). The primaries are where you really get to pick who goes up for election.
It's not exactly like that here in AZ; instead, you can register with any party (D, R, L, G, Ind.) each year, but if you register independent, you don't get to vote in any primary (since there's no "independent party"). Similarly, if you register in the Libertarian or Green party, you probably won't get to vote in any primaries (those parties don't seem to have any). So it's kinda pointless to register in any party other than D or R, since with those at least you can vote in those primaries and try to make some kind of difference there. Why they even bother doing it that way, I don't know; it's not like your party selection has any effect in the general election.
Registering as "independent" however means that you aren't allowed to vote in any primary elections, so your vote is limited to whichever turd sandwiches the morons registered in the two main parties select in their primary elections. By registering for one of the parties (at least in my state), even if you don't really agree with that party's platform, you get a chance to decide who in that party goes up in the general election. This can be used strategically too; if you're OK with the likely front-runner in your preferred party, you can register with the opposite party that year, and vote for the absolutely worst candidate on that side.
Sometimes I wonder if that's what happened back in 2008: everyone registered with the opposite party, and selected the worst possible candidate, giving us Obama and McCain/Palin. Fantasizing this way would let me avoid facing up to the obvious fact that my fellow voters are complete morons.
It's because we Americans are simply too stupid to select an election system that allows more than two parties, such as the proportional representation systems that you Europeans have. All we get is simple plurality voting, which of course leads inevitably to two parties, and a vote for any other party is "a wasted vote".
I googled those things some time ago, maybe a few years ago, perhaps on Newegg, and was surprised to see them still being sold (though again, I've never seen one sold in a local store, I think it's online-only). But what surprised me even more was that it looked like they were exactly the same as they were around 1990. I mean they were identical: the cabinets, the control buttons; the designs hadn't changed one bit since then. They looked really odd compared to the aesthetics of modern computer equipment.
Oh yeah, forgot about him since his head was chopped off. Who is "Dumbledore"?
That's pretty similar, though, to The Tudors: they had Sam Neill in the first season, and of course near the end of the 1st season he died too. They also had a couple of very brief appearances by Peter O'Toole.
So maybe the scheme is to find a near-A-lister actor who's well recognized, a reliable actor, but not nearly as expensive as one of the real A-listers (Neill was pretty much a has-been), and get them into a regular role in the 1st series to draw some more people in, then kill them off near the end of the 1st season so in the 2nd season they can pump up the effects and scenery budgets now that everyone's hooked.
Huh? There's certainly central characters, just like almost any show. Sure, there's a comparatively large number of them compared to a 2-hour movie, but there most certainly are central characters. And yes, you're right, once a show gets going and becomes popular, it's very risky to remove a central character; perhaps their contracts are written so that they can't back out so easily and can't demand too much more money for subsequent seasons, I don't know.
As for having "the technology", I don't buy that. You're in NZ, you should know this. They filmed LoTR there for a reason. They film a bunch of stuff near you in Queensland, Australia too for a good reason; the recent TV show "Terra Nova" was filmed in QLD, and it cost a fortune because of that (mainly because the rainy weather delayed production a lot, forcing them to pay a bunch of people to sit around doing nothing). If it were that cheap to use CGI to replace on-location filming, they'd be doing it a lot more now, but they aren't. CGI still doesn't look that real except when used in limited amounts, and simply doesn't replace things like jungles.
I love the courses in college that tell you how you should do something to make maintenance easier but then ignore the real world contraint of time and money (probably the most underrepresented part of making software). Making something with care takes more time (and therefore money) thank hacking something together.
Sorry, but the college courses are correct; hacking something together poorly will cause you to have higher long-term costs. CS departments can't help it if the morons over in the Business Schools across campus are teaching all the MBAs to be short-sighted idiots.
I was about to ask the same question. The only places I even see those old dot-matrix printers these days is at banks, and they appear to be using the exact same printers they were using 25 years ago.
As the other responder said, this doesn't appear to be the case for this particular project in TFA. However, you're right, what you describe is normal for most projects. The way to handle it is this: since management isn't interested in doing a re-write, you just do your best trying to figure it out, which of course is not going to be very successful. Keep making excuses about how bad the code is when deadlines fly by. All this time, be sure to be looking for a new job on Dice.com. As long as you're making some kind of progress, management will keep you around, because very slow progress is better than no progress at all (which is what you get if you fire the developers). Sooner or later, a new opportunity will present itself to you and you can ditch that dump.
Of course, then you start the cycle all over again. This is the life of a software engineer.
I don't know about this. For the bigger artists, yes, that seems to have been the deal; the record companies basically take all the money from album sales because of their usurious interest-rate "advances", so artists really don't make much money on those, and make real money doing tours.
However, for independent artists, the math is probably very different. Remember, if you're a big band like The Rolling Stones, everyone knows who you are because of decades of promotion and album sales, so when you play a concert, thousands of people line up to buy tickets. If you're some little local band, no one's going to pay a dime to see your concert; at best, some local restaurant will pay you $250 to play a gig there one evening. Divided 4 or 5 ways among the band members, that's not exactly a lot of money. However, many times, local performers will sell their own CDs after the performance for $10 or $15. It's cheap these days to have your own CD professionally made in quantities of 1000 or so, and it's not that hard to do the recording yourself with a PC and get decent results; you don't need some ridiculously expensive recording studio like you did decades ago, and even if you do want to go that route for better quality, it's possible to rent time at studios. So these small-time artists probably make most of their money selling their own independently-produced CDs.
The thing about actors' salaries is true for blockbuster movies with A-list actors, but I don't think this applies to Game of Thrones; I've never seen any of those actors before, except Peter Dinklage (who's played minor parts in some minor movies, such as the crazy children's book author in one scene of "Elf") who probably does not command A-list salaries.
However, GoT does have lots of actors due to its story, so even if none of them are as handsomely paid as Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, it still adds up. Then throw in all the on-location shooting in exotic locations (northern Ireland and Malta namely), all the costumes, and all the sets, and it gets pretty expensive. It's always going to be a lot cheaper to film a show/movie about a small handful of people living in a modern-day city or other location, and spending all their time in an apartment talking to each other. Creating a fantasy world is expensive, as is creating an authentic historical world hundreds of years in the past (like with another successful HBO show, "The Tudors"). Notice also that in both these shows, almost all of the actors were unknowns, and many of them not even from Hollywood but rather little-known European actors. Several actors from The Tudors, in fact, were unknown before that, but became known because of their roles on that show and went on to other work (such as the girl who played Anne Boleyn). There's a reason for this: these TV shows do have a limited budget, so their draw is the story, not the actors, so they get cheap actors (which is fine; high-paid A-list actors are really overrated anyway).
A lot of your economic analysis I think only applies to hollywood movies, which these TV miniseries are not. I think the main way you're going to reduce their cost is to simply reduce the cost of filming somehow, either with better CGI, or lower on-location costs.
If they were smarter about marketing and selling their product, instead of stubbornly insisting that it only be sold through ancient and obsolete distribution channels which are losing subscribers rapidly, they probably would have a lot more money for expensive scenes.
Regulation seems to work decently well in many European countries. Maybe we should outsource all our regulation to them. I think it's fairly obvious that we Americans are just too corrupt to handle regulation ourselves; it's like asking Latin American governments to not be blatantly corrupt. Our culture simply doesn't value non-corruption. So maybe we need to yield to others who do have such a culture.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? Two of those are correct, they just got the scale wrong. Energy has gotten much more expensive than in 1997, but not enough that it's causing massive problems in developed countries, yet. Why do you think energy-efficient appliances and vehicles are so popular now?
Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would.
This is an excellent point here. Why doesn't Slashdot allow you to edit posts anyway? Reddit does. Slashdot's UI is so inferior to Reddit's it's not even funny.
RP isn't perfect, but he's the only non-corrupt, non-corporatist candidate on the Republican side. On the Democrat side in '08, they had Dennis Kucinich, who would make a great candidate IMO, and again is pretty obviously non-corrupt and non-corporatist (the establishment in Cleveland tried to have him assassinated even, for not going along with their privatization plan), which you can't say about Obama.
$30 a ticket? Is that all they cost in the UK? That's pretty cheap these days! Over here in the US, I can't expect to get into a concert for less than $60 after the ticket price and Ticketbastard "convenience fees".
Yes, of course, but at least if you can vote in the primaries you can have a little more say in elections, so you might get a better turd sandwich.
You're making the mistake of assuming that people in high public positions are just as dumb as people who become violent criminals. They can be just as sociopathic, yes, but violent criminals usually have no education and no impulse control. Those who reach high positions in government and business are usually pretty smart, well educated, and have very good impulse control.
Upon further reading, I don't see how my statements contradict the Wikipedia page at all. Maybe you should read more before spouting off and looking like an idiot. Arizona's primaries are indeed "open"; there's no check to make sure you're a "party member", you just have to declare an affiliation a certain amount of time before the election with the state government, and then they'll send you a ballot for that party's primaries. From the Wikipedia page for "Primary Election": "Open primary.[3] All voters can take part in an open primary and may cast votes on a ballot of any party. The party may require them to express their support to the party's values and pay a small contribution to the costs of the primary."
This is what we have, with the caveat that you have to sign up for a particular party a certain amount of time beforehand (whenever you register to vote, since the deadline for voter registration is one or two months or so before voting starts). There's no contribution required, nor any requirement to "express their support to the party's values".
I honestly don't care what Wikipedia says here; what I told you is how elections are handled here. If you don't register with one of the parties a certain amount of time before the election, you CANNOT vote in that party's (D or R) primary.
Registering independent is a bad idea; it means you aren't allowed to vote in the primaries (at least in AZ). The primaries are where you really get to pick who goes up for election.
It's not exactly like that here in AZ; instead, you can register with any party (D, R, L, G, Ind.) each year, but if you register independent, you don't get to vote in any primary (since there's no "independent party"). Similarly, if you register in the Libertarian or Green party, you probably won't get to vote in any primaries (those parties don't seem to have any). So it's kinda pointless to register in any party other than D or R, since with those at least you can vote in those primaries and try to make some kind of difference there. Why they even bother doing it that way, I don't know; it's not like your party selection has any effect in the general election.
Registering as "independent" however means that you aren't allowed to vote in any primary elections, so your vote is limited to whichever turd sandwiches the morons registered in the two main parties select in their primary elections. By registering for one of the parties (at least in my state), even if you don't really agree with that party's platform, you get a chance to decide who in that party goes up in the general election. This can be used strategically too; if you're OK with the likely front-runner in your preferred party, you can register with the opposite party that year, and vote for the absolutely worst candidate on that side.
Sometimes I wonder if that's what happened back in 2008: everyone registered with the opposite party, and selected the worst possible candidate, giving us Obama and McCain/Palin. Fantasizing this way would let me avoid facing up to the obvious fact that my fellow voters are complete morons.
It's because we Americans are simply too stupid to select an election system that allows more than two parties, such as the proportional representation systems that you Europeans have. All we get is simple plurality voting, which of course leads inevitably to two parties, and a vote for any other party is "a wasted vote".
Yep. Kids, I recommend finding another major while you still can. I hear medicine is still a pretty good field, and pays much better than this.
I googled those things some time ago, maybe a few years ago, perhaps on Newegg, and was surprised to see them still being sold (though again, I've never seen one sold in a local store, I think it's online-only). But what surprised me even more was that it looked like they were exactly the same as they were around 1990. I mean they were identical: the cabinets, the control buttons; the designs hadn't changed one bit since then. They looked really odd compared to the aesthetics of modern computer equipment.
Oh yeah, forgot about him since his head was chopped off. Who is "Dumbledore"?
That's pretty similar, though, to The Tudors: they had Sam Neill in the first season, and of course near the end of the 1st season he died too. They also had a couple of very brief appearances by Peter O'Toole.
So maybe the scheme is to find a near-A-lister actor who's well recognized, a reliable actor, but not nearly as expensive as one of the real A-listers (Neill was pretty much a has-been), and get them into a regular role in the 1st series to draw some more people in, then kill them off near the end of the 1st season so in the 2nd season they can pump up the effects and scenery budgets now that everyone's hooked.
Huh? There's certainly central characters, just like almost any show. Sure, there's a comparatively large number of them compared to a 2-hour movie, but there most certainly are central characters. And yes, you're right, once a show gets going and becomes popular, it's very risky to remove a central character; perhaps their contracts are written so that they can't back out so easily and can't demand too much more money for subsequent seasons, I don't know.
As for having "the technology", I don't buy that. You're in NZ, you should know this. They filmed LoTR there for a reason. They film a bunch of stuff near you in Queensland, Australia too for a good reason; the recent TV show "Terra Nova" was filmed in QLD, and it cost a fortune because of that (mainly because the rainy weather delayed production a lot, forcing them to pay a bunch of people to sit around doing nothing). If it were that cheap to use CGI to replace on-location filming, they'd be doing it a lot more now, but they aren't. CGI still doesn't look that real except when used in limited amounts, and simply doesn't replace things like jungles.
Yes, that sounds like a pretty effective way to discourage corruption. Maybe we should try that here.
I love the courses in college that tell you how you should do something to make maintenance easier but then ignore the real world contraint of time and money (probably the most underrepresented part of making software). Making something with care takes more time (and therefore money) thank hacking something together.
Sorry, but the college courses are correct; hacking something together poorly will cause you to have higher long-term costs. CS departments can't help it if the morons over in the Business Schools across campus are teaching all the MBAs to be short-sighted idiots.
There's a lot of 40-year-old women these days who look pretty hot in a speedo. People aren't aging as badly as they used to.
I was about to ask the same question. The only places I even see those old dot-matrix printers these days is at banks, and they appear to be using the exact same printers they were using 25 years ago.
As the other responder said, this doesn't appear to be the case for this particular project in TFA. However, you're right, what you describe is normal for most projects. The way to handle it is this: since management isn't interested in doing a re-write, you just do your best trying to figure it out, which of course is not going to be very successful. Keep making excuses about how bad the code is when deadlines fly by. All this time, be sure to be looking for a new job on Dice.com. As long as you're making some kind of progress, management will keep you around, because very slow progress is better than no progress at all (which is what you get if you fire the developers). Sooner or later, a new opportunity will present itself to you and you can ditch that dump.
Of course, then you start the cycle all over again. This is the life of a software engineer.
I don't know about this. For the bigger artists, yes, that seems to have been the deal; the record companies basically take all the money from album sales because of their usurious interest-rate "advances", so artists really don't make much money on those, and make real money doing tours.
However, for independent artists, the math is probably very different. Remember, if you're a big band like The Rolling Stones, everyone knows who you are because of decades of promotion and album sales, so when you play a concert, thousands of people line up to buy tickets. If you're some little local band, no one's going to pay a dime to see your concert; at best, some local restaurant will pay you $250 to play a gig there one evening. Divided 4 or 5 ways among the band members, that's not exactly a lot of money. However, many times, local performers will sell their own CDs after the performance for $10 or $15. It's cheap these days to have your own CD professionally made in quantities of 1000 or so, and it's not that hard to do the recording yourself with a PC and get decent results; you don't need some ridiculously expensive recording studio like you did decades ago, and even if you do want to go that route for better quality, it's possible to rent time at studios. So these small-time artists probably make most of their money selling their own independently-produced CDs.
The thing about actors' salaries is true for blockbuster movies with A-list actors, but I don't think this applies to Game of Thrones; I've never seen any of those actors before, except Peter Dinklage (who's played minor parts in some minor movies, such as the crazy children's book author in one scene of "Elf") who probably does not command A-list salaries.
However, GoT does have lots of actors due to its story, so even if none of them are as handsomely paid as Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, it still adds up. Then throw in all the on-location shooting in exotic locations (northern Ireland and Malta namely), all the costumes, and all the sets, and it gets pretty expensive. It's always going to be a lot cheaper to film a show/movie about a small handful of people living in a modern-day city or other location, and spending all their time in an apartment talking to each other. Creating a fantasy world is expensive, as is creating an authentic historical world hundreds of years in the past (like with another successful HBO show, "The Tudors"). Notice also that in both these shows, almost all of the actors were unknowns, and many of them not even from Hollywood but rather little-known European actors. Several actors from The Tudors, in fact, were unknown before that, but became known because of their roles on that show and went on to other work (such as the girl who played Anne Boleyn). There's a reason for this: these TV shows do have a limited budget, so their draw is the story, not the actors, so they get cheap actors (which is fine; high-paid A-list actors are really overrated anyway).
A lot of your economic analysis I think only applies to hollywood movies, which these TV miniseries are not. I think the main way you're going to reduce their cost is to simply reduce the cost of filming somehow, either with better CGI, or lower on-location costs.
If they were smarter about marketing and selling their product, instead of stubbornly insisting that it only be sold through ancient and obsolete distribution channels which are losing subscribers rapidly, they probably would have a lot more money for expensive scenes.
Regulation seems to work decently well in many European countries. Maybe we should outsource all our regulation to them. I think it's fairly obvious that we Americans are just too corrupt to handle regulation ourselves; it's like asking Latin American governments to not be blatantly corrupt. Our culture simply doesn't value non-corruption. So maybe we need to yield to others who do have such a culture.