Assume chunks of equal area peal off the shuttle, so that the drag forces are equal (actually, as the foam slows down faster, drag force on it decreases a bit faster).
drag.force = mass * drag.acceleration. So if the mass of the ice is 1/10th as much as the foam, a.foam = 10a.ice.
The kinetic energy gained by falling some distance is mass*distance*acceleration. So with 10x the mass and 1/10th the acceleration and the same distance fallen, ice and foam should end up with almost the same kinetic energy.
The only difference upon impact should be how much area the energy gets transferred into - and that means that ice, being denser, could potentially do more damage.
My guess is that the real answer is that ice is more brittle than foam, will seldom peal off in large intact chunks, and if it does then when it hits it will tend to shatter more easily, so that less energy is transferred to the area of impact.
A device and method for detecting the signal in a video stream indicating that a commercial is about to begin, which will immediately cause the channel to change prior to the establishment of "commercial lock".
I think MY patent will be a lot more popular than THEIR patent...:P
There are plenty of quick fixes to CO2 and energy, if we want to take them. As usual, it's government that is preventing a lot of the solutions Here's one approach:
Revise zoning laws: Stop forcing the building of commercial buildings all in one area - spread them out. Eliminate the foolish prohibitions on commercial or high-rise buildings - let them mix freely. For a few decades, reverse the current zoning approach, by only allowing new commercial construction in an area that is less than 20% commercial (after the new construction is complete). Include floor area, not just ground surface area - so if someone wants to build a high rise corporate tower, they have to pair it with an even larger high rise residential complex, or split the highrise into commercial and residential floors.
Cow dung for power generation seems to have some problems. First of course - will really poor people have all that many animals to produce enough dung?
If the area is hot and dry and short on vegetation, the people probably are already burning cow dung for other purposes. Putting it into electricity generation will make it less available for the poorest to use for cooking.
Cheap solar concentrators seem like an obvious solution for hot dry areas - you can make a big and cheap one out of local materials (e.g. woven baskets) plus shiny tin foil, and the energy is free. Charge up a bunch of batteries for use at night, or if that isn't appropriate-tech enough, use the solar heat to power a compressor to make lots of ice and hot water during the day, and at night use the stored hot and cold to increase the efficiency of a stirling engine burning a small amount of fuel. Having ice can also raise standards of living in the village, reducing food spoilage.
If the area is hot and humid, they probably have plenty of vegetation to burn for electricity, and dung often won't usually be dry enough to burn without extra drying - though waste heat from the generator might be enough for that. Likely they could collect rain for reasonably good drinking water through much of the year, if they had plastic sheets and large storage drums. When the rains stop for a long periods, they could suspend the sheets, fill them with water, and catch condensation.
About 2 to 15 minutes to download, over USB 2.0? It'll be faster to drive to the store and get your movies than to download over broadband at home - though if you're not in a rush and not charged by the megabyte transferred, not having to leave home may be more convenient.
Standard Def Movie - roughly 6Mbps, 7200 seconds worth, would take a minimum of 90 seconds if you got 480Mbps - probably a bit longer in RL. HD movies 2x to 3x longer. Combined with movie previews and browsing for another movie as you wait, the delay should be tolerable. A typical video store would need about 10x as many terminals as they currently have cashiers, to keep the same customer throughput.
The only reason to rent/buy standard def movies this way would be if you have no choice but to do this - otherwise people are comfy with their DVDs. So it'd have to take off on HD video rentals, which means it's limited to owners of HDTVs or those who'll watch on a PC. But that could be a big advantage - the disc players are going to have a tough time getting the costs of their players down with the volume being limited by the installed base of HDTVs, and almost no one will hook a consumer HD disc player up to a PC. That isn't as big a problem for portable hard drive players - their costs are already down, and people are used to hooking them up to PCs.
Probably, to take off fast enough, the video store will have to start out with a service that swaps drive units - allowing them to gang-load a bunch of drives in parallel with the most popular movies. So you can get in and out with the latest videos in a few minutes, all they'd do is wipe out a decryption key on the drive for any you don't pay for. That way they need fewer terminals for "browsers", reduce the load on their RAID, and don't need to rely on people buying the hard drive unit retail to get enough customers.
Long term, the video store would be doomed - the right place to put the terminals will be in a convenience store - closer on average to customers, and no big store full of shelves to pay for.
Gee, whatever happened to the 5th ammendment? I guess the same thing that allows the Prez to wiretap anyone he wants, without a court order. The "loopholes" in our Constitution have been widened enough to make it leak like a screen door on a submarine, with predictable results - we're sinking fast.
It's time to stop making fun of the Libertarians and give them some political power, because as far as I can see, they're the only ones even interested in limiting and cutting back the power of government. Even if you think they're nuts, the fear of them gaining power should drive the other parties somewhat back in line. Without them, your choices for President in 2008 are going to be NeoCon Puppet #2, or Hillary Care. World domination, or surrender to anyone who demands it.
Yeah - I heard that too - my response was "what a waste!" - 10000 people to protect 65000 of the super-elite. And there wasn't even a "credible threat".
Homeland security only cares about one thing - making sure that if there is a terrorist attack, no one be able to say they should have anticipated it and done more. Which is NOT the same thing as providing the best possible security - it's just bureaucratic CYA.
Recording off the air was settled a long time ago, when VCRs started coming out. So now they want to change the rules?
OK. So let's change the rules.
Add an ammendment to the bill, requiring that the "broadcast flag" may only be applied to content that is aired without commercials - i.e. where the content provider foots the entire bill for broadcasting it, in the hope of charging people later for copies. Otherwise, free TV is free TV - if you don't want your content recorded, don't broadcast it through my airspace.
It's time to get started making fabbers a real hobby, like the PC revolution started. Once average-joe can easily download and fab open source electronic designs, this sort of thing will die the death it deserves.
Proof that the law is often written not to protect us, but to benefit some special interest. If it were not for that rational motivation (for the special interest it must seem rational!), the only term for this would be "MORONIC". Let's hope the legislators are too embarrassed to go through with it.
Most consumers won't care - they only "stick the disc in and play it" anyhow. But then, for the vast majority of people and movies, they wouldn't have made a copy anyhow. If they wanted a copy to keep, they'd buy the disc at Walmart, or wait for the video store to put it on sale cheap. So Blu-Ray DRM won't affect them.
Techies will find ways to suck the raw signal out and make un-protected copies available on the internet. The few people out there who like to make big video libraries of every bad movie there is, will get their fix this way. So Blu-Ray DRM will inconvenience them - but won't cause them to buy any more copies.
Real pirates will use those same techniques to make pirated copies in commercial quantities, and sell them in countries that don't energetically enforce copyrights against large scale piracy. So DRM will add a little to their costs - but not much.
In short - DRM will have one main effect - the paranoid movie companies will feel safe to keep producing movies.
When displays get really cheap...
on
Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This type of application will get a lot more interesting when displays get so cheap we can paper our walls with them, so virtual pets can literally roam around the house - following you or playing hide'n'seek.
Yes, NASA should shift their trade-offs away from maximizing payload, toward much lower maintenance. That may mean adding more complexity in some cases (e.g. self monitoring, self testing), and more simplicity in others (fewer parts = fewer things to fail).
No, I don't think re-usables were proven "wrong" - but for them to pay off, the total support and maintenance costs for N flights DO have to be much lower than the cost just making N copies of a throw-away rocket. That might mean doing without cryogenic fuels, despite needing a bigger rocket or having a smaller payload to compensate.
That's probably one reason the solid rocket boosters seem to be a strong component of next generation plans. Even with refurbishment that's close to the cost of making a whole new SRB, they're probably cheaper than non-re-usables that use cyrogenic fuels and so have higher ground support costs.
As our next big experiment with lowering costs, I'd like to see us establish tele-robotic oxygen mining on the moon. That would be relatively affordable (probably $1B mission costs, plus several $billion developing the systems), and should eventually let us deliver oxygen to LEO from the moon, slashing the mass that needs to be lifted from Earth to LEO for Moon and Mars ships.
Even if that doesn't work out, we'll learn a hell of a lot from trying it, just as we learned a lot of things NOT to do from the Shuttle. (The problem was, once we'd technically learned those lessons, we kept flying the Shuttle anyhow!)
If you study the most recent space elevator plans, you'll find out that the risk to the planet are negligible, and the costs will be reasonable. There is still some technology development to be done, and then a few billion dollars to be invested, so it's not a "done deal", but it is looking pretty reasonable.
Imagine two companies, each selling identical computers. One installs your compay's version of Linux and sells 1,000,000 systems a year. That gets their costs way down, so that despite paying you $50 a copy, their price comes in $20 cheaper than the other company that installs Windows and only sells 1000 units a year - despite Microsoft giving it to them for free.
Now imagine that the bigger company buys out the smaller one, and tells you that they intend to pass along the economies of scale they get selling Linux, to those Windows machines - resulting in the Windows machines coming in $50 cheaper than systems with Linux!
"Wait a minute" you say to them... "Our popular Linux software helped you achieve those economies of scale, and now you're going to screw us over by passing the benefits of that on to our competitor? I don't think so..."
Now - just switch Windows and Linux in the above, and you've got your explanation and maybe a bit better perspective on the situation.
It should be possible to come up with a technical solution to make Chinese censorship too expensive.
Ideas, anyone?
The ultimate aim might be to make it so difficult to censor, that the Chinese government decides to simply shut off all access to the outside Internet. At that point, it'd be up to the Chinese people to decide whether they'll tolerate that.
0) Provide fun things to do, ideally with a weekly, evolving story that keeps people coming back, that they can take part in. Let them shape the story a little bit by their actions, even if it's just "story path A vs path B".
1) No Leveling. Create a character, play that character til you're bored with them - they don't continuously "improve". Let people have fun WITHOUT the Grind. Or make character improvement rare, unique, totally unpredictable, earned when a special opportunity came up (but you don't know it's one of those until you complete the quest) - so the 200 hour player has maybe 4 interesting improvements over the newbie.
3) Tightly limit item slots to keep it simple. E.g one melee weapon, one ranged. Want a new one? Toss the old one. Or do upgrades and repairs (weapon and armor damage to spend money on, but you can always dump it and pick up free basic equipment if it gets TOO bad).
4) Sign up once for all MMO games (to set up credit card info, account $$ limits, etc). Eliminate this barrier to getting into a new game, so you can rent a game and try it out. In the long run, this helps all game developers. Forget trying to "lock in" players - that just keeps them from coming back once they switch.
5) Charge on a "run a tab" basis - play until you've run up a certain $$ tab - high enough to get new MMO players hooked before the bill comes due. If they quit forever, bill them after one year.
6) Give'm a taste. Once you've signed up for MMO access, you can create a character and play any game 30 minutes for free. Good for rental games you may or may not like.
7) Make it trivial to chat - as in just talking into a microphone and hearing what others are saying/yelling/screaming nearby. No keyboard, usually no button presses - continuous voice. Charge people if they want to talk, but let them listen for free. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can trigger stock phrases, maybe a personal digitized "battle cry", etc.
8) Offer multiple worlds "right sized" and "right feel" for different players. Some like lots of company, some like nearly empty worlds. Hardcore or nerfed or smurfed. Etc.
9) Provide two tracks - casual and heavy player. Casual players can buy or rent the basic game, and play forever, whenever. Heavy players get on the 'fresh content' upgrade disc track, paying modest amounts for the most recent releases. Separate worlds, obviously, but try to entice casual players onto the upgrade track with in-game tales of "the real action" happening on the frequent upgrade track, while they're dinking around in a relative backwater of the game world. E.g. base game is around a home city under attack, upgrades wander the world taking it to the enemy in new and exciting places - but also able to return to the home city to brag of their exploits.
AMD's complaints all boil down to "AMD can't afford to sell processors as cheap as Intel can, once all discounts and rebates are figured in." If you read between the lines, AMD tries to offer the same sorts of deals as Intel - but can't really afford it, so in most instances Intel wins. This also shows up in AMD's bottom line, where they used to consistently lose money, and still do sometimes, despite Intel's numerous mis-steps of late.
AMD's basic problem is that they basically wish they could become Intel, and think the way to do that is to mimic Intel's sales strategies - which they can never do as well as Intel because they don't have the manufacturing volume and low costs to back it up. "Business 101" could tell them how to compete in this situation, but their leadership's ego(s) keep them from doing it consistently.
I'm happy to see the separate CXV (crew transport vehicle) - I've long said that was the way to get the safest manned launch for the lowest cost, simply because you don't end up compromising with other goals.
I'm less enthused with them trying to use the same system to transport fuel into orbit. I counted something like 50 flights needed to fill the two tankers and two CEVs, each flight taking 3 rockets. (Read the PDF describing their concept of operations.)
I can see where they're coming from - if you do lots of flights, you spread your fixed costs over every flight, which gets the cost per flight way down, making any one flight look like a bargain. That's a great way to make manned flight cheap as well as safer.
But I suspect NASA experts will consider that a weak point - lots of launches means launching lots of redundant tanker payload to orbit and bringing it back down to Earth. They tend to think of efficiency in terms of a single rocket, ignoring fixed costs. It's just going to "feel wrong" to them.
I also wonder if you couldn't build a CEV out of CXVs and S1 tankers, and then just land CXVs and S1 cargo ships individually on the moon. If you had to strip rockets from some of the tankers to keep mass down, just leave those tanks empty in orbit around the moon. You'd have to buy a lot more S1 vehicles, but don't have to develop and launch a separate CEV.
I have content I paid for on my machine, I'm keeping it forever
Maybe allow some intelligence into that. E.g. I don't care to clutter my disk with adverts, at least not beyond a day or two. Don't save any video or animated images that I didn't directly click on - auto-chop them down to a single frame with a link to the original content just in case I want it later.
They ought to go to Phobos instead, and see if it has enough hydrogen (ideally water ice) and carbon to supply fuel for a cheaper and safer variant on Mars Direct.
Run-a-Tab - a workable marketing and accounting variant of micropayments:
Sign up to get an "advance credit" of $24 worth 1200 article pre-paid views - almost like free money, except if you ever cancel your subscription you get charged $24. (So most people will never cancel.) When your "tab" goes over 1000 views, you get charged $20 - and get another advance of $20, worth 1000 views.
Your current tab of remaining pre-paid views is displayed on every article, along with a 'dispute tab' button. Terms and conditions make it clear that you are responsible for monitoring this amount - reducing disputes, and reducing the value to the customer of falsely disputing charges.
Even re-viewing the same article counts as a charge - to keep people from sharing accounts, and to avoid needing to track who has read what. Web browsers or a browser add-in will offer a feature to save some number of days of content from pay-per-view sites, in addition to normal caching.
To minimize problems of someone stealing an account, the default limit of views per day is 20 - the user must explicitly request to view more than that, and thereby accept their current tab.
Disputing a view-charge restores it, no questions asked - just recording that you did a dispute. Dispute twice or more in a day, or dispute a full day's usage, and your name put on a watch list to detect people trying to scam the system. This takes a lot more data and processing, but will apply to fewer subscribers.
If you let your account go inactive for maybe a year, you'll be charged $20 to cover the advance. Reactivate within 2 years to recover your view credits.
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Nonsense.
Assume chunks of equal area peal off the shuttle, so that the drag forces are equal (actually, as the foam slows down faster, drag force on it decreases a bit faster).
drag.force = mass * drag.acceleration. So if the mass of the ice is 1/10th as much as the foam, a.foam = 10a.ice.
The kinetic energy gained by falling some distance is mass*distance*acceleration. So with 10x the mass and 1/10th the acceleration and the same distance fallen, ice and foam should end up with almost the same kinetic energy.
The only difference upon impact should be how much area the energy gets transferred into - and that means that ice, being denser, could potentially do more damage.
My guess is that the real answer is that ice is more brittle than foam, will seldom peal off in large intact chunks, and if it does then when it hits it will tend to shatter more easily, so that less energy is transferred to the area of impact.
A device and method for detecting the signal in a video stream indicating that a commercial is about to begin, which will immediately cause the channel to change prior to the establishment of "commercial lock".
I think MY patent will be a lot more popular than THEIR patent...
There are plenty of quick fixes to CO2 and energy, if we want to take them. As usual, it's government that is preventing a lot of the solutions Here's one approach:
Revise zoning laws: Stop forcing the building of commercial buildings all in one area - spread them out. Eliminate the foolish prohibitions on commercial or high-rise buildings - let them mix freely. For a few decades, reverse the current zoning approach, by only allowing new commercial construction in an area that is less than 20% commercial (after the new construction is complete). Include floor area, not just ground surface area - so if someone wants to build a high rise corporate tower, they have to pair it with an even larger high rise residential complex, or split the highrise into commercial and residential floors.
Cow dung for power generation seems to have some problems. First of course - will really poor people have all that many animals to produce enough dung?
If the area is hot and dry and short on vegetation, the people probably are already burning cow dung for other purposes. Putting it into electricity generation will make it less available for the poorest to use for cooking.
Cheap solar concentrators seem like an obvious solution for hot dry areas - you can make a big and cheap one out of local materials (e.g. woven baskets) plus shiny tin foil, and the energy is free. Charge up a bunch of batteries for use at night, or if that isn't appropriate-tech enough, use the solar heat to power a compressor to make lots of ice and hot water during the day, and at night use the stored hot and cold to increase the efficiency of a stirling engine burning a small amount of fuel. Having ice can also raise standards of living in the village, reducing food spoilage.
If the area is hot and humid, they probably have plenty of vegetation to burn for electricity, and dung often won't usually be dry enough to burn without extra drying - though waste heat from the generator might be enough for that. Likely they could collect rain for reasonably good drinking water through much of the year, if they had plastic sheets and large storage drums. When the rains stop for a long periods, they could suspend the sheets, fill them with water, and catch condensation.
About 2 to 15 minutes to download, over USB 2.0? It'll be faster to drive to the store and get your movies than to download over broadband at home - though if you're not in a rush and not charged by the megabyte transferred, not having to leave home may be more convenient.
Standard Def Movie - roughly 6Mbps, 7200 seconds worth, would take a minimum of 90 seconds if you got 480Mbps - probably a bit longer in RL. HD movies 2x to 3x longer. Combined with movie previews and browsing for another movie as you wait, the delay should be tolerable. A typical video store would need about 10x as many terminals as they currently have cashiers, to keep the same customer throughput.
The only reason to rent/buy standard def movies this way would be if you have no choice but to do this - otherwise people are comfy with their DVDs. So it'd have to take off on HD video rentals, which means it's limited to owners of HDTVs or those who'll watch on a PC. But that could be a big advantage - the disc players are going to have a tough time getting the costs of their players down with the volume being limited by the installed base of HDTVs, and almost no one will hook a consumer HD disc player up to a PC. That isn't as big a problem for portable hard drive players - their costs are already down, and people are used to hooking them up to PCs.
Probably, to take off fast enough, the video store will have to start out with a service that swaps drive units - allowing them to gang-load a bunch of drives in parallel with the most popular movies. So you can get in and out with the latest videos in a few minutes, all they'd do is wipe out a decryption key on the drive for any you don't pay for. That way they need fewer terminals for "browsers", reduce the load on their RAID, and don't need to rely on people buying the hard drive unit retail to get enough customers.
Long term, the video store would be doomed - the right place to put the terminals will be in a convenience store - closer on average to customers, and no big store full of shelves to pay for.
Gee, whatever happened to the 5th ammendment? I guess the same thing that allows the Prez to wiretap anyone he wants, without a court order. The "loopholes" in our Constitution have been widened enough to make it leak like a screen door on a submarine, with predictable results - we're sinking fast.
It's time to stop making fun of the Libertarians and give them some political power, because as far as I can see, they're the only ones even interested in limiting and cutting back the power of government. Even if you think they're nuts, the fear of them gaining power should drive the other parties somewhat back in line. Without them, your choices for President in 2008 are going to be NeoCon Puppet #2, or Hillary Care. World domination, or surrender to anyone who demands it.
Yeah - I heard that too - my response was "what a waste!" - 10000 people to protect 65000 of the super-elite. And there wasn't even a "credible threat".
Homeland security only cares about one thing - making sure that if there is a terrorist attack, no one be able to say they should have anticipated it and done more. Which is NOT the same thing as providing the best possible security - it's just bureaucratic CYA.
Recording off the air was settled a long time ago, when VCRs started coming out. So now they want to change the rules?
OK. So let's change the rules.
Add an ammendment to the bill, requiring that the "broadcast flag" may only be applied to content that is aired without commercials - i.e. where the content provider foots the entire bill for broadcasting it, in the hope of charging people later for copies. Otherwise, free TV is free TV - if you don't want your content recorded, don't broadcast it through my airspace.
It's time to get started making fabbers a real hobby, like the PC revolution started. Once average-joe can easily download and fab open source electronic designs, this sort of thing will die the death it deserves.
...So we'll be RID of the useless thing within a year.
Proof that the law is often written not to protect us, but to benefit some special interest. If it were not for that rational motivation (for the special interest it must seem rational!), the only term for this would be "MORONIC". Let's hope the legislators are too embarrassed to go through with it.
How many people have actually fallen for these scams? Are there statistics?
The question you have to ask, is:
Why are our governments (Canadian, US, others) so terribly afraid of their citizens?
Blu-Ray wins, because they'll have the movies.
Most consumers won't care - they only "stick the disc in and play it" anyhow. But then, for the vast majority of people and movies, they wouldn't have made a copy anyhow. If they wanted a copy to keep, they'd buy the disc at Walmart, or wait for the video store to put it on sale cheap. So Blu-Ray DRM won't affect them.
Techies will find ways to suck the raw signal out and make un-protected copies available on the internet. The few people out there who like to make big video libraries of every bad movie there is, will get their fix this way. So Blu-Ray DRM will inconvenience them - but won't cause them to buy any more copies.
Real pirates will use those same techniques to make pirated copies in commercial quantities, and sell them in countries that don't energetically enforce copyrights against large scale piracy. So DRM will add a little to their costs - but not much.
In short - DRM will have one main effect - the paranoid movie companies will feel safe to keep producing movies.
This type of application will get a lot more interesting when displays get so cheap we can paper our walls with them, so virtual pets can literally roam around the house - following you or playing hide'n'seek.
Yes, NASA should shift their trade-offs away from maximizing payload, toward much lower maintenance. That may mean adding more complexity in some cases (e.g. self monitoring, self testing), and more simplicity in others (fewer parts = fewer things to fail).
No, I don't think re-usables were proven "wrong" - but for them to pay off, the total support and maintenance costs for N flights DO have to be much lower than the cost just making N copies of a throw-away rocket. That might mean doing without cryogenic fuels, despite needing a bigger rocket or having a smaller payload to compensate.
That's probably one reason the solid rocket boosters seem to be a strong component of next generation plans. Even with refurbishment that's close to the cost of making a whole new SRB, they're probably cheaper than non-re-usables that use cyrogenic fuels and so have higher ground support costs.
As our next big experiment with lowering costs, I'd like to see us establish tele-robotic oxygen mining on the moon. That would be relatively affordable (probably $1B mission costs, plus several $billion developing the systems), and should eventually let us deliver oxygen to LEO from the moon, slashing the mass that needs to be lifted from Earth to LEO for Moon and Mars ships.
Even if that doesn't work out, we'll learn a hell of a lot from trying it, just as we learned a lot of things NOT to do from the Shuttle. (The problem was, once we'd technically learned those lessons, we kept flying the Shuttle anyhow!)
If you study the most recent space elevator plans, you'll find out that the risk to the planet are negligible, and the costs will be reasonable. There is still some technology development to be done, and then a few billion dollars to be invested, so it's not a "done deal", but it is looking pretty reasonable.
Imagine two companies, each selling identical computers. One installs your compay's version of Linux and sells 1,000,000 systems a year. That gets their costs way down, so that despite paying you $50 a copy, their price comes in $20 cheaper than the other company that installs Windows and only sells 1000 units a year - despite Microsoft giving it to them for free.
Now imagine that the bigger company buys out the smaller one, and tells you that they intend to pass along the economies of scale they get selling Linux, to those Windows machines - resulting in the Windows machines coming in $50 cheaper than systems with Linux!
"Wait a minute" you say to them... "Our popular Linux software helped you achieve those economies of scale, and now you're going to screw us over by passing the benefits of that on to our competitor? I don't think so..."
Now - just switch Windows and Linux in the above, and you've got your explanation and maybe a bit better perspective on the situation.
It should be possible to come up with a technical solution to make Chinese censorship too expensive.
Ideas, anyone?
The ultimate aim might be to make it so difficult to censor, that the Chinese government decides to simply shut off all access to the outside Internet. At that point, it'd be up to the Chinese people to decide whether they'll tolerate that.
0) Provide fun things to do, ideally with a weekly, evolving story that keeps people coming back, that they can take part in. Let them shape the story a little bit by their actions, even if it's just "story path A vs path B".
1) No Leveling. Create a character, play that character til you're bored with them - they don't continuously "improve". Let people have fun WITHOUT the Grind. Or make character improvement rare, unique, totally unpredictable, earned when a special opportunity came up (but you don't know it's one of those until you complete the quest) - so the 200 hour player has maybe 4 interesting improvements over the newbie.
3) Tightly limit item slots to keep it simple. E.g one melee weapon, one ranged. Want a new one? Toss the old one. Or do upgrades and repairs (weapon and armor damage to spend money on, but you can always dump it and pick up free basic equipment if it gets TOO bad).
4) Sign up once for all MMO games (to set up credit card info, account $$ limits, etc). Eliminate this barrier to getting into a new game, so you can rent a game and try it out. In the long run, this helps all game developers. Forget trying to "lock in" players - that just keeps them from coming back once they switch.
5) Charge on a "run a tab" basis - play until you've run up a certain $$ tab - high enough to get new MMO players hooked before the bill comes due. If they quit forever, bill them after one year.
6) Give'm a taste. Once you've signed up for MMO access, you can create a character and play any game 30 minutes for free. Good for rental games you may or may not like.
7) Make it trivial to chat - as in just talking into a microphone and hearing what others are saying/yelling/screaming nearby. No keyboard, usually no button presses - continuous voice. Charge people if they want to talk, but let them listen for free. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can trigger stock phrases, maybe a personal digitized "battle cry", etc.
8) Offer multiple worlds "right sized" and "right feel" for different players. Some like lots of company, some like nearly empty worlds. Hardcore or nerfed or smurfed. Etc.
9) Provide two tracks - casual and heavy player. Casual players can buy or rent the basic game, and play forever, whenever. Heavy players get on the 'fresh content' upgrade disc track, paying modest amounts for the most recent releases. Separate worlds, obviously, but try to entice casual players onto the upgrade track with in-game tales of "the real action" happening on the frequent upgrade track, while they're dinking around in a relative backwater of the game world. E.g. base game is around a home city under attack, upgrades wander the world taking it to the enemy in new and exciting places - but also able to return to the home city to brag of their exploits.
AMD's complaints all boil down to "AMD can't afford to sell processors as cheap as Intel can, once all discounts and rebates are figured in." If you read between the lines, AMD tries to offer the same sorts of deals as Intel - but can't really afford it, so in most instances Intel wins. This also shows up in AMD's bottom line, where they used to consistently lose money, and still do sometimes, despite Intel's numerous mis-steps of late.
AMD's basic problem is that they basically wish they could become Intel, and think the way to do that is to mimic Intel's sales strategies - which they can never do as well as Intel because they don't have the manufacturing volume and low costs to back it up. "Business 101" could tell them how to compete in this situation, but their leadership's ego(s) keep them from doing it consistently.
I'm happy to see the separate CXV (crew transport vehicle) - I've long said that was the way to get the safest manned launch for the lowest cost, simply because you don't end up compromising with other goals.
I'm less enthused with them trying to use the same system to transport fuel into orbit. I counted something like 50 flights needed to fill the two tankers and two CEVs, each flight taking 3 rockets. (Read the PDF describing their concept of operations.)
I can see where they're coming from - if you do lots of flights, you spread your fixed costs over every flight, which gets the cost per flight way down, making any one flight look like a bargain. That's a great way to make manned flight cheap as well as safer.
But I suspect NASA experts will consider that a weak point - lots of launches means launching lots of redundant tanker payload to orbit and bringing it back down to Earth. They tend to think of efficiency in terms of a single rocket, ignoring fixed costs. It's just going to "feel wrong" to them.
I also wonder if you couldn't build a CEV out of CXVs and S1 tankers, and then just land CXVs and S1 cargo ships individually on the moon. If you had to strip rockets from some of the tankers to keep mass down, just leave those tanks empty in orbit around the moon. You'd have to buy a lot more S1 vehicles, but don't have to develop and launch a separate CEV.
I have content I paid for on my machine, I'm keeping it forever
Maybe allow some intelligence into that. E.g. I don't care to clutter my disk with adverts, at least not beyond a day or two. Don't save any video or animated images that I didn't directly click on - auto-chop them down to a single frame with a link to the original content just in case I want it later.
They ought to go to Phobos instead, and see if it has enough hydrogen (ideally water ice) and carbon to supply fuel for a cheaper and safer variant on Mars Direct.
Run-a-Tab - a workable marketing and accounting variant of micropayments:
Sign up to get an "advance credit" of $24 worth 1200 article pre-paid views - almost like free money, except if you ever cancel your subscription you get charged $24. (So most people will never cancel.) When your "tab" goes over 1000 views, you get charged $20 - and get another advance of $20, worth 1000 views.
Your current tab of remaining pre-paid views is displayed on every article, along with a 'dispute tab' button. Terms and conditions make it clear that you are responsible for monitoring this amount - reducing disputes, and reducing the value to the customer of falsely disputing charges.
Even re-viewing the same article counts as a charge - to keep people from sharing accounts, and to avoid needing to track who has read what. Web browsers or a browser add-in will offer a feature to save some number of days of content from pay-per-view sites, in addition to normal caching.
To minimize problems of someone stealing an account, the default limit of views per day is 20 - the user must explicitly request to view more than that, and thereby accept their current tab.
Disputing a view-charge restores it, no questions asked - just recording that you did a dispute. Dispute twice or more in a day, or dispute a full day's usage, and your name put on a watch list to detect people trying to scam the system. This takes a lot more data and processing, but will apply to fewer subscribers.
If you let your account go inactive for maybe a year, you'll be charged $20 to cover the advance. Reactivate within 2 years to recover your view credits.