Look at it this way, some one was just killed by a bicycle and the blind deal with those everyday and they are just as quiet. 99% of the people benefiting from the sound will in fact be people that can't be bothered to look first. I've had gasoline running cars that were silent enough I didn't hear them approach. There does seem to be a touch of insanity making regulations that require noise pollution. Whether it's hydrogen or battery electric motor driven vehicles are likely the future so are we now setting a standard that we are committing to a future of gasoline engine sounding cars from here on out? To me it seems a little like demanding cars make the sound of horse hooves a 100 years ago so people were more comfortable with the transition.
Most small businesses fail and most Kickstarter projects deliver. I'd say their average is excellent in the real world. It's the lack of exposure to the business world for the average person that is at issue. You are assuming you prepaid for a product when you in a sense invested in a potential business. Your investment might return the quoted items but it might return nothing. It's why Double Fine was able to raise so much because they are established and there's a very high probability they will deliver. Most of the wackier ones don't receive funding.
I largely agree with what Woz said but..... Since Steve Jobs died they can't seem to figure out what to name the next generation iPad. I never bought an iPhone or iPad before but I did buy the latest one and I find myself having to describe which one it is instead of using an actual name.
The other thing is I switched a while back to Apple because I got sick of Microsoft updating every time I turned around and I had in the past better luck with Apple. I was shocked at the Lion upgrade which made a mess of my machine. A recent update added to the mess. The worst was iTunes which some one thought it'd be cool to get rid of "Hide iTunes" and make it really slow to unhide the bottom menu bar, which is now the only way short of turning it off to get rid of iTunes, and sometimes that doesn't work so I end up having to turn off iTunes just to get out of it. I guess they want to trap you in some vain hope you'll buy more. Instead I rarely turn it on now and use my Touch for music.
Across the board I've noticed Apple software released in the last year seems buggier than in the past. It feels like they are rushing stuff to market rather than doing a proper debugging. One example is Author which has lots of issues like after my first few attempts it no longer accepts Keynote files and even a reinstall couldn't sort out the mess. Also sound clips refuse to loop. There are a few other issues I just wish it was more stable. Hard to layout a book when you don't know what content it'll accept. Also they released it without iPhone or Touch support. They also dropped support for Mpeg and only support that bastard M4p format that Apple came up with. What's a pain is only Compressor 4 and I take it the latest Final Cut Pro support that format in 2K and Compressor sucks and Final Cut Pro is now iMovie Pro so I avoid it like the plague.
My point is it feels like chaos is setting in. I hope I'm wrong but if not the company could be a mess in another year. Steve Jobs was the ring master and the lions don't seem to know what to do now that he's gone. They might start eating the audience if some one doesn't take control.
They spent 18 million reworking it to 3D. I haven't seen a lot of publicity so it's unlikely they spent more than 18 million for prints and advertizing. They made 17.4 million on the opening weekend just on domestic box office. It almost certainly will make 50 million domestic and could hit a 100 million although somewhere in the middle is more likely. Foreign is less for 3D but it sold strong overseas so it could match the US take. Break the numbers down and for a 36 million investment they get around 50 to 100 million back after you factor out the theater take. They either double or triple their money and that doesn't factor in a spike in DVD and Blu-rays since they are likely to also release a special addition. The studios are in it to make money not films. Why risk 18 million on a film that could bomb when they make 30 to 70 million in profit by recycling a hit? Disney survived through many bleak years after Walt died re-releasing old animated films.
"Stick Your Head Between Your Legs and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" Warning. I guess "Unsurvivable" covers this in a less colorful way.
Look, hard copy everything and if not there's still DVDs and CDs to be burned. Personal data can easily be burned on a CD. Keep a copy in a bank vault and at home. You can even keep a thumb drive on you, I did this for years. These days there are cloud services but I like hard data. It's less secure but you can even e-mail yourself data. I have actually done this before as a back up since it can be accessed from your local Starbucks. Consider FTPs since they are fairly cheap and semi secure. The whole point is to get your data away from home to keep it safe.
The earthquakes are all minor but groundwater being poisoned in areas without back up supplies is serious. They keep talking about how there's a layer of rock protecting the groundwater but the fracking shatters that layer of protective rock. It's hard to argue with tap water being flammable. Great we get 10 to 30 years of natural gas and the residents get to shower with bottled water for the next few hundred years. Some of the chemicals used are cancer causing so guess who gets stuck with that bill? Not the gas companies. If it's safe prove it's safe before you frack half the country. This got rammed through with zero oversight. Everyone can say who cares about the midwest but guess what that's where much of your food is grown. Also one of the hottest ares for potentially fracking is the very place New York City gets much of it's water from. Cheap gas may end up as very expensive water. This is about the rich getting richer, period. They were already getting plenty of gas out of the fields this is about getting 3X to 4X as much thus increasing profits. Who gets stuck with the environmental costs in the end? The tax payers. Which do we need more, water or natural gas? Well you can't raise corn and wheat or drink natural gas so I have to come down on the side of water. The gas companies don't care about groundwater because they make their money off gas and not groundwater. If they could charge a $100 a barrel for groundwater it'd be a very different story.
I come out of the film industry and my saying is "some one always gets greedy". I told this to my expartner on my last film and he claimed that wasn't the case. Just to prove my point he stole the film literally from my home and to this day it's gone unfinished and is effectively worthless. I've seen it happen time after time that some one involved gets greedy and often the films get shelved because of it so no one benefits. The oddest thing it tends to be the person least involved that thinks they deserve it all which is what happened to me. On my previous film an actor sued the distributor because he thought he should get a share of the profits in spite of the fact the film broke even and his contract didn't grant him profits. He lost the first lawsuit and got a $25,000 judgement against him so what did he do? He sued a second time and lost again. It's shocking how greedy people get when they think they can make a quick buck.
When did 130 ly become nearby? Did someone invent a FTL drive while I wasn't paying attention?
Light coming from it is only a 130 years old not millions or billions of years old. I think the general unspoken idea of nearby is that they may still have the same technology if there were intelligent life that they did a 130 years ago so there's the potential for contact if a civilization was detected. There is a likely window of a few hundred years to a few thousand years where contact would be possible. There is no set standard for nearby but I think that would be the closest I could come, any star with the potential for contact. 130 light years is definitely in that range and with multiple large planets it'd be a solid candidate for life.
It puts the control back in the hands of the creator where it belongs. The only ones I can see against it would be the corporations that want to exploit the artists work. Wait until one of them signs with a major distributor and see how fast the demands to take the work down show up. It's when the corporations get involved that things fall apart. Artists are always looking for ways to promote themselves while corporations only care about how much money they would make off it.
The original drones were meant as cheap somewhat disposable aircraft that avoided loss of life and aircraft that cost 35 to 400 million to replace. Now since contractors are making a bundle off building them they ask how can we make them more expensive? The first version of the modern drones were built by a modelmaker in the US for Israel and they were essentially large RC planes with on board cameras. They cost around 50K to build. The US was so impressed they launched their own drone program which for many years was a miserable failure. At first they were shooting for 500K instead of the modest 50K. Eventually the price shot up to 1.5 to 3 million. I have no idea what the current ones cost. It's classic military in that now that you have one that can fly recon can you arm it? Now can you make it stay up for 24 hours? What about days, weeks, months? Every time they open their mouths to try to turn them into swiss army knives that can do anything the price goes up. One day you'll hear about 400 million dollar drones and the cost savings will be out the window. Why do you need one that can stay up for months at a time at potentially 10X the cost? Isn't it better to have ten drones that need to be refueled more often? One gets shot down or a mechanical failure and you still have nine. You can cover more ground with ten drones and each can be specialized rather than trying to make them so them can do anything needed. The real beauty of a drone is a cheap craft that can be mass produced and it doesn't hurt so much when they get shot down. They already made them stealth which is expensive and now they want nuclear. It's just more and bigger toys with only a marginal advantage.
The two biggest problems with storage are first that hydrogen is the smallest element so it tends to pass easily through most seals meaning storage tanks will leak the hydrogen over time. The other issue is hydrogen combines so easily with other elements. The classic example is if you expose hydrogen to oxygen you get water. It works best for short term storage. Don't drive your car for a month and you may have an empty tank. There are storage mediums as in other elements that will bond to the hydrogen but are much easier to break loose so as an example heating the storage tank releases the hydrogen slowly. I actually like hydrogen as a back up source for off grid homes more than for cars. The hydrogen economy they keep boasting about depends on a cheap abundant source of hydrogen, kind of sounds like oil in that way. The plus with hydrogen is if you can solve the production problem we won't ever run out.
Darwinism needs to take over. Remove all government funding for law school tutition and the schools themselves except for those that agree to commit 10 or more years to civil service. Change the rules so if a lawsuit is declared frivolous then the party being sued can counter sue for 10X the amount sought. Regulate lawyers as in place a strict limit on the number of lawyers allowed to practice. We have more than the rest of the world put together so there are obviously too many. Limit lawyer fees to time and expenses plus 10%. Limit corporate lawsuits to actual losses plus legal fees. Limit the number of times some one can take the bar. Sorry but some take it for years and even in rare cases decades before they pass. I doubt they hang a sign on their wall that it took five tries to pass the bar. The point is to limit lawsuits and improve the quality of the lawyers that remain.
Okay here are scary numbers. There were 1,143,358 lawyers in the US in 2007 but only 751,000 farmers in 2008. There are significantly more lawyers than farmers. Farmers contribute food. Lawyers contribute headaches.
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Look at it this way, some one was just killed by a bicycle and the blind deal with those everyday and they are just as quiet. 99% of the people benefiting from the sound will in fact be people that can't be bothered to look first. I've had gasoline running cars that were silent enough I didn't hear them approach. There does seem to be a touch of insanity making regulations that require noise pollution. Whether it's hydrogen or battery electric motor driven vehicles are likely the future so are we now setting a standard that we are committing to a future of gasoline engine sounding cars from here on out? To me it seems a little like demanding cars make the sound of horse hooves a 100 years ago so people were more comfortable with the transition.
Most small businesses fail and most Kickstarter projects deliver. I'd say their average is excellent in the real world. It's the lack of exposure to the business world for the average person that is at issue. You are assuming you prepaid for a product when you in a sense invested in a potential business. Your investment might return the quoted items but it might return nothing. It's why Double Fine was able to raise so much because they are established and there's a very high probability they will deliver. Most of the wackier ones don't receive funding.
I largely agree with what Woz said but..... Since Steve Jobs died they can't seem to figure out what to name the next generation iPad. I never bought an iPhone or iPad before but I did buy the latest one and I find myself having to describe which one it is instead of using an actual name. The other thing is I switched a while back to Apple because I got sick of Microsoft updating every time I turned around and I had in the past better luck with Apple. I was shocked at the Lion upgrade which made a mess of my machine. A recent update added to the mess. The worst was iTunes which some one thought it'd be cool to get rid of "Hide iTunes" and make it really slow to unhide the bottom menu bar, which is now the only way short of turning it off to get rid of iTunes, and sometimes that doesn't work so I end up having to turn off iTunes just to get out of it. I guess they want to trap you in some vain hope you'll buy more. Instead I rarely turn it on now and use my Touch for music. Across the board I've noticed Apple software released in the last year seems buggier than in the past. It feels like they are rushing stuff to market rather than doing a proper debugging. One example is Author which has lots of issues like after my first few attempts it no longer accepts Keynote files and even a reinstall couldn't sort out the mess. Also sound clips refuse to loop. There are a few other issues I just wish it was more stable. Hard to layout a book when you don't know what content it'll accept. Also they released it without iPhone or Touch support. They also dropped support for Mpeg and only support that bastard M4p format that Apple came up with. What's a pain is only Compressor 4 and I take it the latest Final Cut Pro support that format in 2K and Compressor sucks and Final Cut Pro is now iMovie Pro so I avoid it like the plague. My point is it feels like chaos is setting in. I hope I'm wrong but if not the company could be a mess in another year. Steve Jobs was the ring master and the lions don't seem to know what to do now that he's gone. They might start eating the audience if some one doesn't take control.
They spent 18 million reworking it to 3D. I haven't seen a lot of publicity so it's unlikely they spent more than 18 million for prints and advertizing. They made 17.4 million on the opening weekend just on domestic box office. It almost certainly will make 50 million domestic and could hit a 100 million although somewhere in the middle is more likely. Foreign is less for 3D but it sold strong overseas so it could match the US take. Break the numbers down and for a 36 million investment they get around 50 to 100 million back after you factor out the theater take. They either double or triple their money and that doesn't factor in a spike in DVD and Blu-rays since they are likely to also release a special addition. The studios are in it to make money not films. Why risk 18 million on a film that could bomb when they make 30 to 70 million in profit by recycling a hit? Disney survived through many bleak years after Walt died re-releasing old animated films.
"Stick Your Head Between Your Legs and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" Warning. I guess "Unsurvivable" covers this in a less colorful way. Look, hard copy everything and if not there's still DVDs and CDs to be burned. Personal data can easily be burned on a CD. Keep a copy in a bank vault and at home. You can even keep a thumb drive on you, I did this for years. These days there are cloud services but I like hard data. It's less secure but you can even e-mail yourself data. I have actually done this before as a back up since it can be accessed from your local Starbucks. Consider FTPs since they are fairly cheap and semi secure. The whole point is to get your data away from home to keep it safe.
The earthquakes are all minor but groundwater being poisoned in areas without back up supplies is serious. They keep talking about how there's a layer of rock protecting the groundwater but the fracking shatters that layer of protective rock. It's hard to argue with tap water being flammable. Great we get 10 to 30 years of natural gas and the residents get to shower with bottled water for the next few hundred years. Some of the chemicals used are cancer causing so guess who gets stuck with that bill? Not the gas companies. If it's safe prove it's safe before you frack half the country. This got rammed through with zero oversight. Everyone can say who cares about the midwest but guess what that's where much of your food is grown. Also one of the hottest ares for potentially fracking is the very place New York City gets much of it's water from. Cheap gas may end up as very expensive water. This is about the rich getting richer, period. They were already getting plenty of gas out of the fields this is about getting 3X to 4X as much thus increasing profits. Who gets stuck with the environmental costs in the end? The tax payers. Which do we need more, water or natural gas? Well you can't raise corn and wheat or drink natural gas so I have to come down on the side of water. The gas companies don't care about groundwater because they make their money off gas and not groundwater. If they could charge a $100 a barrel for groundwater it'd be a very different story.
I come out of the film industry and my saying is "some one always gets greedy". I told this to my expartner on my last film and he claimed that wasn't the case. Just to prove my point he stole the film literally from my home and to this day it's gone unfinished and is effectively worthless. I've seen it happen time after time that some one involved gets greedy and often the films get shelved because of it so no one benefits. The oddest thing it tends to be the person least involved that thinks they deserve it all which is what happened to me. On my previous film an actor sued the distributor because he thought he should get a share of the profits in spite of the fact the film broke even and his contract didn't grant him profits. He lost the first lawsuit and got a $25,000 judgement against him so what did he do? He sued a second time and lost again. It's shocking how greedy people get when they think they can make a quick buck.
When did 130 ly become nearby? Did someone invent a FTL drive while I wasn't paying attention?
Light coming from it is only a 130 years old not millions or billions of years old. I think the general unspoken idea of nearby is that they may still have the same technology if there were intelligent life that they did a 130 years ago so there's the potential for contact if a civilization was detected. There is a likely window of a few hundred years to a few thousand years where contact would be possible. There is no set standard for nearby but I think that would be the closest I could come, any star with the potential for contact. 130 light years is definitely in that range and with multiple large planets it'd be a solid candidate for life.
It puts the control back in the hands of the creator where it belongs. The only ones I can see against it would be the corporations that want to exploit the artists work. Wait until one of them signs with a major distributor and see how fast the demands to take the work down show up. It's when the corporations get involved that things fall apart. Artists are always looking for ways to promote themselves while corporations only care about how much money they would make off it.
The original drones were meant as cheap somewhat disposable aircraft that avoided loss of life and aircraft that cost 35 to 400 million to replace. Now since contractors are making a bundle off building them they ask how can we make them more expensive? The first version of the modern drones were built by a modelmaker in the US for Israel and they were essentially large RC planes with on board cameras. They cost around 50K to build. The US was so impressed they launched their own drone program which for many years was a miserable failure. At first they were shooting for 500K instead of the modest 50K. Eventually the price shot up to 1.5 to 3 million. I have no idea what the current ones cost. It's classic military in that now that you have one that can fly recon can you arm it? Now can you make it stay up for 24 hours? What about days, weeks, months? Every time they open their mouths to try to turn them into swiss army knives that can do anything the price goes up. One day you'll hear about 400 million dollar drones and the cost savings will be out the window. Why do you need one that can stay up for months at a time at potentially 10X the cost? Isn't it better to have ten drones that need to be refueled more often? One gets shot down or a mechanical failure and you still have nine. You can cover more ground with ten drones and each can be specialized rather than trying to make them so them can do anything needed. The real beauty of a drone is a cheap craft that can be mass produced and it doesn't hurt so much when they get shot down. They already made them stealth which is expensive and now they want nuclear. It's just more and bigger toys with only a marginal advantage.
The two biggest problems with storage are first that hydrogen is the smallest element so it tends to pass easily through most seals meaning storage tanks will leak the hydrogen over time. The other issue is hydrogen combines so easily with other elements. The classic example is if you expose hydrogen to oxygen you get water. It works best for short term storage. Don't drive your car for a month and you may have an empty tank. There are storage mediums as in other elements that will bond to the hydrogen but are much easier to break loose so as an example heating the storage tank releases the hydrogen slowly. I actually like hydrogen as a back up source for off grid homes more than for cars. The hydrogen economy they keep boasting about depends on a cheap abundant source of hydrogen, kind of sounds like oil in that way. The plus with hydrogen is if you can solve the production problem we won't ever run out.
The Health Problems confused me then I realized they must have seen this video and were afraid of their kids trying it out and ending up as oh so many birds do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUQRenG-ZjQ&feature=related
Well, what a bunch of faggot assholes here.
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
--- Ethanol-fueled
"You" actually has only one 'U' in it. I'm guessing you got banned for misspelling. Just use a spell checker and you'll be fine the next time.
Darwinism needs to take over. Remove all government funding for law school tutition and the schools themselves except for those that agree to commit 10 or more years to civil service. Change the rules so if a lawsuit is declared frivolous then the party being sued can counter sue for 10X the amount sought. Regulate lawyers as in place a strict limit on the number of lawyers allowed to practice. We have more than the rest of the world put together so there are obviously too many. Limit lawyer fees to time and expenses plus 10%. Limit corporate lawsuits to actual losses plus legal fees. Limit the number of times some one can take the bar. Sorry but some take it for years and even in rare cases decades before they pass. I doubt they hang a sign on their wall that it took five tries to pass the bar. The point is to limit lawsuits and improve the quality of the lawyers that remain. Okay here are scary numbers. There were 1,143,358 lawyers in the US in 2007 but only 751,000 farmers in 2008. There are significantly more lawyers than farmers. Farmers contribute food. Lawyers contribute headaches.