About 1/3 of those items are to the direct benefit of the artists. The guitars, the sound equipment, the blow-out party, the catering, the tour bus and the limos are all effectively income for the artists.
For one thing, a number of those "services" are provided by the labels or through companies that the labels have deals with. The artist is billed at an outrageous rate, so they're not that lucky at all.
For another thing, a number of these services are probably not the artists' decisions. I would imagine that the record label goes to some lengths to "encourage" the artist to be profligate-- to the point of even simply throwing the party for them. But of that I'm not certain.
But unknown artists will give their left arm for a recording contract that is a supposed rip-off. Why? Because it isn't a rip-off
I have a question you could ask of any desperately aspiring musician or band: "would you sign a deal with the devil, if it were the only way you could ever become nationally famous?"
I'll bet that in at least half of the cases, you'd get a "yes". The record labels know this, so they do everything they can to be the next best thing.
Bands are offered a choice: sign this "deal memo", which essentially commits you to signing a deal you haven't looked at... or never work in this town again. That's how it works, and the major labels don't compete with each other over acts that try to obtain better terms-- that'd be bad for business.
And so the artists is forced to jump in blind, or try to make it on their own. With the advent of the Internet, it's at least possible to hope that you can make it yourself... but still, very few bands do it, because the anti-competitive record labels control the major channels of distribution by maintaining high-barriers of entry and with things like payola (technically, "indie" promoters nowadays).
All the brainy contract-reading nerds in the world can't compete with an entrenched anti-competitive cartel. But if you think you can do better, please do try.
The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute.
Nupedia was the one with the rigorous proofreading system and quality-control process. It never went much of anywhere. There are a few articles up, but the project is pretty much in hiatus.
One of the biggest problems with Nupedia was that it required you to write an entire article yourself. Wikipedia, since it's completely wide-open and collaborative, is much easier to deal with. You can start an article with a paragraph or so; people will add information; someone will rearrange and rewrite so it looks better; people will copyedit it; etc.
At some point an article may reach a level of maturity that would be a good starting point for the formal copyedit/review process designed into Nupedia, thus the two projects might complement each other eventually.
a dispute ever comes by someone with a stronger background could rewrite the article and put his/her bio on it.
Experience doesn't always correspond to accuracy. A much better solution is to simply to address the facts in dispute, which is generally what happens on Wiki. If someone disputes a fact in an article (say, that the relapsing-fever tick has a soft outer shell), they should be prepared to provide evidence, either citing literature or some other reliable websites.
At worst, someone needs to go to the library or contact an expert. You'd be surprised how much information is available even to non-experts.
I do think there should be some paid volunteers and experts in particular subjects to check the authenticity of the work. Professors or researchers would be nice.
I agree that this would be nice. However, the great thing about professors is that they already have a source of income. What you really need to do is bring this project to their attention and try and get them to take it seriously.
Maybe Wiki's too young and rough for their taste. But I imagine that there are enough professors who would find the concept intriguing enough to contribute a few proofreads and edits here and there, just on principle.
Wiki's strength is that articles tend to get better as people contribute, not worse. There's certainly some vandalism, and even some idiots who think they know more than they actually do... But my bet is that if someone took it upon themselves to make the correction specified, it would stay correct.
I wouldn't trust Wiki's accuracy as much as I might trust other encyclopedias (though EB has its mistakes too!) But I would trust it as much or more than the typical "I consider myself an expert, let me stick some info on my web page" page that you come across when googling. This at least has review, and incorrect facts are regularly uncovered.
When Wiki reaches a certain level of maturity, snapshot articles will be lifted out of it and "frozen". Perhaps they'll be added to Nupedia, or some other non-editable encyclopedia with a dedicated fact-checking and copyediting system.
You could never do that with H2G2 or e2, of course, because of the copyright issues.
The job of the Supreme Court is to implement and enforce the constitution. This document states that Congress has the authority to protect copyrights for a 'limited time'. Virtually any amount of time, provided it is explicitly named, can properly be called limited.
Read Lessig's analysis. Learn a little something about the case. At very least, do that before you post.
The issue had nothing to do with how long Congress could set that limited time at. It could be 100 years or 100,000 years. The only thing that the Constitution asks is that the time should actually have a limit.
And therein lies the problem: if Congress can retroactively extend copyright an unlimited number of times, then there is no limit to the terms. Think of it as an egg-timer that I simply wind back up every time it's about to expire. There's no limit to how long such an egg-timer might run before I let it run out, as long as I want to keep it running. Retroactive extensions violate the simple Constitutional requirement that copyright terms have a limit. And therefore they're not Constitutionally acceptable.
This was the number one argument in the briefs. It was the point made by the dissenting Judge in the Appeals Court (out of a panel of three judges.) This Court has claimed a responsibility to keep Congress in line with the Constitution, and they abdicated that responsibility by addressing every single argument but the biggest one.
In conclusion, say all you want about the industry pissing you off and quality deteriorating. Everyone outside of high school says that, they did 20 years ago, they will 20 years from now.
One major change, which doesn't require too many subjective evaluations to notice, is that the music companies have made a shift away from developing artists to a regime where they're more about developing songs. There's always been a certain amount of this throughout the past few decades, but it's taken on a particularly feverish industrial pitch in the last several years.
The end result is that listeners seem to be less attached to the artists that they listen to, and buying the album or becoming part of a following is less important; with the exception of a very small number of artists, all you need is that band's one or three major hits. Then you can forget all about them because chances are they'll just fade away.
This change really took off right around the time that it became easy to simply swap and collect songs in a convenient and reasonably high-quality (ie non-casette) format, with the Internet and p2p making it easy to share with millions of people all over the world. Instant disaster.
would be very happy if I could just plug it into my network and have it update itself via my DSL connection that 3 other PC's share. Currently they only support ATT Broadband in their products.
People with new Tivos can just buy a USB to Ethernet adapter and they're set to go (cheap and easy.) People with older Tivos can run a serial cable to their PC and run PPP over it, allowing them to share the computer's network connection. This is a snap to set up if you use Windows, and only slightly more work if you use Linux.
Really, if you've ever been to a bar during a rush-hour, you'll notice how little time the bartender has for real social interaction. And yet, this is the time that bars make the most money.
The point is to encourage that situation. People might be willing to forgo bartender socialization just for the chance to get free drinks. Not to mention the cool factor of getting their drink from a machine.
So as a result you get a high volume of customers and at that point social interaction is more customer-to-customer than customer-to-bartender. Perfectly alright with me and most other people.
He says somewhere that he has a "mid-range BMW" which probably means a $40K-55K 5-series. Calculate the monthly payment on a 4-year loan for *that*, son.
Talk about comparing apples and gold-plated oranges. If you're the kind of person who feels the need to drive a $40-55K BMW 5-series, you're sure not likely to give it up for a Segway. Unless you've just had a pretty major conflict with your state's motor vehicle laws.
But given that this guy seems to be employed by a grass-roots ad-agency, it's not surprising that his math's a little generous. And I wouldn't be too surprised if BMW was also one of his clients.
PS With proper maintenance you should be able to drive that BMW for years after you've paid it off. What's the estimated lifespan of a Segway?
What I'm getting at is, how do we know that this site isn't just a plant by Segway's marketing agency?
What do you mean "how do we know it isn't a plant"? Of course it's a plant.
I don't mind the dupes. I don't mind the mistakes. But blithely posting underhanded ad pitches on the front page cross the line.
I like Slashdot, and I've never before stooped to bitching at the editors... But I can't take it anymore: what the fuck is the matter with you guys? I know VA Linux stock ain't doing all that well, but for christ's sake, you have jobs unlike a lot of Slashdot's readership. If you don't care about this site-- which seems to be the case-- why don't you step down and let someone else take over?
Basically, I've never heard anything about the Catholic church disputing the idea of extinction or dinosaurs. Or are you just using that as a type of example?
There was a great deal of contention prior to 1950, when the Church officially announced that it would tolerate its members believing in the Theory of Evolution. This ocurred when Pope Pius XII produced the papal encyclical entitled "Humani Generis". His statement said, essentially, that it was alright for Catholics to believe whatever scientific theory they wanted... then went on to stress that the Theory of Evolution was still unproven.
The above poster may be referring to the much more recent (1996) statement by Pope John Paul II entitled "Truth cannot contradict Truth". In this document, the pope not only accepted the ToE as being in line with Catholic beliefs, but he stated that it was "more than a hypothesis". This was the first time that a Pope officially supported the ToE, rather than merely tolerating it.
So it's more or less correct that the Church only officially got behind Evolution recently, though I don't know if it's accurate to say that they disputed the existence (and extinction) of the Dinosaurs.
The same applies to fossils. If fossils found far far back didn't belong to deceased animals, then that means (to religious people) that God put them there (the bones). But then that contradicts the watchmaker theory. Why would God create essentially fraudulent records?
It seems that the existence of fossils could be construed as incompatible with the Watchmaker theory anyway. Why would God, in the process of creating an intricately designed world, feel it necessary to create creatures (actually, entire ecosystems) that would ultimately be unable to survive?
You could respond that God is ineffable, but that same logic pretty much works for the folks who think God created fake fossils and buried them in the ground. The point is, once you allow for the existence of God, rational arguments are pretty much always vulnerable to the divine wild-card.
If I'm making no noise, and have an easy grasp of the course material, who says I have to sit there or even take notes unless the class requires participation? I've had a disdain for professors who either require attendance and/or "undevided attention" when I know the course material or no participation in class ins necessary.
As a former student, soon to be teaching, I'm torn on this one. The difference between my best and my worst classes has often been student engagement. When half the class is zoning out, I find it that much harder to be interested in the material. When everyone around me is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (whether it be because the material is interesting, or because they know their performance depends on their absorbing the material), the attitude is contagious. In-class teaching is valuable, and very often provides more than any textbook. And for god's sake, you didn't pay $n,000 dollars to get the same education you could get from a video-correspondance course.
I wish more professors moved from dry lecturing to a slightly more socratic class style. In the absence of that, they might at least making the material important enough that you can't afford to miss it (ie, not a re-hash of the textbook chapter.) At very least, it's not unreasonable to make attendance non-mandatory and demand that the people who don't want to be there go check their email somewhere else.
*Sigh* I have this problem with my students, too. The "GPS signal" is actually many radio signals, all of them out in the open and conveying no position data on you
Several relatively faint satellite signals on a limited range of frequencies that are relatively easy to isolate and disrupt (hell, a simple steel box will jam a GPS device if you physically have access to it-- it doesn't take a high-tech solution.)
See this article from Aviation International News (or just do a Google search).
As far as GPS-jamming goes, the top-level poster made a perfectly reasonable point. However, I don't think that it's much of a solution, as the authorities will soon notice the constant lack of information from your box and come over to investigate.
Astronauts need to breathe
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Clearly you haven't lived in a tight space with four other people all eating rice and lentils. The methane alone will asphyxiate them all.
Though perhaps they could use it as some sort of power source?
If you have several cars with 4 people in it, all having there cell phone turned on, then it might look like a traffic jam, or at least very condensed traffic, but it might not be the case
Presumably they're looking as much at the speed of the passers-by than at the density; four cellphones zipping past at 120 km/h certainly looks a lot different than four cellphones sitting still or crawling by along with 10,000 others. Four cellphones sitting still while 10,000 other zip by at 120 km/h also isn't going to look like a jam.
I imagine they've refined this technique a little bit so that it won't be confused by a few people stopped or going slower than average, etc. I remember a number of companies doing this, so I'm sure there's commercial software out there that's already been tested.
Any way you cut it, a traffic jam's going to look a lot different from a normal, free roadway. I don't imagine that it's terribly difficult to build a system that can differentiate between the two, although it's possible that there will be some unique situations in which confusion is possible.
So now, the cloners are allowing a freelance journalist to get together a group of scientists and they're going to take samples of DNA from the mother and the child and send them back. How much do you want to bet that they won't let the scientists take the actual samples?
If they don't let the scientists take the actual samples, then everyone'll pack up and the whole thing'll be put down as a hoax. Regardless of whether it's true or not. A lot of people are just looking for an excuse to call these people a bunch of idiots and dump them on their ass.
These Raelian folks have apparently put a lot of money and effort into this project, whatever it is, and I get the distinct impression that a primary goal is self-publicizing. If the Raelians come across as anything less than above-board, all that money and effort goes down the drain, and nobody'll ever give them a second thought.
The end result will be that we read about the first verified case of human cloning five years from now instead of five months.
If they don't make a Trek movie (which WILL make money) then are going make another movie, and not every movie is a "Harry Potter". The "other" movie they make could very well wind up being a Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Those two movies were boc office flops. Definitely getting a theater half full is better than maybe getting a theater completely empty.
Taking risks is what part of what studios do. Major studios are like banks, and movies are investments. If the average performance of their other movies (risks like Pluto Nash included) greatly exceeds that of Trek, they'll spread their dollars out there instead of the unsatisfactory known quantity that is Trek. Sort of the same way you might spread your risks across an S&P Index Fund rather than putting your money into one consistently underperforming company, say CSX railroads.
Now, Trek hasn't reached the point where it's not worth investing in, which is why Nemesis exists (in fact, it's doing pretty well so far). But if present trends continue it'll head there. And sooner or later Paramount will start to reserve its money for other films, including risks like Pluto Nash (which could, in theory, have been the next Austin Powers) rather than throwing it at always-disappointing Star Trek movies. I hope they fire Berman et al. long before that happens.
But my point was a lot simpler than that. I was just pointing out that ticket sales do matter, because they give a better indication of the health of a particular franchise than raw cash intake does (even inflation-adjusted intake.) An even better statistic would normalize the ticket sales or cash intake against the same figures for the entire industry; that'd give you a really good indication of how Trek was doing in comparison (whereas raw numbers are hard to interpret.)
I dissagree. They are measuring the comercial value of the movies. It doesn't matter if half as many people see it if they are willing to pay twice as much.
If average theatre attendance also dropped by half during that period, then drops in Trek attendance wouldn't mean a lot. If, on the other hand, Americans were still turning out for other movies in droves (despite the price increases), while Trek ticket sales plummeted, then Trek would have a problem.
Or put it as a question: why should a multiplex waste a screen on a half-full showing of Trek when it can use that resource for a full showing of Harry Potter? And why should Paramount put money into Trek if it can get better attendance on another film?
Here's the woldwide gross for each Trek movie in adjusted 2002 dollars
Even adjusting for inflation doesn't do it. You have to adjust for changes in ticket prices, which have accelerated well beyond inflation. Throw that in, or look at the actual number of tickets sold, and the picture gets even grimmer.
Full page advertising and those Flash ads that inject themselves on top of what you're reading are about a hundred times more intrusive than anything even an ad-loaded glossy magazine is ever going to give you. One thing dead-tree publications never demand is that you stop what you're doing and watch some silly, slow Flash animation.
Advertisers should stick with injecting the ads into the article text, even if they're large blocks that you have to scroll through until you get to the rest of it. Being forced through full page ads or Flash crap just makes me want to avoid a site.
I've thought about this for a little while, and there are some issues.
do remember, your card would have to have the same MAC as his, or the AP could drop your packets.
And if you have the same MAC, then you and he get the same packets, and neither of you can surf.
Setting the MAC address on many 802.11 cards is a snap. My Lucent card allows me to change it on the fly through their control panel. As to neither of you being allowed to surf, there are ways around that-- for one thing, you could simply install a different TCP/IP stack that isn't paralyzed by the confusion; your mark might find his own surfing disrupted, but he might not know it's you.
I've considered that maybe the answer is not to trust MAC addresses or IP addresses, and to instead use an IPSEC tunnel from the client to the AP. That would afford better security and make it much harder for anyone to hijack your connection. 'Course that'd require some extra installation, but most OSes are starting to include IPSEC-- you'd just need a way to make configuration simple and automatic.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, a number of those "services" are provided by the labels or through companies that the labels have deals with. The artist is billed at an outrageous rate, so they're not that lucky at all.
For another thing, a number of these services are probably not the artists' decisions. I would imagine that the record label goes to some lengths to "encourage" the artist to be profligate-- to the point of even simply throwing the party for them. But of that I'm not certain.
I have a question you could ask of any desperately aspiring musician or band: "would you sign a deal with the devil, if it were the only way you could ever become nationally famous?"
I'll bet that in at least half of the cases, you'd get a "yes". The record labels know this, so they do everything they can to be the next best thing.
And so the artists is forced to jump in blind, or try to make it on their own. With the advent of the Internet, it's at least possible to hope that you can make it yourself... but still, very few bands do it, because the anti-competitive record labels control the major channels of distribution by maintaining high-barriers of entry and with things like payola (technically, "indie" promoters nowadays).
All the brainy contract-reading nerds in the world can't compete with an entrenched anti-competitive cartel. But if you think you can do better, please do try.
Nupedia was the one with the rigorous proofreading system and quality-control process. It never went much of anywhere. There are a few articles up, but the project is pretty much in hiatus.
One of the biggest problems with Nupedia was that it required you to write an entire article yourself. Wikipedia, since it's completely wide-open and collaborative, is much easier to deal with. You can start an article with a paragraph or so; people will add information; someone will rearrange and rewrite so it looks better; people will copyedit it; etc.
At some point an article may reach a level of maturity that would be a good starting point for the formal copyedit/review process designed into Nupedia, thus the two projects might complement each other eventually.
Experience doesn't always correspond to accuracy. A much better solution is to simply to address the facts in dispute, which is generally what happens on Wiki. If someone disputes a fact in an article (say, that the relapsing-fever tick has a soft outer shell), they should be prepared to provide evidence, either citing literature or some other reliable websites.
At worst, someone needs to go to the library or contact an expert. You'd be surprised how much information is available even to non-experts.
I do think there should be some paid volunteers and experts in particular subjects to check the authenticity of the work. Professors or researchers would be nice.
I agree that this would be nice. However, the great thing about professors is that they already have a source of income. What you really need to do is bring this project to their attention and try and get them to take it seriously.
Maybe Wiki's too young and rough for their taste. But I imagine that there are enough professors who would find the concept intriguing enough to contribute a few proofreads and edits here and there, just on principle.
I wouldn't trust Wiki's accuracy as much as I might trust other encyclopedias (though EB has its mistakes too!) But I would trust it as much or more than the typical "I consider myself an expert, let me stick some info on my web page" page that you come across when googling. This at least has review, and incorrect facts are regularly uncovered.
When Wiki reaches a certain level of maturity, snapshot articles will be lifted out of it and "frozen". Perhaps they'll be added to Nupedia, or some other non-editable encyclopedia with a dedicated fact-checking and copyediting system.
You could never do that with H2G2 or e2, of course, because of the copyright issues.
Read Lessig's analysis. Learn a little something about the case. At very least, do that before you post.
The issue had nothing to do with how long Congress could set that limited time at. It could be 100 years or 100,000 years. The only thing that the Constitution asks is that the time should actually have a limit.
And therein lies the problem: if Congress can retroactively extend copyright an unlimited number of times, then there is no limit to the terms. Think of it as an egg-timer that I simply wind back up every time it's about to expire. There's no limit to how long such an egg-timer might run before I let it run out, as long as I want to keep it running. Retroactive extensions violate the simple Constitutional requirement that copyright terms have a limit. And therefore they're not Constitutionally acceptable.
This was the number one argument in the briefs. It was the point made by the dissenting Judge in the Appeals Court (out of a panel of three judges.) This Court has claimed a responsibility to keep Congress in line with the Constitution, and they abdicated that responsibility by addressing every single argument but the biggest one.
One major change, which doesn't require too many subjective evaluations to notice, is that the music companies have made a shift away from developing artists to a regime where they're more about developing songs. There's always been a certain amount of this throughout the past few decades, but it's taken on a particularly feverish industrial pitch in the last several years.
The end result is that listeners seem to be less attached to the artists that they listen to, and buying the album or becoming part of a following is less important; with the exception of a very small number of artists, all you need is that band's one or three major hits. Then you can forget all about them because chances are they'll just fade away.
This change really took off right around the time that it became easy to simply swap and collect songs in a convenient and reasonably high-quality (ie non-casette) format, with the Internet and p2p making it easy to share with millions of people all over the world. Instant disaster.
People with new Tivos can just buy a USB to Ethernet adapter and they're set to go (cheap and easy.) People with older Tivos can run a serial cable to their PC and run PPP over it, allowing them to share the computer's network connection. This is a snap to set up if you use Windows, and only slightly more work if you use Linux.
"free" should read "cheap".
Really, if you've ever been to a bar during a rush-hour, you'll notice how little time the bartender has for real social interaction. And yet, this is the time that bars make the most money.
The point is to encourage that situation. People might be willing to forgo bartender socialization just for the chance to get free drinks. Not to mention the cool factor of getting their drink from a machine.
So as a result you get a high volume of customers and at that point social interaction is more customer-to-customer than customer-to-bartender. Perfectly alright with me and most other people.
Talk about comparing apples and gold-plated oranges. If you're the kind of person who feels the need to drive a $40-55K BMW 5-series, you're sure not likely to give it up for a Segway. Unless you've just had a pretty major conflict with your state's motor vehicle laws.
But given that this guy seems to be employed by a grass-roots ad-agency, it's not surprising that his math's a little generous. And I wouldn't be too surprised if BMW was also one of his clients.
PS With proper maintenance you should be able to drive that BMW for years after you've paid it off. What's the estimated lifespan of a Segway?
What do you mean "how do we know it isn't a plant"? Of course it's a plant.
I don't mind the dupes. I don't mind the mistakes. But blithely posting underhanded ad pitches on the front page cross the line.
I like Slashdot, and I've never before stooped to bitching at the editors... But I can't take it anymore: what the fuck is the matter with you guys? I know VA Linux stock ain't doing all that well, but for christ's sake, you have jobs unlike a lot of Slashdot's readership. If you don't care about this site-- which seems to be the case-- why don't you step down and let someone else take over?
There was a great deal of contention prior to 1950, when the Church officially announced that it would tolerate its members believing in the Theory of Evolution. This ocurred when Pope Pius XII produced the papal encyclical entitled "Humani Generis". His statement said, essentially, that it was alright for Catholics to believe whatever scientific theory they wanted... then went on to stress that the Theory of Evolution was still unproven.
The above poster may be referring to the much more recent (1996) statement by Pope John Paul II entitled "Truth cannot contradict Truth". In this document, the pope not only accepted the ToE as being in line with Catholic beliefs, but he stated that it was "more than a hypothesis". This was the first time that a Pope officially supported the ToE, rather than merely tolerating it.
So it's more or less correct that the Church only officially got behind Evolution recently, though I don't know if it's accurate to say that they disputed the existence (and extinction) of the Dinosaurs.
The same applies to fossils. If fossils found far far back didn't belong to deceased animals, then that means (to religious people) that God put them there (the bones). But then that contradicts the watchmaker theory. Why would God create essentially fraudulent records?
It seems that the existence of fossils could be construed as incompatible with the Watchmaker theory anyway. Why would God, in the process of creating an intricately designed world, feel it necessary to create creatures (actually, entire ecosystems) that would ultimately be unable to survive?
You could respond that God is ineffable, but that same logic pretty much works for the folks who think God created fake fossils and buried them in the ground. The point is, once you allow for the existence of God, rational arguments are pretty much always vulnerable to the divine wild-card.
As a former student, soon to be teaching, I'm torn on this one. The difference between my best and my worst classes has often been student engagement. When half the class is zoning out, I find it that much harder to be interested in the material. When everyone around me is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (whether it be because the material is interesting, or because they know their performance depends on their absorbing the material), the attitude is contagious. In-class teaching is valuable, and very often provides more than any textbook. And for god's sake, you didn't pay $n,000 dollars to get the same education you could get from a video-correspondance course.
I wish more professors moved from dry lecturing to a slightly more socratic class style. In the absence of that, they might at least making the material important enough that you can't afford to miss it (ie, not a re-hash of the textbook chapter.) At very least, it's not unreasonable to make attendance non-mandatory and demand that the people who don't want to be there go check their email somewhere else.
Several relatively faint satellite signals on a limited range of frequencies that are relatively easy to isolate and disrupt (hell, a simple steel box will jam a GPS device if you physically have access to it-- it doesn't take a high-tech solution.)
See this article from Aviation International News (or just do a Google search).
As far as GPS-jamming goes, the top-level poster made a perfectly reasonable point. However, I don't think that it's much of a solution, as the authorities will soon notice the constant lack of information from your box and come over to investigate.
Though perhaps they could use it as some sort of power source?
Presumably they're looking as much at the speed of the passers-by than at the density; four cellphones zipping past at 120 km/h certainly looks a lot different than four cellphones sitting still or crawling by along with 10,000 others. Four cellphones sitting still while 10,000 other zip by at 120 km/h also isn't going to look like a jam.
I imagine they've refined this technique a little bit so that it won't be confused by a few people stopped or going slower than average, etc. I remember a number of companies doing this, so I'm sure there's commercial software out there that's already been tested.
Any way you cut it, a traffic jam's going to look a lot different from a normal, free roadway. I don't imagine that it's terribly difficult to build a system that can differentiate between the two, although it's possible that there will be some unique situations in which confusion is possible.
And on that day, the voting public will damn well have the speed limit to raised 140mph so they can continue to drive like maniacs on the NJ Turnpike.
If they don't let the scientists take the actual samples, then everyone'll pack up and the whole thing'll be put down as a hoax. Regardless of whether it's true or not. A lot of people are just looking for an excuse to call these people a bunch of idiots and dump them on their ass.
These Raelian folks have apparently put a lot of money and effort into this project, whatever it is, and I get the distinct impression that a primary goal is self-publicizing. If the Raelians come across as anything less than above-board, all that money and effort goes down the drain, and nobody'll ever give them a second thought.
The end result will be that we read about the first verified case of human cloning five years from now instead of five months.
Taking risks is what part of what studios do. Major studios are like banks, and movies are investments. If the average performance of their other movies (risks like Pluto Nash included) greatly exceeds that of Trek, they'll spread their dollars out there instead of the unsatisfactory known quantity that is Trek. Sort of the same way you might spread your risks across an S&P Index Fund rather than putting your money into one consistently underperforming company, say CSX railroads.
Now, Trek hasn't reached the point where it's not worth investing in, which is why Nemesis exists (in fact, it's doing pretty well so far). But if present trends continue it'll head there. And sooner or later Paramount will start to reserve its money for other films, including risks like Pluto Nash (which could, in theory, have been the next Austin Powers) rather than throwing it at always-disappointing Star Trek movies. I hope they fire Berman et al. long before that happens.
But my point was a lot simpler than that. I was just pointing out that ticket sales do matter, because they give a better indication of the health of a particular franchise than raw cash intake does (even inflation-adjusted intake.) An even better statistic would normalize the ticket sales or cash intake against the same figures for the entire industry; that'd give you a really good indication of how Trek was doing in comparison (whereas raw numbers are hard to interpret.)
If average theatre attendance also dropped by half during that period, then drops in Trek attendance wouldn't mean a lot. If, on the other hand, Americans were still turning out for other movies in droves (despite the price increases), while Trek ticket sales plummeted, then Trek would have a problem.
Or put it as a question: why should a multiplex waste a screen on a half-full showing of Trek when it can use that resource for a full showing of Harry Potter? And why should Paramount put money into Trek if it can get better attendance on another film?
Even adjusting for inflation doesn't do it. You have to adjust for changes in ticket prices, which have accelerated well beyond inflation. Throw that in, or look at the actual number of tickets sold, and the picture gets even grimmer.
Advertisers should stick with injecting the ads into the article text, even if they're large blocks that you have to scroll through until you get to the rest of it. Being forced through full page ads or Flash crap just makes me want to avoid a site.
do remember, your card would have to have the same MAC as his, or the AP could drop your packets. And if you have the same MAC, then you and he get the same packets, and neither of you can surf.
Setting the MAC address on many 802.11 cards is a snap. My Lucent card allows me to change it on the fly through their control panel. As to neither of you being allowed to surf, there are ways around that-- for one thing, you could simply install a different TCP/IP stack that isn't paralyzed by the confusion; your mark might find his own surfing disrupted, but he might not know it's you.
I've considered that maybe the answer is not to trust MAC addresses or IP addresses, and to instead use an IPSEC tunnel from the client to the AP. That would afford better security and make it much harder for anyone to hijack your connection. 'Course that'd require some extra installation, but most OSes are starting to include IPSEC-- you'd just need a way to make configuration simple and automatic.