I'm picturing the demand curve as an exponential, shifted so that it intercepts both the x and y axes. There's a lot of demand for the most popular items, and declining demand for less and less popular ones. By definition, of course, but the shape of the curve matters. No matter how far out you go, there's always somebody who'll want it (given a large enough population).
For a traditional bookstore, the x axis hits the curve pretty high. There's a substantial cost to stock each book, say $2.00/year. There's also a fairly small local demand, say 200 copies a week for a John Grisham novel. Only a few thousand titles sell fast enough to make a profit before that $2.00/year eats up the sale price minus wholesale price.
For a mail-order/online bookstore, the cost to stock each book is lower since you only need a warehouse instead of reading stacks + comfy chairs + cashiers + parking. The cost to stock each book could drop to $0.50/year. The demand is now national, so that same John Grisham novel sells 20,000 copies a week. And a title that sold once a year in a traditional store now sells twice a week. So, many more titles can beat the clock and turn a profit.
The shape of demand didn't change. In both cases it's an exponential cut off at the point of profitability. But that point is now much farther out along the x axis. So the online retailer can make money selling stuff that would never survive in a traditional store. And customers can find stuff online that they'd be lucky to ever see locally.
This isn't delegating responsibility, this is alerting a pedestrian when the idiot drunk driver is coming towards you at excessive speed. Have you seriously never encountered an irresponsible driver?
The audio effect only kicks in below 12 MPH, when the motor and tire noise is too quiet to be heard otherwise. Or were you proposing a siren connected to a breathalyzer?
I heard this suggested as an easier way to get to Mars and back: don't stop.
Rocket to Mars. Stay in high orbit. Drop some remote control vehicles to the surface. Operate them manually without the long delays that Earth-based controllers would suffer. Recapture some very small sample return vehicles from the surface. And shift back into a cheap return-to-Earth trajectory.
I think it's an awful lot of trouble just for more responsive remote controls. But it could be a big savings of fuel/mass and might be a wise step ahead of a full Man-on-Mars mission.
Dude, nobody's gonna pay you $32 for the 30-second questionnaire. But somebody might pay that much for all the information you said you have (credit cards, bank accounts, contact lists, birthdate, address, medical records, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, debit cards).
My online value of $10,000 is worth $675, for which a criminal might pay $80. The difference between $675 and $80 accounts for the risk that the information is bogus, that the credit cards will be closed before they're used, that the whole process is illegal, and profit.
Now if you want to actually sell all your passwords, bank account numbers, and credit card numbers for $32 then go for it. If you want to sell fake passwords and numbers then good luck. Try that a few thousand times and you might get your fingers/legs/neck broke.
The other responders explained where the colors come from, but they skipped over the other half of your question...
The images are what you would see if your eyes were sensitive to the same wavelengths as Hubble and your brain mapped those sensations to the same mental colors. They are not embellished for an extra splash of pink here, a different shade of blue there, or clearing out some poorly placed stars for better contrast. They are simply the measured wavelengths mapped to computer-renderable colors.
He is adding an apostrophe to any word which ends in a vowel before appending the 's' to make it plural. He doesn't insert the apostrophe into plural words that end in consonants in their singular form.
It's weird and wrong, but I've seen that pattern before.
Boy has joined the chat. [Boy] Mr. Owl, how many bits does it take to kill you? [MrOwl] A good question. Let's find out. A one... A two-HOO... A three... MrOwl has left the chat. [Boy] Three!
These are not tours of duck habitats. And these are not tours for ducks. These are tours for humans of human habitats. Adding the sound of a duck to such a tour is novel and arbitrary. Therefore someone should be able to trademark that sound used for that purpose. Duck sounds related to zoos, lakes, blades of grass, and ice cream would not be covered.
By the way, the reason that ducks are affiliated with the tours at all is that the vehicles they use are amphibious like ducks. Making the leap from offering tours in an amphibious vehicle to giving your passengers quackers is clever in my book.
Works fine in Safari 4.0.3 on Mac OS X 10.5.8: the rectangular "watermelon" smoothly resizes both horizontally and vertically whether I make the window smaller or larger.
But I do see the bug in Opera 10.00. If I shrink the window vertically (and only vertically) then the watermelon shrinks in jumps or falls behind and brings up a vertical scrollbar. If I enlarge the window vertically, then the watermelon stays at whatever size it was before. Even a pixel of resizing horizontally forces a refresh to the proper dimensions.
Why are they doing all of this and still leaving behind the single best application of the wiimote - swordfights.
There's a popular new game called Wii Sports Resort that uses a position-sensitive controller add-on to simulate several sports. One of them is Swordplay. You can jab, slice, and block your friend or computer characters. There's even a Nerf sword you can stick the controller into if you want to feel a little more dorky.
If Google's entire business were Gmail then offering it's service for free is fine. But if Google makes money in other areas and then uses that money to prop up a free email service that kills any other company trying to do business in email, that might not be fine. And if Google gains power from it's free (as in beer) email service that strengthens its position in the business area where it already has a monopoly, then things really start smelling rotten.
I love Google and I don't think they have a monopoly anywhere yet. But giving something away for free does not disprove the existence of a monopoly. Often, it's a blink tag on exactly that point.
One of the great things about Starcraft's balance is that each unit is great in certain matchups and awful in others. For example, vultures are great versus zealots or dark templar but not so good versus dragoons or archons. My biggest fear with Starcraft 2 is that there seem to be so many dimensions of advantage/disadvantage that it will be very hard to build an overall strong defense.
Likewise, when most of your opponents are playing one race then you can gain advantages by playing another race with special weapons versus the dominant race. Thus no single race is ever the universal best (unless they REALLY screw up the balance).
Was two releases of the original Starcraft "nonsense"? Would you have cried "money gouging" if Blizzard released a second expansion a year after Brood War?
I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours.' He said, 'Yes, but not in a row.' - Steven Wright
There's something wrong with a calculation method that yields a claim of "230 miles per gallon" for a vehicle that cannot drive 230 miles on one gallon of gasoline.
"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." - Proust (?)
Brevity, simplicity, and disposability are good things for many messages. I'm learning to like a communication stream with brief updates that I can parse in three seconds or ignore when I'm busy without an email program exclaiming that I have fifty messages unread.
I'll back ya up. No job I worked in my twenties had paid vacation during the first year, and half those years were spent working as a chemical engineer.
When I worked at an auto manufacturer, I had zero days vacation the first year and then started earning five days per year beginning on my first anniversary. Gee, I wonder why I was so eager to leave for graduate school eighteen months later. The only bright spots were paid overtime and two-weeks unpaid shutdown at Christmas.
At other entry level jobs the best arrangement I got was the ability to sometimes schedule unpaid days off. Paid vacation? Never.
This article is one of the most accurate reports on cancer treatment I've seen. Even the Slashdot title and summary avoid suggesting it's a cure for all cancers. They're very clear that it's a vaccine for colon cancer to prevent progression to cancer in people already at high risk.
There are lots of immunotherapies at various stages of development and testing. I'm considering one myself for a colon cancer that escaped my colon long ago. I wouldn't have been a candidate for this Pittsburgh MUC1 trial since my cancer developed without warning or risk factors. But, as the article mentioned, there are many trials trying to treat established tumors by training the immune system to recognize abnormal proteins on the cancer cells.
The trial I'm applying for is scary as feck. They collect immune cells from your bloodstream, genetically engineer them to recognize the target protein, and culture them up to large numbers. Meanwhile they knock out your immune system with poisons so the modified cells will survive and hopefully reproduce without competition or attacks from your normal immune cells. Then, hopefully, the modified cells attack the cancer cells and your general immune function also returns before a common bug runs amok and kills you. Not fun, but probably my best remaining option if my present course of radiation therapy doesn't do the trick.
They've had some success with a similar treatment for skin cancer, but they're just starting to try it on colon cancer and have no idea how safe or effective it will be. So don't be surprised that these cures seems just around the corner, year after year. Medical science is some of the messiest, slowest, costliest, and riskiest technology known to man.
A little note about the "months of life" number reported for cancer treatments. It's usually small, like the three months you mentioned. But these treatments are also effective in only a fraction of patients, often on the order of one in four. So for the lucky person in whom the treatment works, that's actually a year of extra life.
If we could predict which treatments would work in which patients, rather than just trying every treatment for the cancerous body part, we would be talking about more substantial improvements and avoid wasting time and suffering subjecting non-responders to inappropriate treatments.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no. If it was handwritten in cursive and his writing looks anything like mine, it'd look like:
Uuin uniuuwln wn, uiwum iu Ounu uwvunm oulnny.
I'm picturing the demand curve as an exponential, shifted so that it intercepts both the x and y axes. There's a lot of demand for the most popular items, and declining demand for less and less popular ones. By definition, of course, but the shape of the curve matters. No matter how far out you go, there's always somebody who'll want it (given a large enough population).
For a traditional bookstore, the x axis hits the curve pretty high. There's a substantial cost to stock each book, say $2.00/year. There's also a fairly small local demand, say 200 copies a week for a John Grisham novel. Only a few thousand titles sell fast enough to make a profit before that $2.00/year eats up the sale price minus wholesale price.
For a mail-order/online bookstore, the cost to stock each book is lower since you only need a warehouse instead of reading stacks + comfy chairs + cashiers + parking. The cost to stock each book could drop to $0.50/year. The demand is now national, so that same John Grisham novel sells 20,000 copies a week. And a title that sold once a year in a traditional store now sells twice a week. So, many more titles can beat the clock and turn a profit.
The shape of demand didn't change. In both cases it's an exponential cut off at the point of profitability. But that point is now much farther out along the x axis. So the online retailer can make money selling stuff that would never survive in a traditional store. And customers can find stuff online that they'd be lucky to ever see locally.
The audio effect only kicks in below 12 MPH, when the motor and tire noise is too quiet to be heard otherwise. Or were you proposing a siren connected to a breathalyzer?
I heard this suggested as an easier way to get to Mars and back: don't stop.
Rocket to Mars. Stay in high orbit. Drop some remote control vehicles to the surface. Operate them manually without the long delays that Earth-based controllers would suffer. Recapture some very small sample return vehicles from the surface. And shift back into a cheap return-to-Earth trajectory.
I think it's an awful lot of trouble just for more responsive remote controls. But it could be a big savings of fuel/mass and might be a wise step ahead of a full Man-on-Mars mission.
They even got the colors wrong. In (b), one lobe should be yellow and the other red. Everybody knows that electrons aren't blue.
Dude, nobody's gonna pay you $32 for the 30-second questionnaire. But somebody might pay that much for all the information you said you have (credit cards, bank accounts, contact lists, birthdate, address, medical records, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, debit cards).
My online value of $10,000 is worth $675, for which a criminal might pay $80. The difference between $675 and $80 accounts for the risk that the information is bogus, that the credit cards will be closed before they're used, that the whole process is illegal, and profit.
Now if you want to actually sell all your passwords, bank account numbers, and credit card numbers for $32 then go for it. If you want to sell fake passwords and numbers then good luck. Try that a few thousand times and you might get your fingers/legs/neck broke.
The other responders explained where the colors come from, but they skipped over the other half of your question...
The images are what you would see if your eyes were sensitive to the same wavelengths as Hubble and your brain mapped those sensations to the same mental colors. They are not embellished for an extra splash of pink here, a different shade of blue there, or clearing out some poorly placed stars for better contrast. They are simply the measured wavelengths mapped to computer-renderable colors.
He is adding an apostrophe to any word which ends in a vowel before appending the 's' to make it plural. He doesn't insert the apostrophe into plural words that end in consonants in their singular form.
It's weird and wrong, but I've seen that pattern before.
Boy has joined the chat.
[Boy] Mr. Owl, how many bits does it take to kill you?
[MrOwl] A good question. Let's find out. A one... A two-HOO... A three...
MrOwl has left the chat.
[Boy] Three!
Plural second person future perfect:
all'ya'll'll've
Usage:
All'ya'll'll've been doin' it wrong if all'ya'll do what yer plannin' on doin'.
These are not tours of duck habitats. And these are not tours for ducks. These are tours for humans of human habitats. Adding the sound of a duck to such a tour is novel and arbitrary. Therefore someone should be able to trademark that sound used for that purpose. Duck sounds related to zoos, lakes, blades of grass, and ice cream would not be covered.
By the way, the reason that ducks are affiliated with the tours at all is that the vehicles they use are amphibious like ducks. Making the leap from offering tours in an amphibious vehicle to giving your passengers quackers is clever in my book.
Works fine in Safari 4.0.3 on Mac OS X 10.5.8: the rectangular "watermelon" smoothly resizes both horizontally and vertically whether I make the window smaller or larger.
But I do see the bug in Opera 10.00. If I shrink the window vertically (and only vertically) then the watermelon shrinks in jumps or falls behind and brings up a vertical scrollbar. If I enlarge the window vertically, then the watermelon stays at whatever size it was before. Even a pixel of resizing horizontally forces a refresh to the proper dimensions.
best dept name evar /.
thx
There's a popular new game called Wii Sports Resort that uses a position-sensitive controller add-on to simulate several sports. One of them is Swordplay. You can jab, slice, and block your friend or computer characters. There's even a Nerf sword you can stick the controller into if you want to feel a little more dorky.
Photoshop Disasters
Microsoft Photoshop Dance Remix
If Google's entire business were Gmail then offering it's service for free is fine. But if Google makes money in other areas and then uses that money to prop up a free email service that kills any other company trying to do business in email, that might not be fine. And if Google gains power from it's free (as in beer) email service that strengthens its position in the business area where it already has a monopoly, then things really start smelling rotten.
I love Google and I don't think they have a monopoly anywhere yet. But giving something away for free does not disprove the existence of a monopoly. Often, it's a blink tag on exactly that point.
One of the great things about Starcraft's balance is that each unit is great in certain matchups and awful in others. For example, vultures are great versus zealots or dark templar but not so good versus dragoons or archons. My biggest fear with Starcraft 2 is that there seem to be so many dimensions of advantage/disadvantage that it will be very hard to build an overall strong defense.
Likewise, when most of your opponents are playing one race then you can gain advantages by playing another race with special weapons versus the dominant race. Thus no single race is ever the universal best (unless they REALLY screw up the balance).
Was two releases of the original Starcraft "nonsense"? Would you have cried "money gouging" if Blizzard released a second expansion a year after Brood War?
They were "infested", not "infected". See also Sarah Kerrigan
I believe they were mind controlled by zerg larvae rather than being undead, so they shouldn't quite qualify as zombies.
Chinese nothing. Just find some terrorists on the Moon and then we'll send men there, no matter how difficult, expensive, or pointless it is.
There's something wrong with a calculation method that yields a claim of "230 miles per gallon" for a vehicle that cannot drive 230 miles on one gallon of gasoline.
"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." - Proust (?)
Brevity, simplicity, and disposability are good things for many messages. I'm learning to like a communication stream with brief updates that I can parse in three seconds or ignore when I'm busy without an email program exclaiming that I have fifty messages unread.
Does Google censor it's results too? Let's see:
Try getting Google to "Be evil".
Uncensored!
I'll back ya up. No job I worked in my twenties had paid vacation during the first year, and half those years were spent working as a chemical engineer.
When I worked at an auto manufacturer, I had zero days vacation the first year and then started earning five days per year beginning on my first anniversary. Gee, I wonder why I was so eager to leave for graduate school eighteen months later. The only bright spots were paid overtime and two-weeks unpaid shutdown at Christmas.
At other entry level jobs the best arrangement I got was the ability to sometimes schedule unpaid days off. Paid vacation? Never.
This article is one of the most accurate reports on cancer treatment I've seen. Even the Slashdot title and summary avoid suggesting it's a cure for all cancers. They're very clear that it's a vaccine for colon cancer to prevent progression to cancer in people already at high risk.
There are lots of immunotherapies at various stages of development and testing. I'm considering one myself for a colon cancer that escaped my colon long ago. I wouldn't have been a candidate for this Pittsburgh MUC1 trial since my cancer developed without warning or risk factors. But, as the article mentioned, there are many trials trying to treat established tumors by training the immune system to recognize abnormal proteins on the cancer cells.
The trial I'm applying for is scary as feck. They collect immune cells from your bloodstream, genetically engineer them to recognize the target protein, and culture them up to large numbers. Meanwhile they knock out your immune system with poisons so the modified cells will survive and hopefully reproduce without competition or attacks from your normal immune cells. Then, hopefully, the modified cells attack the cancer cells and your general immune function also returns before a common bug runs amok and kills you. Not fun, but probably my best remaining option if my present course of radiation therapy doesn't do the trick.
They've had some success with a similar treatment for skin cancer, but they're just starting to try it on colon cancer and have no idea how safe or effective it will be. So don't be surprised that these cures seems just around the corner, year after year. Medical science is some of the messiest, slowest, costliest, and riskiest technology known to man.
A little note about the "months of life" number reported for cancer treatments. It's usually small, like the three months you mentioned. But these treatments are also effective in only a fraction of patients, often on the order of one in four. So for the lucky person in whom the treatment works, that's actually a year of extra life.
If we could predict which treatments would work in which patients, rather than just trying every treatment for the cancerous body part, we would be talking about more substantial improvements and avoid wasting time and suffering subjecting non-responders to inappropriate treatments.