It, and everything else, are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them.
Of course, but I wasn't questioning that it was worth that amount of money. I asked why.
Interesting question... the collector's market is really strange and much of it is completely illogical. Things nobody wants can be worth a fortune a little later. Believe it or not there are actually fashion trends in junk. I'm constantly amazed at the crap you can sell interior decorators. When steam punk is all the rage you can sell old cogwheels and cast iron table legs for a fortune, when the trend switches to 70's nostalgia your rusty iron machinery becomes worthless but crappy plastic disco balls and sweaty old clothes become valuable rarities. Believe it or not vintage jeans can be worth thousands and the more beat up they are the more people pay. I've seen people buy stuff that I resolutely refused to believe was worth a dime before I saw money change hands. Just because it's rare or old does not mean it is valuable, but it could be if it comes into fashion so timing is key. Stuff like the Apple I is valuable because of the history of Apple and the company's effect on the computer business. Most Nazi stuff is considered creepy and sells to a niche market but Enigma machines are an exception and sell to rich math geeks and IT startups millionaires because you get nerd points for owning one. Just wait a couple of decades and watch Google promotional banners, posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts or low serial Nexus One smartphones sell for outlandish sums of money.
I'm not arguing the point you're making, but there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Just because this woman apparently was unaware of the value of this old stuff does not mean that she's stupid, for all we know she may be a brilliant medical researcher who just happens to be totally uninterested in old computer hardware.
I've watched enough episodes of all kinds of shows like 'Pickers' and 'Salvage Hunters' in addition to my own experience to know that you'd not believe what stuff you have laying around in your garage or on your property that's worth money and it doesn't have to be a long lost Vermeer, the hitherto unknown seventh production Bugatti Royale or a Ming vase. I once met a guy who found an old Audi Quattro in a hedge on his property one morning. It had been driven there by joyriders and abandoned. He just let it lay there until the local authority started making noises about the thing. Nobody claimed the vehicle, nobody wanted it except the council who wanted it gone so when a passing Quattro enthusiast offered to buy it becasue it was in good nick and he wanted to restore it the land owner went through the motions to claim it and sold it for a tidy amount. That car was in good order despite looking rather bad but even if it hadn't been he could probably still have sold it to a used parts trader. I've seen people sell granite boulders for a up to a couple of hundred dollars a piece, rusty old machinery, gnarled furniture, light fittings can all be flogged to people outfitting themed restaurant/nightclubs for amounts of money you wouldn't believe. The list goes on, and on. My sister even cleaned out her house last year, put the junk into one big box and flogged most of it on ebay for just under £200. The biggest problem you have when cleaning out a house or a property is not making money off of what might seem like junk at first glance, it's finding a dealer who isn't going to rip you off if you don't have time to sell your junk yourself.
The artist who is doing well is the exception and not the rule.
'Doing well' isn't necessarily a good metric to use. A few years ago, I was listening to a piece on PBS about musicians and self-publishing, and they had one artist who was talking about their switch to self-publishing; they had cut an album for a commercial label, and despite it having sold several tens of thousands of CDs over a span of three years, the label claimed that they were still 'in the hole' for production and advertising costs, and the artist had not seen a dime beyond their initial advance. Meanwhile, an album that they had produced themselves and sold through their website directly via a service (the music equivalent of an 'instant print' service) gave them about $7 per CD sold, and in one year had already produced income more than triple the value of their advance from the commercial label. Now, that artist's income from marketing their work directly may not have been 'doing well' in an overall sense, but the relative payout from working with a commercial label and independent publishing certainly qualifies, for the return on their work, as 'doing well', even if it's not of itself enough to support a 'well off' lifestyle.
That's where I try to buy my music, directly from the artists if it is at all possible. Recently, however, I was informed that that this makes me a luddite because I want to own copies of my music instead of having a Spotify account. The thing is that if the labels pay badly it seems Spotify pays even worse. The popular logic goes that this is the label's fault for pocketing the money they get from Spotify which implies the logic that the artists should switch to a new gatekeeper i.e. Spotify an the other streaming services (I'm sure they'd loose no time in setting up a cartel if they haven't already) but I don't see that happening quickly since the streaming services will always get raped by the people who own the rights to the large music collections because a lot of their revenue comes from serving classic popular music to nostalgic users and a streaming service will always be more sensitive to their needs and opinions than rights owners than those of an individual artist. IMHO artists are and will always be best advised to market and sell their own product and they would be best served by a heavily decentralised market especially now that anybody with a PC and the knowledge of how to do music production and recording can cobble together pretty decent product and set up their own website meaning that overheads have decreased massively. This would also have the effect of putting a sock in the mouth of people who claim they pirate music to stick it to the Studios, anybody who pirates from indie musicians who produce and market their own music is an asshole, plain and simple.
Only the rich will be able to afford it. So you die with 75 and they with 300. They will feel like god like creatures.
I know you are joking but there is a core of truth in it. Back in ancient Egypt the average lifespan was around 50 years, if somebody lived to 60 it was considered to be remarkable. For the nobility, however, things were different. Ramses II lived to be 90 which was effectively almost twice the normal lifespan so both he and the royalty and high aristocracy in general who lived in the lap of luxury must have seemed "blessed with long life" in the eyes of the population, to steal a quote from the Lord of the Rings. Based on my unshakable belief in the axiom "there is no such thing as free lunch" I'm going to go out in a limb here and hypothesise that if age reversing is ever perfected there will be some sort of tradeoff that makes it less appealing than it would seem at first. One likely tradeoff might for example be not being able to live very far from a team of doctors for the last 150-200 years of your 300 years of life. There is a reason that evolution set our expiry date at a maximum of 100 years or so.
The numbers are what they are. The UK has a healthy balance in trade with most of the more economically advanced EU member states, but overall it is the non-UK side that tends to export slightly more at the moment, so they have more to lose if the bureaucrats throw their toys out of the pram instead of dealing with any UK exit like adults.
And there is no particular reason to assume the trade rules would change dramatically in any new agreements anyway. As I said before, the trade agreements are one of the areas where everyone saw common ground long before the EU was around, and they are one of the areas where there is still a lot of common ground today. You're just fear-mongering, again.
You are talking as if none of Britain's booming trade has anything to do with the common market and as if that relationship would continue unchanged if Britain exits the EU. If that really happens and the EU bureaucrats allow Britain to exit whilst retaining all of its trade agreements and privileges except influencing internal EU affairs, what is to stop Greece, Hungary or any other country where EU skeptics have come into power from demanding the same? Anybody interested in keeping the EU in tact is going to be as enthusiastic about giving Britain a 'leave while retaining all membership privileges' deal as the UK government is to give you a 'continue to earn money and use public facilities while paying no taxes' deal.
> For example, Sweden has to abide by most EU rules even though it isn't in the EU
I think you're thinking about Norway here, mate.
He's still got a point. Britain wants to restrict immigration from other EU nations but I wonder what the reaction would be if British people began to be rejected for residency in other EU nations? One of the founding principles of the EU is the principle of the free movement of goods. The free movement of services and freedom of establishment. The free movement of persons including free movement of workers. This only works as long as everybody is equal. If the British are not on board with these basic principles then they should Brexit and do their own thing because they won't get any opt-outs on the four freedoms which is essentially what they want.
3) Since it depends upon the eurozone for at least half of it's exports. The toll barriers resulting from a Brexit would induce British business to move significant portions of their production into the common market area.
Britain is one of the few countries within the EU that exports more to countries outside it than to ones in it, albeit by a small margin. One of the arguments for leaving is that the regulations required by the EU (which may have protectionist origins) make it harder to compete outside of it with faster growing world economies.
It's easy to point out statistics like this. It is tougher to find that a bit less than half of your exports, albeit by a small margin, have alluvasudden become 15-20% more expensive and therefore less competitive. That is a recipe for a nosedive in market share, and market share is much more easily lost than regained. It is considerably more difficult to point out how British businesses who export into the common market are supposed to compete if they keep their production in the UK. The obvious reaction to a Brexit is for British businesses to form subsidiaries inside the common market, preferably in places where labour costs are low with the resulting loss in British jobs and tax revenue. The average German, Frenchman, Italian Spaniard, Pole, Portuguese, Romanian will not give a hoot if the dark British beer that is becoming less and less popular in Britain but is gaining popularity on the continent is brewed in the UK or in Romania under the oversight of British Brewers if it costs 20% less. If Britain exits the European Union literally hundreds of international agreements it is a party to as part of it's EU membership will become void and will have to be painfully renegotiated and that is going to be difficult and it will take a long time. Since many of these agreement are trade agreements the damage would be likely to be extensive. This process of painstakingly renegotiating Britain's trade agreements will not be made easier by the fact that the other EU nations would have very little motivation to give the UK, an outsider nation, the same deal as a EU member nation. If the EU becomes a two tier organisation with full members and second tier members as some have suggested. The UK as an outsider looking in on a market area of 500 million potential customers would effectively be a honorary third class member. UK access to that market would depend on the good will the British enjoy in Berlin and Paris. What's more, and whether Nigel Farage is willing to admit it or not, how painful the Brexit will be depends mightily upon what kind of a mood Angela Merkel and Fracois Hollande are to give Britan a good deal when Brexit happens.
Most rational people recognize Britain should be part of the EU.
Why? I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'm erring on the side of leaving for entirely rational reasons.
In short, I think the UK and much of continental Europe have different long term goals. The Eurozone nations have opted for a degree of financial integration that the UK doesn't want or need. Obviously that hasn't worked out very well recently, at least for the economically stronger EU nations, so there is little reason for the UK to join in the foreseeable future. I think the wider EU is also heading for a more centralised, federalised system of legislation and broader government, which again the UK does not generally want to join. I suspect that in the long term these two fundamental types of integration will prove to be inseparable, and those who want to be part of the EU will increasingly lose sovereignty over things like taxation, weakening national governments in favour of ever-more-powerful central EU authorities. That's OK if it really is what they want, but I don't think it is what the UK is looking for in its relationship with its European neighbours.
On the other hand, the UK and many other EU nations are valuable trading partners for each other, so maintaining a liberal trading environment is in everyone's interests. This was what our previous generation actually signed up for by joining the predecessors of the current EU, of course. I think many in the UK also value things like the the European Convention on Human Rights (even if our current administration do not like it) and would be happy to remain a signatory, but that is a different European system, not part of the EU. Similarly I think those from the UK who often travel to Europe or vice versa would see merit in the UK joining the Schengen Area (even though again our current administration are probably strongly against it).
As things stand, it may be that the best way of everybody getting as close as possible to achieving their own goals is for the UK and EU to separate amicably, and then for the UK to establish alternative agreements for mutual benefit with the EU and/or individual member states in those areas where everyone's interests do align. It would no doubt be painful for everyone in the short term, but this might be a having to break eggs to make omelettes situation.
Somebody has been attending UKP rallies, "...separate amicably..." that is has to be one of my favourite Nigel Farage quotes. In other words you want the UK to enjoy all the economic advantages of EU membership without any of the burdens and preferably outside the EU? The Americans have a saying: "There is no such thing as free lunch". What motivation would the other EU nations have to give Britain all the economic advantages it used to enjoy once Britain leaves the EU without any of the perceived shortcomings such as political and economic integration? At the very least:
1) Giving a Britain outside the EU a 'special deal' would be opening the door to every eurosceptic wing nut and velvet fascist in the EU to demand the same special treatment. That would be worse than the Brexit alone since it would effectively be the end of the EU and exactly the effect that the likes of Putin would like to see. Which is also why the Russians support parties like Front National and the Party for Freedom in one way or another. The smart machiavellian thing to do is let Britan Brexit if it really wants to and then give them a rough time.
2) There are plenty of countries willing to fill the political vacuum that Britain leaves in the EU, first among them being Poland. It is pretty revealing that when the Ukraine crisis hit it was German France and Poland that took centre stage when a decade ago it would have been Britain, France and Germany. If Britan Brexits in some fit of nationalistic intoxication Britain would to a large extent be an overseer in the decision making process that will determine the political and economic future
GayWAD was right, if yo've used Slashdot beta to find a sex partner, you now have no problems.
Actually, if you have managed to find a sex partner using Slashdot beta all you will have achieved is finding another person who needs to read several Wikipedia articles and closely study the diagrams before they can successfully have sex with another human being since both of your previous sexual experience will have been limited to a computer monitor and one or both of the prehensile, multi-fingered extremities attached to the upper limbs of your body.
I have zero sympathy for Anonymous Cowards. I think that if people have something that they really need to say on/. that they should use their normal account. Who cares if they lose mod points. The people like you posting using AC accounts should be outed!
That the AC was certainly extreme, I don't think anybody deserves to be blackmailed. He did have a point though, if you are cheating on your wife/husband you won't get much sympathy from me if you get found out and there is plenty of people who agree with me. The world is full of people who claim they are saving/improving their marriages/relationships and doing their spouse some sort of favour by cheating behind their backs instead of drumming up the courage to talk to their spouse and working out their relationship problems honestly. These individuals are all delusional and they all deserve to be found out because they are making their spouse's unknowingly waste their lives on a deceitful and untrustworthy excuse for a human being.
I knew someone would grab a million year old soapbox and answer this.
Now get off my strata!
Well he asked a perfectly reasonable question. Scientists have in the past been known to make a mountain out of a mole-hill, a whole species out of a jaw bone or a fragment of facial bone. They sometimes read way to much into a singe find which has led people to call all archeological/paleontological discoveries into question. What most people don't realize is that in modern archeological/paleontological digs chemistry, physics, forensics, statistics, medicine, and many other disciplines of science (the most recent and spectacular addition being genetics) come together to create a much more robust body of evidence. It's absolutely amazing to me that we have found, what is it now?... three or four archaic species of humans that are known only rummaging around in our our own DNA and not from any physical remains they left behind that have so far been identified.
How does one tell the difference between a chunk of rock and a 3.3 million year old tool? Because they both look fucking indistinguishable to me: they're both just chunks of rock.
Well firstly, if you know about geology and how erosion works you can tell the difference between a coincidentally shaped rock and a purposefully shaped rock. This difference is even more pronounced if you are also a good flintknapper sort of like a cop can spot an expertly forged bank note. Secondly there is forensics, tool manufacture leaves distinctive marks and so does tool use. Even if somebody randomly smashed a rock and used a sharp flake to butcher an animal you would see the distinctive wear patterns on the flake. You might even find trace evidence on the tool if you are lucky. This is why it is a huge mistake to wash a recently discovered stone tool because even after tens of thosands of years you can sometimes tell what a tool was last used to cut, scrape, drill or hack apart. Thirdly, there is context. You often find tools at a site where animals were butchered, where tools were made or if you are very lucky in a place where people lived for a while. Perhaps a fire was lit, which can give a date. Bones with distinctive tool marks you only get through systematic butchery and bones that have been smashed to get at marrow are a dead give-away. These bones are also useful for dating associated tools as are layers of volcanic ash, lava or sediments and attributes of the stone tools themselves can also give date information.
Yep, Hindenburg got it wrong. If they only knew your trick...
Nice try, but that was one disaster in an amazingly long history of safe operation considering the volatility of hydrogen. A number of airships were shot down during WWI and some perished in inclement weather but in peace time airship losses weren't unusually high compared to contemporary heavier than air aviation technology. If you replace the hydrogen with helium, install powerful modern engines and computerized control systems and try to resist the temptation of overflying the Great Plains during the height of tornado season without first reading the weather forecast, then blimps and rigid airships are probably the safest mode of air transport thinkable.
The article labels them "anti-terrorism experts" but the mere fact that they even considered this long enough for there to have been a written record belies that title and proves instead that they are "anti-terrorism idiots".
One might be tempted to assume this is a hoax. Unfortunately we have examples of similar hysteria from decades past that make one seriously consider that this might be true. It is really strange how people manage to get themselves into a state of utter hysteria about some minority ethnic, cultural or even cultural sub group. Punks, hippies, jews, gypsies, gays, social democrats... to name a few have all caused the elements within society that are prone to worrying themselves to death or who just simply enjoy tyrannizing some smaller group of people a great degree of anguish although nowadays it the favorite target seems to be muslims.
I don't remember claiming that *nix systems were immune to malware. That is an figment of your imagination that you invented so that you'd have something to get upset over. Unix systems are, however, vastly less targeted than Windows with the exception of Android (if one can still call it a Linux system) which leads the list of targeted mobile OS'es. Like it or not (and you obviously don't) that makes my life easier. Call it security by obscurity but it is a fact I'm going to be insufferably smug about to every Windows user who brings malware up in conversation until your prediction of Linux dethroning Windows as the emperor of malware comes true. I have firewalls, malware scanners and intrusion detectors running on all my Linux and BSD boxes at work partly because I'm mildly paranoid by nature and partly because my colleagues in the Microsoft systems department are afraid my *nix boxes might be an entry point for Windows malware. It's been very quite on that front for years except for the e-mails I get about files infected with Windows malware. The same goes for my personal MacBook. The only thing the security scanner I installed there ever finds is tracking cookies. It has uncovered a piece of genuine 24 carat OS X malware exactly once in six years and it's rated very well in malware detection tests (not the best anymore though, Avira has been outperforming the competition recently).
Their program will slow down your computer with all kinds of security theater "features", but like any other antivirus, it will fail to root out most viruses written in the past 8 years once they've been executed and implanted themselves as a rootkit.
Ahhhh... Every time a Windows user posts something like this I get fond memories of why I switched to using *nix based OS'es.
"Everyone else" loved Interstellar. My wife (who is a real engineer) could tolerate about 10 minutes of it. I quickly gave up on the content of it myself but would have continued watching just for the visuals.
Call it cinematic junk food.
Most Americans have no taste.
You don't get tired of that McDonalds analogy do you?...and accusing 319 million Americans of having bad taste because they don't like the same movies you do is pretty dumb in my book. You sound like one of those frustrated artist types who sits pouting in a corner and claims the only true art is art that does not sell and that nobody wants to see. A good movie is a movie that, when I walk out of the cinema, does not leave me feeling like I have been cheated out of the ticket price and when enough people feel like that a film qualifies as a good movie regardless of what the snobby professional critics and the film connoisseur community may think. The most accurate predictor of whether a movie will leave me feeling as if I was cheated out of the ticket price or that I found so far isn't the trailer, it isn't the marketing blurb and it sure as shit is not the opinion of the movie critics or the film connoisseur community it's the audience approval rating and keep in mind this also applies to artsy movies since the unwashed masses don't as a rule go watch them so you get an accurate picture of what the target audience of such a film thought of it.
6.41% of a standard deviation, according to TFA. Not exactly the same thing.
As usual, don't trust journalists.:(
When I was doing my masters degree I attended lectures where professors allowed laptops in class. Some people used them for taking notes like I did but a sizeable number of students just sat there posting on Facebook, web-surfing or playing FarmVille or some other dumb ass flash game. I'll never understand why people do that, they pay an arm and a leg in school admission fees, spend the entire semester goofing off and are then surprised when they flunk out or pass the course by the skin of their teeth. I don't think banning laptops, tablets and phones will do much good, people will just find another way to goof off but I can relate to why teachers want to ban these devices. It's the students who goof off all semester who blame everybody but themselves and write the most scathingly critical reviews of a course and its teacher and that's bloody frustrating when you know perfectly well that their failure is nobody's fault but their own.
No, it isn't a good movie. Not anywhere near a good movie. Actually kinda a dumb movie. It does have lots of car chases and explosions to distract you from the fact that it is a bad movie. I'm sure it will be successful - nobody eats at McDonalds for quality food but they still eat there.
People like you always crack me up. Mad Max: Fury Road has an audience approval rating hovering around 90% and in the end that's what counts and it's what makes a movie good, when most of the people who watched it liked what they saw. Anything else is irrelevant. Some of the best movies I have ever seen got dumped on by critics even though the audiences loved them. I'm sometimes tempted to hypothesise that in order to judge the watchability of a film the best way is to find somebody like you or some opinionated snob of a film critic like Leonard Martin and watch only the stuff you guys don't like.
It will be the first time the Arabs have used science in 800 years.
Arabs and Moslems in general are in many ways a lot less hostile toward science than many Christians. The standard bearers of the most popular movement to ban the theory of evolution from schools are evangelical christians from the USA. You can point your finger at salafists and bandits like ISIS and the Taleban all day long but they are the exception not the rule. Iran for example is a pretty fundamentalist state that is opressive in many ways but Iranians are no anti-scientific luddites who make asses of them selves internationally by preaching inteigent design. Most Quaranic scholars have spent much more energy on trying to reconcile scripture with the theory of evolution rather than just trying to ban it by law.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Study Crime In Progress In a VR Simulated Environment
So reality has finally caught up with CSI Miami?
It, and everything else, are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them.
Of course, but I wasn't questioning that it was worth that amount of money. I asked why.
Interesting question... the collector's market is really strange and much of it is completely illogical. Things nobody wants can be worth a fortune a little later. Believe it or not there are actually fashion trends in junk. I'm constantly amazed at the crap you can sell interior decorators. When steam punk is all the rage you can sell old cogwheels and cast iron table legs for a fortune, when the trend switches to 70's nostalgia your rusty iron machinery becomes worthless but crappy plastic disco balls and sweaty old clothes become valuable rarities. Believe it or not vintage jeans can be worth thousands and the more beat up they are the more people pay. I've seen people buy stuff that I resolutely refused to believe was worth a dime before I saw money change hands. Just because it's rare or old does not mean it is valuable, but it could be if it comes into fashion so timing is key. Stuff like the Apple I is valuable because of the history of Apple and the company's effect on the computer business. Most Nazi stuff is considered creepy and sells to a niche market but Enigma machines are an exception and sell to rich math geeks and IT startups millionaires because you get nerd points for owning one. Just wait a couple of decades and watch Google promotional banners, posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts or low serial Nexus One smartphones sell for outlandish sums of money.
I'm not arguing the point you're making, but there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Just because this woman apparently was unaware of the value of this old stuff does not mean that she's stupid, for all we know she may be a brilliant medical researcher who just happens to be totally uninterested in old computer hardware.
I've watched enough episodes of all kinds of shows like 'Pickers' and 'Salvage Hunters' in addition to my own experience to know that you'd not believe what stuff you have laying around in your garage or on your property that's worth money and it doesn't have to be a long lost Vermeer, the hitherto unknown seventh production Bugatti Royale or a Ming vase. I once met a guy who found an old Audi Quattro in a hedge on his property one morning. It had been driven there by joyriders and abandoned. He just let it lay there until the local authority started making noises about the thing. Nobody claimed the vehicle, nobody wanted it except the council who wanted it gone so when a passing Quattro enthusiast offered to buy it becasue it was in good nick and he wanted to restore it the land owner went through the motions to claim it and sold it for a tidy amount. That car was in good order despite looking rather bad but even if it hadn't been he could probably still have sold it to a used parts trader. I've seen people sell granite boulders for a up to a couple of hundred dollars a piece, rusty old machinery, gnarled furniture, light fittings can all be flogged to people outfitting themed restaurant/nightclubs for amounts of money you wouldn't believe. The list goes on, and on. My sister even cleaned out her house last year, put the junk into one big box and flogged most of it on ebay for just under £200. The biggest problem you have when cleaning out a house or a property is not making money off of what might seem like junk at first glance, it's finding a dealer who isn't going to rip you off if you don't have time to sell your junk yourself.
The artist who is doing well is the exception and not the rule.
'Doing well' isn't necessarily a good metric to use. A few years ago, I was listening to a piece on PBS about musicians and self-publishing, and they had one artist who was talking about their switch to self-publishing; they had cut an album for a commercial label, and despite it having sold several tens of thousands of CDs over a span of three years, the label claimed that they were still 'in the hole' for production and advertising costs, and the artist had not seen a dime beyond their initial advance. Meanwhile, an album that they had produced themselves and sold through their website directly via a service (the music equivalent of an 'instant print' service) gave them about $7 per CD sold, and in one year had already produced income more than triple the value of their advance from the commercial label. Now, that artist's income from marketing their work directly may not have been 'doing well' in an overall sense, but the relative payout from working with a commercial label and independent publishing certainly qualifies, for the return on their work, as 'doing well', even if it's not of itself enough to support a 'well off' lifestyle.
That's where I try to buy my music, directly from the artists if it is at all possible. Recently, however, I was informed that that this makes me a luddite because I want to own copies of my music instead of having a Spotify account. The thing is that if the labels pay badly it seems Spotify pays even worse. The popular logic goes that this is the label's fault for pocketing the money they get from Spotify which implies the logic that the artists should switch to a new gatekeeper i.e. Spotify an the other streaming services (I'm sure they'd loose no time in setting up a cartel if they haven't already) but I don't see that happening quickly since the streaming services will always get raped by the people who own the rights to the large music collections because a lot of their revenue comes from serving classic popular music to nostalgic users and a streaming service will always be more sensitive to their needs and opinions than rights owners than those of an individual artist. IMHO artists are and will always be best advised to market and sell their own product and they would be best served by a heavily decentralised market especially now that anybody with a PC and the knowledge of how to do music production and recording can cobble together pretty decent product and set up their own website meaning that overheads have decreased massively. This would also have the effect of putting a sock in the mouth of people who claim they pirate music to stick it to the Studios, anybody who pirates from indie musicians who produce and market their own music is an asshole, plain and simple.
Only the rich will be able to afford it. So you die with 75 and they with 300. They will feel like god like creatures.
I know you are joking but there is a core of truth in it. Back in ancient Egypt the average lifespan was around 50 years, if somebody lived to 60 it was considered to be remarkable. For the nobility, however, things were different. Ramses II lived to be 90 which was effectively almost twice the normal lifespan so both he and the royalty and high aristocracy in general who lived in the lap of luxury must have seemed "blessed with long life" in the eyes of the population, to steal a quote from the Lord of the Rings. Based on my unshakable belief in the axiom "there is no such thing as free lunch" I'm going to go out in a limb here and hypothesise that if age reversing is ever perfected there will be some sort of tradeoff that makes it less appealing than it would seem at first. One likely tradeoff might for example be not being able to live very far from a team of doctors for the last 150-200 years of your 300 years of life. There is a reason that evolution set our expiry date at a maximum of 100 years or so.
Usually I call that "government"....
... I also call it corporation, and come to think of it banks also qualify.
The numbers are what they are. The UK has a healthy balance in trade with most of the more economically advanced EU member states, but overall it is the non-UK side that tends to export slightly more at the moment, so they have more to lose if the bureaucrats throw their toys out of the pram instead of dealing with any UK exit like adults. And there is no particular reason to assume the trade rules would change dramatically in any new agreements anyway. As I said before, the trade agreements are one of the areas where everyone saw common ground long before the EU was around, and they are one of the areas where there is still a lot of common ground today. You're just fear-mongering, again.
You are talking as if none of Britain's booming trade has anything to do with the common market and as if that relationship would continue unchanged if Britain exits the EU. If that really happens and the EU bureaucrats allow Britain to exit whilst retaining all of its trade agreements and privileges except influencing internal EU affairs, what is to stop Greece, Hungary or any other country where EU skeptics have come into power from demanding the same? Anybody interested in keeping the EU in tact is going to be as enthusiastic about giving Britain a 'leave while retaining all membership privileges' deal as the UK government is to give you a 'continue to earn money and use public facilities while paying no taxes' deal.
> For example, Sweden has to abide by most EU rules even though it isn't in the EU
I think you're thinking about Norway here, mate.
He's still got a point. Britain wants to restrict immigration from other EU nations but I wonder what the reaction would be if British people began to be rejected for residency in other EU nations? One of the founding principles of the EU is the principle of the free movement of goods. The free movement of services and freedom of establishment. The free movement of persons including free movement of workers. This only works as long as everybody is equal. If the British are not on board with these basic principles then they should Brexit and do their own thing because they won't get any opt-outs on the four freedoms which is essentially what they want.
3) Since it depends upon the eurozone for at least half of it's exports. The toll barriers resulting from a Brexit would induce British business to move significant portions of their production into the common market area.
Britain is one of the few countries within the EU that exports more to countries outside it than to ones in it, albeit by a small margin. One of the arguments for leaving is that the regulations required by the EU (which may have protectionist origins) make it harder to compete outside of it with faster growing world economies.
It's easy to point out statistics like this. It is tougher to find that a bit less than half of your exports, albeit by a small margin, have alluvasudden become 15-20% more expensive and therefore less competitive. That is a recipe for a nosedive in market share, and market share is much more easily lost than regained. It is considerably more difficult to point out how British businesses who export into the common market are supposed to compete if they keep their production in the UK. The obvious reaction to a Brexit is for British businesses to form subsidiaries inside the common market, preferably in places where labour costs are low with the resulting loss in British jobs and tax revenue. The average German, Frenchman, Italian Spaniard, Pole, Portuguese, Romanian will not give a hoot if the dark British beer that is becoming less and less popular in Britain but is gaining popularity on the continent is brewed in the UK or in Romania under the oversight of British Brewers if it costs 20% less. If Britain exits the European Union literally hundreds of international agreements it is a party to as part of it's EU membership will become void and will have to be painfully renegotiated and that is going to be difficult and it will take a long time. Since many of these agreement are trade agreements the damage would be likely to be extensive. This process of painstakingly renegotiating Britain's trade agreements will not be made easier by the fact that the other EU nations would have very little motivation to give the UK, an outsider nation, the same deal as a EU member nation. If the EU becomes a two tier organisation with full members and second tier members as some have suggested. The UK as an outsider looking in on a market area of 500 million potential customers would effectively be a honorary third class member. UK access to that market would depend on the good will the British enjoy in Berlin and Paris. What's more, and whether Nigel Farage is willing to admit it or not, how painful the Brexit will be depends mightily upon what kind of a mood Angela Merkel and Fracois Hollande are to give Britan a good deal when Brexit happens.
Most rational people recognize Britain should be part of the EU.
Why? I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'm erring on the side of leaving for entirely rational reasons.
In short, I think the UK and much of continental Europe have different long term goals. The Eurozone nations have opted for a degree of financial integration that the UK doesn't want or need. Obviously that hasn't worked out very well recently, at least for the economically stronger EU nations, so there is little reason for the UK to join in the foreseeable future. I think the wider EU is also heading for a more centralised, federalised system of legislation and broader government, which again the UK does not generally want to join. I suspect that in the long term these two fundamental types of integration will prove to be inseparable, and those who want to be part of the EU will increasingly lose sovereignty over things like taxation, weakening national governments in favour of ever-more-powerful central EU authorities. That's OK if it really is what they want, but I don't think it is what the UK is looking for in its relationship with its European neighbours.
On the other hand, the UK and many other EU nations are valuable trading partners for each other, so maintaining a liberal trading environment is in everyone's interests. This was what our previous generation actually signed up for by joining the predecessors of the current EU, of course. I think many in the UK also value things like the the European Convention on Human Rights (even if our current administration do not like it) and would be happy to remain a signatory, but that is a different European system, not part of the EU. Similarly I think those from the UK who often travel to Europe or vice versa would see merit in the UK joining the Schengen Area (even though again our current administration are probably strongly against it).
As things stand, it may be that the best way of everybody getting as close as possible to achieving their own goals is for the UK and EU to separate amicably, and then for the UK to establish alternative agreements for mutual benefit with the EU and/or individual member states in those areas where everyone's interests do align. It would no doubt be painful for everyone in the short term, but this might be a having to break eggs to make omelettes situation.
Somebody has been attending UKP rallies, "...separate amicably..." that is has to be one of my favourite Nigel Farage quotes. In other words you want the UK to enjoy all the economic advantages of EU membership without any of the burdens and preferably outside the EU? The Americans have a saying: "There is no such thing as free lunch". What motivation would the other EU nations have to give Britain all the economic advantages it used to enjoy once Britain leaves the EU without any of the perceived shortcomings such as political and economic integration? At the very least:
1) Giving a Britain outside the EU a 'special deal' would be opening the door to every eurosceptic wing nut and velvet fascist in the EU to demand the same special treatment. That would be worse than the Brexit alone since it would effectively be the end of the EU and exactly the effect that the likes of Putin would like to see. Which is also why the Russians support parties like Front National and the Party for Freedom in one way or another. The smart machiavellian thing to do is let Britan Brexit if it really wants to and then give them a rough time.
2) There are plenty of countries willing to fill the political vacuum that Britain leaves in the EU, first among them being Poland. It is pretty revealing that when the Ukraine crisis hit it was German France and Poland that took centre stage when a decade ago it would have been Britain, France and Germany. If Britan Brexits in some fit of nationalistic intoxication Britain would to a large extent be an overseer in the decision making process that will determine the political and economic future
GayWAD was right, if yo've used Slashdot beta to find a sex partner, you now have no problems.
Actually, if you have managed to find a sex partner using Slashdot beta all you will have achieved is finding another person who needs to read several Wikipedia articles and closely study the diagrams before they can successfully have sex with another human being since both of your previous sexual experience will have been limited to a computer monitor and one or both of the prehensile, multi-fingered extremities attached to the upper limbs of your body.
I have zero sympathy for Anonymous Cowards. I think that if people have something that they really need to say on /. that they should use their normal account. Who cares if they lose mod points. The people like you posting using AC accounts should be outed!
That the AC was certainly extreme, I don't think anybody deserves to be blackmailed. He did have a point though, if you are cheating on your wife/husband you won't get much sympathy from me if you get found out and there is plenty of people who agree with me. The world is full of people who claim they are saving/improving their marriages/relationships and doing their spouse some sort of favour by cheating behind their backs instead of drumming up the courage to talk to their spouse and working out their relationship problems honestly. These individuals are all delusional and they all deserve to be found out because they are making their spouse's unknowingly waste their lives on a deceitful and untrustworthy excuse for a human being.
Thanks you for an enlightening post.
I knew someone would grab a million year old soapbox and answer this.
Now get off my strata!
Well he asked a perfectly reasonable question. Scientists have in the past been known to make a mountain out of a mole-hill, a whole species out of a jaw bone or a fragment of facial bone. They sometimes read way to much into a singe find which has led people to call all archeological/paleontological discoveries into question. What most people don't realize is that in modern archeological/paleontological digs chemistry, physics, forensics, statistics, medicine, and many other disciplines of science (the most recent and spectacular addition being genetics) come together to create a much more robust body of evidence. It's absolutely amazing to me that we have found, what is it now? ... three or four archaic species of humans that are known only rummaging around in our our own DNA and not from any physical remains they left behind that have so far been identified.
How does one tell the difference between a chunk of rock and a 3.3 million year old tool? Because they both look fucking indistinguishable to me: they're both just chunks of rock.
Well firstly, if you know about geology and how erosion works you can tell the difference between a coincidentally shaped rock and a purposefully shaped rock. This difference is even more pronounced if you are also a good flintknapper sort of like a cop can spot an expertly forged bank note. Secondly there is forensics, tool manufacture leaves distinctive marks and so does tool use. Even if somebody randomly smashed a rock and used a sharp flake to butcher an animal you would see the distinctive wear patterns on the flake. You might even find trace evidence on the tool if you are lucky. This is why it is a huge mistake to wash a recently discovered stone tool because even after tens of thosands of years you can sometimes tell what a tool was last used to cut, scrape, drill or hack apart. Thirdly, there is context. You often find tools at a site where animals were butchered, where tools were made or if you are very lucky in a place where people lived for a while. Perhaps a fire was lit, which can give a date. Bones with distinctive tool marks you only get through systematic butchery and bones that have been smashed to get at marrow are a dead give-away. These bones are also useful for dating associated tools as are layers of volcanic ash, lava or sediments and attributes of the stone tools themselves can also give date information.
Yep, Hindenburg got it wrong. If they only knew your trick...
Nice try, but that was one disaster in an amazingly long history of safe operation considering the volatility of hydrogen. A number of airships were shot down during WWI and some perished in inclement weather but in peace time airship losses weren't unusually high compared to contemporary heavier than air aviation technology. If you replace the hydrogen with helium, install powerful modern engines and computerized control systems and try to resist the temptation of overflying the Great Plains during the height of tornado season without first reading the weather forecast, then blimps and rigid airships are probably the safest mode of air transport thinkable.
The article labels them "anti-terrorism experts" but the mere fact that they even considered this long enough for there to have been a written record belies that title and proves instead that they are "anti-terrorism idiots".
One might be tempted to assume this is a hoax. Unfortunately we have examples of similar hysteria from decades past that make one seriously consider that this might be true. It is really strange how people manage to get themselves into a state of utter hysteria about some minority ethnic, cultural or even cultural sub group. Punks, hippies, jews, gypsies, gays, social democrats... to name a few have all caused the elements within society that are prone to worrying themselves to death or who just simply enjoy tyrannizing some smaller group of people a great degree of anguish although nowadays it the favorite target seems to be muslims.
Because ?
I don't remember claiming that *nix systems were immune to malware. That is an figment of your imagination that you invented so that you'd have something to get upset over. Unix systems are, however, vastly less targeted than Windows with the exception of Android (if one can still call it a Linux system) which leads the list of targeted mobile OS'es. Like it or not (and you obviously don't) that makes my life easier. Call it security by obscurity but it is a fact I'm going to be insufferably smug about to every Windows user who brings malware up in conversation until your prediction of Linux dethroning Windows as the emperor of malware comes true. I have firewalls, malware scanners and intrusion detectors running on all my Linux and BSD boxes at work partly because I'm mildly paranoid by nature and partly because my colleagues in the Microsoft systems department are afraid my *nix boxes might be an entry point for Windows malware. It's been very quite on that front for years except for the e-mails I get about files infected with Windows malware. The same goes for my personal MacBook. The only thing the security scanner I installed there ever finds is tracking cookies. It has uncovered a piece of genuine 24 carat OS X malware exactly once in six years and it's rated very well in malware detection tests (not the best anymore though, Avira has been outperforming the competition recently).
Their program will slow down your computer with all kinds of security theater "features", but like any other antivirus, it will fail to root out most viruses written in the past 8 years once they've been executed and implanted themselves as a rootkit.
Ahhhh... Every time a Windows user posts something like this I get fond memories of why I switched to using *nix based OS'es.
Again with the McDonalds metaphor.
"Everyone else" loved Interstellar. My wife (who is a real engineer) could tolerate about 10 minutes of it. I quickly gave up on the content of it myself but would have continued watching just for the visuals.
Call it cinematic junk food.
Most Americans have no taste.
You don't get tired of that McDonalds analogy do you? ...and accusing 319 million Americans of having bad taste because they don't like the same movies you do is pretty dumb in my book. You sound like one of those frustrated artist types who sits pouting in a corner and claims the only true art is art that does not sell and that nobody wants to see. A good movie is a movie that, when I walk out of the cinema, does not leave me feeling like I have been cheated out of the ticket price and when enough people feel like that a film qualifies as a good movie regardless of what the snobby professional critics and the film connoisseur community may think. The most accurate predictor of whether a movie will leave me feeling as if I was cheated out of the ticket price or that I found so far isn't the trailer, it isn't the marketing blurb and it sure as shit is not the opinion of the movie critics or the film connoisseur community it's the audience approval rating and keep in mind this also applies to artsy movies since the unwashed masses don't as a rule go watch them so you get an accurate picture of what the target audience of such a film thought of it.
6.41% of a standard deviation, according to TFA. Not exactly the same thing.
As usual, don't trust journalists. :(
When I was doing my masters degree I attended lectures where professors allowed laptops in class. Some people used them for taking notes like I did but a sizeable number of students just sat there posting on Facebook, web-surfing or playing FarmVille or some other dumb ass flash game. I'll never understand why people do that, they pay an arm and a leg in school admission fees, spend the entire semester goofing off and are then surprised when they flunk out or pass the course by the skin of their teeth. I don't think banning laptops, tablets and phones will do much good, people will just find another way to goof off but I can relate to why teachers want to ban these devices. It's the students who goof off all semester who blame everybody but themselves and write the most scathingly critical reviews of a course and its teacher and that's bloody frustrating when you know perfectly well that their failure is nobody's fault but their own.
No, it isn't a good movie. Not anywhere near a good movie. Actually kinda a dumb movie. It does have lots of car chases and explosions to distract you from the fact that it is a bad movie. I'm sure it will be successful - nobody eats at McDonalds for quality food but they still eat there.
People like you always crack me up. Mad Max: Fury Road has an audience approval rating hovering around 90% and in the end that's what counts and it's what makes a movie good, when most of the people who watched it liked what they saw. Anything else is irrelevant. Some of the best movies I have ever seen got dumped on by critics even though the audiences loved them. I'm sometimes tempted to hypothesise that in order to judge the watchability of a film the best way is to find somebody like you or some opinionated snob of a film critic like Leonard Martin and watch only the stuff you guys don't like.
That should teach you to use a watch to tell the current date.
Let me try and whore for some more Karma: It's an Apple watch.
Oh, and by the way ... it's a damn good movie.
Is it the 1st of April already? My watch must be a few months off...
It will be the first time the Arabs have used science in 800 years.
Arabs and Moslems in general are in many ways a lot less hostile toward science than many Christians. The standard bearers of the most popular movement to ban the theory of evolution from schools are evangelical christians from the USA. You can point your finger at salafists and bandits like ISIS and the Taleban all day long but they are the exception not the rule. Iran for example is a pretty fundamentalist state that is opressive in many ways but Iranians are no anti-scientific luddites who make asses of them selves internationally by preaching inteigent design. Most Quaranic scholars have spent much more energy on trying to reconcile scripture with the theory of evolution rather than just trying to ban it by law.