Of course, I should check my math before hitting the Submit button. 60 cents per hour is only a penny a minute, not half a penny. Even so, that's quite reasonable, and I'd still be willing to pay for TV without commercials.
I've long harbored a fantasy about a television system that could be tailored to individual viewers. I became frustrated with both my cable company and DirecTV over the way they offer their services. In both systems, customers are offered "packages" of channels with names like "TotalChoice" and "Premium" that are, in fact, not choices at all. If I want to see Comedy Central, AMC, Bravo and the SciFi Channel, I have to also get the Food Network, Home and Garden, Lifetime, multiple ESPN channels and more than half a dozen religious channels. If I want to get TechTV or the Sundance Channel, I not only have to pay more, but I also have to get the Golf Channel, Oxygen, UniVision and TeleMundo.
I want to be able to pick and choose what I watch and not have to subsidize religious broadcasters or channels that I have no interest in seeing. I would gladly pay extra to get only those channels I want and not have to pay for channels I don't want. I'd even pay extra to not have to watch commercials.
I don't think I'm unusual, and I think lots of viewers would jump at the chance for this kind of service. Say you develop a cable or satellite receiver that logs everything you watch in a given month and charges you only for what you watch. Come up with a system of micropayments such as $0.005 per minute (which works out to $0.60 per hour) and people may be more discriminating in what the spend their time/money watching.
If I had to pay for every minute of television I watch, I might not spend so much time in front of the tube, but I'd be much more careful about what I watched. Current Pay-Per-View offerings of heavyweight boxing events or WWE Wrestling spectaculars charge anywhere from $15 to $65 for one to four hours of programming, and regularly make millions. Pay-Per-View movies have proven themselves a viable option for people who don't wish to subscribe to HBO, ShowTime or CineMax.
The business model is complicated because you can't predict that people would watch more TV if they had to pay by the minute, but if the billing system could be designed with incentives like frequent flyer miles where you paid less money if you watched more hours, then I think this could be a profitable venture.
Anyone interested in designing such a receiver? I'll be the first in line to buy one!
Oh, please, no. Stalker is my favorite Tarkovsky film, and while it might be better suited for "Hollywood" treatment if it stuck closer to the novel "Roadside Picnic," it couldn't hope to compare to the beauty and wonderment of the original, which deviated greatly from the book. I just wish I could find this on DVD.
Ahh, takes me back to the old days (1987). The first relational database I ever worked with was SEQUITUR, developed by Lee Felsenstein, the engineer who designed the breakthrough Osborne PC the first portable/lugable computer, (see http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org). I didn't know at the time how SEQUITUR performed its magic, but I figured out how to use it, and loved it. Felsenstein never marketed it well enough to compete with dBase or Paradox, but I think it was better than either of them. Many years later, when I took classes in MS-SQL, I began to see how it all fit together and evolved into something even more powerful.
Hey, didn't I ask Miss Cleo about asteroids the last time I called her 900 number? She didn't say anything about this one. She certainly should have seen this coming, considering how much she charged me. Maybe I should try the Psychic Friends Network next time.
There were also a series of short stories written by Nat Schachner in the 1930s about a lawyer in space named Kerry Dale who dealt with a number of these kinds of sovreignty questions. Most were published in Astounding, but some may have appeared elsewhere. Schachner was himself an attorney, and thus well-read in the area of property law.
What a crock. I've been in unions before and they are next to worthless. The biggest rip-off ever pulled on the working class is the lie that joining a union will make your life better, help you feed your children, insure job security and cure cancer. The only thing that's going to accomplish any of these lofty goals is hard work and diligent effort by talented individuals, not forking over a percentage of your hard-earned wages to an "organizer" or "steward" to support a corrupt bureaucracy like a labor union. Just look at what unionizing public school teachers has done for education.
No thanks. I'll negotiate my own contract, and be much better off.
Those of us who are certified in one or more technologies can argue with you there. But the point the poster is making is that it is very difficult to "show them what you know" if you can't even get a foot in the door to meet "them." A lot of companies screen applicants by keywords and your application/resume/inquiry won't even show up as a blip on their screens without certain keywords such as MCSE, CCNA, CNE, MCDBA, RHCE or some other certification being included as part of your name. It's the eternal chicken and egg dilemma we've all faced at one point or another in our careers.
If you're so concerned about it that you've already developed a conspiracy theory to explain the existence Lindows, why not do some real research and download the Lindows Sneak Peak?
Whatever their level of altruism, Lindows is definitely going to be released. Their Sneak Peak releases of beta versions have demonstrated that they're serious about this mission and their product. They're very up front about their plans for the product. It remains to be seen if they can successfully compete with not just M$, but also the other Linux distributors out there who have armies of fiercely loyal users. Then again, they're not marketing their distribution to diehard Linux users, but to frustrated Microsoft customers and newbies who can still be persuaded not to succumb to the Dark Side.
Federal payroll tax withholding dates back to World War II and was intended to make it easier for the government to finance the war effort. At the time, people accepted it because it was wartime, and they were promised that it would be repealed once the war ended. The repeal never happened, and people never complained too much about it because they just got used to having their paychecks docked.
Yeah, Sam Raimi could direct it (though I think John Woo would also be great), but Kevin Smith can't write dialogue to save his life, and has no business doing anything but comedy (and even those comedies struggle for laughs). Given Peter Jackson's triumph with LotR, he'd be a good choice (though I doubt he'd want to take on another job like the one he's already done).
Having long since sold off my old book collection, I no longer have my SFBC series to check, but I did pull out Richard A. Lupoff's "BARSOOM: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision" (1976, Mirage Press, Baltimore, MD) to refresh my memory. Lupoff notes that the eleventh book in the series, "John Carter of Mars," was published in 1964, 14 years after Burroughs' death and almost 20 years after "Llana of Gathol," was published in 1948. "Llana" was actually four separate novelettes first published in Amazing stories in 1941. "John Carter of Mars" consisted of two separate novelettes, "John Carter and the Giant of Mars" and "The Skeleton Men of Jupiter," which apparently made me think they were two separate books.
Nothing Burroughs wrote is in the public domain. His family has maintained control over all of his estate and renews the copyrights on all of his works whenever they are due to expire. He was so successful during his lifetime that an entire industry evolved out of the Tarzan series, and his family owns a lot of Los Angeles Real Estate. That's how the city of Tarzana, California came to be incorporated; it was originally the Burroughs family estate. ERB was almost a corporation unto himself!
I have a tendendcy to trust CNN reports for accuracy, but they refer to ERB as an English author. He was as American as applie pie and All Story magazine. Get yer facts straight, man.
All that aside, I've dreamed of seeing the John Carter series on the screen since I was a schoolboy, reading all twelve books in sequence, purchased through the Science Fiction Book Club. I knew even then that such a project would be far too expensive to ever be realized successfully (and having seen what happened to other ERB books that were filmed in the 1970s; remember "The Land/People that Time Forgot" and "At the Earth's Core?"). But now that CGI effects have made such large-scale fantasies technically possible, and the boxoffice success of similar films makes them financially feasible, I can see "A Princess of Mars" being turned into a pretty good Saturday Afternoon popcorn matinee hit, just as the Mummy films were.
I hope they don't make the entire series, though, since the books were very uneven in quality. The series was so popular that Burroughs was under a lot of pressure from the publisher to grind them out very quickly over the years and some of them are really quite poor, hitting the low point with the last one, which was supposedly completed by Burrough's son after his death and based on some very sketchy notes.
I've just purchased a house in California, and since we have to replace the roof anyway, I've been investigating the benefits and drawbacks of adding solar panels during the re-roofing process. Since the energy situation isn't about to get better any time soon, I felt it would be a prudent investment, and would add greatly to the value of the property. I opted to change my power provider the minute it was allowed two years ago during the early stages of the "deregulation" (cough) process, and switched to Green Mountain for their solar/wind combination package. That worked great until Green Mountain pulled out of the California market after PG&E stopped paying them for the power they were sending to the Golden State.
I'd still like to stay with renewable energy mechanisms, and am intrigued by the generous rebates offered for those of us who go this way, but I'm not sure I trust the utility (PG&E) or the State (now near broke) to fulfill their end of the bargain.
I'll keep studying the options, and keep pricing solar panels and intertie systems for another few weeks.
Thanks for posting this discussion!
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Of course, I should check my math before hitting the Submit button. 60 cents per hour is only a penny a minute, not half a penny. Even so, that's quite reasonable, and I'd still be willing to pay for TV without commercials.
I've long harbored a fantasy about a television system that could be tailored to individual viewers. I became frustrated with both my cable company and DirecTV over the way they offer their services. In both systems, customers are offered "packages" of channels with names like "TotalChoice" and "Premium" that are, in fact, not choices at all. If I want to see Comedy Central, AMC, Bravo and the SciFi Channel, I have to also get the Food Network, Home and Garden, Lifetime, multiple ESPN channels and more than half a dozen religious channels. If I want to get TechTV or the Sundance Channel, I not only have to pay more, but I also have to get the Golf Channel, Oxygen, UniVision and TeleMundo.
I want to be able to pick and choose what I watch and not have to subsidize religious broadcasters or channels that I have no interest in seeing. I would gladly pay extra to get only those channels I want and not have to pay for channels I don't want. I'd even pay extra to not have to watch commercials.
I don't think I'm unusual, and I think lots of viewers would jump at the chance for this kind of service. Say you develop a cable or satellite receiver that logs everything you watch in a given month and charges you only for what you watch. Come up with a system of micropayments such as $0.005 per minute (which works out to $0.60 per hour) and people may be more discriminating in what the spend their time/money watching.
If I had to pay for every minute of television I watch, I might not spend so much time in front of the tube, but I'd be much more careful about what I watched. Current Pay-Per-View offerings of heavyweight boxing events or WWE Wrestling spectaculars charge anywhere from $15 to $65 for one to four hours of programming, and regularly make millions. Pay-Per-View movies have proven themselves a viable option for people who don't wish to subscribe to HBO, ShowTime or CineMax.
The business model is complicated because you can't predict that people would watch more TV if they had to pay by the minute, but if the billing system could be designed with incentives like frequent flyer miles where you paid less money if you watched more hours, then I think this could be a profitable venture.
Anyone interested in designing such a receiver? I'll be the first in line to buy one!
Oh, please, no. Stalker is my favorite Tarkovsky film, and while it might be better suited for "Hollywood" treatment if it stuck closer to the novel "Roadside Picnic," it couldn't hope to compare to the beauty and wonderment of the original, which deviated greatly from the book. I just wish I could find this on DVD.
Ahh, takes me back to the old days (1987). The first relational database I ever worked with was SEQUITUR, developed by Lee Felsenstein, the engineer who designed the breakthrough Osborne PC the first portable/lugable computer, (see http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org). I didn't know at the time how SEQUITUR performed its magic, but I figured out how to use it, and loved it. Felsenstein never marketed it well enough to compete with dBase or Paradox, but I think it was better than either of them. Many years later, when I took classes in MS-SQL, I began to see how it all fit together and evolved into something even more powerful.
Hey, didn't I ask Miss Cleo about asteroids the last time I called her 900 number? She didn't say anything about this one. She certainly should have seen this coming, considering how much she charged me. Maybe I should try the Psychic Friends Network next time.
There were also a series of short stories written by Nat Schachner in the 1930s about a lawyer in space named Kerry Dale who dealt with a number of these kinds of sovreignty questions. Most were published in Astounding, but some may have appeared elsewhere. Schachner was himself an attorney, and thus well-read in the area of property law.
"We really need a union."
What a crock. I've been in unions before and they are next to worthless. The biggest rip-off ever pulled on the working class is the lie that joining a union will make your life better, help you feed your children, insure job security and cure cancer. The only thing that's going to accomplish any of these lofty goals is hard work and diligent effort by talented individuals, not forking over a percentage of your hard-earned wages to an "organizer" or "steward" to support a corrupt bureaucracy like a labor union. Just look at what unionizing public school teachers has done for education.
No thanks. I'll negotiate my own contract, and be much better off.
Those of us who are certified in one or more technologies can argue with you there. But the point the poster is making is that it is very difficult to "show them what you know" if you can't even get a foot in the door to meet "them." A lot of companies screen applicants by keywords and your application/resume/inquiry won't even show up as a blip on their screens without certain keywords such as MCSE, CCNA, CNE, MCDBA, RHCE or some other certification being included as part of your name. It's the eternal chicken and egg dilemma we've all faced at one point or another in our careers.
If you're so concerned about it that you've already developed a conspiracy theory to explain the existence Lindows, why not do some real research and download the Lindows Sneak Peak?
Whatever their level of altruism, Lindows is definitely going to be released. Their Sneak Peak releases of beta versions have demonstrated that they're serious about this mission and their product. They're very up front about their plans for the product. It remains to be seen if they can successfully compete with not just M$, but also the other Linux distributors out there who have armies of fiercely loyal users. Then again, they're not marketing their distribution to diehard Linux users, but to frustrated Microsoft customers and newbies who can still be persuaded not to succumb to the Dark Side.
Federal payroll tax withholding dates back to World War II and was intended to make it easier for the government to finance the war effort. At the time, people accepted it because it was wartime, and they were promised that it would be repealed once the war ended. The repeal never happened, and people never complained too much about it because they just got used to having their paychecks docked.
Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles"and Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series are two entirely different works by two entirely different authors.
No, she's already too closely associated with a different princess type role. How about Catherine Zeta-Jones?
Yeah, Sam Raimi could direct it (though I think John Woo would also be great), but Kevin Smith can't write dialogue to save his life, and has no business doing anything but comedy (and even those comedies struggle for laughs). Given Peter Jackson's triumph with LotR, he'd be a good choice (though I doubt he'd want to take on another job like the one he's already done).
Federal Copyright = Death of author + 70 years
Since ERB died March 19, 1950, that would mean that the copyrights on his works won't expire until at least 2020.
I guess that should close this thread down.
Having long since sold off my old book collection, I no longer have my SFBC series to check, but I did pull out Richard A. Lupoff's "BARSOOM: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision" (1976, Mirage Press, Baltimore, MD) to refresh my memory. Lupoff notes that the eleventh book in the series, "John Carter of Mars," was published in 1964, 14 years after Burroughs' death and almost 20 years after "Llana of Gathol," was published in 1948. "Llana" was actually four separate novelettes first published in Amazing stories in 1941. "John Carter of Mars" consisted of two separate novelettes, "John Carter and the Giant of Mars" and "The Skeleton Men of Jupiter," which apparently made me think they were two separate books.
I stand corrected.
Nothing Burroughs wrote is in the public domain. His family has maintained control over all of his estate and renews the copyrights on all of his works whenever they are due to expire. He was so successful during his lifetime that an entire industry evolved out of the Tarzan series, and his family owns a lot of Los Angeles Real Estate. That's how the city of Tarzana, California came to be incorporated; it was originally the Burroughs family estate. ERB was almost a corporation unto himself!
I have a tendendcy to trust CNN reports for accuracy, but they refer to ERB as an English author. He was as American as applie pie and All Story magazine. Get yer facts straight, man.
All that aside, I've dreamed of seeing the John Carter series on the screen since I was a schoolboy, reading all twelve books in sequence, purchased through the Science Fiction Book Club. I knew even then that such a project would be far too expensive to ever be realized successfully (and having seen what happened to other ERB books that were filmed in the 1970s; remember "The Land/People that Time Forgot" and "At the Earth's Core?"). But now that CGI effects have made such large-scale fantasies technically possible, and the boxoffice success of similar films makes them financially feasible, I can see "A Princess of Mars" being turned into a pretty good Saturday Afternoon popcorn matinee hit, just as the Mummy films were.
I hope they don't make the entire series, though, since the books were very uneven in quality. The series was so popular that Burroughs was under a lot of pressure from the publisher to grind them out very quickly over the years and some of them are really quite poor, hitting the low point with the last one, which was supposedly completed by Burrough's son after his death and based on some very sketchy notes.
I've just purchased a house in California, and since we have to replace the roof anyway, I've been investigating the benefits and drawbacks of adding solar panels during the re-roofing process. Since the energy situation isn't about to get better any time soon, I felt it would be a prudent investment, and would add greatly to the value of the property. I opted to change my power provider the minute it was allowed two years ago during the early stages of the "deregulation" (cough) process, and switched to Green Mountain for their solar/wind combination package. That worked great until Green Mountain pulled out of the California market after PG&E stopped paying them for the power they were sending to the Golden State. I'd still like to stay with renewable energy mechanisms, and am intrigued by the generous rebates offered for those of us who go this way, but I'm not sure I trust the utility (PG&E) or the State (now near broke) to fulfill their end of the bargain. I'll keep studying the options, and keep pricing solar panels and intertie systems for another few weeks. Thanks for posting this discussion!