"Also, profits of Mission Impossible go to cover the losses of the gamble on Young Adult."
$10M is a pretty anemic box office, but it's totally possible for a huge special-effects-laden blockbuster with lots of high-priced stars to rake in a huge box office and still not be profitable for the studio, while a small film like Young Adult to take in a fraction of the ticket sales but still make a tidy profit.
Ha ha, yes, welcome to the socio-economic problem that has plagued mankind for, oh, the last 5,000 years or so. We look forward to hearing your contribution!
Did you know that the vast bulk of New York's complex subway system, without which the city wouldn't function today, was built in about 25 years? Hundreds of miles of tunnels and bridges and stations. Meanwhile, today the city is struggling to build a couple miles of the 2nd Avenue Subway in less than a decade.
Ditto Interstates and improved intercity rail. Our society's ability to do big projects just seems to be on the decline.
the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
While the psychological trauma must have been horriffic, in aggregate economic terms Europe actually went through an upswing in the generation after the Black Death, believe it or not. Daily life improved for peasants in particular, who suddenly found their labor in great demand (both because there were fewer of them and there was a sudden surfeit of unclaimed land).
I lived in the San Francisco area and commuted by BART in the late '90s/early '00s, when cell phones were first becoming omnipresent among the tech crowd. On my train ride back from SF to Berkeley there were two brief periods where trains came above ground, which were marked by everyone whipping out their phones and breathlessly relaying status updates to those they were meetings. I remember thinking, "Jeez, I hope they don't put cell reception in the tunnels, this will just be insufferable." Looks like I was right!
My understanding that much of Gates' donations have been spent on organizations trying to reform public education along "market-based" lines -- i.e., public schools run by private companies, which supposedly makes them more accountable. Maybe he's discovering this isn't the panacea that the reformers have sold?
Self-regulation can be a response to incentives, actually; one of the incentives is to not have regulations imposed by the government. The history of movie ratings in the U.S. -- first the Hayes Code, and then the current rating system we have now -- are examples of industry self-regulation that was designed to stave off government censorship. Technically you don't have to have your movie rated by the MPAA, but since virtually everyone in the film business participates in the system, it's difficult if not impossible to bypass it and still make money.
Of course, as this study shows, it's lots easier to break the rules when you're the one setting the rules and enforcing them.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
on
When Software Offends
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· Score: 2
So... they couldn't get a date in high school, so it's OK for them to name software after a genre that revolves around the (implied or explicit) humiliation of women? I don't think anyone's labelling "men" as objects, I think people are labelling these particular men as rude.
How about "when software is named by assholes"
on
When Software Offends
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I love how this is all framed as people being "offended," so that everyone can say "Ooh, look at the little baby, so offended by harsh language." When actually the issue is that the names for these (non-panty-related) software has been picked out by dudes who apparently think that it's hilarious to take pictures up women's skirts without their consent (which is what everyone knows "upskirt" and "pantyshot" mean, on the internet). You don't need to be a native speaker of English to know what they think of women.
Actually, it's a blog post written by the founder of BlogAds, like the summary says. He's FB friends with a lot of these folks, which is why he noticed. It's not promoting BlogAds as a company.
The lawsuits in the article wouldn't be about your right to stream the channels onto your iPad; it would be about Time Warner's right to make the app available to its customers. Nobody's claiming that you're violating copyright; the channels are claiming that Time Warner is violating its contracts with them. Basically, they're saying they only sold Time Warner the rights to show their programming on television sets, narrowly defined.
The only reason they can even ask for this is that the feed has "NYT" in its name. They should just relaunch under the name "FreeGreyLady" or something ("the grey lady" being an old-school nickname for the New York TImes, even though it's been in color for a while now.) Assuming the Times' hasn't trademarked that, I'd think they couldn't touch it.
I always find this argument hilarious because people act as if "democracy" and "republic" are terms that have one extremely precise meaning each, and are mutually exclusive.
Etymologically, "republic" comes from the Latin phrase "res publica", which means "common thing" or "common substance". It was meant to contrast the Roman state, which was the possession of the entire Roman citizen body, with foreign kingdoms that were (in the view of the Romans) "owned" by a single despot. The English phrase "commonwealth" is a more or less literal translation. (The Romans continued to use this name for their state well after the oligarchic system we call the "Roman republic" was replaced by the one-man rule we call the "Roman empire," by the way.)
Etymologically, "democracy" comes from a Greek phrase that means "people power", or, perhaps more accurately, "citizen body power" ("demos" referring to the body of people with citizen rights, not the population as a whole). It was used as a term of abuse even back in the days of ancient Athens, when the state went back and forth between various systems of government, some of which involves large-scale participation of the citizen body in day-to-day decisions, others not so much.
The two words have been used to describe an incredible variety of political systems over the past 2000 years or so. The modern use of the word "republic" probably emerged in the late 18th/early 19th century, when it came to specifically denote states that weren't monarchies (as this was a live question in that era). The modern use of the word "democracy" is similarly broad, denoting a system of government where the citizens have a significant say in how the country is run. Since there are virtually no instances of states run by direct democracy, the term is understood as being wholly compatible with representative government, in which citizens elect officials to run the state on their behalf.
You can have states that are democracies but not republics (e.g., the UK and Sweden), that are republics and not democracies (e.g., Syria, Belarus), that are both (e.g., the U.S., France), or that are neither (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Brunei).
And really, this isn't any different than the current situation. People with existing conditions can go through the phone book today and call every company they see listed asking for a quote, and they'll get quotes.
My understanding is that for some (many) conditions this is not the case. You can have pre-existing conditions that will mean that you literally cannot buy health insurance no matter how much you are willing to pay. (This is on the individual market mind you -- if you can buy insurance through a group, then you can always get it no matter what pre-existing conditions you might have, though the rates may be steep.)
Congress could pass a law forcing insurance companies operating in interstate commerce (which is basically all of them) to offer coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, etc, and that's clearly within the commerce clause power.
Ah ha, but if insurance companies have to insure everybody (which they do, under the new law), but people aren't required to buy insurance, many people will wait until they're sick to buy health insurance, and the system will collapse. This doesn't have anything to do with the constitutionality of the law, but it does affect its practicality.
Call it a "corporate handout" if you want, but the logic behind it is this: you can't require private insurers to accept new customers with pre-existing conditions (which the health reform does -- and this is probably its most popular provision) without requiring everyone to buy health insurance. Otherwise, people would just stay uninsured until they got sick, and the whole health insurance industry would collapse. Essentially, this is the only way that you can get a system with universal coverage that is entirely based on private insurance.
If this provision doesn't hold, you may get your single payer coverage sooner than you think.
I'm not arguing for or against a paywall. I'm actually replying to the parent commenter's statement that "Cost of publishing is now next to nothing, cost of distribution is now next to nothing. So what services does a Media company like The Times offer it's employee's to entice them from not competing directly against the company?" There are still many advantages to working together as an organization rather than as a lone wolf reporter-blogger, was my point.
That having been said, media companies have been hearing for years that it's more important to expand their reach or "mindshare" rather than make money from their customers, and over the same period of time they've seen their revenues drop dramatically. One can understand why they might decide to try another tactic. I'm certainly not convinced that it'll work, but the "get as many people as humanly possible to read your site and the cash will follow" has been the operating procedure for the last decade, and it hasn't exactly worked like gangbusters either.
Paid-content advocates have been arguing that advertisers will be willing to pay more per thousand impressions if the audience is of higher quality, and that the paywall screens out low-quality pageviews, so the CPM rate can be increased.
This is a longstanding tactic in print, too -- often magazines charge cover prices of various degrees of heft primarily so they can tell advertisers that their audience has a certain disposable income. It's not clear yet whether this will take in online advertising, but it's certainly true that on free sites, even well read and much beloved ones, fully half of ad impressions are garbage, readers who stumbled onto a page by accident, stay less than two seconds, and never return.
Slashdot Mirror
"Also, profits of Mission Impossible go to cover the losses of the gamble on Young Adult."
$10M is a pretty anemic box office, but it's totally possible for a huge special-effects-laden blockbuster with lots of high-priced stars to rake in a huge box office and still not be profitable for the studio, while a small film like Young Adult to take in a fraction of the ticket sales but still make a tidy profit.
Once President Perry eliminates the job-killing EPA!
The rest is a matter of distribution
Ha ha, yes, welcome to the socio-economic problem that has plagued mankind for, oh, the last 5,000 years or so. We look forward to hearing your contribution!
Did you know that the vast bulk of New York's complex subway system, without which the city wouldn't function today, was built in about 25 years? Hundreds of miles of tunnels and bridges and stations. Meanwhile, today the city is struggling to build a couple miles of the 2nd Avenue Subway in less than a decade.
Ditto Interstates and improved intercity rail. Our society's ability to do big projects just seems to be on the decline.
Actually, it seems like Microsoft sees VMware as its actual competition.
the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
While the psychological trauma must have been horriffic, in aggregate economic terms Europe actually went through an upswing in the generation after the Black Death, believe it or not. Daily life improved for peasants in particular, who suddenly found their labor in great demand (both because there were fewer of them and there was a sudden surfeit of unclaimed land).
I lived in the San Francisco area and commuted by BART in the late '90s/early '00s, when cell phones were first becoming omnipresent among the tech crowd. On my train ride back from SF to Berkeley there were two brief periods where trains came above ground, which were marked by everyone whipping out their phones and breathlessly relaying status updates to those they were meetings. I remember thinking, "Jeez, I hope they don't put cell reception in the tunnels, this will just be insufferable." Looks like I was right!
My understanding that much of Gates' donations have been spent on organizations trying to reform public education along "market-based" lines -- i.e., public schools run by private companies, which supposedly makes them more accountable. Maybe he's discovering this isn't the panacea that the reformers have sold?
Self-regulation can be a response to incentives, actually; one of the incentives is to not have regulations imposed by the government. The history of movie ratings in the U.S. -- first the Hayes Code, and then the current rating system we have now -- are examples of industry self-regulation that was designed to stave off government censorship. Technically you don't have to have your movie rated by the MPAA, but since virtually everyone in the film business participates in the system, it's difficult if not impossible to bypass it and still make money.
Of course, as this study shows, it's lots easier to break the rules when you're the one setting the rules and enforcing them.
So ... they couldn't get a date in high school, so it's OK for them to name software after a genre that revolves around the (implied or explicit) humiliation of women? I don't think anyone's labelling "men" as objects, I think people are labelling these particular men as rude.
I love how this is all framed as people being "offended," so that everyone can say "Ooh, look at the little baby, so offended by harsh language." When actually the issue is that the names for these (non-panty-related) software has been picked out by dudes who apparently think that it's hilarious to take pictures up women's skirts without their consent (which is what everyone knows "upskirt" and "pantyshot" mean, on the internet). You don't need to be a native speaker of English to know what they think of women.
Excellent douchebaggy AC language usage troll! A+++++, would be trolled again.
Actually, it's a blog post written by the founder of BlogAds, like the summary says. He's FB friends with a lot of these folks, which is why he noticed. It's not promoting BlogAds as a company.
...not so well on veggies or other things that don't have barcodes.
The lawsuits in the article wouldn't be about your right to stream the channels onto your iPad; it would be about Time Warner's right to make the app available to its customers. Nobody's claiming that you're violating copyright; the channels are claiming that Time Warner is violating its contracts with them. Basically, they're saying they only sold Time Warner the rights to show their programming on television sets, narrowly defined.
The only reason they can even ask for this is that the feed has "NYT" in its name. They should just relaunch under the name "FreeGreyLady" or something ("the grey lady" being an old-school nickname for the New York TImes, even though it's been in color for a while now.) Assuming the Times' hasn't trademarked that, I'd think they couldn't touch it.
I always find this argument hilarious because people act as if "democracy" and "republic" are terms that have one extremely precise meaning each, and are mutually exclusive.
Etymologically, "republic" comes from the Latin phrase "res publica", which means "common thing" or "common substance". It was meant to contrast the Roman state, which was the possession of the entire Roman citizen body, with foreign kingdoms that were (in the view of the Romans) "owned" by a single despot. The English phrase "commonwealth" is a more or less literal translation. (The Romans continued to use this name for their state well after the oligarchic system we call the "Roman republic" was replaced by the one-man rule we call the "Roman empire," by the way.)
Etymologically, "democracy" comes from a Greek phrase that means "people power", or, perhaps more accurately, "citizen body power" ("demos" referring to the body of people with citizen rights, not the population as a whole). It was used as a term of abuse even back in the days of ancient Athens, when the state went back and forth between various systems of government, some of which involves large-scale participation of the citizen body in day-to-day decisions, others not so much.
The two words have been used to describe an incredible variety of political systems over the past 2000 years or so. The modern use of the word "republic" probably emerged in the late 18th/early 19th century, when it came to specifically denote states that weren't monarchies (as this was a live question in that era). The modern use of the word "democracy" is similarly broad, denoting a system of government where the citizens have a significant say in how the country is run. Since there are virtually no instances of states run by direct democracy, the term is understood as being wholly compatible with representative government, in which citizens elect officials to run the state on their behalf.
You can have states that are democracies but not republics (e.g., the UK and Sweden), that are republics and not democracies (e.g., Syria, Belarus), that are both (e.g., the U.S., France), or that are neither (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Brunei).
That 1.5 million number represents sales of phones by manufacturers to retailers, not sales of retailers to customers.
O CRUEL REMINDER! *sobs*
I'm the one who submitted it to Slashdot, and it's totally my fault, not a mistake in TFA. Apologies.
And really, this isn't any different than the current situation. People with existing conditions can go through the phone book today and call every company they see listed asking for a quote, and they'll get quotes.
My understanding is that for some (many) conditions this is not the case. You can have pre-existing conditions that will mean that you literally cannot buy health insurance no matter how much you are willing to pay. (This is on the individual market mind you -- if you can buy insurance through a group, then you can always get it no matter what pre-existing conditions you might have, though the rates may be steep.)
Congress could pass a law forcing insurance companies operating in interstate commerce (which is basically all of them) to offer coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, etc, and that's clearly within the commerce clause power.
Ah ha, but if insurance companies have to insure everybody (which they do, under the new law), but people aren't required to buy insurance, many people will wait until they're sick to buy health insurance, and the system will collapse. This doesn't have anything to do with the constitutionality of the law, but it does affect its practicality.
Call it a "corporate handout" if you want, but the logic behind it is this: you can't require private insurers to accept new customers with pre-existing conditions (which the health reform does -- and this is probably its most popular provision) without requiring everyone to buy health insurance. Otherwise, people would just stay uninsured until they got sick, and the whole health insurance industry would collapse. Essentially, this is the only way that you can get a system with universal coverage that is entirely based on private insurance.
If this provision doesn't hold, you may get your single payer coverage sooner than you think.
I'm not arguing for or against a paywall. I'm actually replying to the parent commenter's statement that "Cost of publishing is now next to nothing, cost of distribution is now next to nothing. So what services does a Media company like The Times offer it's employee's to entice them from not competing directly against the company?" There are still many advantages to working together as an organization rather than as a lone wolf reporter-blogger, was my point.
That having been said, media companies have been hearing for years that it's more important to expand their reach or "mindshare" rather than make money from their customers, and over the same period of time they've seen their revenues drop dramatically. One can understand why they might decide to try another tactic. I'm certainly not convinced that it'll work, but the "get as many people as humanly possible to read your site and the cash will follow" has been the operating procedure for the last decade, and it hasn't exactly worked like gangbusters either.
Paid-content advocates have been arguing that advertisers will be willing to pay more per thousand impressions if the audience is of higher quality, and that the paywall screens out low-quality pageviews, so the CPM rate can be increased.
This is a longstanding tactic in print, too -- often magazines charge cover prices of various degrees of heft primarily so they can tell advertisers that their audience has a certain disposable income. It's not clear yet whether this will take in online advertising, but it's certainly true that on free sites, even well read and much beloved ones, fully half of ad impressions are garbage, readers who stumbled onto a page by accident, stay less than two seconds, and never return.