No no, see this: (By default, I'll go see any cheesy sci fi, unless it otherwise offends me.)
I would have seen it without the advertising, no question. I would have browsed the released list of films showing that week, seen the name and the two sentence line about the movie, and watched it without any additional advertising. You are incorrect to state that their advertising made me "curious enough... to see it".
Texas has a similar tax, enacted last year, but it has a few key differences:
1. Texas' tax is on margin, computed one of three ways:
- sales price minus COGS
- sales price times 0.7
- sales price minus compensation (I'll cover the compensation option later.)
2. Texas' tax is on receipts for items sold in Texas only, but is due regardless of whether the company is based in Texas or not. (In other words, base your company in Nevada or Washington - it doesn't matter - you still pay the tax in Texas if you sell here.)
3. Texas' tax lets you subtract compensation for all employees in the state as one of the options to limit your tax. (This means that if you are based here, but sell worldwide, you can subtract the cost of your entire R&D budget from the gross receipts of your Texas-only sales. The net result is minimal tax on Texas-based corporations.)
The primary reason for creating this tax was to enact a property tax reduction, due to state constitution issues with the methods for financing public education. So far, I don't believe any major loopholes have come up to exploit it. Search on google for "Texas franchise tax" if you want to read more.
Tell you what. How about you pour yourself a nice hot cup of 190 degree coffee, and "enjoy it immediately", and see if you end up looking like the person in the picture on that website.
Apparently there was some sort of 'buzz' about Cloverfield for the past few months. I missed it. That may not be interesting, except I watch 2 to 3 hours of TV a day, spend more time than that on the web, subscribe to several popular (non-technical) magazines, and read a daily newspaper. I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, but I'm not quite ammish.
This is a bit off-topic, I know, but anyway: I have a Virgin Mobile phone. I paid very little for the phone and very little for the service. In return (as I look at it), they occasionally text me with some advertising crap. It's annoying when it comes in a meeting, but usually it's harmless.
In the past month, I received several spams for Cloverfield. It was the only advertising I saw regarding the film, and it almost made me skip seeing it. (Get that, studio? The ads you paid for nearly cost you a customer!) Only a friend's recommendation made me go after receiving those. (By default, I'll go see any cheesy sci fi, unless it otherwise offends me.)
(Incidentally, I directly stated that I felt no ill effects from the camera work. But, I felt that I'd eaten something bad as soon as I got home that night, and spend the night sick and missed half a day of work. It seriously felt like I'd eaten spoiled ice cream, or something, but all the reports I read later made me wonder if I'd internalized the shaky-cam and gotten sick over it without consciously realizing it.)
Sadly, this sounds like the coffee incident, ready to happen again.
People understand that coffee is hot. People understand that flashlights are bright.
However, neither "hot" nor "bright" have precise values; both are relative terms. No reasonable person expects a "hot" cup of coffee to be 190 degrees Fahrenheit; they expect around 140 degrees at most. Likewise, no reasonable person would expect a "bright" flashlight to be 4100 Lumens - when a 2000 Lumen flashlight is suitable for most "bright" flashlight applications.
In both cases, there are people who will claim that, in their ideal society, it is entirely up to the buyer to beware, and that everyone should walk around with an array of scientific instruments to gauge, measure, and test any product they consider before purchase, since putting a little label on something is an undue burden on the manufacturer.
Hmm, I'm not sure that they'd want to pay for all the bandwidth to have thousands and thousands of people download a 4000-page document from their web site. That would probably cost a lot of money.
If only there was some way that they could start it out on the internet - say, "seed" it - and then those interested in it could share it amongst themselves, using the "seed" as a guide. I'm sure that would save them some bandwidth costs. If only there was technology to do so, and I could somehow inform TPB of the existence and benefits of this technology.
Fortunately this one has been easily solved years ago. Think about all of the movies that have, as background vehicles, a Ford, GM, Chrysler, etc., vehicle.
No, I'm not talking about the ones where the car is featured prominently (Transporter, Transformers, etc.) - in those the movie studio clearly got permission (or was paid prominently for their use). I'm talking about background vehicles. The studios do not and never have paid for their use when they were filmed on a public street. If Ford tries to press this, they'll have the movie studios pressing against them.
Note of course that carbon pulled from the ground and made into plastic never enters the atmosphere. From a climate impact, that particular carbon has no detrimental effect unless the plastic, when discarded, is burned or otherwise breaks down into the atmosphere.
When we run out of oil, we can figure out how to make plastics without it. In the mean time, we can stop pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere, even if we have to use petroleum-based products to do it.
Well, if your prime minister or whatever starts trying to direct things in ways that your representative - you know the guy who can actually closely represent your views - doesn't like, along with enough other representatives, then they can give a vote of no confidence and new elections are called.
With 10 parties, and a parliment style government where each party gets their percentage share of elected officials, the compromise still has to happen. But in this case, my elected official would be more like me, and so I know that, even if he has to compromise on one law, on the next he'll be right back to representing my interests.
With only two parties, the compromise was made by me a year and a half ago when I voted, and then I have to accept years worth of bad decisions on many issues because I have no ability to control their outcome. Unless, of course, we make sure I get a direct vote on the decision in some complicated general election.
There's a big difference between having to form a consensus on every issue, versus having the "same old same old" make decisions knowing there's no real opposition represented in the governing body.*
* Note: I don't think Republicans and Democrats are all the same. There are very key differences that make me vote one way versus the other. But in some other key things, their opinions seem way too close together.
We bought two South American families goats for the holidays. Hopefully their kids will have enough milk and cheese, and income from selling the extra, so that they can spend less time working for their food and more time using their OLPC PC.
I really don't mean to flame, but every single voting issue thread attracts at least one post from someone explaining how Canada votes, and how simple it is, and how the U.S. could just do it the same way. Most of the time this post gets modded up insightful.
About half the time, someone responds, explaining how U.S. elections are more complicated than those in Canada, because U.S. elections usually feature a dozen or more separate items to vote on; in addition to national elections (up to three at a time), there can be a dozen state, county, and municipal elections, plus votes on city propositions, bond packages, and constitutional amendments (almost every year in Texas). It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.
To this post, someone from Canada usually responds, asking why we have to vote on all that stuff, and wondering why we don't let our elected officials decide some of that for us.
To which someone else responds, pointing out that our system of government doesn't work the same as Canada's; once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them. We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue. Thus, we like to have a chance to directly vote on more items than most other countries. Also, to increase the likelihood of high voter turnout, we combine elections to minimize the number of election days. In Texas, I believe there can only be three election days a year: the March primaries (if needed), and the May and November general elections.
------
So, in summary, this concept and its responses have been beaten to death. If you feel the same way I do, do as I will and start modding all "Canada votes like this, why doesn't the U.S., too?" redundant.
This happened to me a few years ago, with Godaddy's whois lookup (while logged in to my Godaddy account) with the domain buylocal.com. It was untaken when I queried, then snapped up by Godaddy within a few days.
Needless to say, Godaddy doesn't get my business any more.
I bought an HP LaserJet 4M Plus at Discount Electronics in Austin a few years ago, when my wife's college printer finally broke a critical plastic piece.
It was more than 10 years old when I bought it, and came with an installed JetDirect card and whatever toner was in the cartridge. It turns out the cartridge was full, because it's still going strong today. All that for $99.
HP's problem is that they can't compete with their own products. The things they made 15 years ago still work and are still of better quality than the crap they produce today.
In 1999 after my wife graduated from college, she worked at a company called NTown Technologies in Knoxville, TN. They had a device that reconstructed the web pages of ISP users, and added a banner bar to the top of each page. The bar had links to email, a search box, and... a big area for banner ads.
The company's motto was "Bringing the Web Home" and they wanted to sell these boxes to ISPs around the country. The ISP would try to use the local paper's ad sales force to sell ads for internet viewers, thereby giving the paper a little revenue stream. The ads would supposedly "work better" because they would be for local businesses instead of internet-wide companies. (Note: I think Ntown got a patent on this business model, so don't go copy it now!)
My wife worked for the Ntown dial-up ISP that they ran as a test platform. The technology worked; they had a customer base willing to have the banner in exchange for a lower monthly access cost, but I think there were problems scaling the traffic, especially with regard to non-html traffic that needed to be analyzed (or not). I assume they also had trouble finding customers. They went out of business less than a year after my wife quit.
And what gas mileage did that get, 6? Unless you plan to replace the engine, it's best use is to sit in a museum next to all those C64s. And if you replace the engine to up the fuel economy, that's not so different than gutting a C64 case and putting a Mac Mini running Linux in there, is it?
Speaking of C64 games, in addition to M.U.L.E. I really liked the introduction music to Frightmare. Great stuff. I spent a lot of time listening to that so I could reprogram it into the Commodore to play with the sound capabilities.
Sadly, if you get far enough into the game it just dies . . depending on the path you take the game either freezes, or gets garbled, or the screen blanks. I guess they shouldn't have spent so much disk space on the intro music... (The PC version on the other side of the disk has no music and is broken from page 1.)
That, and when they fixed the lens they also replaced all of the on-board electronics, because JPL and NASA had consumed too much of the component life before the satellite was even launched into space.
Hint: if you want to lifetime test a part to make sure it's reliable, don't use that part in your satellite after burning up its usable life. Buy two parts from the same batch, test one, and use the other one.
Both NASA and JPL tested the heck out of it, and as a result it failed almost immediately.
Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.
No one in the country has a guaranteed job. Everyone needs to be saving for emergencies and for retirement.
If it's not possible to live as a staff or freelance script writer? Then it's not a viable occupation, sorry, get a job as a waiter. I tried to get a job as a school crossing guard, working two hours a day during school days for just $500 a day (enough, you know, so that I could survive through the summer). But for some reason a lot of parents volunteered for the work, and I couldn't find anyone to pay me a decent wage.
I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.
Sounds like the writers should be striking not to earn more royalties that rely on oppressive copyright law and draconian DRM to enforce, but instead should be striking to get a fair wage for a purchased script at time of sale, or to be hired as staff writers with a steady and adequate salary.
You have it completely wrong. The jobs leaving the country are Machinist V at the local Ford assembly plant. The jobs left in the US require computer and communication skills, logical thinking, knowledge of business and economics. These are all things that a high school C student who applies himself can learn in college, whereby he can get a good job and better his children's future.
Our C average students could never compete with the best of the best foreigners. They don't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
No no, see this:
... to see it".
(By default, I'll go see any cheesy sci fi, unless it otherwise offends me.)
I would have seen it without the advertising, no question. I would have browsed the released list of films showing that week, seen the name and the two sentence line about the movie, and watched it without any additional advertising. You are incorrect to state that their advertising made me "curious enough
Texas has a similar tax, enacted last year, but it has a few key differences:
1. Texas' tax is on margin, computed one of three ways:
- sales price minus COGS
- sales price times 0.7
- sales price minus compensation
(I'll cover the compensation option later.)
2. Texas' tax is on receipts for items sold in Texas only, but is due regardless of whether the company is based in Texas or not.
(In other words, base your company in Nevada or Washington - it doesn't matter - you still pay the tax in Texas if you sell here.)
3. Texas' tax lets you subtract compensation for all employees in the state as one of the options to limit your tax.
(This means that if you are based here, but sell worldwide, you can subtract the cost of your entire R&D budget from the gross receipts of your Texas-only sales. The net result is minimal tax on Texas-based corporations.)
The primary reason for creating this tax was to enact a property tax reduction, due to state constitution issues with the methods for financing public education. So far, I don't believe any major loopholes have come up to exploit it. Search on google for "Texas franchise tax" if you want to read more.
The National Coffee Association are going to get their asses sued, and good riddance to them.
http://www.tap-water-burn.com/
Tell you what. How about you pour yourself a nice hot cup of 190 degree coffee, and "enjoy it immediately", and see if you end up looking like the person in the picture on that website.
Apparently there was some sort of 'buzz' about Cloverfield for the past few months. I missed it. That may not be interesting, except I watch 2 to 3 hours of TV a day, spend more time than that on the web, subscribe to several popular (non-technical) magazines, and read a daily newspaper. I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, but I'm not quite ammish.
This is a bit off-topic, I know, but anyway: I have a Virgin Mobile phone. I paid very little for the phone and very little for the service. In return (as I look at it), they occasionally text me with some advertising crap. It's annoying when it comes in a meeting, but usually it's harmless.
In the past month, I received several spams for Cloverfield. It was the only advertising I saw regarding the film, and it almost made me skip seeing it. (Get that, studio? The ads you paid for nearly cost you a customer!) Only a friend's recommendation made me go after receiving those. (By default, I'll go see any cheesy sci fi, unless it otherwise offends me.)
(Incidentally, I directly stated that I felt no ill effects from the camera work. But, I felt that I'd eaten something bad as soon as I got home that night, and spend the night sick and missed half a day of work. It seriously felt like I'd eaten spoiled ice cream, or something, but all the reports I read later made me wonder if I'd internalized the shaky-cam and gotten sick over it without consciously realizing it.)
Sadly, this sounds like the coffee incident, ready to happen again.
People understand that coffee is hot. People understand that flashlights are bright.
However, neither "hot" nor "bright" have precise values; both are relative terms. No reasonable person expects a "hot" cup of coffee to be 190 degrees Fahrenheit; they expect around 140 degrees at most. Likewise, no reasonable person would expect a "bright" flashlight to be 4100 Lumens - when a 2000 Lumen flashlight is suitable for most "bright" flashlight applications.
In both cases, there are people who will claim that, in their ideal society, it is entirely up to the buyer to beware, and that everyone should walk around with an array of scientific instruments to gauge, measure, and test any product they consider before purchase, since putting a little label on something is an undue burden on the manufacturer.
I should have been more clear. I was responding specifically to my parent poster's comment:
"Now, imagine what it's like if you have to get permission to put *any* product in *any* picture."
That has already been solved.
but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk.
Yeah, but shipping 20-lb bags of dog food is going to catch on like crazy!
Hmm, I'm not sure that they'd want to pay for all the bandwidth to have thousands and thousands of people download a 4000-page document from their web site. That would probably cost a lot of money.
If only there was some way that they could start it out on the internet - say, "seed" it - and then those interested in it could share it amongst themselves, using the "seed" as a guide. I'm sure that would save them some bandwidth costs. If only there was technology to do so, and I could somehow inform TPB of the existence and benefits of this technology.
Fortunately this one has been easily solved years ago. Think about all of the movies that have, as background vehicles, a Ford, GM, Chrysler, etc., vehicle.
No, I'm not talking about the ones where the car is featured prominently (Transporter, Transformers, etc.) - in those the movie studio clearly got permission (or was paid prominently for their use). I'm talking about background vehicles. The studios do not and never have paid for their use when they were filmed on a public street. If Ford tries to press this, they'll have the movie studios pressing against them.
Note of course that carbon pulled from the ground and made into plastic never enters the atmosphere. From a climate impact, that particular carbon has no detrimental effect unless the plastic, when discarded, is burned or otherwise breaks down into the atmosphere.
When we run out of oil, we can figure out how to make plastics without it. In the mean time, we can stop pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere, even if we have to use petroleum-based products to do it.
Well said.
Well, if your prime minister or whatever starts trying to direct things in ways that your representative - you know the guy who can actually closely represent your views - doesn't like, along with enough other representatives, then they can give a vote of no confidence and new elections are called.
Or does it not work that way in Canada?
With 10 parties, and a parliment style government where each party gets their percentage share of elected officials, the compromise still has to happen. But in this case, my elected official would be more like me, and so I know that, even if he has to compromise on one law, on the next he'll be right back to representing my interests.
With only two parties, the compromise was made by me a year and a half ago when I voted, and then I have to accept years worth of bad decisions on many issues because I have no ability to control their outcome. Unless, of course, we make sure I get a direct vote on the decision in some complicated general election.
There's a big difference between having to form a consensus on every issue, versus having the "same old same old" make decisions knowing there's no real opposition represented in the governing body.*
* Note: I don't think Republicans and Democrats are all the same. There are very key differences that make me vote one way versus the other. But in some other key things, their opinions seem way too close together.
In other words, donate to Heifer International.
http://www.heifer.org/
We bought two South American families goats for the holidays. Hopefully their kids will have enough milk and cheese, and income from selling the extra, so that they can spend less time working for their food and more time using their OLPC PC.
I really don't mean to flame, but every single voting issue thread attracts at least one post from someone explaining how Canada votes, and how simple it is, and how the U.S. could just do it the same way. Most of the time this post gets modded up insightful.
About half the time, someone responds, explaining how U.S. elections are more complicated than those in Canada, because U.S. elections usually feature a dozen or more separate items to vote on; in addition to national elections (up to three at a time), there can be a dozen state, county, and municipal elections, plus votes on city propositions, bond packages, and constitutional amendments (almost every year in Texas). It's simply not possible to count all of this quickly and accurately by hand in one day.
To this post, someone from Canada usually responds, asking why we have to vote on all that stuff, and wondering why we don't let our elected officials decide some of that for us.
To which someone else responds, pointing out that our system of government doesn't work the same as Canada's; once we elect someone we are pretty much stuck with them for two, four, or six years, so if our officials start doing things we don't like, we don't have the opportunity to call new elections and replace them. We also only have two viable political parties, so it's less likely that we agree with our elected representatives on every issue. Thus, we like to have a chance to directly vote on more items than most other countries. Also, to increase the likelihood of high voter turnout, we combine elections to minimize the number of election days. In Texas, I believe there can only be three election days a year: the March primaries (if needed), and the May and November general elections.
------
So, in summary, this concept and its responses have been beaten to death. If you feel the same way I do, do as I will and start modding all "Canada votes like this, why doesn't the U.S., too?" redundant.
This happened to me a few years ago, with Godaddy's whois lookup (while logged in to my Godaddy account) with the domain buylocal.com. It was untaken when I queried, then snapped up by Godaddy within a few days.
Needless to say, Godaddy doesn't get my business any more.
I bought an HP LaserJet 4M Plus at Discount Electronics in Austin a few years ago, when my wife's college printer finally broke a critical plastic piece.
It was more than 10 years old when I bought it, and came with an installed JetDirect card and whatever toner was in the cartridge. It turns out the cartridge was full, because it's still going strong today. All that for $99.
HP's problem is that they can't compete with their own products. The things they made 15 years ago still work and are still of better quality than the crap they produce today.
In 1999 after my wife graduated from college, she worked at a company called NTown Technologies in Knoxville, TN. They had a device that reconstructed the web pages of ISP users, and added a banner bar to the top of each page. The bar had links to email, a search box, and... a big area for banner ads.
The company's motto was "Bringing the Web Home" and they wanted to sell these boxes to ISPs around the country. The ISP would try to use the local paper's ad sales force to sell ads for internet viewers, thereby giving the paper a little revenue stream. The ads would supposedly "work better" because they would be for local businesses instead of internet-wide companies. (Note: I think Ntown got a patent on this business model, so don't go copy it now!)
My wife worked for the Ntown dial-up ISP that they ran as a test platform. The technology worked; they had a customer base willing to have the banner in exchange for a lower monthly access cost, but I think there were problems scaling the traffic, especially with regard to non-html traffic that needed to be analyzed (or not). I assume they also had trouble finding customers. They went out of business less than a year after my wife quit.
Here's a press release that vaguely describes the technology as of 2000:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_May_23/ai_62257929
Is there money to be made?
At least in 1999-2000, the answer was no.
and it is STILL useful.
And what gas mileage did that get, 6? Unless you plan to replace the engine, it's best use is to sit in a museum next to all those C64s. And if you replace the engine to up the fuel economy, that's not so different than gutting a C64 case and putting a Mac Mini running Linux in there, is it?
But can it run Linux, err, I mean the C64 command-line interpreter?
Speaking of C64 games, in addition to M.U.L.E. I really liked the introduction music to Frightmare. Great stuff. I spent a lot of time listening to that so I could reprogram it into the Commodore to play with the sound capabilities.
Sadly, if you get far enough into the game it just dies . . depending on the path you take the game either freezes, or gets garbled, or the screen blanks. I guess they shouldn't have spent so much disk space on the intro music... (The PC version on the other side of the disk has no music and is broken from page 1.)
That, and when they fixed the lens they also replaced all of the on-board electronics, because JPL and NASA had consumed too much of the component life before the satellite was even launched into space.
Hint: if you want to lifetime test a part to make sure it's reliable, don't use that part in your satellite after burning up its usable life. Buy two parts from the same batch, test one, and use the other one.
Both NASA and JPL tested the heck out of it, and as a result it failed almost immediately.
Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.
No one in the country has a guaranteed job. Everyone needs to be saving for emergencies and for retirement.
If it's not possible to live as a staff or freelance script writer? Then it's not a viable occupation, sorry, get a job as a waiter. I tried to get a job as a school crossing guard, working two hours a day during school days for just $500 a day (enough, you know, so that I could survive through the summer). But for some reason a lot of parents volunteered for the work, and I couldn't find anyone to pay me a decent wage.
I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.
Sounds like the writers should be striking not to earn more royalties that rely on oppressive copyright law and draconian DRM to enforce, but instead should be striking to get a fair wage for a purchased script at time of sale, or to be hired as staff writers with a steady and adequate salary.
You have it completely wrong. The jobs leaving the country are Machinist V at the local Ford assembly plant. The jobs left in the US require computer and communication skills, logical thinking, knowledge of business and economics. These are all things that a high school C student who applies himself can learn in college, whereby he can get a good job and better his children's future.
Our C average students could never compete with the best of the best foreigners. They don't have to.