between pure a la carte and pakcage deals is more likely the best way to handle this. It's true that if everyone could just order the individual channels they wanted then it would a) be more expensive on a per-channel basis, and b) this meta-market would cause a lot of the less-watched channels to disappear altogether. "Great! I don't watch them anyway, who cares" you might say, but think about how many people watch schlock like American Idol and reality TV shows. I, for one, do not want what channels survive dictated by the majority of television viewers who seem to like total crap. At the same time, I just had my cable rates raised (RCN) this month by another $6/month to add the lifetime movie channel, the Tennis channel, and 4 other channels that I have absolutely no interest in. It's like ordering dinner at a restaurant and getting charged for an appetizer you're allergic to because the kitchen needs to get rid of the extra stock.
Instead of a pick-channels-one-by-one approach there just need to be smaller bundles, and you can pick 3 or 4 of these bundles with basic service and then maybe add an extra bundle for an added charge. Put sports channels together, put women's tv channels together, non-english channels, tech, entertainment, etc. Each bundle could be 10 or so related channels and, sure, you might not be getting 100% just what you want but now you've reduced the cost increases due to a la carte pricing, and buffered the loss of channels due to market demands. I would much rather pay $40/mo and only get 8 channels I don't want to see than (currently) pay $80/mo for something like 50 channels I don't want.
So now that we know which base pairs in certain muscle fiber genes are responsible for creating larger and more powerful muscles, could this be applied through genetic manipulation to create those atomic supermen we've been missing?
Granted, genetics is a complicated and young field, but we are becoming quite adept at it. It seems every time there is a discovery about which gene creates what protein there's some scientist two months later growing potatoes or rats with that trait. Can it be long before DARPA starts mucking about with superstrong mammals?
Imagine a trained attack dog with the strength of a horse. (shudder)
I for one do not welcome our new tiny-brained, hypermuscular overlords.
From what I've heard here and elsewhere, between the internal hardware changes, and dropping two (important!!) buttons from the controller I don't see how the XBox2 could possibly be backwards compatible. I think this is total folly on Microsoft's part, especially considering that despite better graphics they are still way below being the console market leader, so we've already seen that better graphics != bigger marketshare. When a new system comes out, what I ask myself is - ok, so what does this system give me that my current one doesn't and how much is it gonna cost me? Experience tells us the MSRP on this new X2 is gonna be at least $250, and by the time it comes out original XBoxes will be selling for $150 or less. The XBox is still a kick-ass system, and provided a major leap from N64 and PS1 (and personally I feel PS2 as well). So what could the X2 possibly be offering to encourage consumers to buy a new console and a whole new suite of games to play on it? Just getting the system and enough games to enjoy it will cost probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $500+. Unless the X2 gives 3D (as in holographic) graphics, or is just so liquid that the real-time graphics look like the ray-traced FMVs from recent Final Fantasies then there's no reason to upgrade to the new system. Hell it makes more sense to go out and buy a used xbox and half a dozen used games and you'll still spend less than upgrading and still have a great console.
So for those who rtf, what I want to know is at what point did David Mitzi say to himself, "Geez, if only I could dissolve this tin disulphide in something really caustic. Like gasoline, only waaaay stronger... Hmmm, Mary could you bring me some of that hydrazine we have laying around? I think it's behind my lunch in the minifridge..." ??
is great and all but without a massive movement that information doesn't always flow upstream very quickly. In other words speak with your wallet and with your voice. Email is still free (mostly) so everytime your specifically purchase a non-DRM product over theirs write and tell them! Let them know how much $$$ they're losing on a sale-to-sale basis. Companies live and die by numbers and having another level of data tells them even more forcefully that, yes a boycott is in progress, and they're actively losing our money.
Remember, in order to short a stock you have to get it from someone that has it. IANAB(roker) but maybe it moved up because there's so many demands to short stock that brokerages don't own that they're buying it to make available. Ah the hilarity.
In other news today, a candlelight vigil for a young boy with terminal lung cancer was broken up by NEOCorp private police when participants refused to pay a licensing fee for the billions of carbon nanotubes they were blantantly producing by burning wax. When asked for comment a NEOCorp spokesman said, "It really is too bad about that kid dying or whatever, but we've got to focus on the real issue here, our IP was being flagrantly abused in public with no monetary compensation to us, and we are not going to sit idly by and allow the screaming naked masses to continue to profit from the light and heat given off as a byproduct of producing NEOCorp's patented molecules."
When asked for comment on why NEOCorp felt it had the right to patent naturally occuring substances that it merely found rather than explicitly created, the original reporter was rapidly bludgeoned to near-death and taken
to NEOCorp's multitrillion dollar headquarters (previously Japan) for immediate Company Re-Education.
I have just copyrighted a 16Kb database containing the basic Newtonian equations governing gravity and acceleration, including "distance = time x speed". Anyone who wishes to continue to calculate things falling (I'm looking at you, physics departments) or indeed even continue to stand on the planet due to it's gravitational attraction will be required to send me a modest Gravity Licensing Fee of just $699.
Lawsuits and gravitational uncouplings will be forthcoming for all who do not comply by... tomorrow.
So what happens if I perform a coin toss starting with the coin perpendicular to the ground? This should eliminate the bias. Of course one could also just flip a coin to see which side to start up before performing a coin toss (begin infinite loop regression)....
So does anyone else read this as an open invitiation from M$ for all those hackers out there who have been slacking off to step up and get those exploits out on time?
By this time next week we'll be ass-deep in MyDoom.g and PrePatchOfDeath.a.b and.c
I know I'm almost a week late to this party but whatever.
From page 2 of ANKoS - "One might have thought - as at first I certainly did - that if the rules for a program were simple then this would mean that its behavior must also be correspondingly simple..... But the pivotal discover I made some eighteen years ago is that in the world of programs such intuition is not even close to correct."
I know he's talking ultimately about CA in this book but getting two pages into it I'm not willing to read a paragraph more from the above sentences alone. Gee, Prof Wolfram, you mean by taking a simple 'program' like, oh I don't know, c=a+b*i and iterating it I could produce complex results? Wow! That's amazing, I'm so glad you "discovered" that simple rules can create complex outputs that explain natural processes.
It only takes three transformations and rotations of a rectangle iterated over and over to produce a fractal fern, I learned and understood that concept at 12 when I first read about Gaston Julia who did his work circa 1920. I just don't see how Wolfram's expression of the same theory in the field of CA makes it anymore new or scientifically ground breaking. And if he thinks his little shaded graph paper patterns are so complex he should try generating the Mandelbrot set by hand!
My appologies, FRS-only then, jim deane has it right. FRS-only radios should be fine however and not susceptible to FCC fines. From the FCC FRS Page:
"You may use your FRS unit for business-related communications.
License documents are neither needed nor issued. You are provided authority to operate a FRS unit in places where the FCC regulates radio communications as long as you use only an unmodified FCC certified FRS unit. An FCC certified FRS unit has an identifying label placed on it by the manufacturer. There is no age or citizenship requirement."
Your best bet for cost and effectiveness is to get nicer walkie-talkies. At $40/pair Motorola FRS/GMRS radios have 22 channels, and a 2-mile range, plus you can get headset/microphones to go with em. I own a couple pairs and they're durable as hell (you shouldn't drop them in a lake, but mine came back to life anyway) and have 12+ continuous hrs on a couple AAs. Plus now you can multichannel your crew - Ch 1 is Lights/sound Ch 2 is backstage crew....
~J
>-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Let's not forget Onimusha, after you beat it you can replay the game in... a giant panda suit. (sorry, couldn't find any screenshots) Complete with fliptop head. Nothing like battling demons and samurai as the gentle-giant-turned-warrior, fiercest of the selective herbivors.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of a pick-channels-one-by-one approach there just need to be smaller bundles, and you can pick 3 or 4 of these bundles with basic service and then maybe add an extra bundle for an added charge. Put sports channels together, put women's tv channels together, non-english channels, tech, entertainment, etc. Each bundle could be 10 or so related channels and, sure, you might not be getting 100% just what you want but now you've reduced the cost increases due to a la carte pricing, and buffered the loss of channels due to market demands. I would much rather pay $40/mo and only get 8 channels I don't want to see than (currently) pay $80/mo for something like 50 channels I don't want.
Granted, genetics is a complicated and young field, but we are becoming quite adept at it. It seems every time there is a discovery about which gene creates what protein there's some scientist two months later growing potatoes or rats with that trait. Can it be long before DARPA starts mucking about with superstrong mammals?
Imagine a trained attack dog with the strength of a horse. (shudder)
I for one do not welcome our new tiny-brained, hypermuscular overlords.
From what I've heard here and elsewhere, between the internal hardware changes, and dropping two (important!!) buttons from the controller I don't see how the XBox2 could possibly be backwards compatible.
I think this is total folly on Microsoft's part, especially considering that despite better graphics they are still way below being the console market leader, so we've already seen that better graphics != bigger marketshare. When a new system comes out, what I ask myself is - ok, so what does this system give me that my current one doesn't and how much is it gonna cost me? Experience tells us the MSRP on this new X2 is gonna be at least $250, and by the time it comes out original XBoxes will be selling for $150 or less. The XBox is still a kick-ass system, and provided a major leap from N64 and PS1 (and personally I feel PS2 as well). So what could the X2 possibly be offering to encourage consumers to buy a new console and a whole new suite of games to play on it? Just getting the system and enough games to enjoy it will cost probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $500+. Unless the X2 gives 3D (as in holographic) graphics, or is just so liquid that the real-time graphics look like the ray-traced FMVs from recent Final Fantasies then there's no reason to upgrade to the new system. Hell it makes more sense to go out and buy a used xbox and half a dozen used games and you'll still spend less than upgrading and still have a great console.
UFO sees you!
So for those who rtf, what I want to know is at what point did David Mitzi say to himself, "Geez, if only I could dissolve this tin disulphide in something really caustic. Like gasoline, only waaaay stronger... Hmmm, Mary could you bring me some of that hydrazine we have laying around? I think it's behind my lunch in the minifridge..." ??
is great and all but without a massive movement that information doesn't always flow upstream very quickly. In other words speak with your wallet and with your voice. Email is still free (mostly) so everytime your specifically purchase a non-DRM product over theirs write and tell them! Let them know how much $$$ they're losing on a sale-to-sale basis. Companies live and die by numbers and having another level of data tells them even more forcefully that, yes a boycott is in progress, and they're actively losing our money.
This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the spam population and have your operating system spayed or neutered. (patch patch patch!)
IANAB(roker) but maybe it moved up because there's so many demands to short stock that brokerages don't own that they're buying it to make available. Ah the hilarity.
When asked for comment a NEOCorp spokesman said, "It really is too bad about that kid dying or whatever, but we've got to focus on the real issue here, our IP was being flagrantly abused in public with no monetary compensation to us, and we are not going to sit idly by and allow the screaming naked masses to continue to profit from the light and heat given off as a byproduct of producing NEOCorp's patented molecules."
When asked for comment on why NEOCorp felt it had the right to patent naturally occuring substances that it merely found rather than explicitly created, the original reporter was rapidly bludgeoned to near-death and taken to NEOCorp's multitrillion dollar headquarters (previously Japan) for immediate Company Re-Education.
Lawsuits and gravitational uncouplings will be forthcoming for all who do not comply by ... tomorrow.
Of course one could also just flip a coin to see which side to start up before performing a coin toss (begin infinite loop regression)....
By this time next week we'll be ass-deep in MyDoom.g and PrePatchOfDeath.a .b and .c
From page 2 of ANKoS - "One might have thought - as at first I certainly did - that if the rules for a program were simple then this would mean that its behavior must also be correspondingly simple..... But the pivotal discover I made some eighteen years ago is that in the world of programs such intuition is not even close to correct."
I know he's talking ultimately about CA in this book but getting two pages into it I'm not willing to read a paragraph more from the above sentences alone. Gee, Prof Wolfram, you mean by taking a simple 'program' like, oh I don't know, c=a+b*i and iterating it I could produce complex results? Wow! That's amazing, I'm so glad you "discovered" that simple rules can create complex outputs that explain natural processes.
It only takes three transformations and rotations of a rectangle iterated over and over to produce a fractal fern, I learned and understood that concept at 12 when I first read about Gaston Julia who did his work circa 1920. I just don't see how Wolfram's expression of the same theory in the field of CA makes it anymore new or scientifically ground breaking. And if he thinks his little shaded graph paper patterns are so complex he should try generating the Mandelbrot set by hand!
I would have moderated this as funny if it weren't so frightfully inevitable.
"You may use your FRS unit for business-related communications.
License documents are neither needed nor issued. You are provided authority to operate a FRS unit in places where the FCC regulates radio communications as long as you use only an unmodified FCC certified FRS unit. An FCC certified FRS unit has an identifying label placed on it by the manufacturer. There is no age or citizenship requirement."
~J
Your best bet for cost and effectiveness is to get nicer walkie-talkies. At $40/pair Motorola FRS/GMRS radios have 22 channels, and a 2-mile range, plus you can get headset/microphones to go with em. I own a couple pairs and they're durable as hell (you shouldn't drop them in a lake, but mine came back to life anyway) and have 12+ continuous hrs on a couple AAs. Plus now you can multichannel your crew - Ch 1 is Lights/sound Ch 2 is backstage crew.... ~J >-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Let's not forget Onimusha, after you beat it you can replay the game in ... a giant panda suit. (sorry, couldn't find any screenshots) Complete with fliptop head. Nothing like battling demons and samurai as the gentle-giant-turned-warrior, fiercest of the selective herbivors. :P