You seriously like the weather up here? Have you been here anytime other than July - September?
I know a LOT of people that moved here after visiting in the summer... they don't realize what the weather is like most of the time.
Maybe they're goth. Then the weather is perfect with just enough sun in the year to begin to bitch about it after your vitamin D level begin to build back up.
Two days ago we had a story about how Iron Maiden is making big bucks by touring and not by selling CDs or whatever. Everyone agreed, back then, that this is the way to make money in the music industry.
Saying that there is money in touring because Iron Maiden is doing it is like saying there is money in throwing the winning touchdown pass in the superbowl. To get to the point where that sort of money is even an option for that work means years of working up from the bottom and paying dues.
That's why artists tour. They make shit all on album sales. Especially if they didn't write all the songs they sing. They make lots more with ticket sales.
Never heard of a musician that made profits off of touring. It's always been a promotional tactic and lucky if a tour breaks even. Renting the bus, renting hotels, buying food to feed the band and roadies when they aren't happy with their cheese tray the venue produces in the green room, all add up. Merch might tip the equation sometimes, but any band that tours beyond a local circuit that is making money on tour is making money on records sales also and touring as a promotional tactic to boost those sales.
But having their songs heard got them fans which go out and see their live shows/tours, and that makes them quite a bit of money.
I hear that a lot, but certainly not from the musicians I know. I've been a roadie and just finished a book on touring by Martin Atkins. Everything I've ever heard has been that touring is a necessary evil needed for promotion. Tours run on a shoestring budget that can turn from break even to hugely in debt in the blink of an eye. I'm sure that some people make money off of tours, but those people are also the very small sample that are making lots of money off of their album sales also. Most musicians on major labels are basically in the company store model. They get paid by the company to make their album. If their album sells past the amount needed to pay back what they were advanced, they start making money.
Merchandise is the wild card. Depending on how much sells, and what the terms are, tours can make money off of that, but certainly don't make it off of ticket sales. I knew lots of punk bands that would essentially pay for their tours by coming up with a cool t-shirt design, get them made as cheap as possible, and survive off the desire of kids wanting to wear a cool graphic or slogan on a shirt (an never really caring who the band was). Even then, it just barely kept them in gas money and ramen. Bands who expect for people to buy t-shirts because they like the band rather than the graphic on the shirt usually end up with a lot of extra stock at the end of the tour (again, unless they are the few big names in their genre).
I have sat in a table with mostly musicians and heard them talk about how licensing is pretty much the only serious way to make money in music and anybody who isn't admitting that to themselves is dreaming. Licensing for a TV show, movie, ad, or even muzak will end up making them more money than they ever made off of album sales because those are the industries where the money is. Spotify and other music services are part of that. Even then the musician has to be careful and manage his material in those venues because the money can apparently end up going to the labels or not being paid out to anyone quite legally.
I was under the impression that (US) doctors had to maintain medical record security. If Google is able to monitor everything the glasses are used for, how would this be possible?
The medical institution would have to have Google sign a HIPAA form and make sure the transfer was secure. Although this is not really impossible, Google would pretty much just have to form a separate healthcare department and handle those Google Glass streams with proper security, given that they have not done so with their email yet, I doubt they'll go through the trouble to do so with Google Glass. The other solutions would be to encrypt the stream from glasses to hospital server so Google is monitoring an encrypted stream just like every other ISP between a device and server or just skip the monitoring of healthcare feeds perhaps by allowing the hospitals to run their own server.
Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference. Or I flip to a topic I am looking for. With physical media, this is relatively painless. With ebooks, you get lost.
Yep, PDF readers need a flip function. Something like a bar that you can put your finger one as a representation of how far through the book, but instead of jumping to where your finger is, it starts flipping pages. SLow for the first few then speeding up to fast, but still slow enough to scan the page. If going through a lot of pages, the middle parts between the beginning and end flip past be too fast to scan, but then as you get near your finger the flipping slows down again.
I'm still playing after all these years, but I'd have to ask what the player wants. WoW these days is pretty much level up as fast as possible and raid for most people. The auction houses are dead for anything except mats (which is probably good as the prices would be outrageous for new players). The lower levels are void of other players. There is plenty of good content still there if the player is wanting solo PvE and doesn't care about playing below their level, but anything except the last expansion seems to be lacking any sort of MM part to the ORPG these days.
I was more worried about finding the ice and bringing it to its destination as the rate-limiting step.
Oort cloud has plenty of ice and due to the energy requirements needed to move it, such a project would take decades if not centuries. Plenty of time to arrange for all the needed components to arrive when desired.
Although I haven't done the math, an astrophysicist friend of mine once did do the math to see how long Mars would take to lose an Earth-like atmosphere. The time scale was 10,000 years. So, it would require moving the parts into position in at least that short of an amount of time.
You collect large amounts of H20 or frozen H2 somewhere in the solar system. Since it's frozen, you only need to give it a bump once to set it on a collision course with the planet, where it will rain down in gigantic torrents.
Admittedly, I've just made this up and have no clue. Would this work in principle?
In theory, it would work, however once you crunch some numbers, it looks a bit different. I once sat down and did the math in what it would take to move Haley's comet sized objects from the oort cloud to Mars in order to give it an Earth like atmosphere. The rough energy requirements to do such in a decade were on the order of three days total output of energy of the sun, and that was just getting the objects to Mars in that timeframe and letting them collide with Mars. That could be reduced by increasing the time needed to something like a century, but still, I imagine it would be around the scale of more energy than mankind has used in history combined. Basically, to begin a terraforming project, one must first begin a macro scale energy gathering engineering project around the sun.
I don't get why companies insist on trying to make gaming tablets, sure they might be fine for angrybirds, but I think you'd be hardpressed to find any hardcore gamer looking to buy a tablet to game on. Maybe there is a target audience out there that isn't imaginary, but I just know I don't see it.
Maybe hardcore gamers aren't where the money is. There are fewer of them than normal gamers, which are probably fewer than normal people that just occasionally play some games. Plus, the hardcore gamer market would be competing with consoles as well as computers. A gamer tablet would pretty much just be competing with other tablets and would need something to make it stand out anyway in that market.
Rocks burn up falling through atmosphere. Were talking about accelerating a rock upwards from the ground through the same air into space.
Rocks burn up in the atmosphere because of the large delta-v between them and the earth. Something falling straight down as if dropped would not have this issue any more than the guy that jumped from space. Escape velocity for the Earth is 11 kms and 42 for the solar system. Unsure what that would look like but given the case, the sample in question would not be shot like out of a gun through atmosphere but likely pushed out by a pressure wave along with everything including the atmosphere around it at the same time. It would be subject to some serious Gs and perhaps compression, but friction with things around it probably wouldn't be an issue as everything in the vicinity would be traveling in the same direction at the same speed.
I ordered hundreds of dollars of equipment from dx.com/dealextreme.com over the years.
The absolute worst things that's happened to me is that something was out of stock, and they credited me for my order.
Say what you want about ordering things on the slow boat from China, but DX, overall, has pretty good customer service -- especially for a company that'll send you a $2.97 butane torch (filled with butane!) from Asia, shipping included.
Beings as we can only ever see a very small fraction of the universe, and don't even know how big it is in its entirety, it's certainly possible we simply can't view a large enough area for the distribution to "even out."
If the universe is smaller or larger than the observable universe is still a matter of debate. Quite likely, it will be observations like this that will lead us to the answer by what we can figure out about the very early universe and its expansion.
Management? The store where I live (Capitol Hill in Seattle) must have been run way different as I don't remember getting hit with any late fees or dealing with management. My memories of going to Blockbuster were of cute 20-something girls behind the counter telling me they dropped all my late fees without even asking me to pay. Still, sadly, that Blockbuster is gone also.
When it comes to corporate IT, they're idiots at removing viruses. I'm head IT manager but also run a mostly residential computer repair shop. I know how to remove a virus! Anyone who doesn't remove viruses for a living does not. Its as easy as can be to delete any virus manually then clean up with other tools if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, they do not.
Corporate IT doesn't need to know now to remove viruses beyond clicking 'delete' in the installed AV software. If it goes beyond that then there is a security issues and the best practice is just to replace the computer which usually takes less time, work, and worry than trying to remove viruses manually.
The needs belief fulfilled don't exist anymore. We don';t need to grasp blindly and any reason for something, we have science.
Science has particularly unsatisfactory answers to "Why am I here?", "Where am I going?", "Why do bad things happen to me and not others?", "Did I do ok with my life?", etc. It pretty much lacks any sort of philosophy as to how one should live their life. Add in that many people probably don't want to spend that much time thinking on such and the societal need for exactly that to continue functioning smoothly, and you have why atheism just doesn't appeal to human nature. Mankind has had philosophy for much longer than science, and it is more important to mankind than science.
I'm currently writing an MMORGY where grinding is the ONLY requirement! Level cap's 69, armor types are Latex, Leather and None, no questing (just grinding!) Only weapon you can equip is a whip! It's going to make ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
Not buying it until it supports riding crop as a weapon.
We got it was satire, but it took 16 years for us to get over that we didn't get power armor drops from space. Like many Hollywood movies, it was a fine movie and would have been better without being associated with some otherwise unrelated title of another story used for advertising purposes.
The fact that some people only now see Starship Troopers as perhaps somewhat sarcastic blows my mind. How can you miss it?
Not sure. All my geek friends and I picked up on it, but we probably we're talking about that aspect because we were upset that we got a satire film with bad tactics rather than power armor.
Last time I looked at the budget (and it is confusing), you could eliminate all discretionary spending including all non military salaries and welfare programs (that are not medicare, medicaid, or SS which have their own earmarked tax), and still not eliminate the yearly deficit.
I would love to believe that the US could still pull off cutting edge aerospace project, but I'm really skeptical. After 50 years we've lost our manned space program, hard to believe we are building a project that will push the limits beyond existing technology. This looks like NASP (X30), Constellation, manned mars missions and various other ambitious programs that provided some nice pictures and fancy design studies, but never really went anywhere.
I hope I'm wrong and we are still doing cool aerospace stuff.
Keep up the hope, because this isn't aerospace, but military. The military is still getting plenty of money to build a first strike hypersonic missiles and planes. Later, if we're lucky, the tech might get repurposed into a space plane.
What the fuck is the deal with this fascination with zombies?
Well, I think you went on to ask all the wrong questions. Zombies are not the main attraction of zombie media. In effect, they are just a natural disaster that humans are thrown against and thus the actual stories are human versus natuire, but really human versus human. Zombies are an excuse to thrust people into difficult situations and tell the story of how they interact with each other, not the zombies. Zombies work because they are a natural disaster that you can shoot in the face and thus provide action.
If you're actually worried about how zombies came about, are functioning, and why they are doing what they are doing, you are missing the entire story that is being told.
Slashdot Mirror
You seriously like the weather up here? Have you been here anytime other than July - September?
I know a LOT of people that moved here after visiting in the summer... they don't realize what the weather is like most of the time.
Maybe they're goth. Then the weather is perfect with just enough sun in the year to begin to bitch about it after your vitamin D level begin to build back up.
Two days ago we had a story about how Iron Maiden is making big bucks by touring and not by selling CDs or whatever. Everyone agreed, back then, that this is the way to make money in the music industry.
Saying that there is money in touring because Iron Maiden is doing it is like saying there is money in throwing the winning touchdown pass in the superbowl. To get to the point where that sort of money is even an option for that work means years of working up from the bottom and paying dues.
That's why artists tour. They make shit all on album sales. Especially if they didn't write all the songs they sing. They make lots more with ticket sales.
Never heard of a musician that made profits off of touring. It's always been a promotional tactic and lucky if a tour breaks even. Renting the bus, renting hotels, buying food to feed the band and roadies when they aren't happy with their cheese tray the venue produces in the green room, all add up. Merch might tip the equation sometimes, but any band that tours beyond a local circuit that is making money on tour is making money on records sales also and touring as a promotional tactic to boost those sales.
But having their songs heard got them fans which go out and see their live shows/tours, and that makes them quite a bit of money.
I hear that a lot, but certainly not from the musicians I know. I've been a roadie and just finished a book on touring by Martin Atkins. Everything I've ever heard has been that touring is a necessary evil needed for promotion. Tours run on a shoestring budget that can turn from break even to hugely in debt in the blink of an eye. I'm sure that some people make money off of tours, but those people are also the very small sample that are making lots of money off of their album sales also. Most musicians on major labels are basically in the company store model. They get paid by the company to make their album. If their album sells past the amount needed to pay back what they were advanced, they start making money.
Merchandise is the wild card. Depending on how much sells, and what the terms are, tours can make money off of that, but certainly don't make it off of ticket sales. I knew lots of punk bands that would essentially pay for their tours by coming up with a cool t-shirt design, get them made as cheap as possible, and survive off the desire of kids wanting to wear a cool graphic or slogan on a shirt (an never really caring who the band was). Even then, it just barely kept them in gas money and ramen. Bands who expect for people to buy t-shirts because they like the band rather than the graphic on the shirt usually end up with a lot of extra stock at the end of the tour (again, unless they are the few big names in their genre).
I have sat in a table with mostly musicians and heard them talk about how licensing is pretty much the only serious way to make money in music and anybody who isn't admitting that to themselves is dreaming. Licensing for a TV show, movie, ad, or even muzak will end up making them more money than they ever made off of album sales because those are the industries where the money is. Spotify and other music services are part of that. Even then the musician has to be careful and manage his material in those venues because the money can apparently end up going to the labels or not being paid out to anyone quite legally.
I was under the impression that (US) doctors had to maintain medical record security. If Google is able to monitor everything the glasses are used for, how would this be possible?
The medical institution would have to have Google sign a HIPAA form and make sure the transfer was secure. Although this is not really impossible, Google would pretty much just have to form a separate healthcare department and handle those Google Glass streams with proper security, given that they have not done so with their email yet, I doubt they'll go through the trouble to do so with Google Glass. The other solutions would be to encrypt the stream from glasses to hospital server so Google is monitoring an encrypted stream just like every other ISP between a device and server or just skip the monitoring of healthcare feeds perhaps by allowing the hospitals to run their own server.
Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference. Or I flip to a topic I am looking for. With physical media, this is relatively painless. With ebooks, you get lost.
Yep, PDF readers need a flip function. Something like a bar that you can put your finger one as a representation of how far through the book, but instead of jumping to where your finger is, it starts flipping pages. SLow for the first few then speeding up to fast, but still slow enough to scan the page. If going through a lot of pages, the middle parts between the beginning and end flip past be too fast to scan, but then as you get near your finger the flipping slows down again.
I'd say WoW, even after all of these years.
I'm still playing after all these years, but I'd have to ask what the player wants. WoW these days is pretty much level up as fast as possible and raid for most people. The auction houses are dead for anything except mats (which is probably good as the prices would be outrageous for new players). The lower levels are void of other players. There is plenty of good content still there if the player is wanting solo PvE and doesn't care about playing below their level, but anything except the last expansion seems to be lacking any sort of MM part to the ORPG these days.
Let's see: unpaid work, check. No breaks, check. Verbal abuse, check. Laws re-constructed in an effort to make it difficult to change jobs, check
We're just one law change away.
Well, if you weren't an Anonymous Coward and doing what must be under the table labor, that wouldn't happen to you.
I was more worried about finding the ice and bringing it to its destination as the rate-limiting step.
Oort cloud has plenty of ice and due to the energy requirements needed to move it, such a project would take decades if not centuries. Plenty of time to arrange for all the needed components to arrive when desired.
Although I haven't done the math, an astrophysicist friend of mine once did do the math to see how long Mars would take to lose an Earth-like atmosphere. The time scale was 10,000 years. So, it would require moving the parts into position in at least that short of an amount of time.
You collect large amounts of H20 or frozen H2 somewhere in the solar system. Since it's frozen, you only need to give it a bump once to set it on a collision course with the planet, where it will rain down in gigantic torrents.
Admittedly, I've just made this up and have no clue. Would this work in principle?
In theory, it would work, however once you crunch some numbers, it looks a bit different. I once sat down and did the math in what it would take to move Haley's comet sized objects from the oort cloud to Mars in order to give it an Earth like atmosphere. The rough energy requirements to do such in a decade were on the order of three days total output of energy of the sun, and that was just getting the objects to Mars in that timeframe and letting them collide with Mars. That could be reduced by increasing the time needed to something like a century, but still, I imagine it would be around the scale of more energy than mankind has used in history combined. Basically, to begin a terraforming project, one must first begin a macro scale energy gathering engineering project around the sun.
I don't get why companies insist on trying to make gaming tablets, sure they might be fine for angrybirds, but I think you'd be hardpressed to find any hardcore gamer looking to buy a tablet to game on. Maybe there is a target audience out there that isn't imaginary, but I just know I don't see it.
Maybe hardcore gamers aren't where the money is. There are fewer of them than normal gamers, which are probably fewer than normal people that just occasionally play some games. Plus, the hardcore gamer market would be competing with consoles as well as computers. A gamer tablet would pretty much just be competing with other tablets and would need something to make it stand out anyway in that market.
If you start counting embedded things as 'computers', traditional 'computers' must fall to a few percent.
The same thing was said when "microcomputers" started being called "computers" rather than real computers, ie "mainframes".
Rocks burn up falling through atmosphere. Were talking about accelerating a rock upwards from the ground through the same air into space.
Rocks burn up in the atmosphere because of the large delta-v between them and the earth. Something falling straight down as if dropped would not have this issue any more than the guy that jumped from space. Escape velocity for the Earth is 11 kms and 42 for the solar system. Unsure what that would look like but given the case, the sample in question would not be shot like out of a gun through atmosphere but likely pushed out by a pressure wave along with everything including the atmosphere around it at the same time. It would be subject to some serious Gs and perhaps compression, but friction with things around it probably wouldn't be an issue as everything in the vicinity would be traveling in the same direction at the same speed.
I ordered hundreds of dollars of equipment from dx.com/dealextreme.com over the years.
The absolute worst things that's happened to me is that something was out of stock, and they credited me for my order.
Say what you want about ordering things on the slow boat from China, but DX, overall, has pretty good customer service -- especially for a company that'll send you a $2.97 butane torch (filled with butane!) from Asia, shipping included.
http://dx.com/p/jet-1300-c-butane-lighter-1320
My cigars thank them.
I really like how Lighters are listed in the Toy section.
Beings as we can only ever see a very small fraction of the universe, and don't even know how big it is in its entirety, it's certainly possible we simply can't view a large enough area for the distribution to "even out."
If the universe is smaller or larger than the observable universe is still a matter of debate. Quite likely, it will be observations like this that will lead us to the answer by what we can figure out about the very early universe and its expansion.
Management? The store where I live (Capitol Hill in Seattle) must have been run way different as I don't remember getting hit with any late fees or dealing with management. My memories of going to Blockbuster were of cute 20-something girls behind the counter telling me they dropped all my late fees without even asking me to pay. Still, sadly, that Blockbuster is gone also.
When it comes to corporate IT, they're idiots at removing viruses. I'm head IT manager but also run a mostly residential computer repair shop. I know how to remove a virus! Anyone who doesn't remove viruses for a living does not. Its as easy as can be to delete any virus manually then clean up with other tools if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, they do not.
Corporate IT doesn't need to know now to remove viruses beyond clicking 'delete' in the installed AV software. If it goes beyond that then there is a security issues and the best practice is just to replace the computer which usually takes less time, work, and worry than trying to remove viruses manually.
The needs belief fulfilled don't exist anymore. We don';t need to grasp blindly and any reason for something, we have science.
Science has particularly unsatisfactory answers to "Why am I here?", "Where am I going?", "Why do bad things happen to me and not others?", "Did I do ok with my life?", etc. It pretty much lacks any sort of philosophy as to how one should live their life. Add in that many people probably don't want to spend that much time thinking on such and the societal need for exactly that to continue functioning smoothly, and you have why atheism just doesn't appeal to human nature. Mankind has had philosophy for much longer than science, and it is more important to mankind than science.
Has there ever been an MMO where grinding wasn't a requirement?
Considering that people use "grinding" for whatever game play that prevents instant gratification, probably not.
I'm currently writing an MMORGY where grinding is the ONLY requirement! Level cap's 69, armor types are Latex, Leather and None, no questing (just grinding!) Only weapon you can equip is a whip! It's going to make ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
Not buying it until it supports riding crop as a weapon.
We got it was satire, but it took 16 years for us to get over that we didn't get power armor drops from space. Like many Hollywood movies, it was a fine movie and would have been better without being associated with some otherwise unrelated title of another story used for advertising purposes.
The fact that some people only now see Starship Troopers as perhaps somewhat sarcastic blows my mind. How can you miss it?
Not sure. All my geek friends and I picked up on it, but we probably we're talking about that aspect because we were upset that we got a satire film with bad tactics rather than power armor.
Last time I looked at the budget (and it is confusing), you could eliminate all discretionary spending including all non military salaries and welfare programs (that are not medicare, medicaid, or SS which have their own earmarked tax), and still not eliminate the yearly deficit.
I would love to believe that the US could still pull off cutting edge aerospace project, but I'm really skeptical. After 50 years we've lost our manned space program, hard to believe we are building a project that will push the limits beyond existing technology. This looks like NASP (X30), Constellation, manned mars missions and various other ambitious programs that provided some nice pictures and fancy design studies, but never really went anywhere.
I hope I'm wrong and we are still doing cool aerospace stuff.
Keep up the hope, because this isn't aerospace, but military. The military is still getting plenty of money to build a first strike hypersonic missiles and planes. Later, if we're lucky, the tech might get repurposed into a space plane.
What the fuck is the deal with this fascination with zombies?
Well, I think you went on to ask all the wrong questions. Zombies are not the main attraction of zombie media. In effect, they are just a natural disaster that humans are thrown against and thus the actual stories are human versus natuire, but really human versus human. Zombies are an excuse to thrust people into difficult situations and tell the story of how they interact with each other, not the zombies. Zombies work because they are a natural disaster that you can shoot in the face and thus provide action.
If you're actually worried about how zombies came about, are functioning, and why they are doing what they are doing, you are missing the entire story that is being told.