I think you've stumbled upon something, and no, it's not the $3 per episode deal. It's the merchandize. Why not just give away the TV series for free to everyone, then sell physical goods to the biggest fans? Maybe sell DVDs with special features or extended scenes, if you want to go that route, but give the fans something extra they'll be willing to pay for.
Bands rarely make that much money from CD sales, but when they put on a live concert and sell tickets and T-shirts, their biggest fans give them boatloads of cash. Then those fans wear those T-shirts and talk to people about those concerts, which converts new people to fans.
The world produces plenty of food, enough to feed everyone, including everyone in Africa, with enough to spare that we can all get fat. The problem is infrastructure and distribution.
Forget sending over food to Africa. So much of it will be spoiled or destroyed before it reaches a starving person. If we decide that "fixing Africa" is what we ought to do (that's a debate for another topic), we should go about it intelligently.
Build an infrastructure of roads, railroads, and highways. Nice modern ones, and then maintain them well and make sure they reach everyone. Then send over a lot of nice refrigerated trucks and railcars, and maintain them well. Then package food well, to prevent damage and spoilage. Even in the modern west we lose a lot of food and other products to improper packaging, so we should continue developing better packaging here at home, and share those advances. Next, build an electrical grid to consistently power tens of thousands of super markets across the continent, and maintain it well. Then, build those nice refrigerated super markets, and maintain them well.
Then, send over the food, if it's even needed anymore. My guess is we'll need to send hardly any food over at all, the existing agricultural output of the continent will be properly distributed without damage and spoilage and we can continue fattening ourselves up guilt-free.
It's hard to argue that the products you named are lackluster if each time they sell better than the previous product. Perhaps you were unimpressed, but consumers loved them all and as a business, that's all that matters.
Stock markets may have been unimpressed by announcements, but Apple has the highest market cap right now, so clearly they're doing something right. Shareholders are apparently stupid, and have no idea what customers like, but each time Apple comes out with an earnings report, or says how many iPhones sold or whatever, the stock price shoots back up again when shareholders realize they were wrong about the new products and customer's willingness to buy them like crazy. Stocks will fluctuate, but the trend here is clearly quite positive.
Your argument about Apple suing rather than innovating is a bit silly, too, since Apple is suing to protect their innovations from companies who can't. Are you really going to argue that having an extensive patent portfolio is a sign that Apple has no ideas?
Muscle memory. After a while typing trains your fingers so well that you can type common words faster and automatically without thinking. Unfortunately, you have no control over this process, so you'll end up typing words you type more often when you intend to type words you type less often.
There's also the whole word-sound thing with language. Safe and save sound rather similar and as a bonus can mean similar things, and probably get stored in your brain in similar places. Even though you think the right word, your language comes out wrong when you go to translate concept-thoughts into action.
They should really do quite the opposite, charge people for carry-ons, and checked baggage is free.
It would speed up the security checkpoints. It would speed up boarding. It would give everyone who actually needs to carry on baggage (people with medicine, kids, etc.) a much easier time finding space close to their seat.
The $100 is an application fee for an entirely separate program run by Customs for international travel. Global Entry just gives you an opportunity to join Precheck without being invited first. The Precheck TSA program is "free" and taxpayers funding DHS's (bloated) budget pick up the bill on this background check, however rigorous and expensive it might be.
It might very well save money, anyhow. More people in the Precheck program means the need for fewer TSA agents to get you through cheaper metal detectors.
Which is why it's so silly to think of Iran as a rational actor as some have unfortunately claimed. No rational nation would decide to build nuclear weapons in this day and age. Developing them just makes everyone nervous and want to build their own. Having them just increases your responsibilities. Using them just assures your own annihilation.
Yes, there's the theory that by having them you prevent anyone from ever wanting to invade you. But that's only a reason to already have them, not to get everyone's ire by trying to get them. If you want to join the nuclear club, you do it in absolute secrecy, then make a big announcement after you're already armed. But once the secret's already out about your development efforts, it's time to apologize, state your clear intentions not to keep going all the way, and quickly dismantle whatever you've done.
Okay, so they're worried about us maybe invading them someday, but why would we do that? Because we seem eager to get into wars in the region? Well, not really, not really. We went into Afghanistan because we got attacked. We went into Iraq because we thought they were making WMDs. The lesson here is not that we are jumping at the chance to invade countries all over the middle east, but that we will only do so if you attack us or threaten mushroom clouds. Granted the Iraqi WMD thing turned out to not be quite as big a deal as we may have once thought, but clearly the solution to not being next is not brazenly building nukes right next door.
Let's face it, Iran is already plenty powerful and influential in the region. We saw to that by bumping off their biggest rival, Iraq. They don't need a bomb, now, nor should they want a bomb. They seem to be trying to get one anyway. If they're this reckless about acquiring nuclear weapons, how reckless will they be once they have them? Scary stuff.
This is especially funny considering people think Iran could possibly close the Strait of Hormuz while we have a carrier group in the area. I'm sure oil speculators will still cause a ruckus if Iran ever tries, though, even after we sink Iran's entire navy in the same day they make their attempt.
Hey, at least with iPad it's a reliable 1-year cycle. There's what, 100 different other tablets that came out last year from far fewer companies? Two a week, all touted as the greatest thing ever and the rest are all crap. Must be tiring.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
on
Apple Unveils New iPad
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· Score: 1
Not really, tablets can always get thinner, lighter, more battery life, and faster. The first three for usability, and faster because developers can then do more with it. Along the way companies making tablets will also figure out new features they want to include, but they won't be as important as thinner, lighter, more battery, and faster.
Yes, I'm sure these rockets won't achieve escape velocity, they'll come back down. But the headline here is that a barrage will light up the sky, which I rather doubt. A barrage is a bombardment, and the rockets crashing down into the ocean I don't think is what will light up the sky, but the rocket engines themselves launching in rapid succession will, and that's a salvo.
Anyway, I was just making a joke about the other slashdot story earlier in the day, and the rampant conspiracy theories there.
Assuming you can calculate exactly where it will hit. These things usually have quite a large margin of error. When the calculations are only good to within a few ten thousand kilometers, you might as well just evacuate an entire hemisphere.
Barrage is not really the word one uses for rockets going up, but for rockets coming back down again with destructive force. A bombardment. An attack. This is all just cover for the final phase of the secret military space weapon. Oh yes, it will light up the sky.
It's a neat trick, but of course it has its limitations. It only works from the right angle, and even then it's not perfect because it relies on a camera on the other side of the car which has a different perspective than your eyes. For land vehicles, though, say military vehicles coming right at you, it might be enough to fool you from far enough away, provided you're using sight alone on watch duty, and not radar, sonar, thermal, or anything like that.
Of course, cloaking devices are particularly worthless in space, since some spectrum of EM will always be leaking out to give it away, if for no other reason than spaceships are hotter than space. Sorry to ruin your plans, but you're not going to want one on your Bird of Prey.
Plus, somebody will set up a tachyon net at the neutral zone so your cloaked fleet can't sneak past without being detected.
This is actually a bit surprising to me. Years ago, which admittedly was the last time I payed any attention to such things, the theory that life first formed in little pools was the common explanation. Up near the surface is where a lot of the energy was from sources such as the sun, volcanos, lightning, etc. I could be wrong in remembering this, but the primordial soup was always depicted as fairly shallow pools (though, perhaps, saltwater tide pools).
How about letting the airlines themselves be the passenger advocates? They're the ones with the financial incentive to get security under control, not some new federal agency, or worse yet, some new division of TSA with the same bosses. Plant some airline employees next to the radiation machines all day long for a while, and maybe some of them will talk to their superiors in the airlines and get the industry to start lobbying to end the TSA.
My security theater strategy is to just chat up the initial intake guy who looks at my ID. I'm friendly, polite, and they just wave me through with no extra security check needed. If they ever do pick me for the scanner, I plan to take the pat down, and talk about cancer clusters already detected, and radiation levels being higher than advertised from the scanners.
I think the pat down is just as atrocious as the scanner, and I fly a lot less now than I did before these new procedures got implemented, but the reality is you really can't drive everywhere. I'm not going to refuse both the scanner and the pat down, but I'm definitely not going to willingly take on more radiation exposure than I absolutely have to.
Well, considering the people I'm arguing against are saying that Foxconn employment causes Chinese workers to commit suicide, it's a pretty important correlation to point out.
And no, I'm not sure it's discernible between employment and employment at Foxconn. I never claimed otherwise. Bear in mind though, the chose many of these workers has if not between employment and employment at Foxconn, but unemployment and employment at Foxconn. Foxconn is where the jobs are, so that's where the unskilled labor force goes to work.
I don't have any statistics between Foxconn employment suicide rates and other employment suicide rates. If somebody has those statistics then please share them, just make sure it's unskilled labor we're talking about, comparable to Foxconn, and not comparing doctors to factory line workers. If these Foxconn workers had other options for employment, they would probably take those jobs, if Foxconn employment is so terrible, right?
Well, that would be a fairly silly comparison to do, since the options these workers have is not between "be unemployed", "work at Foxconn", or "come to America". Unless you're saying Apple should be shipping Chinese workers over in shipping crates instead of Chinese-manufactured iPads?
I mean, seriously, can you think about what you're trying to say here and try it again? I'm really not getting your point. These workers don't have the option of moving to a westernized country (or they probably would have already).
If it helps, our own industrial revolution in the west is responsible for our higher standard of living, and no, it wasn't always easy or pretty, but look at where we are now. That'll be China someday, and probably quicker than it took us. Industrializing China by building factories over there to build our iPads is going to help those Chinese workers rise to western standards. Not giving them any jobs just means they'll stay in poverty forever. If that lower quality of life contributes to a higher suicide rate, then certainly Foxconn isn't just good for the immediate needs of the workers (lowering their suicide rate compared to their unemployed fellow nationals), but good in the long-run too.
I'm not suggesting suicidal workers are a good thing, but way to completely distort what I said. I'm saying quite the opposite, that less suicidal workers is better than more suicidal workers. I am not so naive as to think that suicide rates will ever be zero, at Foxconn, in China, or anywhere else humans work or live.
I'm simply saying that workers sometimes commit suicide, no matter where they are or who they work for. I'm also saying that Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the rest of China, which means the opposite of what you and people like you try to imply, that Foxconn drives their workers to kill themselves with awful conditions. Foxconn does not cause suicide, Foxconn causes a reduction in suicide. This is a mathematical fact, and to argue otherwise shows a willful ignorance and irrational bias.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've stumbled upon something, and no, it's not the $3 per episode deal. It's the merchandize. Why not just give away the TV series for free to everyone, then sell physical goods to the biggest fans? Maybe sell DVDs with special features or extended scenes, if you want to go that route, but give the fans something extra they'll be willing to pay for.
Bands rarely make that much money from CD sales, but when they put on a live concert and sell tickets and T-shirts, their biggest fans give them boatloads of cash. Then those fans wear those T-shirts and talk to people about those concerts, which converts new people to fans.
The world produces plenty of food, enough to feed everyone, including everyone in Africa, with enough to spare that we can all get fat. The problem is infrastructure and distribution.
Forget sending over food to Africa. So much of it will be spoiled or destroyed before it reaches a starving person. If we decide that "fixing Africa" is what we ought to do (that's a debate for another topic), we should go about it intelligently.
Build an infrastructure of roads, railroads, and highways. Nice modern ones, and then maintain them well and make sure they reach everyone. Then send over a lot of nice refrigerated trucks and railcars, and maintain them well. Then package food well, to prevent damage and spoilage. Even in the modern west we lose a lot of food and other products to improper packaging, so we should continue developing better packaging here at home, and share those advances. Next, build an electrical grid to consistently power tens of thousands of super markets across the continent, and maintain it well. Then, build those nice refrigerated super markets, and maintain them well.
Then, send over the food, if it's even needed anymore. My guess is we'll need to send hardly any food over at all, the existing agricultural output of the continent will be properly distributed without damage and spoilage and we can continue fattening ourselves up guilt-free.
Apple said they were going to do their fastest rollout ever, so that has to be taken into account.
Also, looking at ship times right now, 2-3 weeks just to get one built for you. That doesn't sound like plenty of stock to me.
It's hard to argue that the products you named are lackluster if each time they sell better than the previous product. Perhaps you were unimpressed, but consumers loved them all and as a business, that's all that matters.
Stock markets may have been unimpressed by announcements, but Apple has the highest market cap right now, so clearly they're doing something right. Shareholders are apparently stupid, and have no idea what customers like, but each time Apple comes out with an earnings report, or says how many iPhones sold or whatever, the stock price shoots back up again when shareholders realize they were wrong about the new products and customer's willingness to buy them like crazy. Stocks will fluctuate, but the trend here is clearly quite positive.
Your argument about Apple suing rather than innovating is a bit silly, too, since Apple is suing to protect their innovations from companies who can't. Are you really going to argue that having an extensive patent portfolio is a sign that Apple has no ideas?
I'm pretty sure even if Australia has that law, Australian law does not apply in the UK.
Muscle memory. After a while typing trains your fingers so well that you can type common words faster and automatically without thinking. Unfortunately, you have no control over this process, so you'll end up typing words you type more often when you intend to type words you type less often.
There's also the whole word-sound thing with language. Safe and save sound rather similar and as a bonus can mean similar things, and probably get stored in your brain in similar places. Even though you think the right word, your language comes out wrong when you go to translate concept-thoughts into action.
They should really do quite the opposite, charge people for carry-ons, and checked baggage is free.
It would speed up the security checkpoints.
It would speed up boarding.
It would give everyone who actually needs to carry on baggage (people with medicine, kids, etc.) a much easier time finding space close to their seat.
The $100 is an application fee for an entirely separate program run by Customs for international travel. Global Entry just gives you an opportunity to join Precheck without being invited first. The Precheck TSA program is "free" and taxpayers funding DHS's (bloated) budget pick up the bill on this background check, however rigorous and expensive it might be.
It might very well save money, anyhow. More people in the Precheck program means the need for fewer TSA agents to get you through cheaper metal detectors.
Which is why it's so silly to think of Iran as a rational actor as some have unfortunately claimed. No rational nation would decide to build nuclear weapons in this day and age. Developing them just makes everyone nervous and want to build their own. Having them just increases your responsibilities. Using them just assures your own annihilation.
Yes, there's the theory that by having them you prevent anyone from ever wanting to invade you. But that's only a reason to already have them, not to get everyone's ire by trying to get them. If you want to join the nuclear club, you do it in absolute secrecy, then make a big announcement after you're already armed. But once the secret's already out about your development efforts, it's time to apologize, state your clear intentions not to keep going all the way, and quickly dismantle whatever you've done.
Okay, so they're worried about us maybe invading them someday, but why would we do that? Because we seem eager to get into wars in the region? Well, not really, not really. We went into Afghanistan because we got attacked. We went into Iraq because we thought they were making WMDs. The lesson here is not that we are jumping at the chance to invade countries all over the middle east, but that we will only do so if you attack us or threaten mushroom clouds. Granted the Iraqi WMD thing turned out to not be quite as big a deal as we may have once thought, but clearly the solution to not being next is not brazenly building nukes right next door.
Let's face it, Iran is already plenty powerful and influential in the region. We saw to that by bumping off their biggest rival, Iraq. They don't need a bomb, now, nor should they want a bomb. They seem to be trying to get one anyway. If they're this reckless about acquiring nuclear weapons, how reckless will they be once they have them? Scary stuff.
This is especially funny considering people think Iran could possibly close the Strait of Hormuz while we have a carrier group in the area. I'm sure oil speculators will still cause a ruckus if Iran ever tries, though, even after we sink Iran's entire navy in the same day they make their attempt.
Hey, at least with iPad it's a reliable 1-year cycle. There's what, 100 different other tablets that came out last year from far fewer companies? Two a week, all touted as the greatest thing ever and the rest are all crap. Must be tiring.
Not really, tablets can always get thinner, lighter, more battery life, and faster. The first three for usability, and faster because developers can then do more with it. Along the way companies making tablets will also figure out new features they want to include, but they won't be as important as thinner, lighter, more battery, and faster.
That would be a far better word.
Yes, I'm sure these rockets won't achieve escape velocity, they'll come back down. But the headline here is that a barrage will light up the sky, which I rather doubt. A barrage is a bombardment, and the rockets crashing down into the ocean I don't think is what will light up the sky, but the rocket engines themselves launching in rapid succession will, and that's a salvo.
Anyway, I was just making a joke about the other slashdot story earlier in the day, and the rampant conspiracy theories there.
Woosh?
Assuming you can calculate exactly where it will hit. These things usually have quite a large margin of error. When the calculations are only good to within a few ten thousand kilometers, you might as well just evacuate an entire hemisphere.
Barrage is not really the word one uses for rockets going up, but for rockets coming back down again with destructive force. A bombardment. An attack. This is all just cover for the final phase of the secret military space weapon. Oh yes, it will light up the sky.
It's a neat trick, but of course it has its limitations. It only works from the right angle, and even then it's not perfect because it relies on a camera on the other side of the car which has a different perspective than your eyes. For land vehicles, though, say military vehicles coming right at you, it might be enough to fool you from far enough away, provided you're using sight alone on watch duty, and not radar, sonar, thermal, or anything like that.
Of course, cloaking devices are particularly worthless in space, since some spectrum of EM will always be leaking out to give it away, if for no other reason than spaceships are hotter than space. Sorry to ruin your plans, but you're not going to want one on your Bird of Prey.
Plus, somebody will set up a tachyon net at the neutral zone so your cloaked fleet can't sneak past without being detected.
I can't wait for some protester to get shot 50 times when he whips one of these out to document police cracking down on a rally.
This is actually a bit surprising to me. Years ago, which admittedly was the last time I payed any attention to such things, the theory that life first formed in little pools was the common explanation. Up near the surface is where a lot of the energy was from sources such as the sun, volcanos, lightning, etc. I could be wrong in remembering this, but the primordial soup was always depicted as fairly shallow pools (though, perhaps, saltwater tide pools).
How about letting the airlines themselves be the passenger advocates? They're the ones with the financial incentive to get security under control, not some new federal agency, or worse yet, some new division of TSA with the same bosses. Plant some airline employees next to the radiation machines all day long for a while, and maybe some of them will talk to their superiors in the airlines and get the industry to start lobbying to end the TSA.
My security theater strategy is to just chat up the initial intake guy who looks at my ID. I'm friendly, polite, and they just wave me through with no extra security check needed. If they ever do pick me for the scanner, I plan to take the pat down, and talk about cancer clusters already detected, and radiation levels being higher than advertised from the scanners.
I think the pat down is just as atrocious as the scanner, and I fly a lot less now than I did before these new procedures got implemented, but the reality is you really can't drive everywhere. I'm not going to refuse both the scanner and the pat down, but I'm definitely not going to willingly take on more radiation exposure than I absolutely have to.
Clearly the Ludovico Technique is required to make this subway program actually work.
I suddenly have visions of A Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing ruining perfectly good Beethoven for ultraviolent youths.
Well, considering the people I'm arguing against are saying that Foxconn employment causes Chinese workers to commit suicide, it's a pretty important correlation to point out.
And no, I'm not sure it's discernible between employment and employment at Foxconn. I never claimed otherwise. Bear in mind though, the chose many of these workers has if not between employment and employment at Foxconn, but unemployment and employment at Foxconn. Foxconn is where the jobs are, so that's where the unskilled labor force goes to work.
I don't have any statistics between Foxconn employment suicide rates and other employment suicide rates. If somebody has those statistics then please share them, just make sure it's unskilled labor we're talking about, comparable to Foxconn, and not comparing doctors to factory line workers. If these Foxconn workers had other options for employment, they would probably take those jobs, if Foxconn employment is so terrible, right?
Well, that would be a fairly silly comparison to do, since the options these workers have is not between "be unemployed", "work at Foxconn", or "come to America". Unless you're saying Apple should be shipping Chinese workers over in shipping crates instead of Chinese-manufactured iPads?
I mean, seriously, can you think about what you're trying to say here and try it again? I'm really not getting your point. These workers don't have the option of moving to a westernized country (or they probably would have already).
If it helps, our own industrial revolution in the west is responsible for our higher standard of living, and no, it wasn't always easy or pretty, but look at where we are now. That'll be China someday, and probably quicker than it took us. Industrializing China by building factories over there to build our iPads is going to help those Chinese workers rise to western standards. Not giving them any jobs just means they'll stay in poverty forever. If that lower quality of life contributes to a higher suicide rate, then certainly Foxconn isn't just good for the immediate needs of the workers (lowering their suicide rate compared to their unemployed fellow nationals), but good in the long-run too.
I'm not suggesting suicidal workers are a good thing, but way to completely distort what I said. I'm saying quite the opposite, that less suicidal workers is better than more suicidal workers. I am not so naive as to think that suicide rates will ever be zero, at Foxconn, in China, or anywhere else humans work or live.
I'm simply saying that workers sometimes commit suicide, no matter where they are or who they work for. I'm also saying that Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the rest of China, which means the opposite of what you and people like you try to imply, that Foxconn drives their workers to kill themselves with awful conditions. Foxconn does not cause suicide, Foxconn causes a reduction in suicide. This is a mathematical fact, and to argue otherwise shows a willful ignorance and irrational bias.
You're simply an anti-Apple troll.