In the past when I'd see a bad movie, I'd just chalk it up to bad chance. But now I see that pretty much the whole lot of them are just not that great, almost immediately forgettable. And rare indeed is a Hollywood-produced movie that is any good, in my experience. Independent film has a far better hit to loss ratio.
A huge shift has happened in the past 10 years. TV used to be low budget and were 2nd class to movies in every respect. That has now effectively reversed. Many decent movie scripts are being picked up by Netflix, Amazon, etc and being turned into a multi-episode series. You could even make a case that the best writers and producers in the business now are concentrated in the TV/streaming market.
Movies are sort of a relic of a bygone era, when a large screen and air conditioning wasn't something the average person could afford. Countless books were adapted to the 90-120 minute movie format because movies were where the big money was. But was that really the best format to tell the story? Since intermissions are not done nowadays, there is a limit to how long a movie can be. Making sequels and trilogies is a poor substitute for continuing the story after a meal break or tomorrow night. I don't think movies will completely go away but TV and streaming content are the top dog now as far as content quality goes.
We fought hard to inform the public that the Internet existed, and for direct access to it. That's why it horrifies us that many people are taking that freedom we fought and bled for, and willingly giving it up to return to the AOL-like walled gardens of Facebook and iOS, where the company controls everything you can see and do. Don't take your freedom of choice for granted, and throw it away so blithely.
What is your alternative? There are too many people and organizations burning down gardens and toilet papering them now. From malware to disinformation campaigns, the internet riff raff keeps getting more dangerous by the day.
Someone has to put up a wall somewhere. You and I can handle our own wall, but most people can not. That leaves the ISPs, the OS/device makers, or the government to do something about it. Which is the least objectionable?
will listen in. CIA will phone NK nuclear scientists with offers of cash.
Offers of cash? How's that going to work in NK where there is nothing to buy?
I have been there. There are plenty of markets and shops where you can buy almost anything you want, from designer handbags to Power Wheels type toy cars. Chinese brands are more common, but goods from Japan and other Asian countries were also available.
But anyway being a nuclear scientist in North Korea is a pretty sweet gig. They have a high status, are treated like national heroes, and provided with the best the country has to offer. Leaving for another country where they will be treated like an alien not be able to speak the language doesn't seem very appealing to me, regardless of how much money is thrown around.
What better way to spread the word of the Great Leader than you have everyone in the country have a cell phone? As long a the government controls the content that can be accessed on it.
Blocking off your network from the rest of the world means something different than it did 5 years ago. Russia has successfully led very successful disinformation campaigns in Ukraine, the UK, the US, and other european countries. It would be naive to think that China and the US aren't pulling similar operations. Ukraine has blocked Russian social media and news websites. They aren't deliberately trying to be oppressive- there is a very real threat to them.
There may be a time when keeping open and free networks is not possible, even for countries that believe in free speech.
I don't think PC sales have anything to do with it the demand. PCs are a very small portion of the market now.
The rise of the basically disposable smartphone may have something to do with it. As VMs have become more popular, the amount of RAM needed in a server has gone up. "As much as you can afford" is the general rule for a VM server. People are also doing data analysis on larger and larger datasets. There is probably a very large combination of factors on the demand side.
These companies have colluded before. There may be some of that going on too affecting prices on the supply side.
Japanese regnal years are not used for any significant calculations. Behind the scenes it's YYYY, with regnal years used only for display. This is an aesthetic issue only, and hardly unforeseen.
Obviosly this could be seen coming, but how to do you program for it? The next emperor is a high probability, but perhaps not a certainty.
China, who was taking most of our recyclables, has stopped. Newsprint, which was going for $100 per ton, now sells for $5 a ton on the market. Recycling has failed in the US. Your recycling is going to the landfills right now.
However, there are people developing new plastic recycling techniques using chemicals instead of the standard mechanical methods. No word on if this chemical method will have an environmental impact or if it will be economically feasible. It is being developed to recycle the plastic that is floating in the ocean. There is a project underway to gather the plastic and recycle it using the new chemical method. The chemical method still requires sorting.
For $5/ton, burning newsprint for power starts to make a lot of sense, assuming the power plant is near to where the material is being collected. That's only around $9/MWh ($0.009) for fuel. You would definitely want a sliding grate boiler and a serious electrostatic precipitator though. Assuming the trucking costs were reasonable, this is very much economical.
Burning tree material is mostly carbon-neutral, but I'm sure that environmentalists would be tripping all over themselves arguing whether burying (sequestering) it would be better or worse than burning it.
I concur. Jail plus a lifetime ban on participating in politics or lobbying. I think that last bit would dissuade a lot of politicians planning to move to the lucrative lobbying sector after they get out of office.
How would you define lobbying in a way that wouldn't be full of loopholes? And how could that possibly be enforced?
At that height, no satellite will stay in "orbit" very long, due to atmospheric drag. I don't have the figures here but at 100 miles up, the daily loss of altitude will be easily noticed. And it is expensive to correct that loss. Mind you , it is much easier to launch to 100 miles than to a more stable altitude like 600 miles, provided you don't mind losing the satellite very soon.
This is a very good thing. There is so much junk in space already, it is already making launch windows short due to avoiding all the other stuff possibly in the way. All sorts of companies are talking about constellations of "thousands" of small satellites. The last thing we need in orbit is thousands of satellites with decades-long orbital decay times. Even the idea of launching thousands of small satellites is not a good idea given the possibility of collisional cascading.
It is my belief that we should be encouraging or incentivizing the consolidation of satellites into fewer, but larger and longer-lasting vehicles. A single company putting 1000s of satellites in orbit is unnecessary and basically a territory grab to the detriment of anyone else who wants a satellite in a particular orbit.
Because this article didn't match my observations of closing and aging Best Buy stores all around me, I looked the facts up.
Their profits are roughly the same as they were a decade ago - before inflation adjustment. And they have less stores than they did at their peak. Any retail operation that isn't even maintaining is well on the path to dying.
Given the collapse in other competition such as Circuit City, Radio Shack, Sears, K-Mart, etc, it is apparent that they have succeeded in picking up no customers from competitors when those competitors collapsed.
This is "thriving"? Was this article written by Best Buy's investor relations folks?
I'm not buying a refrigerator from Amazon. Trying to return it would be a nightmare. Sears is done and my local Lowes/Home Depot don't carry all the refrigerator/washer/drier manufacturers or models. Best Buy has a surprisingly large selection of appliances. They also had the lowest price last time I was in the market. Costco sells appliances too but they don't have display models. Is there any other major national appliance store? All I see in Houston is mom-n-pops and local/regional chains.
Makes me wonder what the heck Apple is doing with their tens of thousands of engineers and billions of dollars. They put out around 2 new phones a year, although arguably those phones are near or at the cutting edge. Laptops and PCs are refreshed on an industry-slowest timeline and targeting a narrower and narrower market with each revision.
I guess if you can print money you don't need to design more than 4 products a year. Must be a very nice place to work.
HUGE fan of the MagSafe , it has save my laptop from the grandkids and the dogs a number of times.
My phone (Sonim XP7) has a magnetic connector for charging/USB. Instead of relying on a gasketed cover to make the port waterproof, it is just a waterproof port. The only reason I can think of why magnetic connectors never got wide market penetration is because they are slightly bulky.
It doesn't really matter unless there is data on whether the system works or not. Nothing in the article seems to mention this.
This is actually 2 questions. Whether it worked in the beginning, and whether it works now.
There is presumably no data available for initial or follow-on investments that were not made. The investment either wasn't made at all, or it was invested by someone else so Google probably doesn't have good or any data. Therefore, any adjustments to the algorithm based on greenlighted projects that then failed will probably overfit due to incomplete data on yellow or redlighted projects that could have succeeded. Unless Google deliberately invests in Yellow or Red projects to test the algorithm, the algorithm may get more and more conservative over time.
You're really relying on the vendor to technically know what they are doing. Our company has been trying to win some government work in the past few months. We know we are technically competent but we are totally outclassed by the vendors who know how to game the system- getting their proprietary specs into the RFP, forcing numerous addendums to be issued so that small competitors (us) can't keep up with all the changes, etc.
In our core business, our customers are wise to these practices and don't put up with them. In government, it seems there are different rules that allow and/or require these types of vendor requests to be taken seriously. The winner isn't going to be the one with the most technical competence (unless by accident). The winner is the one who can game the system the most.
We have no way of knowing how bad the voter fraud problem is
Such a convenient lie to believe.
Not a lie. We have a very good indication that physical voter fraud so low to be considered nonexistant. Physical meaning someone votes twice or someone is litterally stuffing paper ballots. We have good systems to track the first, and physical monitoring to protect against the second.
Electronic fraud is a lot more difficult to know. It could be small across the country. It could be very significant in localized locations. Presumably, persons with the know-how to do electronic fraud would know how to do so stealthily. From that perspective, it is very difficult to know for sure how bad the problem is.
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre.
Seems like you should also take the width of roads into account. The wider, the later, thanks to the car.
Generally yes, but some places have very wide boulevards independently or very much predating car development. Washington, DC has a few roads which were probably ridiculously wide when they were laid down, and cars were not even on the horizon. Beijing has some ultra-wide boulevards. Many streets in Pyongyang seemed stupidly wide 10 years ago, but traffic jams are now starting to be more and more common. On the other hand, this may be luck- Burma's highway to Naypyidaw being a great example of how making a wide road can go wrong.
Every other kind of porn that you could possibly think of you can get for free on the internet. There's literally an endless amount of people very willing to shag in front of cameras and put that online, who'd pay for something like that?
The only way you could get people to pay for porn anymore is if you can produce some where the production cost is higher than, well, a home video camera and a broadband connection.
As you mention, there is a big difference between 4k shot from multiple angles, in good lighting, and amateur home videos.
In addition, there are plenty of niche genres where there are not a lot of free videos out there. Not everybody knows how to pirate, and pirating relies on someone uploading the content, which may not be the case for many niche genres.
I agree with the heavy fines. Green cards for rats is a terrible idea though. People will cross illegally and then turn on each other so one of them can win the "lottery".
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
In Germany wind turbines are simply put on fields.
There are no roads between them, why would there?
You need some sort of service road (usually dirt) capable of accomodating a 1000 ton (or more) crane. These cranes generally come in pieces so you need to get large trucks in there too. They might plow over the road later but that would be dumb since major maintenance usually involves lifting the generator down to the ground and shipping it off.
An these deaths will occur in the third world because they are most dependent on food shipments from first world countries. So is it will come down to countries feed themselves or feeding them. I can't imagine any country picking to feed another population over its own.
Funny aid always comes in the form of food and not in tractors and combine harvesters. Maybe John Deere should be giving congressmen more money than the corn lobby.
I'm a big fan of the traditional commercial-type IP cameras and network video recorders (NVRs). I have a dedicated NVR, but all of my cameras can save to any local network share. I have Dahua branded stuff from Aliexpress but there are plenty of brands who sell similar products.
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In the past when I'd see a bad movie, I'd just chalk it up to bad chance. But now I see that pretty much the whole lot of them are just not that great, almost immediately forgettable. And rare indeed is a Hollywood-produced movie that is any good, in my experience. Independent film has a far better hit to loss ratio.
A huge shift has happened in the past 10 years. TV used to be low budget and were 2nd class to movies in every respect. That has now effectively reversed. Many decent movie scripts are being picked up by Netflix, Amazon, etc and being turned into a multi-episode series. You could even make a case that the best writers and producers in the business now are concentrated in the TV/streaming market.
Movies are sort of a relic of a bygone era, when a large screen and air conditioning wasn't something the average person could afford. Countless books were adapted to the 90-120 minute movie format because movies were where the big money was. But was that really the best format to tell the story? Since intermissions are not done nowadays, there is a limit to how long a movie can be. Making sequels and trilogies is a poor substitute for continuing the story after a meal break or tomorrow night. I don't think movies will completely go away but TV and streaming content are the top dog now as far as content quality goes.
We fought hard to inform the public that the Internet existed, and for direct access to it. That's why it horrifies us that many people are taking that freedom we fought and bled for, and willingly giving it up to return to the AOL-like walled gardens of Facebook and iOS, where the company controls everything you can see and do. Don't take your freedom of choice for granted, and throw it away so blithely.
What is your alternative? There are too many people and organizations burning down gardens and toilet papering them now. From malware to disinformation campaigns, the internet riff raff keeps getting more dangerous by the day.
Someone has to put up a wall somewhere. You and I can handle our own wall, but most people can not. That leaves the ISPs, the OS/device makers, or the government to do something about it. Which is the least objectionable?
will listen in. CIA will phone NK nuclear scientists with offers of cash.
Offers of cash? How's that going to work in NK where there is nothing to buy?
I have been there. There are plenty of markets and shops where you can buy almost anything you want, from designer handbags to Power Wheels type toy cars. Chinese brands are more common, but goods from Japan and other Asian countries were also available.
But anyway being a nuclear scientist in North Korea is a pretty sweet gig. They have a high status, are treated like national heroes, and provided with the best the country has to offer. Leaving for another country where they will be treated like an alien not be able to speak the language doesn't seem very appealing to me, regardless of how much money is thrown around.
What better way to spread the word of the Great Leader than you have everyone in the country have a cell phone? As long a the government controls the content that can be accessed on it.
Blocking off your network from the rest of the world means something different than it did 5 years ago. Russia has successfully led very successful disinformation campaigns in Ukraine, the UK, the US, and other european countries. It would be naive to think that China and the US aren't pulling similar operations. Ukraine has blocked Russian social media and news websites. They aren't deliberately trying to be oppressive- there is a very real threat to them.
There may be a time when keeping open and free networks is not possible, even for countries that believe in free speech.
Welders can make 100k a year. The majority do not. The highest paying gigs are usually seasonal or temp gigs.
I don't think PC sales have anything to do with it the demand. PCs are a very small portion of the market now.
The rise of the basically disposable smartphone may have something to do with it. As VMs have become more popular, the amount of RAM needed in a server has gone up. "As much as you can afford" is the general rule for a VM server. People are also doing data analysis on larger and larger datasets. There is probably a very large combination of factors on the demand side.
These companies have colluded before. There may be some of that going on too affecting prices on the supply side.
Japanese regnal years are not used for any significant calculations. Behind the scenes it's YYYY, with regnal years used only for display. This is an aesthetic issue only, and hardly unforeseen.
Obviosly this could be seen coming, but how to do you program for it? The next emperor is a high probability, but perhaps not a certainty.
China, who was taking most of our recyclables, has stopped. Newsprint, which was going for $100 per ton, now sells for $5 a ton on the market. Recycling has failed in the US. Your recycling is going to the landfills right now.
However, there are people developing new plastic recycling techniques using chemicals instead of the standard mechanical methods. No word on if this chemical method will have an environmental impact or if it will be economically feasible. It is being developed to recycle the plastic that is floating in the ocean. There is a project underway to gather the plastic and recycle it using the new chemical method. The chemical method still requires sorting.
For $5/ton, burning newsprint for power starts to make a lot of sense, assuming the power plant is near to where the material is being collected. That's only around $9/MWh ($0.009) for fuel. You would definitely want a sliding grate boiler and a serious electrostatic precipitator though. Assuming the trucking costs were reasonable, this is very much economical.
Burning tree material is mostly carbon-neutral, but I'm sure that environmentalists would be tripping all over themselves arguing whether burying (sequestering) it would be better or worse than burning it.
I concur. Jail plus a lifetime ban on participating in politics or lobbying. I think that last bit would dissuade a lot of politicians planning to move to the lucrative lobbying sector after they get out of office.
How would you define lobbying in a way that wouldn't be full of loopholes? And how could that possibly be enforced?
At that height, no satellite will stay in "orbit" very long, due to atmospheric drag. I don't have the figures here but at 100 miles up, the daily loss of altitude will be easily noticed. And it is expensive to correct that loss. Mind you , it is much easier to launch to 100 miles than to a more stable altitude like 600 miles, provided you don't mind losing the satellite very soon.
This is a very good thing. There is so much junk in space already, it is already making launch windows short due to avoiding all the other stuff possibly in the way. All sorts of companies are talking about constellations of "thousands" of small satellites. The last thing we need in orbit is thousands of satellites with decades-long orbital decay times. Even the idea of launching thousands of small satellites is not a good idea given the possibility of collisional cascading.
It is my belief that we should be encouraging or incentivizing the consolidation of satellites into fewer, but larger and longer-lasting vehicles. A single company putting 1000s of satellites in orbit is unnecessary and basically a territory grab to the detriment of anyone else who wants a satellite in a particular orbit.
That’s a shameful behavior. Is there a link to the videos?
The real shameful thing here is that this guy seems to have an unlimited and uncapped data plan. Where do I sign up for that?
Because this article didn't match my observations of closing and aging Best Buy stores all around me, I looked the facts up.
Their profits are roughly the same as they were a decade ago - before inflation adjustment. And they have less stores than they did at their peak. Any retail operation that isn't even maintaining is well on the path to dying.
Perhaps this article announcing their first new store in seven years this past April justifies the "thriving" label.
Given the collapse in other competition such as Circuit City, Radio Shack, Sears, K-Mart, etc, it is apparent that they have succeeded in picking up no customers from competitors when those competitors collapsed.
This is "thriving"? Was this article written by Best Buy's investor relations folks?
I'm not buying a refrigerator from Amazon. Trying to return it would be a nightmare. Sears is done and my local Lowes/Home Depot don't carry all the refrigerator/washer/drier manufacturers or models. Best Buy has a surprisingly large selection of appliances. They also had the lowest price last time I was in the market. Costco sells appliances too but they don't have display models. Is there any other major national appliance store? All I see in Houston is mom-n-pops and local/regional chains.
Makes me wonder what the heck Apple is doing with their tens of thousands of engineers and billions of dollars. They put out around 2 new phones a year, although arguably those phones are near or at the cutting edge. Laptops and PCs are refreshed on an industry-slowest timeline and targeting a narrower and narrower market with each revision.
I guess if you can print money you don't need to design more than 4 products a year. Must be a very nice place to work.
HUGE fan of the MagSafe , it has save my laptop from the grandkids and the dogs a number of times.
My phone (Sonim XP7) has a magnetic connector for charging/USB. Instead of relying on a gasketed cover to make the port waterproof, it is just a waterproof port. The only reason I can think of why magnetic connectors never got wide market penetration is because they are slightly bulky.
It doesn't really matter unless there is data on whether the system works or not. Nothing in the article seems to mention this.
This is actually 2 questions. Whether it worked in the beginning, and whether it works now.
There is presumably no data available for initial or follow-on investments that were not made. The investment either wasn't made at all, or it was invested by someone else so Google probably doesn't have good or any data. Therefore, any adjustments to the algorithm based on greenlighted projects that then failed will probably overfit due to incomplete data on yellow or redlighted projects that could have succeeded. Unless Google deliberately invests in Yellow or Red projects to test the algorithm, the algorithm may get more and more conservative over time.
You're really relying on the vendor to technically know what they are doing. Our company has been trying to win some government work in the past few months. We know we are technically competent but we are totally outclassed by the vendors who know how to game the system- getting their proprietary specs into the RFP, forcing numerous addendums to be issued so that small competitors (us) can't keep up with all the changes, etc.
In our core business, our customers are wise to these practices and don't put up with them. In government, it seems there are different rules that allow and/or require these types of vendor requests to be taken seriously. The winner isn't going to be the one with the most technical competence (unless by accident). The winner is the one who can game the system the most.
We have no way of knowing how bad the voter fraud problem is
Such a convenient lie to believe.
Not a lie. We have a very good indication that physical voter fraud so low to be considered nonexistant. Physical meaning someone votes twice or someone is litterally stuffing paper ballots. We have good systems to track the first, and physical monitoring to protect against the second.
Electronic fraud is a lot more difficult to know. It could be small across the country. It could be very significant in localized locations. Presumably, persons with the know-how to do electronic fraud would know how to do so stealthily. From that perspective, it is very difficult to know for sure how bad the problem is.
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre.
Seems like you should also take the width of roads into account. The wider, the later, thanks to the car.
Generally yes, but some places have very wide boulevards independently or very much predating car development. Washington, DC has a few roads which were probably ridiculously wide when they were laid down, and cars were not even on the horizon. Beijing has some ultra-wide boulevards. Many streets in Pyongyang seemed stupidly wide 10 years ago, but traffic jams are now starting to be more and more common. On the other hand, this may be luck- Burma's highway to Naypyidaw being a great example of how making a wide road can go wrong.
Every other kind of porn that you could possibly think of you can get for free on the internet. There's literally an endless amount of people very willing to shag in front of cameras and put that online, who'd pay for something like that?
The only way you could get people to pay for porn anymore is if you can produce some where the production cost is higher than, well, a home video camera and a broadband connection.
As you mention, there is a big difference between 4k shot from multiple angles, in good lighting, and amateur home videos.
In addition, there are plenty of niche genres where there are not a lot of free videos out there. Not everybody knows how to pirate, and pirating relies on someone uploading the content, which may not be the case for many niche genres.
Speaking for a friend, of course.
I agree with the heavy fines. Green cards for rats is a terrible idea though. People will cross illegally and then turn on each other so one of them can win the "lottery".
What about artificial gravity?
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
In Germany wind turbines are simply put on fields. There are no roads between them, why would there?
You need some sort of service road (usually dirt) capable of accomodating a 1000 ton (or more) crane. These cranes generally come in pieces so you need to get large trucks in there too. They might plow over the road later but that would be dumb since major maintenance usually involves lifting the generator down to the ground and shipping it off.
What good are tractors and combines in the third world with no arable land or people who lack any farming history or knowledge?
And yet, that didn't stop Saudi Arabia. Granted, they had a pile of money, but giving food year after year in perpetuity costs a pile of money too.
An these deaths will occur in the third world because they are most dependent on food shipments from first world countries. So is it will come down to countries feed themselves or feeding them. I can't imagine any country picking to feed another population over its own.
Funny aid always comes in the form of food and not in tractors and combine harvesters. Maybe John Deere should be giving congressmen more money than the corn lobby.
I'm a big fan of the traditional commercial-type IP cameras and network video recorders (NVRs). I have a dedicated NVR, but all of my cameras can save to any local network share. I have Dahua branded stuff from Aliexpress but there are plenty of brands who sell similar products.