The air pressure increases gradually on the way down. Perhaps terminal velocity goes down gradually enough to provide a smooth transition. After all, the objects that typically end up as fireballs entered with quite a bit of extra velocity to start with.
I always figured that anyone who buys a phone that needs scripting to do what they want is the one who under thought their purchase. It's like being proud that you need to install your own shocks in your brand new car.
They are the same engine, with the difference being that TF2 also has some extra complicated netcode bolted on to handle the large team games. In fact Valve tends to forward-port their previous games to the newest engine, which is currently represented by L4D2/Portal2. So get L4D2 working first. Then bolt on the extra bits the Portal games need. That gets you just about the entire Source Engine back catalog along with most of the 3rd party Source games. Then get the netcode (that has to interact with large teams of players on two other platforms) working and TF2 and CounterStrike are good to go.
DRM is not a requirement of being on Steam. Many games are DRM free on steam for both Windows and OSX. If you dig through the file directory to find the executable for the games instead of using Steam as a launcher most games will launch without steam running. Alternatively if you find the steam launcher convenient you can add non-steam games to the Steam app.
It's not really a patent. Much closer to a trademark. Design patents are what stops all the other drink companies from selling cola in those distinctive Coke bottles. Doesn't mean that Coke has a patent on glass bottles, or on bottles with rounded bits, although I'm sure variations of both those are part of the design patent. They have a specific design that is protected.
Apple does not have a patent (or even claim to have a patent) on rounded corners. They have a design patent on a specific design that happens to include rounded corners.
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Design Patents have almost nothing to do with regular patents. They are much more along the lines of Trademarks. They are very, very, very specific and almost impossible to enforce.
The reason you don't know anything about Design Patents? They almost never make it anywhere near a court, let alone a news story. It's almost impossible to violate them on purpose, let alone by accident. That rounded corners thing? That's not an 'OR' operator, it's an 'AND' operator. For a design patent to get to court it has to violate damn near every one of dozens of specific claims, and missing any one can invalidate the entire thing.
So, your total monthly expenses (including taxes) are less than $1500. That's pretty good. I'd be interested in knowing what kind of area you are living in.
Hundreds of thousands of units benefiting NVIDIA immensely? If that is all Tegra is selling then Linux doesn't have a lot to offer. Some quick google puts the price of a Tegra chip in the $20-$25 range. Assuming that NVIDIA can claim $10 profit off each one (a high assumption) then sales of 500,000 only gets them $5m. That's not even a blip on the radar. That's not even a blip on the radar as a quarterly number. Monthly and it still wouldn't make the earnings report.
If the Tegra sales numbers are anything less than tens of millions NVIDIA may as well kill the project. And if that's the best Linux has to offer...
Because that corporation makes use of public infrastructure and otherwise passes on costs. Things like maintenance costs of the roads the corporate vehicles drive on. How do they get covered if the profits get sent to someone out of country? Or just sit in funds without ever being redeemed as taxable profits?
Corporations gain benefits from healthy an funded infrastructure. There is no reason they should not help support it.
I suspect that the margin of error for footprints would be even higher. After all, many, many uncontrollable and unknowable external effects would go into the final fossilized footprint.
And when you originally went into mainframes, did you do so with the realistic expectation that your skills would cease to make you employable after a decade or so? If you went back knowing that and got to choose again would you still specialize in mainframes? Now, assuming that you are once again choosing your career path and you know that mainframes are a dead end, how much extra would a company that needs mainframe specialists anyways need to offer you in order to have you (and a reliable number of other top prospects) make that decision?
Most actors will make less than 3 million over their lives. Many much less. I'd be willing to bet that the average compensation for actors as a whole is less than the average wage in America. Go look up the IMDB page of the people that were on shows you watched ten or twenty years ago. I guarantee they are full of little bit parts and other things you have never heard of. Many do start second careers as directors and producers and other industry positions.
With few exceptions, the lack of work relates to lack of job offers, not lack of willingness. If the majority of entertainment stars people under 40, by definition you get more actors over 40 than available work. Actors get too known from one big role. No one will cast them because it is too much trouble to separate the new character from the public identification with the famous one. These are the nature of the business. Different industries operate under different realities and randomly trying to enforce the realities of one on another is simply nonsensical.
If a top actor only made $80,000 a year... there would be no top actors.
Think of an actor that you really liked. REALLY liked. That one who completely sold you on some big momentous scene. You watched every episode of their series for years. Now, name three other series they have stared in.
The reality of acting work is that even the really good professionals are unlikely to work more than one or two really big jobs in their careers. There are a lot of reasons for this, some good and some bad, but either way it is a reality. An actor who manages a five year run on a TV show and then follows it up with similar run on another show probably represents 90% of their professional income, total. So those 10 years need to pay out in a significant way. It has many of the same economic incentive that athletics do with similar payscale effects. The pay of a successful actor or football player looks amazing until you add in all the years they will not be working before and after the gravy days.
Assuming you could force a system where all actors get paid according to your arbitrary rules the only real effect would be an end of skilled professional actors. A few young people might do it for the fun but everyone else will go get a real job rather than earn your $80,000 one year in four.
Fine. You can wait a year or so and pay less to read copies of those books that make it to paperback. Some of us will buy the books that interest us as they come out for somewhat more. Books that enough of us early readers like will eventually filer down to you. Everybody wins.
I agree that comparing paperbacks to e-books is absurd. Even considering it is silly. Paperbacks only get published if a book has already made a profit on the hardcover. No one makes their money on the paperback. It is simply a way to soak up a little extra profit after the bills have been paid.
Paperbacks are a secondary market. E-books are a primary market. There can be no comparison.
Independent from what? Even the biggest publishers have a fairly flat structure and if there is ANY media industry known for it's small time producers it's the publishing industry. If they can convince someone that there is readership (or are willing to put up their won money) anyone has been able to get anything published since as long as the printing press has existed. There are no gatekeepers in publishing and never have been.
And the publishers running their own stores is a bad idea in the same way that one of the music labels deciding to sell only through their own outlets would be a dumb idea. No one cares who publishes a book. They simply have the (reasonable) expectation that they can find it in a book store.
For that matter, how would a publisher run their own personal book store any different than Apple is? They already decide what content to list and set their own prices.
You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount.
How much do you think it costs to print a book? Let's look at it this way. You can go out and buy a laser printer that will do 5c/page for double sided text. Each double sided paper equals four pages in a hard cover book. 400 pages in a typical book, or printing costs of about $5. Done at home on consumer equipment. Yes, you still need binding and shipping and such but I have to figure that a professional print house can do the actual printing for cheaper than I can do it at my computer desk so it would all balance out.
So the total cost savings for a publisher by going digital is likely more than $5 but certainly less than $10. And most digital copies tend to be about $5-$10 cheaper than the hardcover. Yes, there are exceptions but on the whole I'd say it tracks pretty well.
By definition FRAND licenses apply universally. You could build a chip in your garage, pay the fee and be good to go, no questions asked.
Part of the problem is that traditionally most companies have been happy to work out alternate licensing agreements. Apple is the first big player to actually pay the FRAND costs instead of negotiating.
Rated -1 "Fails to grasp basic economies of scale".
Look, I love the maker revolution stuff. Been a follower and supporter of things like the RepRap/Makerbot projects for as long as they have existed. But no, printing everyday stuff is not right around the corner.
You mention Shapeways in your post but have obviously never used it. Ever priced something out there? Getting a set of WalMart quality eating utensils from Shapeways would cost more than a set of actual silver silverware. Yes, it is a wonderful and unique niche service. But emphasis is on 'niche' and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
You want your own custom laptop case made to spec? You don't need anything fancy or new for that. I guarantee there are dozens of metal shops in any city that would be pleased as punch to mill one out for you to any specifications you can dream. That's not new. That's a service that has existed for as long as there have been shops. Of course the case alone will cost an order of magnitude more than just buying an entire high end laptop. Has it caught on? Never.
Or, if I happen to be able to find a skyscraper model, I could easily compose the exact scene I want in my computer. Faster, probably.
This sentence is how I know you are a programmer. First, finding a premade photo-realistic model of anything that happen to match the image in your imagination is worse than a needle in a haystack. But let's say you do.
You still need surrounding buildings, if only to create the right reflections and shadows. You need realistic trees and stop lights and power lines linking everything. You need sidewalks and roads with the right geometry. And everything needs matching textures with similar levels of dirt/colour tone/littler etc.
And render time on anything measured in mega-pixels is going to be a bitch. For a magazine quality full page image the render tIme might be measured in days for a complex scene.
Faster to wait a couple days for good weather and take a picture.
Honestly, direct democracy doesn't scale very well above a village level population, let alone a small city. The problem is that the issues quickly become complex enough and numerous enough that keeping abreast of them is a full time job. Yes, it is useful to get everyone's input for some major piece of infrastructure. But for direct democracy to really work you have to find a way to get the population just as engaged with reviewing the sanitary regulations.
What you quickly get is a small class of 'professional' politicians who guide and control the general votes. But since it theoretically remains a direct democracy you get none of the necessary controls and safeguards intentionally built into any sane representative democracy. And since the full time politicians don't enjoy the same official position that they would in a representative democracy they typically find less official ways to compensate themselves.
I'll take a well designed representative democracy built around proportional representation or preferential voting (or some mix of the two) any day over the nasty mess of a large scale direct democracy.
No, it's not. Unless deciding against organic farming also magically transports the new surpluses into the hands of the starving it doesn't matter at all.
Food shortages are a distribution problem, not a production problem. My guess is that if the distribution problem was magicaly solved tomorrow we could probably meet actual demand mostly with organics.
Slashdot Mirror
The air pressure increases gradually on the way down. Perhaps terminal velocity goes down gradually enough to provide a smooth transition. After all, the objects that typically end up as fireballs entered with quite a bit of extra velocity to start with.
I always figured that anyone who buys a phone that needs scripting to do what they want is the one who under thought their purchase. It's like being proud that you need to install your own shocks in your brand new car.
They are the same engine, with the difference being that TF2 also has some extra complicated netcode bolted on to handle the large team games. In fact Valve tends to forward-port their previous games to the newest engine, which is currently represented by L4D2/Portal2. So get L4D2 working first. Then bolt on the extra bits the Portal games need. That gets you just about the entire Source Engine back catalog along with most of the 3rd party Source games. Then get the netcode (that has to interact with large teams of players on two other platforms) working and TF2 and CounterStrike are good to go.
DRM is not a requirement of being on Steam. Many games are DRM free on steam for both Windows and OSX. If you dig through the file directory to find the executable for the games instead of using Steam as a launcher most games will launch without steam running. Alternatively if you find the steam launcher convenient you can add non-steam games to the Steam app.
I don't know what the current laws are, presumably there is something in place to allow the Google guys to profit from their asteroid venture.
Yeah. Finders/Keepers. When you are the only ones around ownership is something of a moot point.
It's not really a patent. Much closer to a trademark. Design patents are what stops all the other drink companies from selling cola in those distinctive Coke bottles. Doesn't mean that Coke has a patent on glass bottles, or on bottles with rounded bits, although I'm sure variations of both those are part of the design patent. They have a specific design that is protected.
Apple does not have a patent (or even claim to have a patent) on rounded corners. They have a design patent on a specific design that happens to include rounded corners.
Certainly sounds like a patent case to me.
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Design Patents have almost nothing to do with regular patents. They are much more along the lines of Trademarks. They are very, very, very specific and almost impossible to enforce.
The reason you don't know anything about Design Patents? They almost never make it anywhere near a court, let alone a news story. It's almost impossible to violate them on purpose, let alone by accident. That rounded corners thing? That's not an 'OR' operator, it's an 'AND' operator. For a design patent to get to court it has to violate damn near every one of dozens of specific claims, and missing any one can invalidate the entire thing.
So, your total monthly expenses (including taxes) are less than $1500. That's pretty good. I'd be interested in knowing what kind of area you are living in.
Hundreds of thousands of units benefiting NVIDIA immensely? If that is all Tegra is selling then Linux doesn't have a lot to offer. Some quick google puts the price of a Tegra chip in the $20-$25 range. Assuming that NVIDIA can claim $10 profit off each one (a high assumption) then sales of 500,000 only gets them $5m. That's not even a blip on the radar. That's not even a blip on the radar as a quarterly number. Monthly and it still wouldn't make the earnings report.
If the Tegra sales numbers are anything less than tens of millions NVIDIA may as well kill the project. And if that's the best Linux has to offer...
Because that corporation makes use of public infrastructure and otherwise passes on costs. Things like maintenance costs of the roads the corporate vehicles drive on. How do they get covered if the profits get sent to someone out of country? Or just sit in funds without ever being redeemed as taxable profits?
Corporations gain benefits from healthy an funded infrastructure. There is no reason they should not help support it.
I suspect that the margin of error for footprints would be even higher. After all, many, many uncontrollable and unknowable external effects would go into the final fossilized footprint.
And when you originally went into mainframes, did you do so with the realistic expectation that your skills would cease to make you employable after a decade or so? If you went back knowing that and got to choose again would you still specialize in mainframes? Now, assuming that you are once again choosing your career path and you know that mainframes are a dead end, how much extra would a company that needs mainframe specialists anyways need to offer you in order to have you (and a reliable number of other top prospects) make that decision?
Most actors will make less than 3 million over their lives. Many much less. I'd be willing to bet that the average compensation for actors as a whole is less than the average wage in America. Go look up the IMDB page of the people that were on shows you watched ten or twenty years ago. I guarantee they are full of little bit parts and other things you have never heard of. Many do start second careers as directors and producers and other industry positions.
With few exceptions, the lack of work relates to lack of job offers, not lack of willingness. If the majority of entertainment stars people under 40, by definition you get more actors over 40 than available work. Actors get too known from one big role. No one will cast them because it is too much trouble to separate the new character from the public identification with the famous one. These are the nature of the business. Different industries operate under different realities and randomly trying to enforce the realities of one on another is simply nonsensical.
If a top actor only made $80,000 a year... there would be no top actors.
Think of an actor that you really liked. REALLY liked. That one who completely sold you on some big momentous scene. You watched every episode of their series for years. Now, name three other series they have stared in.
The reality of acting work is that even the really good professionals are unlikely to work more than one or two really big jobs in their careers. There are a lot of reasons for this, some good and some bad, but either way it is a reality. An actor who manages a five year run on a TV show and then follows it up with similar run on another show probably represents 90% of their professional income, total. So those 10 years need to pay out in a significant way. It has many of the same economic incentive that athletics do with similar payscale effects. The pay of a successful actor or football player looks amazing until you add in all the years they will not be working before and after the gravy days.
Assuming you could force a system where all actors get paid according to your arbitrary rules the only real effect would be an end of skilled professional actors. A few young people might do it for the fun but everyone else will go get a real job rather than earn your $80,000 one year in four.
Fine. You can wait a year or so and pay less to read copies of those books that make it to paperback. Some of us will buy the books that interest us as they come out for somewhat more. Books that enough of us early readers like will eventually filer down to you. Everybody wins.
Not really. Apple and other sellers take 30% of the sale price. Can't be that much different than the margins/costs for a physical bookstore.
I agree that comparing paperbacks to e-books is absurd. Even considering it is silly.
Paperbacks only get published if a book has already made a profit on the hardcover. No one makes their money on the paperback. It is simply a way to soak up a little extra profit after the bills have been paid.
Paperbacks are a secondary market. E-books are a primary market. There can be no comparison.
Independent from what? Even the biggest publishers have a fairly flat structure and if there is ANY media industry known for it's small time producers it's the publishing industry. If they can convince someone that there is readership (or are willing to put up their won money) anyone has been able to get anything published since as long as the printing press has existed. There are no gatekeepers in publishing and never have been.
And the publishers running their own stores is a bad idea in the same way that one of the music labels deciding to sell only through their own outlets would be a dumb idea. No one cares who publishes a book. They simply have the (reasonable) expectation that they can find it in a book store.
For that matter, how would a publisher run their own personal book store any different than Apple is? They already decide what content to list and set their own prices.
You still have to make the money back on editors, artwork, advertisement, etc., but the physical print, transportation, and storage costs should cause those books to be discounted a good amount.
How much do you think it costs to print a book? Let's look at it this way. You can go out and buy a laser printer that will do 5c/page for double sided text. Each double sided paper equals four pages in a hard cover book. 400 pages in a typical book, or printing costs of about $5. Done at home on consumer equipment. Yes, you still need binding and shipping and such but I have to figure that a professional print house can do the actual printing for cheaper than I can do it at my computer desk so it would all balance out.
So the total cost savings for a publisher by going digital is likely more than $5 but certainly less than $10. And most digital copies tend to be about $5-$10 cheaper than the hardcover. Yes, there are exceptions but on the whole I'd say it tracks pretty well.
By definition FRAND licenses apply universally. You could build a chip in your garage, pay the fee and be good to go, no questions asked.
Part of the problem is that traditionally most companies have been happy to work out alternate licensing agreements. Apple is the first big player to actually pay the FRAND costs instead of negotiating.
Rated -1 "Fails to grasp basic economies of scale".
Look, I love the maker revolution stuff. Been a follower and supporter of things like the RepRap/Makerbot projects for as long as they have existed. But no, printing everyday stuff is not right around the corner.
You mention Shapeways in your post but have obviously never used it. Ever priced something out there? Getting a set of WalMart quality eating utensils from Shapeways would cost more than a set of actual silver silverware. Yes, it is a wonderful and unique niche service. But emphasis is on 'niche' and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
You want your own custom laptop case made to spec? You don't need anything fancy or new for that. I guarantee there are dozens of metal shops in any city that would be pleased as punch to mill one out for you to any specifications you can dream. That's not new. That's a service that has existed for as long as there have been shops. Of course the case alone will cost an order of magnitude more than just buying an entire high end laptop. Has it caught on? Never.
8 other people within three meters? Most cubicle workers can say the same.
Normal OSX installers won't load on random hardware. They were packaging OSX installer discs but that isn't what they were installing.
Or, if I happen to be able to find a skyscraper model, I could easily compose the exact scene I want in my computer. Faster, probably.
This sentence is how I know you are a programmer. First, finding a premade photo-realistic model of anything that happen to match the image in your imagination is worse than a needle in a haystack. But let's say you do.
You still need surrounding buildings, if only to create the right reflections and shadows. You need realistic trees and stop lights and power lines linking everything. You need sidewalks and roads with the right geometry. And everything needs matching textures with similar levels of dirt/colour tone/littler etc.
And render time on anything measured in mega-pixels is going to be a bitch. For a magazine quality full page image the render tIme might be measured in days for a complex scene.
Faster to wait a couple days for good weather and take a picture.
Honestly, direct democracy doesn't scale very well above a village level population, let alone a small city. The problem is that the issues quickly become complex enough and numerous enough that keeping abreast of them is a full time job. Yes, it is useful to get everyone's input for some major piece of infrastructure. But for direct democracy to really work you have to find a way to get the population just as engaged with reviewing the sanitary regulations.
What you quickly get is a small class of 'professional' politicians who guide and control the general votes. But since it theoretically remains a direct democracy you get none of the necessary controls and safeguards intentionally built into any sane representative democracy. And since the full time politicians don't enjoy the same official position that they would in a representative democracy they typically find less official ways to compensate themselves.
I'll take a well designed representative democracy built around proportional representation or preferential voting (or some mix of the two) any day over the nasty mess of a large scale direct democracy.
No, it's not. Unless deciding against organic farming also magically transports the new surpluses into the hands of the starving it doesn't matter at all.
Food shortages are a distribution problem, not a production problem. My guess is that if the distribution problem was magicaly solved tomorrow we could probably meet actual demand mostly with organics.