Comment Re:Geosync is only 26200 miles (Score 1) 126
Also no beards in space.
Also no beards in space.
Since broadcast went digital, I know lots of folks (me being just one) who dropped cable TV and busted out the rabbit ears. HD over-the-air + Netflix streaming + DVDs of whatever isn't available OTA or Netflix = happy wallet.
If the game is only on cable, go to a friend's house with cable or watch it at a sports bar for the price of some nachos.
1. You presume incorrectly: "Artists credits on the public domain orchestral reference work" is a big joke. Most recordings list no more than the conductor and name of the orchestra, and if they do list a complete personnel list almost no one cares. If they hire a major professional orchestra(s) to record these, merely being a member of that orchestra will be a better line on the resume. And if they hire a pick-up ensemble, it's going to be a big "who cares?" line on 80 people's resumes.
2. A recording project done by a bunch of amateurs (definition: people who just love the music and want people to hear it) is not going to have much viability. Sure, listening to a big-city community orchestra (or maybe even a crappy small-town group) live may sound pretty good in the moment, but once you listen to the recording a few times you'll notice how much better you'd enjoy a more polished recording of professionals who will require they be paid a reasonable wage for their time.
1. Even warhorse orchestral music requires some rehearsal to get the musicians on the same page regarding interpretation.
2. Other than the conductor, no individual musician in these recordings is going to receive one bit of publicity, certainly not publicity that would be worthwhile to do this gig for anything other than the pay scale a professional musician would expect to receive for any other recording gig.
What about the Americans? Will we develop a fuel based on Budweiser or Tequila?
Bourbon.
Congratulations. You may be in the 1%* of people who know what the hell they are doing.
(*statistic made up by Lumpy may be inaccurate)
The most obvious example of this not being true is the SAT. Average is 500 out of 800 which is 62.5%.
Actually, the SAT is on a 200-800 point scale, so 500 is the 50% mark on the scale. If I remember correctly (and assuming scoring is similar to when I last took the SAT about 12 years ago) SAT scoring is weighted: correct answers earn a raw point, incorrect answers lose fractions of a raw point, and skipping a question scores zero raw points. I seem to remember raw scores translate to actual scores on some kind of statistical model.
(Just a nit; not really disagreeing with your argument.)
Everywhere I've lived the line fee is an extra $10. If the cable company offers a "basic TV" package for just $10 (they never have where I've lived) it's just the OTA stations + public access anyway. You get hd with an antenna but not with basic cable and I don't care about public access. So if it's worth it to get the lowest tier cable, go for it whether you watch it or not. Otherwise just pay the line fee and consider the cable company your "internet company."
I hear myself and many of my peers say "grab a soda from the fridge for me." This may, however, be regional in use. Only when I lived in the southeast did 'coke' ever seem like a generic term. In the midwest, the generic is 'pop.'
I don't think I've ever asked someone to xerox something, and everything I knows calls that machine a 'copier.' I don't remember ever working somewhere with a Xerox-brand copier anyway. I think I've heard my grandmother refer to her vacuum cleaner as a 'hoover,' even though it's another brand, but not my parents or any friends/coworkers my age. To me 'xerox' is similar: something old people might say. (I understand 'hoover' is pretty common among the Brits, though.)
There seems to be a definite subset of 25-35-years-olds who are resisting 'google' as a verb. Not that any of these same people would go to anyplace other than google if I suggested they "search the web" for something. My parents and their peers (50-70 age range) seem to have completely adopted 'google' as a verb.
'Kleenex' is hard to argue. I have, however, heard proper southern ladies say "Could you hand me a tissue?" when sitting at the opposite end of a couch from the box of Kleenex. Too bad, since I find Puffs to be the superior tissue. Kleenex brand always seems to flake away paper dust that just makes you keep sneezing.
If you do business in the US, you ought to have to accept US currency.
If I understand things correctly, US businesses must accept US currency for debts. So if you provide a service where payment isn't due until after services are rendered, you must accept US currency for that debt. If you sell goods retail (including counter-service food) you can choose to accept or refuse any method of payment, since there is no debt involved.
So if you must pay for your $5 cheeseburger with a $50, looks like you'll have to find someplace that will serve your order before you pay.
Hmmm... Your comment implied to me that you thought customers who would otherwise never buy Blu-ray would go ahead and buy the Blu-ray/DVD pack, thereby "hooking" them on Blu-ray. You also implied that Disney is "giving Blu-ray discs away free." This would only be true if Disney DVDs were *only* available in the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, which (so far) isn't true. As it stands now, the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack is $5-10 more expensive than the DVD alone.
My reply merely stated that they're not creating a new Blu-ray customer by bundling. They just found a gimmick to get existing Blu-ray customers to buy kids' movies on Blu-ray too.
I recently bought some printer paper from them minus a $25 mail-in rebate. They never bothered to tell me that it's on a credit card and therefore I have to spend the money - I can't just cash it and put it in my savings like I originally planned.
Really? Just save an extra $25 into your savings account and use the $25 rebate debit to buy groceries that week. It's $25, not $200. Whine much?
a cashier almost told us we were nuts when we paid for ice cream with a $ 100 bill. My impression has become that Americans are much more fond of paying with credit cards than we are in Europe since noone I know thinks it's unusual to have 100-200 euros in your wallet.
In a shopping mall, it's not completely unusual for an American to carry around a lot of cash. American ATMs usually give out nothing but $20 bills, so larger bills always seem somewhat exotic. Furthermore, when you tender a $50 or larger note in a situation where you'll get more than 60% of that note back in change, it usually throws off the change in the till, which may have as little as $100 total inside it at the beginning of a shift (and contain nothing larger than $5 bills).
The look from the cashier probably wasn't so much about the $100 bill itself, but about using a $100 bill to pay for (I'm assuming) less than $10 worth of ice cream.
They are spinning it as letting consumers take advantage of Blu-ray while getting the portability of DVD, but a less charitable way to put it is that consumers don't want to be locked into Blu-ray and have stayed away in droves, so Disney are giving Blu-ray discs away free with the DVDs in the hope of hooking them.
Nope. It's just a way to actually get anyone to buy kids' movies on Blu-ray.
These are kids movies. Kids nowadays watch movies non-stop in the car. Effectively no one has a Blu-ray player in their car. Geeky dad with his cool home theater wants to buy movies on Blu-ray, but he's smart enough to know that the kids' movies need to be on DVD so they work in the car. He's not insane enough to buy one Blu-ray copy and one DVD copy since it's just a kids' movie.
So Disney's great idea is to include the DVD in the same package as the Blu-ray so geeky dad will spend the extra $5-10 on the Blu-ray ('cuz it's cool) even though only the DVD (in the car) will actually ever get watched.
Parents without a Blu-ray player will just buy the plain DVD.
It's not the seller's shadow account I'm worried about, it's the stupid eBay bidders who can't decide how much they're willing to pay.
If you place a bid early, it gives the idiots days to decide "oh I guess I can spend a little more." This just inflates prices (which is what eBay wants and what sellers want). If everyone waits until the last possible moment and just bids whatever they are *actually willing to pay* then the item goes to the buyer who actually perceived the item to have the greatest value, instead of some dope who keeps convincing himself to spend just $5 more.
People who bid early are just fueling other people to outbid them and artificially driving up prices.
Sentient plasmoids are a gas.
