"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is a great story, but I'm struggling with how well it would translate into anything resembling an interesting movie that people would actually pay to watch, and still be the slightest bit true to a story about a computer becoming self-aware while outcasts are trying to split from their oppressive overlords. There are scenes that would translate well (bombing the Earth with rocks), but Hollywood would latch on to those scenes and you'd end up with something akin to "The Two Towers" becoming "The Battle for Helms Deep: A Love Story".

Ringworld, on the other hand, is a special-effects masterpiece waiting to happen. The storyline is simple, the beauty of the story is visualizing the engineering involved, and that would translate with really good (but horribly expensive) visual effects. I don't know if you'd ever get enough viewership to justify effects at that scope, though.

Yes, let's drop these silly regulations like the law of gravity and let the free market decide what the gravitational pull should be!

How? If the copyright holder is releasing it for redistribution, then I fail to see how redistribution under their terms could be considered unauthorized, unless the DVD is higher quality and someone rips that and torrents it, in which case Paramount will have a legitimate case since they only authorized the lower-quality version for torrent distribution.

I think their goal on this is simple. I suspect Paramount wants this movie to have absolutely abysmal DVD sales. That way, they can point at the sales figures and say "see? (very_high_percentage) of people will not buy something if it's available for free!" I also bet the DVD will be expensive to make sure this happens.

Either that, or Paramount is truly trying to see how well .torrents do for distribution (maybe the .torrent will be a lower-resolution version with a quick splash screen saying "if you want this in higher quality, please buy the DVD!").

One interesting business model might be to charge some very nominal fee (say $1-2) for a copy of the .torrent file. Their distribution costs are near zero, so any sales that way are pretty much pure profit. This dovetails in with the "lower the price, reduce piracy" discussion from the other day, and gives would-be pirates a way to go legit while building collections of movies.

There will certainly be some (maybe a lot, hard to say) redistribution of the .torrent file, but it'd be interesting to see what would happen with something like this. Would you sell enough zero-overhead copies of the movie at a buck a pop to make up for your $10 per-unit profit on the DVD release? I have exactly 10 movies in my DVD collection, but if you offered me movies at $1-2 a pop I'd probably own several hundred. They'd be impulse purchases, and I wouldn't think twice about buying a movie to watch once.

I think they'd make some good money on it. Especially with older movies that already sell for a few bucks on the bent can rack at Wally World, most of which has to be eaten up by distribution and materials costs. If you didn't care about liner art and packaging, would you pirate it or cough up 75 cents for the .torrent file and a legit license to it?

I think there's some interesting possibilities in this business model. I don't pirate, but I also don't buy a lot of music because it's overpriced in my opinion. I might buy 30 bucks (2-3 albums) in music a year.

When "all of mp3" came out, I bought TONS of music at about 25 cents a song. I probably dropped $150 in the first year. Many turned out to be music I didn't like, but at 25 cents a song I'll take that risk and work on building collections, because it's easier to download a bunch of stuff and spend a little money than wasting my time picking out individual songs to save money. I'd also spend 10 cents each to download a few sample songs for an artist in 128k, then turn around a day later and spend another 25 cents a song on their entire collection at a decent bitrate if I liked the samples.

OpenSignal shows no coverage anywhere near my house for any carrier, and the nearest AT&T signal is several counties away.

I'd download their app to contribute data, but I don't have an Android and they don't support anything else. It looks like the one guy in my state who downloaded it for his droid used it 3-4 times, tops.

Neat idea, though.

There are already websites that track what are called "Iridium Flares" where the sun reflects off one of the boxy, shiny AT&T Iridium satellites. Focus the beam a little more and you could accomplish some fairly serious eye damage. However, aiming such a thing at a specific target for any length of time would be damned near impossible.

If you wanted to truly permanently blind a populace, issue each of your people a 1kw aiming laser for their rifles. If you want to temporarily blind them, set up a couple of powerful spotlights on a tall building or helicopter. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable.

Not for... (sticks pinky finger to mouth)... One MILLion dollars!

(tap tap tap)
"Candygram!"

What do you mean? I got one of these, and then bought a 500 watt lamp that simulates sunlight. I pointed the lamp at the table. Problem solved. I get almost 10w of charging power, which is plenty to charge my phone.

Now I just need to figure out why my electric bill went up by $60 a month. Must be that new electric toothbrush.

I may get whooshed on this, but I'm assuming you are not making some form of obtuse joke.

The conventional therapy is Viagra (as mentioned in the previous sentence of the summary).

Since the spider venom works in a different way than Viagra does, I'm assuming the point here is that a drug based on the spider venom might work on some patients that do not respond to Viagra. So if Viagra doesn't get Mr. Johnson ready for some action, ask your doctor if Spideyagra is right for you (insert list of possible side effects)!

There's a significant difference between "number dead" and "number confirmed dead". The actual number who have died is unknown, so most outlets report the numbers that are known to be dead.

That means that the number will (sadly) climb much higher. With 1,300 miles of shoreline affected by the tsunami, I expect we won't be talking in the hundreds for very long, unfortunately.

I don't know how things work in Oz, but a lot of libraries in the US have formed "Friends of the Library" groups that manage and help fund things like this (or anything the local government is unwilling or unable to fund). Our local library has one, and it offers things like free passes to local museums and places of interest, kids' art programs, juried art and photography exhibits, teen programs, reading and story times, etc. All run and managed by volunteers, all supported by voluntary membership fees and donations and proceeds from things like sales of community-donated used books and modest entry fees into the art/photography shows.

The "Friends" are partners with the library, and do the sorts of things that the library lacks a budget and personnel to handle. Everything is paid for by the members of the community who wish to participate, and everything can be enjoyed by everyone whether they pay in or not. Enough people cough up $20 (or in a lot of cases a LOT more) a year that the Friends group in our community is doing quite well, and has programs going on constantly.

Good libraries seek relevance in all things, and are relevant in so many things other than books. Don't limit your mission.

Sure, it's hard work, but who else is going to do it? The schools? They're already mired in political and religious wrangling. They're trying to play the role of parent and teacher. They're already the subject of unfunded mandates that conflict with their mission. They're already burdened with parental indifference, community budget-cutting, and federal mandates for unrealistic performance in things that aren't actually helping kids love to learn.

The kind of people who are attracted to the library are, by and large, the kind of people who want to get involved. Build this. They will come. Work with your "Friends of the Library" group (if you have one, and if you don't, FORM ONE NOW) to drive initiatives like this.

Don't ask your community's government for the resources to handle this, ask your fellow citizens directly. There are plenty of us who stand ready to help our libraries, because we recognize them for what they are - not dusty rooms full of books, not free-use computers, not distributors of free access to museums and local places of interest, not arts and crafts centers, not meeting spaces, not community builders, but all of these things, and so very much more.

Plutarch once said, “the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Go light a few fires today.

I believe the article is trying to say that the cost of ALM is coming down while the cost of materials and transportation continues to rise. So, at some point (probably soon), the savings in materials will exceed the cost of the ALM equipment, at least for certain products.

Especially when you start talking about having generalized ALM equipment more local to you that can make whatever you need, instead of making it and shipping it great distances which costs in both energy and damage losses, not to mention turnaround times.

The difference is even greater when you want something as customizable as a bicycle, where it takes someone with specialized knowledge and tools to build one out of a bunch of different parts from a bunch of different places and get one built out and tuned for you. A bicycle is a near-perfect example of something that currently takes a long time to procure, and/or involves middlemen who have to deal with excess stock in one part or shortages in another or damage-in-transit. You tell any serious cyclist they can get an efficient bike that weighs 2/3 what their current bike weighs in an hour down at the local copy shop, they'll pay a premium for that. Tell them it can be made to their exact size and body shape, and they'll start throwing money at you in large wads.

There will always be a place for traditional manufacturing, of course, but I think as the cost of materials creeps up and ALM and 3D printer technologies get cheaper and more available and more automated, you'll find first niche products, then more common products, being created this way.