No, actually, I'm not. I'm assuming that people would put that $10 towards a specific album and thus, a specific artist. If I stream dozens or hundreds of artists a month, the $10 is really diluted, so even if I spent most of my time listening to one artist, they necessarily won't have made as much money off of me as they would've if I'd bought their album.

Well, I mean, to a certain extent I agree. But you and I are having this conversation, which means that we've thought about it. Spotify and services like it mask the conversation from the public. They think that the artists are getting paid an amount commensurate with their skill, and roughly corresponding to the amount that the public enjoys the artist's music. If you ask someone what they think a band gets paid from a streaming service, I'm sure they'll tell you a figure that's much higher than it actually is. To an extent, it even removes the ability of people to vote with their dollars. When $10/month is being split between dozens of artists, even the person that comes out on top is poor. In the end, it may end up backfiring on the streaming services. If bands decide they can make more money doing releases on BandCamp and Spotify is undermining their album sales, maybe they'll pull out of the streaming services to sell fewer albums, but still make more money doing it.

But on a more philosophical level, I think it's sad that art is reduced to a mere calculation and balance sheet. I paid $10 for some albums and I've gotten joy out of them that can't be defined in dollar terms. In a very fundamental way, a lot of music shapes the way we interact with the world. I mean that very literally; music changes and shapes your brain as you listen to it. Emotion and music are tightly interwoven. It's a surprise when you meet someone that takes no enjoyment in music at all.

So while there's a fundamental truth to what you say, driving potential artists away from what could be a workable career doesn't really benefit us. If streaming revenues were enough to make up a decent, middle-ish class living, I don't think I'd argue with you. But these streaming revenues aren't enough to do anything other than have making music as a hobby, and really undermine important album sales. I'm sure there will be lots of artists that continue to make music and live in poverty--that's been true through the ages--but the promise of the age we live in was that MORE artists would be able to reach more people and more EASILY make a living.

While true, it's irrelevant for two reasons:

1) The radio doesn't play the songs you want on demand; and
2) The radio is effectively a way to drive album sales. Spotify is a REPLACEMENT for the album.

It used to be that it was worth it to play your songs on the radio (even at a loss) because people that liked your one song might want to hear the 10 hours you wrote--that would never be heard on the radio--and spend $10 on the album.

Now you pay Spotify $10/month for unlimited access to the entire album. To the entirety of the artist's catalogue. To the entirety of all the included artists' catalogues.

This is obviously and trivially less money than any one of those artists would make previously from you if you liked their music. Perhaps the argument could be made that more people are listening and giving a tiny amount of money to each artist, but I rather think that given the stats I've seen, this isn't even close to true.

This is much different from the time when people were pirating albums, since many fans would go out and buy an album that they downloaded because they wanted to support the artist. Now people feel that because they're paying $10 to Spotify or Rdio that they ARE supporting the artist. They're not going to pay for a subscription AND an album. That's exactly the opposite of the point of these services.

They need a new model. Streaming on its own for $10/month is clearly not enough money to go around. Spotify has infrastructure costs and has been bleeding money (I think they had a break-even or profitable quarter just recently?). Meanwhile, they also need to distribute the remainder of the already paltry $10 between a zillion artists. It makes no sense.

I would buy the low yield argument if one of two conditions were met; 1) the technology was developed this century, and 2) fewer than a billion (that's with a 'B' for those if you following along at home) were produced every year. 1080p ought to be the minimum standard in 2011, it's 2015, time for manufacturers to get with the program.

It's a spec. Designed by intel's marketing group. Which is constantly in flux. Their long term goal is to push affordable yet quality laptop design, but at the same time I wouldn't all $700 "palatable" for an Ultrabook. $570-$640 is palatable for an ultrabook. $700 is just a regular laptop price.
 
And really, should we be praising laptop manufacturers for putting a 1080p screen in a $700 laptop? In 2015? How many pixels does your phone have? How much does it cost off contract. Extrapolate.

The NK-33 rockets are fully tested before they're flown, I don't want to sound like a Russian apologist, but NASA's preliminary report says that the Orbital flight is their own fault, finding evidence of dessicant and spare parts(!!!) in the fuel tank that were later ingested by the turbopump. If you stick metal action figures in the cylinders of your car how many miles do you expect the engine to last running at 80,000 rpm?

Russia charges NASA about $73 million per astronaut, that includes Soyuz training, russian lessons, splashdown survival training, and of course the actual launch. That's per astronaut. We typically rotate through six astronauts a year on a staggered schedule.
 
SpaceX is going to be capable of sending seven astronauts for under $100 million. That's about $15 million per seat or 20% of what the Russians are charging. It could potentially get as low as $60 million per launch which comes out to 8.5 million per launch which would be 12% what we're paying now.
 
If/when SpaceX could successfully land and reuse the booster cores for $20 million per launch, it gets down to $2.8 million per seat. That's 20+ years away perhaps.

Russia was broke through the entire Cold War and was more than happy to let their citizens starve to push their space and millitary programs and they still beat the US in the space race in every respect (excluding landing a man on the moon). They saw the price tag and said "forget that", we already have First Sattelite, First Man/Woman in space, first Man/Woman in orbit, first manned space station, furthest distance driven on the moon/mars (until VERY RECENTLY actually, only in the last two years were those records broken). Russia also has the most reliable manned spaceflight program by a wide margin. Russia does space better and for less money.

They made a formal announcement that they'll be disconnecting from the US half of the ISS at the end of 2013 after approximately 10 years of talking about it. And now they're courting the Chinese, the Japanese and the ESA to go in with them on their own ISS, leaving the ISS with... The US and South Korea.
 
It's not a rumor, it's "when". They have a webcam setup showing construction of their new spaceport built to support the "new" spacestation in it's new orbit. They plan on doing their first launch by the end of the year.

HAL: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.

Most computers these days don't come with a restore disc, let alone a disc drive.
 
Nowadays they have a compressed restore image on the drive that occupies between four and twenty GB as a restore option, which likely comes with the crapware ready to spring in to action(!).

Or you could be Cartagena, which has absolutely zero city planning, and a failed public transit system that was still born (transit stations are overgrown with weeds, etc, built but never opened). Compare to Bogota and Medellin which have thriving public transit systems and well laid out cities. All three cities were established at the same time, only two were truly successful and became world class livable cities.

If you don't see, it's because you're not looking. iTunes is the #1 music download store, by far, and it's all AAC. Apple does not sell MP3s. Their streaming service, iTunes Radio, also uses AAC. Pandora also uses AAC, not MP3, for its streams.

They still have to match orbital velocity on the same ecliptic, even at 0.1c they would show up from a long ways away. There's no "stealth" in space, plain and simple. Spaceships produce too much everything, heat, radiation, gas etc.
 
Orbital insertion would be pretty obvious as well, even at the L1 behind the moon we would notice them coming in.

Driving through the gulf coast from Houston to Miami was a real eye-opener for me. I've been to 20+ countries and the closest thing I can compare their standard of living is to rural Peru.