...merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?
What exactly is Yahoo's "core business"? Their webdirectory is defunct, search outsourced to Bing, and email largely been eaten by its competitors. I would have thought "settings its sights lower" would have involved winding up the company.
All Steam did is wall off a handful of regions where the local currencies are extremely volatile
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability.
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ONLY for accounts gifting games to one another between the rest of the world and these tiny regions
Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy
Yeah, sorry bud. He exactly described what they did and why. They want to be able to take advantage of the Russian economy to target Russian consumers, but don't want to allow consumers to benefit from the same economic fluctuations.
Maybe you should work on your literacy levels instead of spending time thinking of insulting things to say about people whose posts you apparently can't comprehend.
Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Which is exactly what's supposed to happen. If it's economically feasible for the game creators and Steam to sell games at 10% of the price in Russia, there's one of either two things happening:
1) The price they're selling for in Russa is sufficient to recoup their costs, and they're gouging Americans
2) They're forcing US customers to subsidise low Russian prices
"Region Locking" is really just digital protectionism. It's a way to let companies reap the benefits of globalism, while locking consumers out from doing the same. Companies are allowed to source widget/labour from countries overseas with smaller economies, but as soon as consumers do the same, it's time to start playing legal/technical games to keep them out.
The OP has it wrong. The theaters would be liable.
Remember the shooting that occurred at a screening of Batman: the Dark Knight? Well, some families of victims are suing the theater and the case is still ongoing. Because there's a chance that the theater may be found liable of not having "enough security" for a random shooting, and because it can be argued that the theaters in this case were "warned ahead of time of a potential attack," they could potentially be found liable should anything happen.
Keep in mind that Sony is only pulling the release after the five largest theater chains refused to show it. And the reason they refused to show it is because they could potentially be liable should anything happen anywhere in any of their theaters. Given the poor reviews the movie is getting they presumably decided that it just wasn't worth any risk as they're probably not going to make much anything off showing it anyway.
If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.
How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.
Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.
in theory, if you can land the rocket back on dry land, you can refurbish it and reuse it for enough less than the cost of the extra fuel/landing gear/etc to make it a net cost reduction over several launches.
yes, you are losing some mass fraction of orbital payload, but if the cost savings are sufficient to justify the extra initial expense, then it is a win.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k [comscore.com]).
What percentage of the US population has a household income of over $100k? In a two-income household, that's $50k each, which isn't a particularly high income here.
Because as everyone knows, a liberal arts course makes you a better person, whereas STEM leaves you bitter, cynical and competent.
Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?
Pretty darn good.
You have one friend who plays a minor, non-speaking role in a popular TV series. How much did that net him, and how long is that job likely to last before his out looking for another one? You have another friend who "works" on The Daily Show. That could range from really impressive (he hosts it) to the rather unimpressive (he cleans up the studio after everyone's left).
I guess if you get your job satisfaction from tossing around the names of well-known TV shows, that's a good gig. I prefer job security and a good paycheck.
With your bare hands?!?
