Albums haven't been making musicians rich from a long time. Having their songs played on the radio didn't make them rich either.

But having their songs heard got them fans which go out and see their live shows/tours, and that makes them quite a bit of money. Merchandising/Cross promotional deals can make them quite a lot more. (Dr. Dre's Beats brand headphones have totally eclipsed the amount he made in his entire career in the music industry).

The cold hard fact here is that the changes in the music industry are going to happen, no matter what. Spotify and Pandora at least get the artists some money in the meantime. Pirates are not entitled to free music...but they're going to do their thing anyway. Giving those listeners a free stream that at least makes some returns off them gives the artist something rather than nothing.

Even if one day it becomes impossible to make a living off music, I guarantee you, there will still be plenty of music because there are just too many people who want to make music (not all of it good). They'll do it in their spare time while still holding down a full-time job, they feel they need to make that music. Whether that's fair or not, it's still true. The supply of music is overwhelming compared to the demand.

Developers find that their games need to be rebalanced for thumbsticks vs. kb/mouse users. Rebalancing their whole game around the input device takes budget away from other features and from their polish time. Ultimately, developers know they can just balance the game once around controllers(have you noticed how much slower modern shooters are compared to classic PC shooters?), then just release the game on PC for KB/M lovers.

This ensures singleplayer isn't too hard on controller users, and avoids multiplayer imbalance between controller users vs. kb/m. Developers don't need kb/m support on consoles, they can sell to those players on PC instead.

Due to lack of demand from the developers, it's hardly surprising that Sony/MS aren't interested in going into supporting kb/m. Plus Sony/MS would lose out on sales of their proprietary control input if they supported generic kb/ms.

Thanks, that was very interesting for a layperson like myself. Itâ(TM)s so obvious to the user when a program has a great interface design, but itâ(TM)s so hard to tell exactly what the designer did correctly to make it feel that way.

I don't think that "natural" is inherently better than "synthetic" either. Organic is just about meaningless to me.

However, there are still tremendous gulfs in our understanding of human nutritional needs, and the guy in the article is completely relying upon a single food source for all his needs. That ascribes a level of confidence to this "soylent" that is far above all other foods, natural or synthetic. This allows no leeway for serendipitously meeting unknown or poorly understood nutritional needs through a mixed diet.

I think the GP's position that synthetic foods can "never" take the place of of typical food is hyperbole, but I seriously doubt we've reached the level of understanding needed to achieve that goal today. Further, while there is no inherent reason why a "synthetic" food would be less nourishing than normal food, we have a wealth of empirical evidence (though poorly documented) that traditional foods provide the necessary nutrition for our current life expectancy. Synthetic foods (though better documented) just have less evidence, simply because they haven't been around as long in our diet yet. We shouldn't fear innovation, we should still proceed, just with reasonable skepticism. Admittedly, it seems a lot of people forget about the "reasonable" part in that skepticism.

A month-long search wouldn't be needed. They could simply show Kirk's landing, showing someone viewing this on a tricorder and getting up to move, cutting back to kirk's chase sequence, have "someone" yell out "Get in here!"

Explain that when old spock got marooned on the ice planet, a tricorder was included amongst the basic supplies given to him. Thus, the tricorder tracking forms the means by which Old Spock had been moving towards the same federation installation that Kirk was supposed to be headed towards, and be 1) the reason Old Spock was in the same area of the planet 2) the reason Old Spock could get close enough to Kirk to lend him a hand.

Not terribly hard to explain away implausible coincidence with a little bit of setup. They don't even need to spell it out, they could just throw in a brief shot of a tricorder reading, and let fans fill in the details.

From the link:

"An analysis of smoking and cigarette tax rates in 1955 through 1964, prior to the Surgeon Generalâ(TM)s first report and general antismoking sentiment, shows the same relationship between tax increases and declining smoking rates that are prevalent today, suggesting that popular attitudes towards smoking are not a confounding factor.[17]"

Obviously an imperfect experiment since the 9 years between 1955 and 1964 are not identical to 2004-2013 in all other attributes, but it's as close as you can get to a control & experiment in a soft-science like this.

The conclusion that "popular attitudes towards smoking are not a confounding factor" sounds like a bit of a leap to me as well, the analysis would only support the existence of an impact from the cigarette tax, it wouldn't allow them to rule out the impact of other factors added later on. I have to imagine that the cultural shift has had at least some impact in addition to the impact from the tax, possibly adding additional momentum to perpetuate a declining trend in the face of what would have otherwise been diminishing returns from the effects of the tax increase.

People still do smoke, but it's also wildly unpopular compared to what it was before the tax. Smoking is actually a perfect example of how effective taxes are in curbing certain practices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_States

This was a very interesting debate on this very issue:
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/801-the-gop-must-seize-the-center-or-die

The classical concept of the Republican platform has broad appeal. It's why I had registered as a Republican all those years ago, but my registration doesn't guarantee my vote, the GOP doesn't offer many opportunities to vote for those kinds of ideals anymore. The GOP needs to find those ideals again to recover the popular vote, but it looks like things are going to have to get worse for the party before it learns how to get better.

Wait, what "compassionate conservatism" have you seen bashed on this site? Not calling you out here, I just really can't think of a politician pushing compassionate conservatism since Obama got elected, and certainly not on a platform loud enough to have been discussed on /.

My son turned 1 year old 2 weeks ago. We're STILL dealing with incorrect billing issues from his birth.

Classic economic growth theory was that technological advancements would come in and increase the marginal productivity of capital beyond that of labor and drive a shift towards skilled capital-intensive labor, and away from the cheap unskilled mass labor jobs.

Ultimately, though the unskilled laborers suffer from unemployment in the near term, in the long term, they can find new jobs created to support the more capital-intensive industry and end up better off than if they kept their unskilled jobs.

The problem is, it's just a theory. It's a model laid over past results from previous technological advancements, but there is no specific mechanism taking the unskilled worker into a new better job. Sometimes, the unskilled worker will just end up languishing. Especially in situations where education levels are low so that the worker is less equipped to shift into a new career (for example, illiterate fishing villages displaced by the Three Gorges Dam). Or, the jobs may simply spring up in another country, like India or China, and may be a step down. Simply put, labor is not as liquid as capital.

There is no guarantee that a technology that eliminates 10,000 jobs will then generate >10,000 supporting jobs. It's a hope. Because technology is going to keep marching on whether we like it or not, all we can do is try to protect ourselves as it happens.

Did those 2 seats belong to the Democratic party? No? Why is that? Neither a Democratic, nor a Republican candidate owned those seats. As independents they are certainly tempted to receive aid from the larger parties, since there is no large party supporting them, but ultimately they owned the seats and their votes were not guaranteed from the outset. You mention Lieberman taking his seat with help from the Republican Party. He had lost the support of the Democratic party. He could have chosen to side with the Republican Party against the bill to be reelected along the same path.

You're also conveniently pretending the Tea Party has had no effect on U.S. politics.

Your post in no way actually supports your conclusion.

I work for a telecommunications systems company, specifically serving government/military channels.

Over the 3 days leading up to 9/30, the volume of contract awards that came through was more than double that of the last 2 months. In the end it was still about 40% less than this time last year.

They delay some purchases until the end of the year so they can be sure their budget doesn't run out in the middle of the year. When we get to the end of the year, they pull the trigger on the purchases they'd put off because they weren't sure what they have money left for. The rest are put on hiatus until next year when they get a new budget. Plus, some vendors have fiscal year-ends coinciding with the gov't, so to get bookings into the fiscal year-end and maximize year-end bonus comp., salesmen will push to provide the sharpest discounts they can manage to bring those awards into this year.

It's not surprising to see a spurt of purchases at the end of the budget year.

The Tea Party has dragged the entire GOP party to the right. Sure they get elected within the GOP national campaign party, but they've gotten their platform absorbed in the larger GOP platform to create a spectrum shift to the right. They haven't taken a majority in congress as a separate party...but they didn't have to do that to make a difference in US politics. They can run against an incumbent and lose, but force him to move to the right to protect himself from losing his base. I consider the Tea Party to be a very solid example of how a third party can "win" without winning elections. Sure, the result was a shutdown of the government, but hey, they got what they wanted.