Private enterprises are not productive enterprises; it is a necessary cost of society. Private enterprises do not build anything and possesses no means to do so. People do so, and so private enterprise must pay people for what they need.

That's the point, they want to rent you access to a computer too

would shop through ChatGPT

But banning digital tags wont change that.

What if they go slap a new paper tag on the shelf while you're doing that?

Yep.

Scanning down the comments -

Nope. They missed it.

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

Of course it's well known how much money some artists make through their tours. People are willing to pay the price to see them, so good for those artists.

However, at what point will it no longer work? At some point the prices will be too high to sell out arenas. Big acts have been able to demand $1,000 or more for the best seats at giant arenas. Like so many others I can't name a single act that is active currently that I would pay anywhere near that much to see. If prices - and fees - keep going up the number of people in my camp will increase. Maybe the premium experience will be enough to offset that, but at some point demand side economics will take over.

If I can buy every single album, LP, single, and special edition an artist has ever released for less than 1/4 of what a ticket goes for - or for that matter less than just the fees for a ticket - the system seems a bit broken. Sure the live experience is different but is it worth that much?

I was actually in college in the 1990s, but yes, a middle schooler today with python on a raspberry pi and a pretty simple GPS module could do this.

I didn't say it wasn't abhorrent or alarming. I'm presenting the scenario that this task of "defend this three dimensional coordinate box" doesn't require AI.

Yes, it did. The beacon signals weren't that good back then, neither were the sensors. I had the same problem in the fake robot battles I was involved in.

The answer turned out to be a solution not from Defense industries, but from Genie Garage Door Openers.

The robot doesn't care. The robot's job isn't foreign policy. The robot's job is "here's a box defined by this coordinate cloud, defend it"

Like I said, I programmed it for a fighting robot back in the 1990s. It ain't that complex, and with today's drone factory ships, the Navy can now output this level of AI in killbots at a rate of 10,000 a day.

Seems to me I read about this in Atlas Shrugged.

Can it take out a building yet?
What kind of input device does it use (Keyboard, xylophone) ?
Man portable?/Vehicle mount?

So many unanswered questions ...

Wow.

20 fucking hours and only two (three now) comments on a straight science article, but political bullshit has you fucking 'nerds' lining up.

Where are the people who could hve recited all 274 objects? Where are the people who can tell me everything I could possibly want to know about Saturn, had hands on experience with the observational and telemetry hardware, worked with the information gathering systems.

Have you all died, or just went away. Seriously, I would like to know. There has to be at least one of you around here still....

Right?

I once knew a guy who had pi memorized to 500 places. Honestly, thinking about it, I'm no longer sure if he had any other useful talent.

And it was useful. He could pick any spot in the series, run it front to back, back to front, every other number, whatever he wanted, and with math you can do in you head or with a pencil and paper, make something cryptography secure, or at least very inconvenient to solve without using the rubber hose method, and we even solved that more than 30 years ago.

I hope you all come back some day. I miss you.

(Posted as someone who forgot his first two slash logins, used to have sacmog, and then one other I forgot in a ... 151 soaked evening... before this, and still have kronickoff so I can bitch if they manage to kill this account.)

But in all seriousness, is this just another symptom of my git off my lawn syndrome, got to grow the beard to show I'm here or what?

Or are memories all I'll ever have?