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peroo

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If you're a cynic, announcing that you've "discovered" a large of amount of REE in your iron ore tailings - and having the chief executive of the EU declare it strategically important - seems like a very good way of making sure you can continue mining iron ore for the forseeable future.

No, this is just business. Sony and Merlin have already sold all or parts of their shares, and are in the process of sharing the windfall with their labels. It's a pretty significant chunk of cash, so if Warner didn't do the same they would look incredibly bad.

Broader picture the majors want Spotify to succeed, because the alternative is having the business run by Apple and Google, who only have an ancillary interest in music.

As bad as the star system is, I'm not sure there's anything better. I think Amazon has the right idea with the "Was this review helpful to you?" buttons, though that may not work quite as well for Yelp if you consider the possibility of review-burying by owners.

I watched rally for a few years, but lost interest after Loeb won his third straight WC. There was absolutely no suspense, everyone knew Loeb would win most of the rallies barring the winter courses.

As for Women's football, there's a reason it's not really appreciated and that is the fact that the skill level is significantly lower. Far fewer women play, which results in less competition and less highly talented individuals. Another problem is that the goals are sized for men, while the women keepers statistically speaking are smaller and can cover a smaller area, which means it's far easier to score with cheap shots. It all makes for rather dull spectating, sadly.

The ability to monetize music on Youtube is unlikely to be a big hit since few labels make much compared to real streaming services. The big hit is going to be for promotion. The only reason indie labels have put up with the abysmal payouts from Youtube have been the fact that it's a great way to promote their music. Youtube is great for discovery and poor for streaming, which makes for great conversion.

However, what Google are trying to do is essentially turn Youtube into a fully fledged music streaming service, but they're framing it as the same old video sharing service to justify continued abyssmal payouts. They can do this because they know that artists will put pressure on their labels to get back on Youtube if they're ever blocked. It's a classic monopolist move, and the only solace is that Google will likely fuck up yet again like they do every time they try to enter different markets.

A lot of people are already using YouTube as a free streaming service, and even though artist can monetize their music, the payout is significantly lower than from pure music streaming services. This is seen as a fair tradeoff seeing as YouTube is also a great promotional channel, but Google are now trying to pivot it into a pure streaming service without significantly changing payouts.

It sets a very dangerous precedent for the value of music, which can be incredibly damaging for already struggling indie artists (not so much for the three majors who have received _massive_ advances)

Possibly, but that won't help the flora or fauna since young, planted forests have completely different ecosystems than the rainforests we're tearing down. Arguably it won't help co2 emissions much either since old forests capture enormous amounts of carbon in the ground, which planted forests don't.

I doubt Google particularly wants to be an ISP, but something has to be done to break up the stalemate in the US. Google are one of the few companies with enough clout to actually get the ball rolling.

Or you can just install Skype for Windows Desktop. Metro makes perfect sense when you consider a tablet formfactor like Surface, it just shouldn't be used for regular computers, which is where they screwed ujp.

Yep that prevents turbo which stops it from shutting down. Crippling the CPU is a pretty annoying fix, though.

Switching to the onboard Intel GPU works as well, but that means foregoing hardware decoding which means a bunch of things run like glue. I actually ended up just replacing the fan which solved the issue for at least another year until I can get a new copmuter.

I love my Vaio-Z, but it's a bit like a Lamborghini - pretty and sleek, but not all that practical. It has a blazing graphics card but the fan noise could rouse a coma patient. Even worse, after a year it simply started shutting down because cooling wasn't working particularly well anymore, and the fan never goes below medium speed, even when idle. The RAID-SSDs failed too, and are extremely expensive to replace, so I had to put a new SSD in the optical drive bay.

Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.

I agree Off-TV play is a really nice feature, but in my opinion the cons outweigh the pros.

- Few games use it in any meaningful way. - It's bulky and unfamiliar. - It muddies the image of what the console is (is the tablet the Wii U?) - It raised the price of the console significantly. - It threw away the momentum they had for something none of their install-base wanted.

While I love my Wii U, it's destined to become another 20m failure. I hope that I'm wrong and that with time they can really iterate on their online functionality and get some better 3rd party support, but I'm not optimistic. If nothing else the 3DS is killing it, so it's not like they're going broke any time soon.

Hotfile shut down 13 years ago

That's presumably a result of razor-thin margins and quick turnarounds. Competing on quality against free labor is quite hard.

Hotfile shut down 13 years ago

The irony of the situation is that it's unprofitable to license anime for the US precisely because the fansubbing community already distributes "free" copies, and most anime-fans consume the majority of their content that way.

Presumably he pays with a credit card and does a chargeback two or three months after payment, at which point physical rewards have already been shipped. Most payment processors will hold a reserve for a set amount of time for this exact reason.

I think it's a bit early to say since Kickstarter only really took off about a year ago and many projects have longer schedules. That said, if the biggest failure Kickstarter has had so far is a 100k board game, then I'd call it a roaring success. I'm fairly certain that we're talking >99% delivery rate, even if they might not all deliver exactly what the backers expected.

Android phones, and possibly iPhones as well, have multiple options for screen locks, one of which is a pin. That said, it will block pin entry after a set amount of failures after which you have to wait a set amount of time or log in with your Google account. I imagine the wait time scales if you continue guessing, rendering this bot quite useless.

Javapocalypse 13 years ago

Verbosity is Java's middlename. That said, 3rd party libraries can get you a long way.

Widgets have been a zombie product for years, with virtually no users and no development. It was actually removed from Opera about a year ago IIRC, so Chrome had nothing to do with it.

The only thing I'll miss from O12 is Dragonfly. Probably just a habit, but I found it much more intuitive and well designed.

Why does so many startups feel the need to brag about the fact that they're switching to <hot new technology>? To me it just comes off as an attempt to convince themselves it's a great idea.

How about coming back in a year and telling us how it turned out instead? Actual case-studies and analysis are interesting, fashion statements are not.

> If the overarching plot is to kill a dragon, there are some difficulties when trying to stretch it out into 9 hours of films.

From what I've gathered the dragon will be dealt with in the second movie (hence the name), while the third movie will deal with the aftermath, as well as being padded with content from the LOTR appendix. Personally I think the first movie will make more sense in light of the sequels, though that of course doesn't really defend the somewhat lackluster nature of it.