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Except that Lucent have no real reason to put firmware in a fiber switch to read your email as it goes down the tubes.

A company that makes all it's money from targetted ads - might



Did you even read parent's post? We all agree that google (and yahoo, and hotmail) parse our emails to offer better ads and to index them for search. What we're talking about is bad employees reading your emails for their own curiosity.


This is getting off-topic, but did you forget about AT&T's secret rooms that were recording internet traffic? It's not just Google that wants to read your mail. Governments want to spy on their citizens, and ISPs are (allegedly) cooperating in the effort.


sure but that's basically a "constant" in that it's going to happen regardless of where you receive your emails.


It's also part of crazy Hollywood acounting. The more you can charge against the film the better, that's why flops like Titanic and Empire strikes back still haven't made a profit

You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after


That only makes sense if you have a stake in Panavision. There are tons of film makers who don't have an interest in spending more money.


I might not have understood properly, but the idea is for these companies to basically always be "losing" money on paper. Many popular movies are "flops" on paper because of accounting reasons. If these companies have 100 RED cameras lying around, creditors will have something to come after.


The studio could be standing between the filmmakers and the camera providers, pointing the filmmaker to the public rate sheets while actually paying much less.


so we are shooting a $500M movie, $star$ is costing us $250M of that and the advertising budget is another $300M

Can we see if we can get a deal on the camera rental?


$500M movie? The most expensive movies ever made top out at $300M (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films ). Your average major studio film is more likely to be under $50 million.

And $4000 a day can add up pretty quick. 50 days is approximately the average number of days for filming. That's $200,000 per camera. Since you frequently want to do shoot from a few angles, you're talking a half million or more just for cameras.

Now, for a normal Hollywood blockbuster, at $50M, that's significant but not too bad. For an independent film, which will likely have a budget under $10M, and sometimes even under $1M, that's a pretty substantial portion of your costs.

So cameras that cost $10K to buy outright will make a big difference in this space. All of a sudden, things that were prohibitively expensive to independent filmmakers are within reach. Independent films allow people to have more artistic creativity given that there's less at stake; they can also be the "long tail" of filmmaking, covering more niche interests than a big blockbuster is going to have to. So this could be a fairly significant disruptive innovation, if these turn out to be worth it.

Of course, it's not quite as good a deal as it might seem at first, since I believe the price quoted is just for the very core of the camera, containing the sensor, and not lenses, which are where some of the real cost is. But still, these will allow people to do 4K filming who never have been able to do so before.


We can look forward to better looking independent films and pornography, at least.


A lot of which are already shot on things like the Canon 5d - but yes it's good news


Canon 5d doesn't autofocus during a video shoot, so you need to hire someone to pull focus. Not very practical for indie films. Ironically, it works better for big productions where they have a guy to do that already.


We will end up with a whole bunch of pyramid schemes advertised on lamp posts that use this as a way of separating idiots from their money


Where does it say on harvard.edu that they wont kill students and harvest their organs?

Edit: Oh sorry forgot that people in the land of the free don't have a human rights act preventing Google reading their email (not sure about harvesting organs)


It does however tend to color your judgement about how professional and reliable this service is. If they risked their future on the stability of the Somalia domain registry - just so they could have a quirky domain name.

Calling yourself slashdot is funny if you are a geek site - worrying if you are my pension fund.



It fails when a certain proportion of the filament has evaporated. The evaporation rate is pretty constant, assuming either a getter or large enough bulb that the evaporated tungsten doesn't change the environment. So you would expect some form of bell curve distribution around the design lifetime.

Bath tub curves tend to come from large assemblies of reliable components


Yes, the results are consistent with that. Whatever stochastic effects there were, like electrical fluctuations or materials variations, were negligible.


So on one side you run a T-test to see if the correlation is significant.

On the other side you have the ability to phrase it as a question in the same language as Aristotle.


So on one side you run a T-test to see if the correlation is significant.

This is an incredibly gross simplification of applying statistical theory. I suggest you pick up some texts on inference, Bayesian stats, and probability theory to learn how stats != "running t-tests".


He was clearly just picking one useful tool that stats provides, not stating that it was the entirety of statistics.

I'm not making any statement about whether I agree with him, but if you disagree you will have to claim that he is cherry picking one useful and one useless skill, not just say that there is more to stats than t-tests.


Presumably the greatest minds in computer science sat down and decided that silverlight was the optimum technology

Or perhaps they were suspended over a tank of piranha by an evil laughing Bill Gates somewhere in the basement of http://cs.stanford.edu/info/gates

Or perhaps they just out sourced the web design to the cheapest company who happened to use Silverlight.


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