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Baron Bifford posted:Many societies have outlawed gay marriage and miscegenation, so why haven't any outlawed May-December romances? They're illegal if one of the people involved is young enough, you know.
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Feb 11, 2013 19:46
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Baron Bifford posted:Many societies have outlawed gay marriage and miscegenation, so why haven't any outlawed May-December romances? The reason the first two were ever illegal in the first place is that the ignorant society at the time viewed at least one half of that relationship as "sub-human" or even not human/property. You could no more marry a black man, than you could a table. Thankfully, I believe that I'll see full gay marriage adopted at the federal level before I die. With a May-December romance, while it might be creepy to an outside observer, as long as both people are legal aged, rational, consenting adults, it's perfectly fine in the eyes of the law.
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Feb 11, 2013 20:33
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Sieg posted:Halogen headlights are being replaced by HID headlights, and today's halogens are also more efficient and produce more light and less heat than they used to. That might be a small part of it. From a quick read-up on Wikipedia, HIDs have a different, bluer, color than tradition halogens. What I'm noticing isn't electric blue, but instead more light of the plain white variety.
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Feb 11, 2013 20:54
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Affi posted:Am I stupid or will this work? Cigarette smoke smells way different from food smoke. Your best best is to both clean the crap out of every surface AND try to disguise the normal smoke smell with other smoke smell. Either that or you could actually do the smart thing and just tell him what happened. This is much less likely to backfire.
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Feb 11, 2013 20:54
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Grundulum posted:From a quick read-up on Wikipedia, HIDs have a different, bluer, color than tradition halogens. What I'm noticing isn't electric blue, but instead more light of the plain white variety. Stock OEM HIDS are just white compared to the slight yellow tint you get with halogens.
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Feb 11, 2013 21:22
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Grundulum posted:From a quick read-up on Wikipedia, HIDs have a different, bluer, color than tradition halogens. What I'm noticing isn't electric blue, but instead more light of the plain white variety. There is a spectrum. Google "HID color chart" or just look at this: http://www.delonixradar.com.au/hid-xenon/colour-chart.php I can almost guarantee you that what you are seeing is people running HID headlights in a housing that was designed for halogen headlights. Since they are much brighter than the standard headlight, you really need to properly project them with 'projectors'. Most people don't bother replacing the housings because that is expensive.
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Feb 11, 2013 21:30
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Grundulum posted:From a quick read-up on Wikipedia, HIDs have a different, bluer, color than tradition halogens. What I'm noticing isn't electric blue, but instead more light of the plain white variety. A few other things: - People are driving a lot of SUVs and trucks; the higher headlights appear brighter, especially when they have not been adjusted properly. - People give a little less of a flying gently caress about other people than they used to. - People are overmedicated and have gadgets buzzing, beeping, and flashing at them so they aren't paying as much attention. I've also noticed a marked increase in drivers weaving over the center line.
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Feb 11, 2013 21:32
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Baron Bifford posted:Many societies have outlawed gay marriage and miscegenation, so why haven't any outlawed May-December romances? Because most laws tend to be written by the older members of society and why would they take away potential fun?
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Feb 11, 2013 21:45
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I heard that most movies released by Hollywood fail to turn a profit. Is this true? What fraction of movies turn out a profit? Does this explain why reliably profitable filmmakers like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer get to continue making atrocious movies?
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Feb 11, 2013 22:22
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Baron Bifford posted:I heard that most movies released by Hollywood fail to turn a profit. Is this true? What fraction of movies turn out a profit? Does this explain why reliably profitable filmmakers like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer get to continue making atrocious movies? Most ventures of any kind fail to turn a profit. But yes, the "[Terrible] Movie" guys turn in a reliably cheap product that does well enough so they keep getting made.
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Feb 11, 2013 22:29
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Baron Bifford posted:I heard that most movies released by Hollywood fail to turn a profit. Is this true? What fraction of movies turn out a profit? Does this explain why reliably profitable filmmakers like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer get to continue making atrocious movies? They fail to turn a profit by design. It's called Hollywood Accounting. Various movies that have been said to not make a profit because of their curious accounting methods: Coming to America; Forrest Gump; My Big Fat Greek Wedding; and Return of the Jedi. A movie turns a profit usually only because a court ordered them to admit such. Edit: And in the case of lovely movies, yes, they make cheap movies for the studios and there's enough people (ok, stoned college kids) who will pay to sit through them for 90 minutes to justify their cost. They're poo poo, but they make money, so they keep making them. But this is a different issue than why most movies don't make a profit. The movie business is insanely profitable; they just cook the books to make it seem like they're always on the brink of bankruptcy. Golbez fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 22:32
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Wow, Hollywood Accouting sounds crazy. If the movie business is insanely profitable, then more competitors should enter the market until it reaches equilibrium and everyone is making normal profits (this is what I remember of high school economics).
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Feb 11, 2013 23:04
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Then do I have bad news for you! Movie studios - like all established industries - do everything possible to strangle any and all competitors in the crib. There is no "market equilibrium" because there's no opportunity for new companies to compete. The deck is stacked in favor of established interests. If you value your faith in economics, do not wiki up "Regulatory Capture"
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Feb 11, 2013 23:10
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Golbez posted:They fail to turn a profit by design. It's called Hollywood Accounting. Various movies that have been said to not make a profit because of their curious accounting methods: Coming to America; Forrest Gump; My Big Fat Greek Wedding; and Return of the Jedi. Wow, that's wild. Does every studio have "the books" and then the real books? Baron Bifford posted:Wow, Hollywood Accouting sounds crazy. In addition to what Tharizdun said, Hollywood is hard to compare to other industries. It's easier to manufacture a screwdriver or even a smart phone to compete in those markets than try to create an equivalent product in the form of movies.
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Feb 11, 2013 23:16
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So the industry sets up enormous barriers to entry, and it corrupts government agencies to further is purposes. This was covered in my textbooks too (as much as a high school textbook will).
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Feb 11, 2013 23:18
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Actually, it's probably unfair for me to say the industry as a whole is insanely profitable. But when they're declaring that a movie like My Big Fat Greek Wedding made no money, you have to wonder that there is a lot of profit being taken.
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Feb 11, 2013 23:36
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Golbez posted:Actually, it's probably unfair for me to say the industry as a whole is insanely profitable. But when they're declaring that a movie like My Big Fat Greek Wedding made no money, you have to wonder that there is a lot of profit being taken. I remember reading that Steven Seagal movies were made purely to launder mob money. I couldn't think of any other reason personally so now it makes a lot more sense.
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Feb 12, 2013 00:43
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Golbez posted:A movie turns a profit usually only because a court ordered them to admit such. Which is why if you ever become a famous actor you want to get a portion of the gross receipts, and not the net.
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Feb 12, 2013 00:48
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I need to convert times from xxxx.xx seconds to hh:mm:ss.ss. I have lists of times like this that I need to convert so I need like a time calculator. I have spent the last two hours searching Google for a calculator that can do this, and cannot find one. I can find some that do hh:mm:ss, but not hh:mm:ss.ss. I can find a bunch of source code, but that does not help me. I am a 41 year old college graduate, and I cannot figure this grade school math out by myself.  Any help?
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Feb 12, 2013 01:00
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Maldoror posted:I need to convert times from xxxx.xx seconds to hh:mm:ss.ss. I have lists of times like this that I need to convert so I need like a time calculator. If you can use Excel for this I bet someone in the Excel thread would help you out if you ask nicely. It's basically just the integer part of xxxx divided by 3600 for the hours, then integer part of the remainder of that divided by 60 for the minutes, then the remainder is the seconds.
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Feb 12, 2013 01:14
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Maldoror posted:I need to convert times from xxxx.xx seconds to hh:mm:ss.ss. I have lists of times like this that I need to convert so I need like a time calculator. Do you have excel? Put all the times in A2 on down. In B2, put this: code:
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Feb 12, 2013 01:23
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Try this if you have excel: http://www.sendspace.com/file/e7qp9t
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Feb 12, 2013 01:52
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Noni posted:Do you have excel? Put all the times in A2 on down. In B2, put this: Holy poo poo thanks thanks thanks.  To get the two decimal points I had to do a custom format of [h]:mm:ss.00 I don't know why I have such a hard time with time conversions. I took two math courses in college which were designed for non math majors. :\
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Feb 12, 2013 02:12
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I am really new to comic books, and really REALLY new to meeting creators and having things signed (like, I'll be doing it for the first time in a couple days.) I found out Stan Lee is going to be at the Portland Comic Con later this month, and I'd like to go meet him. I'm wondering if it's weird to have him sign something that someone else wrote? I've got some newish Avengers Assemble, and I know a lot of the characters are his creations, but I don't know if it's some kind of faux pas.
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Feb 12, 2013 03:17
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Baron Bifford posted:If the movie business is insanely profitable, then more competitors should enter the market until it reaches equilibrium and everyone is making normal profits (this is what I remember of high school economics). Even if there were no regulation at all, you wouldn't expect a huge change. That zero economic profit equilibrium is true for perfect competition, but perfect competition assumes a few things: 1. All firms produce undifferentiated products. If you and I are wheat farmers and Ozma wants wheat, she doesn't care whose wheat she buys. As such, if you undercut my wheat by one cent, she'll buy all her wheat from you and none from me. 2. No individual firm has market power. Whether I go out of business or produce all the wheat I can has no impact on the market for wheat. Things like market price and total quantity are decided on the market level, not through the decisions of Farmer Bob. 3. There are no barriers to entry or exit. If I'm losing money, I'll sell the farm or just leave my fields alone. If wheat becomes more valuable than gold, my grandmother can start growing wheat in her yard. Obviously, there's next to nothing we'd actually say is perfectly competitive; it's an archetype used to think about competition in the same way a frictionless plane is a good tool to learn Newton' laws. Agriculture's the closest thing we could point to that more-or-less fits with those assumptions. Mass-market films violate all of them. 1. Filmmakers spend billions of dollars differentiating products. There are five thousand subcategories of movies with all sorts of demographics being targeted and "rival" films/studios (think Pixar v. Dreamworks) are common. The presence and cost of a film are extremely small elements in the question of whether it can compete. 2. Think Pixar would notice if Dreamworks went bankrupt tomorrow? Not only is there interdependence (I don't want to focus on romance if everyone else is, but I also don't want to put the one romance film out if everyone wants to see blood), there's a huge amount of control on a firm-by-firm level. Miramax decides how wide a release its films get. Columbia needs to decide what it's charging theaters to show a given film. Once again, there's way more going on than deciding how many to make. 3. Even ignoring legislation, there are huge economies of scale standing in your way. I can't make a blockbuster film without the $300 million in startup capital to compete. A film costs less for Columbia to make than it would for me because Columbia already has its lots, cameras, &c. and can spread those costs over a lot of productions. You can't make a blockbuster film in Cheyenne; you need to be in LA or New York or someplace where talent exists. Natural monopoly isn't really the term, but it's similar enough to give you an idea. Applying the perfect competition model to film just doesn't work. A much better model is monopolistic competition, where each firm is producing "the same product" but can still differentiate and a few large firms share market power (for example, Starbucks and McDonald's both selling coffee). Once you do that, though, the conditions pushing equilibrium towards zero economic profit aren't there. Econ!
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Feb 12, 2013 03:27
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uberwekkness posted:I am really new to comic books, and really REALLY new to meeting creators and having things signed (like, I'll be doing it for the first time in a couple days.) I found out Stan Lee is going to be at the Portland Comic Con later this month, and I'd like to go meet him. I'm wondering if it's weird to have him sign something that someone else wrote? I've got some newish Avengers Assemble, and I know a lot of the characters are his creations, but I don't know if it's some kind of faux pas. Simple fix: go to a local comic book emporium and buy a cheap(ish) old Stan Lee issue. Odds are good the autograph will increase the value anyway.
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Feb 12, 2013 03:55
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I'm having a hard time sorting through the info out there so I need to ask yalls a stupid question: How do I play files from a hard drive to a TV via hdmi? I want to buy something like apple tv but I dont have any need at all for streaming youtube or anything at all, just files from my hard drive to a tv that has an hdmi input. I dont think the TV ill be hooking it up to has any way to browse files or whatever so it would have to be sending a signal of some kind. I'm trying to look around amazon but its all about streams and content and all that so I'm not sure what I need. I would also prefer something that has a backup connection if the hdmi dont work on my tv, like the red white and yellow connectors. Thanks dudes.
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Feb 12, 2013 05:14
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XBMC is your answer.
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Feb 12, 2013 05:27
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I recently found out I'm descended from the Inca, I need to find the most complete, no holds barred anthropology of my people that exists. Music, religion, politics, tattoos, I need it all.
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Feb 12, 2013 05:42
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Rubies posted:I'm having a hard time sorting through the info out there so I need to ask yalls a stupid question: You can't usually just "play" video files on a TV. Either hard drive has to be in some kind of computer that can decode the video and send it through HDMI or the TV has to do it. Either way, there's no way to plug HDMI into a plain old hard drive. You probably want a small computer that can run XBMC, as another poster suggested. We have a pretty active XBMC thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3531650 It's pretty slick.
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Feb 12, 2013 05:54
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My apartment was painted freshly January 2nd, and I moved in the next day. It still reeks of paint; not noticeable once you're in and used to it, but every time I get home the smell is strong. I've tried leaving the windows open for days and have had a fan blow both in and out at a window (only have the one fan) for a day each. The paint is wholly dry everywhere, though the walls in the washroom feel a little gummy-- I assume that the constant steaming-up of the room has prevented the paint from settling? Though it's been a month and a half, and I've been not-home for several days and still no change. Anything else I can do/try?
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Feb 12, 2013 06:19
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Thanks for pointing me to XBMC, guys - that looks like exactly what I need.
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Feb 12, 2013 08:48
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Travakian posted:My apartment was painted freshly January 2nd, and I moved in the next day. It still reeks of paint; not noticeable once you're in and used to it, but every time I get home the smell is strong. I've tried leaving the windows open for days and have had a fan blow both in and out at a window (only have the one fan) for a day each. The paint is wholly dry everywhere, though the walls in the washroom feel a little gummy-- I assume that the constant steaming-up of the room has prevented the paint from settling? Though it's been a month and a half, and I've been not-home for several days and still no change. Talk to your landlord. Edit: Question. The US invaded Iraq because Bush suspected Hussein had WMDs. North Korea has demonstrated several times that it has nuclear capabilities (though perhaps not delivery capabilities) -- most recently today. Are nukes not considered WMDs now? What's up? tarepanda fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 09:04
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tarepanda posted:Talk to your landlord. China.
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Feb 12, 2013 09:38
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tarepanda posted:Talk to your landlord. To add a couple of things to this, the invasion happened right after 9/11, so convincing people that it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq was much easier. It's been over a decade since that happened, and people are more jaded now. Not that there aren't people who would love to see NK go up in smoke, but there are less of them than there was after 9/11. On top of that, The US gains nothing from fighting NK. They have no useful resources, they have no political power, and they have no trading routes worth securing. Alternatively: Bush isn't president anymore, and Obama isn't that stupid.
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Feb 12, 2013 09:55
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tarepanda posted:Talk to your landlord. Yes. The US invaded Iraq because Bush suspected Hussein had WMDs. That is the reason why it happened. Realistically, both Lance and Stubblyhead are right. We could knock over NK in a second, but it'd piss off China, wouldn't net us anything, and then we'd be stuck rebuilding North Korea for decades. I mean, there is a reason why South Korea doesn't want unification. Those people are dirt poor - some of them are literally eating dirt - and any attempt to fix the nation is going to cost a fuckton of money.
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Feb 12, 2013 10:11
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How do I stop Facebook from sending an email every time someone replies to my posts, or a response to a post I replied to? Without removing their feed from my wall? (My Facebook-fu is weak; I know)
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Feb 12, 2013 12:59
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Mister Macys posted:How do I stop Facebook from sending an email every time someone replies to my posts, or a response to a post I replied to? Go to settings -> notifications -> email and work from there. Upper right corner of the general view. E: Also, if you want to avoid getting FB's own notifications for a specific post you've commented in, there's an Unfollow Post option within the post itself. Useful if you've left a throwaway comment in someone else's status and end up getting dozens of notifications about further comments. Fire Safety Doug fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 13:55
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Fire Safety Doug posted:Go to settings -> notifications -> email and work from there. Upper right corner of the general view. How do I disable mobile notifications for one chat thread but not all the rest?
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Feb 12, 2013 15:10
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How do you pronounce nuclear? I've had the right and wrong way explained to me a couple times but I never hear a difference. I'm starting to think it's an elaborate joke.
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Feb 12, 2013 15:22
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