MoviePass changes it's business model faster than new the Javascript community mints new frameworks. It's exhausting. Last Tuesday it was $9.95 a month and you can see three movies every full moon plus you get SoundCloud for free on weekends and next week it'll be $15 a month and twice a week someone will break into your home, tie you to your couch, and force you to watch John Travolta's latest space opera, and they will also bill you for a potion of the food in your fridge.

I get whiplash trying to keep up with their constant quest to find a profitable business model, and somehow it still hasn't occurred to them that "bring in more money than you spend" is the only viable solution.

The movie theaters are worried about the movie going experience becoming devalued in the minds of customers.

A couple of years ago, if you and a friend went to the movies, it cost $20 for the tickets. Now, with movie pass, it costs $0 for the tickets. People are starting to think that "going to the movies" is more or less free.

but movie pass is going to fail. There is simply no way for them to be profitable. So some day in the not-too-distant future, movies are going to start costing $20 again. But if people have been conditioned to think that movies are free, there is going to be a lot of resistance to suddenly paying $20 again, and attendance will drop as a result.

Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.

There's no "seems like"; that is explicitly what the Austrian court ruled. "We don't like this, therefore it is illegal around the world."

He spams his books with hundreds of fake positive reviews, drowning out the honest, negative reviews. "Taking he average" doesn't work, because there's so little signal compared to all the noise.

I'm proposing my own new legislation, the No Exploitation of 9/11 Act. According to this act, any politician who tries to justify their legislation by invoking the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001 will be immediately removed from, and forbidden from ever again holding, any public office. Goddamned vultures.

Bullshit. The Paris attackers did not use encrypted communications.

Was this an intelligence failure? Possibly. Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.

But the password to my email has to be sixteen characters, with at least one upper case, one lower case, a number, a symbol, an umlaut, a character from the pinyin alphabet, and one of those Arabic squiggles. Assholes.

"That's a battery!" "Correct, horse!"

It's not just about "those" tabs. I don't need the IGN Guide to Skyward Sword showing up on my work computer, either.

I really do not want the tabs I browse at home automatically opening up on my work PC. Or my phone, for that matter. Three different media, used for three totally different purposes. It's cool that they figured out how to do this, but I can't see myself ever actually using it.

The biggest flaw is that this is an expensive piece of custom equipment. No criticism of Dr. Jansen intended; he made the gadget he wanted to have. But I would like to see a design that is less expensive and mass-produced

Dr. Jansen agrees with you. From the Mark 2 Design Philosophy section:

Accessibility (cost): "To create something that was as inexpensive as possible, so that people might easily have access to them without having to worry about the cost".
Comment :: This is something I don't feel I did very well on. A ballpark estimate for the component cost of a single Mark 1 was about $500 when I constructed it, which feels like too much. For every household to have their own Tricorder, it feels like something around $100 to $200 is a more accessible price range, and to have one in every child's hand such that they might easily learn more about their worlds both in and (especially) outside of school, that number likely has to be under $50. Thankfully, much of the cost comes from sensors (which are rapidly decreasing in cost), and from PCB production (which is almost negligible in quantity).

Call it Monolith.

Once a week, work out. Go balls out for one minute, rest for one minute, repeat. Stop after twenty minutes.

Millions of copies? For the rare best-seller, maybe. More like thousands for the popular titles, and hundreds for the rest.

I would argue that a text book is actually more likely to earn out than a novel, because a text book (probably) has a guaranteed audience.

There's a very good long-term reason: starvation.

In centuries past, there was a very good probability - almost a certainty - that you would undergo occasional, extended periods of lack. An animal that has too much unnecessary muscle mass would be less able to survive this deprivation.

Modern, industrialized humans don't have this problem, though. If anything, we suffer from too little lack. We never fast, and the genes that carry out repairs during times of fasting never get turned on.

From a health perspective, people with more muscle mass are more likely to survive, period. When someone dies of "old age", it's generally because they don't have enough body mass to support their organs.

There might be some other long-term problems with these modifications - fucking around with the genome is kind of a novelty right now - but on the face of it, this seems like it could be a good thing. Particularly to people with a muscle wasting disease.

Smashwords is so frustrating.

On the one hand, it lets me reach Kobo and Sony, which I just wouldn't have access to without a middle man. Their coupon system makes it easy for me to do promotions and giveaways. And their royalty sharing is very fair.

But their formatting ... the Meatgrinder software has earned a special place in one of the deeper circles of hell, as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea how they thought it was acceptable to throw out eBooks that don't even have chapter breaks, but that's what they do.

And their insistence of calling everything the "Smashwords edition" and inserting a special "Smashwords license note" and refusing to acknowledge the existence of Amazon just seems ... petty. Understandable, but unprofessional.

So, yeah, even though I get a higher royalty from Smashwords, I direct my readers to Amazon or B&N first, because they sell a nicer looking product, which makes my writing look more professional. Or at the very least, detracts from it less.