andrewducker

As a marketing person I have to say that Disney's decision to make standalones has "worst marketing fail ever" written all over it.

The risk of completely over-saturating the market is huge - and not one I'd advise a company to take with a 4 billion buck investment.

It does seem odd. I wonder if they're thinking of it as a variant of the Avengers method - producing multiple movies that lead into an Event movie.

I'm thinking that they think that the best way to recoup their 4 billion buck investment is to generate as many toys as possible, which means needing to create an expanded universe quickly.

They already have a pretty expanded universe! It's not like the SW canons are tiny.

Yeah, but do they have the rights to make toys based on the existing expanded universe?

I'm not sure.

So the top ten films by nominal sales of theatre tickets and take home media (which is how I’m reading the first table from this article on the ever reliable wikipedia )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

All grossed over a billion dollars. Which, if you assume that they cost about $100m to produce and, say $100m to market and distribute, gives $800m of returns. Which is five films to get to your $4bn.

Even if the films are half as successful, and gross $500m (less than the current Star Wars franchise average of more than $600m) then we’re talking ten films. Over twenty years. Basically Bond in SPAAAACE!

That doesn’t seem crazy difficult. Bearing in mind that the original Star Wars film grossed more than $2bn adjusted for inflation.

Then add in merchandise and other spin offs (perhaps a TV series).

Also, just talked to Han Solo. He supports all decarbonisation projects.

310.

Wow. Actively impressed!

Really? I wasn't sure whether that was good or not; felt my technique could've been better, but only did it the once what with actually having to do some work at some point.

If it was "310/404", the 310 is the number that died, not the number you saved. Although that's still better than I did either time.

Eh, either way; I can't say that I felt I did terribly well. A second go got 295 so I reckon one could improve a fair bit with a wee bit of honing of technique.

266. Right, going back to work now.

I found that making the window very narrow made this a lot easier. However it was like a slide show on my computer once there were more than a few lemmings on screen, making it quite difficult to click. I got 214 (whether that's saved or killed).

Hah, good call, I was playing on a 1900 wide screen. On a narrow browser I saved all bar 89.

I wonder if, instead of laser armed robots, you might be better off giving the robots secateurs. The laser seems like over kill to me. Compared to a simple set of blades it seems expensive to manufacture, expensive to maintain, energy hungry (query relative weights), expensive to license and not that much more effective.

I think what I’d aim for would be something that went round the fields just cutting down weeds or stripping them of their leaves mechanically. If it could drag the waste to a central methane from compost tank so much the better.

Secateurs wouldn't work on weeds that are largely ground based, would they? And it would require grasping and suchlike.

I'm not convinced that lasers are expensive in any sense any more. They seem to be able to churn them out for pennies nowadays.

Tall weeds could be cut down,of course.

Mmmh, you might well be right about the different weeds. I was thinking of something that would at worst just shred the leaves of the weeds and leave them to die back from a combination of hunger and disease. Which would work on any plant. With repeat application. A more focused policy of targeting emerging seed pods might work better.

Clearly lasers themselves aren’t that expensive – but I’m also thinking about the power packs that need to be attached and the associated motors to haul the whole thing around. I think we would need these things to be as small as possible,so they don’t damage the crop whilst patrolling it.

The more energy intensive they are the more time they will spend recharging batteries which increases the total cost of the operation. (Which might well be countered by the improved kill ratio from using lasers.)

Or this alternative which use an overdose of fertiliser to kill dandelions.

http://gizmodo.com/5942814/this-weed+killing-robot-dispatches-dandelions-with-98-percent-accuracy

Man that Don Rosa article is depressing. Not entiely surprising, but depressing. I come from a family of Ducks addicts; Carl Barks and Don Rosa are heroes of ours. He deserves so much better.

Disney, you are stupid.