Personally, I think a better metric is the number of fatalities. Look at the totals for all the incidents listed for the US. Grand total of fatalities is 3, from an incident back in 1961.
Everything we do carries some risk. The question is, does the reward outweigh the risks. And in the case of nuclear power plants, it looks like the answer is a resounding Yes.
That's not true at all. It ultimately starts due to superior technology and/or features, and then the snowball effect kicks in and then it's the people that take it to critical mass. Why do you think the first few waves of people switched from MySpace to Facebook? It sure the hell wasn't because all their friends were there, because at that point their friends were all on MySpace. No, it's because at the time, Facebook was a huge improvement over the clusterfuck that MySpace was. You didn't have to design your home page, didn't have to write a fucking pararaph, didn't have to worry about if your music you picked was just right, none of that shit. You just log in, post a sentence or two, upload a photo when you fee like it. The tech and features of Facebook compared to MySpace was absolutely revolutionary. That's what caused the mass switching.
Yeah I think that had the most to do with it of anything. Kodak set themselves up as the producer of cameras and film that anyone could afford. Then digital photography came around, and they were right there... but digital cameras are expensive, and Kodak wasn't perceived as a high quality manufacturer. And then as digital photography became cheaper, it also became integrated into cell phones. Now cell phone cameras are the true successor to the cheap Kodak cameras and film. And we all know Kodak doesn't make cell phones. But then, no one really could have seen that coming until it was probably too late for Kodak to adapt. That's the inherent problem with marketing based purely on affordability. When another company comes along with a different cheaper, more convenient replacement for what you're selling you don't even have a niche to fall back on.
Other companies like Canon had a much better chance to adapt because they were already selling themselves as high-quality photography equipment manufacturers, and there's probably going to be a niche market for that kind of product for a long time. And even if there's not, it's much easier to sell your consumers on a new (even unreleated) product simply because they'll assume it's high quality like your other stuff.
No, it doesn't. You seem to have skipped over the "by default" specification. By default, it should only look in the default directory for images. If you store your images elsewhere you should have the option to instruct it to look in those other places specifically.
There's several key differences that make your lock-on-the-door analogy irrelevant.
- With the house, unless I've had the chance to case it previously, I have no idea if you have anything really worth the risk of B&E. With software, you know exactly what you're getting.
- With the house, it's much easier to get caught. All it takes is an observant neighbor. With the software, the cracker can sit in the comfort of his own house and work on it at his leisure. No one will ever know, unless he gets caught uploading.
- With the house, if I want what you're locking up, I need to be fairly directly involved. With the software, all it takes is for one person to break in and then what was locked can be very quickly available to everyone on the internet. Downloading what someone else cracked is not illegal. Only the cracking and uploading is illegal.
No, it really doesn't. Not with pennies. It just doesn't matter how you spin it. Pennies are a waste of time. Even just counting and wrapping them costs more than they're worth.
You really aren't doing anyone any favors by giving them pennies.
Yes, lets just throw all our pennies in the salvation army buckets and fill them up, that way they get to stand in the cold all day for ten bucks in donations.
But seriously, before you make any more snarky comments please do a google image search for "1,000 pennies" so you can see how many it takes to make a measly ten bucks. They're not worth it, no matter how "convenient" it is to collect them. It's about as useful as pissing on a forest fire. In the mean time, I'll keep throwing my pennies in the trash and drop a buck in your collection pot instead, like I usually do.
By the time you have enough to make a significant difference for anyone, it's so many it's a pain in the ass to take anywhere. 1,000 pennies is only $10. Not worth my time. Other change adds up fast, but these days pennies are at best a terrible nuisance.
Not at all. You do all the math as normal, then round the final value. We already do that and have for decades. There's plenty of times where the price with sales tax doesn't come out to an even cent.
And FWIW, I won't pick up a penny off the floor. Or if I do, it's usually to throw it in the garbage because it's cluttering things up.
there are only a very limited number of spots in the spotlight of the media
Um... duh?
You can't drive a whole industry like that, those games are the exception.
There's a lot more to it than that. First, as you pointed out, there's a very limited number of spots in the spotlight. Just like in any industry, there's only room for so many players, because there's only so much demand. Not every game is going to be a huge hit like that, not because they didn't follow your steps 1-3 in your previous post but because there's just not enough demand. The point is that any game from any studio has the potential to reach those heights if it meets the demand better than other offerings.
But it's always been that way. Those games really aren't so much "the exception". Those unusual ways are how most big game studios and most good franchises got their start. Call of Duty, for example, was started by a handful of guys who left EA. They weren't well known when they released the first CoD, but it was a huge hit, just like Minecraft, just like Angry Birds, and just like many many others. Not because they had years and years of past popularity but because they made a fun game.
What's new here is that now it's possible to leverage that viral popularity to make the next release that much better.
There's proven ways besides steps 1-3 for getting the necessary fan base. For recent great examples, you need look no further than Mojang or Rovio Mobile.
That's exactly what gets me. We've proven over and over that we don't understand anything even nearly as well as we think we do. The more data we find, the less we understand. We can't even accurately predict the weather with any real consistency, and we think we understand something as complex as global climate change? This is a system that's been operating for hundreds of millions of years, of which we've watched and recorded in detail a few hundred years. And we think we understand it? Seriously? That's like me purporting to know your entire life story based on one slashdot post. Sure, there's fossile records, and they help, but that's not at all the same as actually being there.
I deny AGW, not because I don't think it's possible but because I don't think anyone really has any fucking clue about it, and that includes the climate science "experts". If I know and understand about 0.02% of a system like global climatology, and a scientist knows and understands 10 times that, it still doesn't make him an expert. It just makes him slightly less ignorant than me. And that's about where we are. Wake me up when we have about 100,000 years of observed and recorded climate data, then I'll concede that we may actually be getting to some kind of real understanding.
The ones that piss me off the most are the ones on NFL.com pages for live games that play in the same window the game updates will be displayed in. You can't block them, because if you do you won't get what you're on the page for. You can't mute the audio, and nevermind skipping the fucking ad. I've almost quit using the site entirely because of it.
Ah yes, I remember the hype from that game. It was supposed to be a revolutionary must-have game. I wouldn't know, because I also didn't buy it and never played it due to the DRM policy.
It all depends on how much you're paying for the game and how important the DLC is. Also, day 1 DLC just really really sounds like something they stripped out of the game to resell separately to make an extra buck.
The problem with most blockbuster video games these days is that they're overproduced and then overpriced as a result. You don't have to spend hundreds of millions, or tens of millions, or even millions of dollars to create a game that will generate revenues of those same amounts. But they do it any way, thus putting themselves in a position where they have to sell millions of copies at $60-100 just to break even. Then they try to make it sound like it's the fault of gamers when they go bankrupt.
And besides all that, the idea that "America's future is in software" is so absurd, it's hard to even know where to start.
Here for example is something that's actually a great deal more sensible: America's future is in agriculture.
To the people who thought the software idea is any good:
What percentage of the US population do you think is actually good at ANY part of the software creation process? What percentage do you think actually like doing it enough to do it every day? And what percentage do you think fit BOTH criteria? Think on that, and then please think about how stupid it is to claim that the future of any country is in software.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think a better metric is the number of fatalities. Look at the totals for all the incidents listed for the US. Grand total of fatalities is 3, from an incident back in 1961.
Everything we do carries some risk. The question is, does the reward outweigh the risks. And in the case of nuclear power plants, it looks like the answer is a resounding Yes.
That's not true at all. It ultimately starts due to superior technology and/or features, and then the snowball effect kicks in and then it's the people that take it to critical mass. Why do you think the first few waves of people switched from MySpace to Facebook? It sure the hell wasn't because all their friends were there, because at that point their friends were all on MySpace. No, it's because at the time, Facebook was a huge improvement over the clusterfuck that MySpace was. You didn't have to design your home page, didn't have to write a fucking pararaph, didn't have to worry about if your music you picked was just right, none of that shit. You just log in, post a sentence or two, upload a photo when you fee like it. The tech and features of Facebook compared to MySpace was absolutely revolutionary. That's what caused the mass switching.
Yeah I think that had the most to do with it of anything. Kodak set themselves up as the producer of cameras and film that anyone could afford. Then digital photography came around, and they were right there... but digital cameras are expensive, and Kodak wasn't perceived as a high quality manufacturer. And then as digital photography became cheaper, it also became integrated into cell phones. Now cell phone cameras are the true successor to the cheap Kodak cameras and film. And we all know Kodak doesn't make cell phones. But then, no one really could have seen that coming until it was probably too late for Kodak to adapt. That's the inherent problem with marketing based purely on affordability. When another company comes along with a different cheaper, more convenient replacement for what you're selling you don't even have a niche to fall back on.
Other companies like Canon had a much better chance to adapt because they were already selling themselves as high-quality photography equipment manufacturers, and there's probably going to be a niche market for that kind of product for a long time. And even if there's not, it's much easier to sell your consumers on a new (even unreleated) product simply because they'll assume it's high quality like your other stuff.
No, it doesn't. You seem to have skipped over the "by default" specification. By default, it should only look in the default directory for images. If you store your images elsewhere you should have the option to instruct it to look in those other places specifically.
This post and the one below (#39148277) I think are some of the most insightful posts on this story.
There's several key differences that make your lock-on-the-door analogy irrelevant.
- With the house, unless I've had the chance to case it previously, I have no idea if you have anything really worth the risk of B&E. With software, you know exactly what you're getting.
- With the house, it's much easier to get caught. All it takes is an observant neighbor. With the software, the cracker can sit in the comfort of his own house and work on it at his leisure. No one will ever know, unless he gets caught uploading.
- With the house, if I want what you're locking up, I need to be fairly directly involved. With the software, all it takes is for one person to break in and then what was locked can be very quickly available to everyone on the internet. Downloading what someone else cracked is not illegal. Only the cracking and uploading is illegal.
and it does make a difference in the long run.
No, it really doesn't. Not with pennies. It just doesn't matter how you spin it. Pennies are a waste of time. Even just counting and wrapping them costs more than they're worth.
You really aren't doing anyone any favors by giving them pennies.
Yes, lets just throw all our pennies in the salvation army buckets and fill them up, that way they get to stand in the cold all day for ten bucks in donations.
But seriously, before you make any more snarky comments please do a google image search for "1,000 pennies" so you can see how many it takes to make a measly ten bucks. They're not worth it, no matter how "convenient" it is to collect them. It's about as useful as pissing on a forest fire. In the mean time, I'll keep throwing my pennies in the trash and drop a buck in your collection pot instead, like I usually do.
By the time you have enough to make a significant difference for anyone, it's so many it's a pain in the ass to take anywhere. 1,000 pennies is only $10. Not worth my time. Other change adds up fast, but these days pennies are at best a terrible nuisance.
Not at all. You do all the math as normal, then round the final value. We already do that and have for decades. There's plenty of times where the price with sales tax doesn't come out to an even cent.
And FWIW, I won't pick up a penny off the floor. Or if I do, it's usually to throw it in the garbage because it's cluttering things up.
DISCLAIMER: The lawsuit farce is just getting silly, and software patents are getting ridiculous.
Translation: "I'm not trolling guys! Honest!"
Let me making it simple for you. STOP TROLLING.
there are only a very limited number of spots in the spotlight of the media
Um... duh?
You can't drive a whole industry like that, those games are the exception.
There's a lot more to it than that. First, as you pointed out, there's a very limited number of spots in the spotlight. Just like in any industry, there's only room for so many players, because there's only so much demand. Not every game is going to be a huge hit like that, not because they didn't follow your steps 1-3 in your previous post but because there's just not enough demand. The point is that any game from any studio has the potential to reach those heights if it meets the demand better than other offerings.
But it's always been that way. Those games really aren't so much "the exception". Those unusual ways are how most big game studios and most good franchises got their start. Call of Duty, for example, was started by a handful of guys who left EA. They weren't well known when they released the first CoD, but it was a huge hit, just like Minecraft, just like Angry Birds, and just like many many others. Not because they had years and years of past popularity but because they made a fun game.
What's new here is that now it's possible to leverage that viral popularity to make the next release that much better.
There's proven ways besides steps 1-3 for getting the necessary fan base. For recent great examples, you need look no further than Mojang or Rovio Mobile.
Preschooler accuses classmate of not playing fair! More at 11!
On the bright side, SOE would almost certainly have imminent bankruptcy in their future.
But joking aside, you're absolutely right. I can't see this suit possibly winning, as the long-term implations are just too big.
I think it has a lot more to do with what people need (but don't really like) and what they want (and really like).
That's exactly what gets me. We've proven over and over that we don't understand anything even nearly as well as we think we do. The more data we find, the less we understand. We can't even accurately predict the weather with any real consistency, and we think we understand something as complex as global climate change? This is a system that's been operating for hundreds of millions of years, of which we've watched and recorded in detail a few hundred years. And we think we understand it? Seriously? That's like me purporting to know your entire life story based on one slashdot post. Sure, there's fossile records, and they help, but that's not at all the same as actually being there.
I deny AGW, not because I don't think it's possible but because I don't think anyone really has any fucking clue about it, and that includes the climate science "experts". If I know and understand about 0.02% of a system like global climatology, and a scientist knows and understands 10 times that, it still doesn't make him an expert. It just makes him slightly less ignorant than me. And that's about where we are. Wake me up when we have about 100,000 years of observed and recorded climate data, then I'll concede that we may actually be getting to some kind of real understanding.
The ones that piss me off the most are the ones on NFL.com pages for live games that play in the same window the game updates will be displayed in. You can't block them, because if you do you won't get what you're on the page for. You can't mute the audio, and nevermind skipping the fucking ad. I've almost quit using the site entirely because of it.
Not sure why that comment got modded up. That's not at all why Trader Joe's works, and Target's situation is entirely different from TJ's.
Trader Joe's works because they're a grocery boutique.
Ah yes, I remember the hype from that game. It was supposed to be a revolutionary must-have game. I wouldn't know, because I also didn't buy it and never played it due to the DRM policy.
It all depends on how much you're paying for the game and how important the DLC is. Also, day 1 DLC just really really sounds like something they stripped out of the game to resell separately to make an extra buck.
The problem with most blockbuster video games these days is that they're overproduced and then overpriced as a result. You don't have to spend hundreds of millions, or tens of millions, or even millions of dollars to create a game that will generate revenues of those same amounts. But they do it any way, thus putting themselves in a position where they have to sell millions of copies at $60-100 just to break even. Then they try to make it sound like it's the fault of gamers when they go bankrupt.
Good guess, but that wasn't what I was hinting at.
http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com/for_investors/for_investors.html
705 retail stores and 636 college stores. I think that qualifies as a large chain.
Exactly.
Now that all the large chain book stores have disappeared from the landscape
You live in the US, don't you? Aren't you forgetting something?
And besides all that, the idea that "America's future is in software" is so absurd, it's hard to even know where to start.
Here for example is something that's actually a great deal more sensible: America's future is in agriculture.
To the people who thought the software idea is any good:
What percentage of the US population do you think is actually good at ANY part of the software creation process? What percentage do you think actually like doing it enough to do it every day? And what percentage do you think fit BOTH criteria? Think on that, and then please think about how stupid it is to claim that the future of any country is in software.