The thing is, using monopolistic practices usually requires some sort of lock-in effect, where it's hard to change.
It's hard to see how this could happen with Steam. You just need a small program installed to use Steam and each competitor. That's it.
As long as you have a Steam game installed, you have to keep Steam installed, but Steam is hardly going to stop you buying games other ways, and you don't even need to 'use' Steam...you can launch the game, and Steam starts up silently in the background.
Likewise, the Steam overlay seems to require no work to integrate into the game, so there's no lock-in from the developer end. Yeah, if they start doing DLC, they'd have to package them multiple times, but, seriously.
Unless Steam starts making exclusive deals with games to lock competitors out of the market, or somehow makes it hard for both them and a competitor to work, I don't see how their monopoly isn't just a 'they're better than everyone else' monopoly. (And if they start those things, or they have exclusive deals currently, they should be slammed down.)
There's absolutely no barrier to entry. You build a system, contact the 20 or so different game publishers, or just a few to start it, and fire it up.
Steam isn't a publisher. They're a distributor/reseller.
Considering that games are often using Steam even when sold physically (And I don't mean just Value games, Fallout New Vegas did it.), I'm forced to assume that Steam isn't actually taking that big a cut. I don't know how much licensing a DRM solution costs, but apparently using Steam is cheaper now.
I suspect they take a large cut when selling the game, equal to the normal store markup, but still.
The reason this guy got screwed out of so much money has little to do with his lack of knowledge about computers.
No, but I suspect the reason it got started was due to computers. I suspect these scammers often had fun poking around in the browser history of their customers, and they realized this guy was a) a paranoid who believes all sorts of crazy conspiracies, and b) rich as hell.
They could have just as easily been interior decorators who discovered his diary, and faked mail instead of email.
The real reason he got screwed out of so much money is that he hired some IT experts for 'security'. Instead of going to one of the thousand of reputable firms that would consult on this. In fact, rich people almost always have some sort of private security firm they're already using, so him not asking them about this is rather inexplicable.
Maybe they managed to convince him his life was in danger via computer, and they were the best to handle it, which makes him really really stupid.
And there's the biggest problem the Democrats have.
No, sadly, it's not.
The biggest problem is that they don't even grasp that there's a problem.
It's the goddamn Kruger-Dunning effect, at an epic scale.
They really don't understand that you don't compromise without the promise of the other people then supporting the bill, and you don't start from a position that's already further right than you want, then negotiate from there, like with the health care bill. You start with nationalizing all the hospitals, and then work rightward to single payer by putting stuff in in return for votes, which is they seem to actually forgotten to ask for, instead compromising in the hope of getting votes. Um, what?
They don't understand that when you're asserting Republicans want to cut taxes for the rich, and you want to cut taxes for the middle class, you hold a damn vote, watch Republicans vote against it, and then you can point to the damn vote. And, while you're at it, it possibly passes because a few Republicans do vote for it, which means you still get to use the attack anyway against 90% of them, and you got the bill passed.
I swear, the elected Democrats are the stupidest fucking people I have ever seen in my entire life or they're not actually trying to do what they're saying they're trying to do.
I had just come to the conclusion it was the second, that they were 'failing' because they didn't want to succeed...until they also blew the damn election, which I'm pretty sure they weren't secretly trying to do.
You haven't described anything other than fiction.
No I haven't. Fiction is set, by default, in the 'real world', with only a few very tiny modifications having to do with the actors and TV shows.
Aka, we implicitly presume that ER does not air in the ER universe, and we presume that George Clooney doesn't exist, or at least doesn't look exactly look Doug Ross. We're also explicitly informed that the hospital and character do exist, and that the stuff happening is real in the universe we're watching. (Various comedies had had fun with breaking these implicit assumptions, like Spaceballs breaking the first and Monty Python and The Holy Grail breaking the second.)
It's almost a tautology. The story is real within the story, and the fictional story does not exist within the story. Those are the basic fictional conceits.
Other than that, other than the very basic premise of fiction, we're seeing 'the real world'. All of history happened, everything is exactly the same.
Speculative fiction is if you change something else. If you changed anything but the requirements of fiction.
It's not about technology per se, but it is about being able to explain the story world without invoking non-scientific elements. That distinction is what separates science fiction from other genres. In fantasy, there is no constraint on invoking non-scientific elements. In mythology, there is no constraint on empirical realism.
'Non-scientific elements' is a null phrase. It is meaningless. Things are not more or less 'science'. Science is a method of figuring out the truth, and if magic exists, it can be interacted with via 'science' if people can see it.
The word you're looking for is, indeed, 'technology', or 'technological'.
In the first case, the viewer of the show is expected to accept the sorcerer's abilities explicitly as an adjunct to the world, because unfathomable magic forces are certainly an adjunct to the modern secular worldview, just like "real" gods described by religion are an adjunct to the modern view of the universe.
It is entirely possible to write stories that treat magic rationally. And it is entirely possible, and in fact 25% of science fiction probably is this, that treat technology with 'magical thinking', with irrationality.
Basically there are three options for the sci-fi/fantasy divide: technology/magic, possible/impossible, or, as you added, rationality/irrationality. None of those actually work.
Technology and magic are just words used to describe 'the change', and any change describable using one can be described using another, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out.
Possible vs impossible, like I said, is balderdash. What is the possibility of a secret conspiracy covering up aliens, and is it more or less likely that one covering up wizards? And don't try to point 'hard science fiction'...just because physics doesn't currently exclude, for example, exotic matter existing to hold open wormholes doesn't make it 'possible'. (And, hilariously, this would dump all counterfactional history into 'sci fi' too.) Physics also doesn't exclude another dimension where elves lives, and when LoTR counts as hard sci fi as Sliders something has gone horribly horribly wrong.
Rationality vs. irrationality is a worldview, like cynical vs. optimistic, and worldviews are very very good things to base genres on. (Look at noir fiction, for example. Or the various *-punk sci fi.) Sadly, that divide doesn't even slightly manage to succeed....almost all modern fantasy books have some level of rationality. Even Harry Potter has all sorts of explanations about how magic works. It certainly reaches 'Star Trek' level of explanation, and usually is somewhat better. Meanwhile, now stuff like Firefly, where they don't explain anything, isn't science fiction!
None of the definitions proposed actually work consistently at separating out works that 'everyone knows' are sci fi or fantasy, much less seem to work for arguable ones.
Five million, divided by how many fans? A million people like it, that's $5 each. Not bad for a season of a show.
You've taken the absolute lowest cost imaginable and compared it to absurdly high ratings.
Five million is the crazy low estimate for a science fiction series. Five million can barely get you a season of a sitcom with no-name actors. For example, Breaking Bad costs 1.3 million an episode. Stargate SG-1? $1.5 million.
But, hey, don't believe me, go look at a series that is doing as much as it can, called Sanctuary on sci-fi. Before they were picked up by SyFy, they did eight 15-minute or so webisodes. Virtual sets, as limited production costs as they can manage, using new camera tech and green screens.
Cost of that? 4.3 million total. It cost $32,000 a minute.
That's, um, $31 million for a real season of 22 45 minute episodes. That's obviously $31 a person if a million people watch it.
And a million viewers for a non-broadcast show is insane. Wildly popular broadcast shows get maybe eight times that. The highest rating a science fiction TV series has ever gotten was 3.2 million, with an SG-1 episode.
A million people is what unpopular broadcast shows get. And you think a TV series can pick up a third or even a sixth as many viewers based on the pilot?
More importantly, you think a third or a sixth as many people will pay for it, which I remind you they do not for broadcast shows?
Her number was staed on the show when it showed her HUD.
You were able to actually read that? Well, okay.
The problem I had with that is that the one number increment was just stupid, and something I would expect out of a merchandising tie in, not a serious show set in the universe.
All the terminators had different numbers in the series had different numbers, mainly because they were different actors. Although, strictly speaking, it's the model that's the skin, Arnold is model 101. The T-xxx designation is the metal framework and CPU, so two identically sized actors could be the same T- but different models, whereas Arnold played both a T-800 and a T-850, both model 101. (There's actually a model 90, too, which has no skin at all, but is human sized and shaped for fighting in human tunnels.)
But, anyway, the main villain terminator in TSCC was T-888, and while Cameron never got a designation, she clearly wasn't either an T-800, T-850, or T-888 as she's much too small. (Considering her never-before-seen skill at mimicking actual human emotion, fanon has her as a T-9xx. Alternately, as she was specifically designed to infiltrate the resistance far enough to kill John Connor, it's possible she's a one-off and has no model number.)
Granted, that's for the metal-exoskeleton terminators. The T-1001 could have been a T-1000 without worrying about the actor, considering it doesn't 'really' look like any actor. But, like I said, the producers wanted to be able to pull a cat out of the bag in case they needed some surprise, without having to justify why this T-1000 is different from T2's T-1000.
I have no idea why you object to that number specifically. Is it because all the other numbers were even? Frankly, that's stupid in my book. I'd have liked to see more arbitrary naming. Why 888 instead of 874? Did people name it or machines?
If only they'd invented KVMs. Saved a bundle building separate consoles.
More seriously, the idea is stupid. If there's that much danger, run each system from non-flashable ROM, where the only thing in memory is the data. It's called 'segmented memory', fools, it's entirely possible to have the processor only be physically able to pull instructions from the ROM. Viruses would have no ability to actually run.
Plus, even magical perfect viruses should be limited to points that actually speak to the outside. Which is why, IIRC, they had analog coms and physical switching. Which is entirely reasonable, and should actually work. (You can hack a PBX. You can't hack an operator moving plugs.) But a virus got in somehow anyway.
But BSG is one of the most 'magical thinking' TV shows I've ever seen. Stuff can apparently 'just happen' if God wants it to.
IMO the best of SF is that it can put the actors in an imagined world that has different rules that ours so the actors are put in new situations, or in old situations from a diffent point of view.
I think you mean the characters. The actors are, of course, on a soundstage, somewhere they've probably been before.;)
But, yes, you are correct. That is the entire basis of science fiction, and it has been the entire time.
A lot of 'nerds' enjoy reading about supposed 'realistic' scientific development, and seeing them in fiction, but that is not what makes science fiction be science fiction. One of the first science fiction stories was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a story which had no science at all.
Science fiction is where you change the rules of the world to allow plots that would not be allowed in reality.(1) That's it. That's all there is. There is nothing more, there is nothing less to the definition. Change the rules, see what happens to characters. In fact, now you can have non-human characters, which you can't do much using real world rules.
Some people want to divide 'plausible' and 'implausible' changes between sci-fi and fantasy, and call the entire thing speculative fiction, and that's fine, but there isn't really a huge difference, and frankly the entire concept smacks of elitism, and is stupid, because no one's actually figured out how implausible it is that magic users are hiding in the real world or that we'll invent cold fusion.
Different people like different levels of 'supernatural' and 'future tech' and 'aliens' and 'conspiracies' and 'psychic powers' and 'time travel', but yammering how 'realistic' the change is is total nonsense.
I mean, on SG1, the pyramids are three times as old as they really are, which is sheer, total balderdash. It isn't vaguely 'plausible'. Does that make it fantasy? No, because apparently aliens did it instead of sorcerers so it's...more plausible?
Anyone who starts debating on the difference between sci-fi and fantasy is, themselves, living in a fantasy. Spec fi has two expected sub-genres, one which generally makes the changes using technology, and one generally makes the changes using magic. Anyone who tries to debate that technology isn't 'sciency' enough or that the magic is actually sufficiently advanced science is missing the point they're sub-genres and pretty damn vague to start with, and nothing stops things from using aspects of both.
And we also put counterfactual history in there, which is 'changing a tiny point of history' instead of 'changing the rules', but is basically the same thing. (Which also can overlap with either of the other sub-genres if the change was caused by something instead of just happening.)
1) It is, in fact, possible to change the rules, and then not have any plots you couldn't do in reality. No one seems to do this, though.
More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting.
Maybe for you. Not for 99.9999% of the population. Which means you'll never get TV shows dedicated to explaining the how and why.
Many of us, OTOH, watch science fiction because it's drama with an added bit that can't happen in real life. How would these characters act if they knew the future?
That is science fiction, which is essentially just options added to normal fiction to allow plots that can't normally exist. As is fantasy.
You can get off fantasizing over technical specifications all you want, but that's not even 'fiction'.
The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy.
Some of us don't give a flying fuck about any perceived difference, so it's not really 'at best'.
Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction.
If you think Heinlein wrote 'hard science', you've been reading some Heinlein books I don't know anything about. I've got a book here where people uses gyroscopes to jump dimensions on the run from, functionally, demons who can rewrite reality. I have another book where there's an inertialess drive powered by sunlight and people are immortal because of two or three generations of selective breeding. Should I go on? And that's just the ones where he explains things.
Or, for that matter, please explain how Rama's propulsion worked? Please point out the hard science in Childhood's End. There was hard science in the 2001 series, but only by humans...the aliens seem to do whatever they wanted.
In fact, your entire attitude is stupid. Science fiction was, from the start, during the golden age, and to this point, about telling 'impossible stories'. The earliest 'sci-fi' didn't even have technology in it, aka, a Connesticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
The idea it's a way to demonstrate future technology is utter nonsense, as is the idea that all sci-fi that isn't doing that is not really 'science fiction'.
I don't know what you're talking about, but FTL is BSG is pretty obviously a 'jump' style, where they teleport directly from place to place. They do not 'move' at any speed, and the process is instantaneous.
They displace things where they arrive, which does destroy things, but is obviously very bad for the ship. (I don't think the displacement is bad per se, but it's a bad idea to have stuff right up against the ship moving at random speeds.)
Likewise, jumping causes some sort of nearby 'wave' when they leave, that's probably something to do with the displacement, which bends objects right next to the ship. (Well, right next to, but far enough away they aren't sheered in half.) This is only right next to ships, and I think the only time we see it is when a raptor jumps out right next to the BSG.
The FTL in BSG was entirely consistent from what I could see, and they introduced most of the rules of it right from the start.
And you'll notice that most long running dramas aren't trying to tell a story.
Like JAG and CSI and ER. Each week, there was a problem, and they'd solve it. Meanwhile, each character would develop in some direction a little. (Same with TMNT, minus the character development, if you're talking about the 80s cartoon.)
But the entire thing, as a whole, was not a 'story'.
SG-1 is pretty unique for being a thoughtful, well respected science fiction show that wasn't trying to tell a story, and yet was still very good. SG-1 was the JAG of sci-fi. <craig ferguson>I look forward to your letters.</craig ferguson>
I would argue that six years is too long for most 'story' sci-fi. It was too long for the BSG story, it was too long for Lost. Both of those should have lost a season or two in the middle.
Some series can't even go less than that...Heroes, for example, started sputtering in season two.
B5 is the canonical example of a story that worked for several seasons, mainly because JMS actually planned out about seven interlocking stories from the very start, so no one was surprised when one of them wrapped up and another started happening, because they all overlapped and often you didn't realize you were in a new story until halfway in. And he was smart enough to put smaller stories in movies instead of trying to fit them into either a single episode, where they wouldn't fit, or as premise change for half a season, like Thirdspace would have been.
But most of the 'story' sci-fi series really should be no more than three seasons.
I mean, take Dollhouse. Imagine it had actually had full seasons, so the last episode was the end of the first season. Or, rather, than the second season was stretched out into another season, so the middle of season two is the end of season one, and the end of season two is the end of season two still, but with a lot of padding with Echo on the run, and then an entire season with the House working against Rossum. Boring, huh?
Can you really imagine having five times the number of Dollhouse episodes that were made, for six full seasons? Were they actually going to show us the apocalypse, and keep going? I guess, but at that point we're talking a pretty serious genre shift, aren't we?
Dollhouse was cut short, but frankly it needed twice or maybe thrice as much time as the 'one season' it got. It didn't need to keep running for five or six full seasons.
What will help, is convincing the studios not to sign exclusive deals with the networks, and to switch to a business model where they release the pilot, then each subsequent season, under a CC-NC license and don't start producing the next season until they've received enough donations to fund it.
That sentence started out good, and then went into crazy land. No one's going to do that. You can't put actors under contract for show that might happen. You can't film an episode every six months when you get the money....sets cost money to keep, actors have other things, etc.
The only stuff that can get produced at that level is stuff like The Guild, which is a fine show, but functionally airs one-two episodes a year and has 'no sets'. (Or, rather, they borrow sets off the cast and crew and rent locations for the day.) They don't have a studio partner, although they do have a distribution deal now, they didn't the first season. If you haven't watched it, go and do so, like I said, it's a great show, and a good example of what a 'donation supported show' can do...but don't expect something like BSG.
But I see you said 'donations for a season'. Seasons of TV shows cost like five million dollars at minimum. A lot of TV shows are a million an episode. I don't know what sort of 'donations' you're expecting, but just no.
What needs to happen is production companies(1) not sign exclusive deals with networks. They should sign contracts that say we are going to produce at least X episodes of this, and they each cost $Y to buy to air two times. The network promises to buy a certain number of episodes, and can purchase even more, but if they don't we'll keep making them, and sell them to other people, or do whatever the hell we want with them.
What would be really nice is if production companies would build up a small nest egg that would let them keep producing shows even after they were 'canceled', which at the very least would be something to put on the DVD to end the series with (Like Dollhouse did with Epitaph One.), and hopefully would let them carry on long enough to get picked up by someone else.
1) Not studios, studies are just partners. A production company invents an idea (Or, in reality, it's the other way around, someone has the idea and makes the production company.), and they approach a studio to house the sets and provide cameras and crew and facilities, and they split the profits, and together they go find a network to air it. This is where the 'donation' concept falls down...studios can't just 'donate space until people pay for it', sound stages cost money, cameras cost money, crew costs money. You can't leave things sitting empty waiting for enough money to come in.
Actually, as another posted pointed out, humans can almost survive in a vacuum anyway, and our skin does fine in a vacuum. You wouldn't want to build a spaceship out it,because if it takes damage the blood can't clot without hitting external oxygen, but by itself, you could stick your hand into vacuum just fine, for quite some time. (In fact, scientists have done that.)
There are three problems in space for living things from earth:
a) Lack of air. Obviously. Easy enough for something the size of a spaceship to get around...presumably, it's breathing the air inside, and like a whale, it lasts a long time. Of course, life doesn't really need 'oxygen' anyway, could live by something like photosynthesis, or a combination of that and burning oxygen.(Maybe via symbiosis, in either direction)
b) Exposed wet membranes. Aka, all orifices and the eyes. Easy enough for evolution to get around by simply building airtight things around those. (You sorta need to be airtight anyway.) Although there's no reason for eyes to be wet anyway....cameras aren't wet.
c) Heat. Can't get rid of it,and life generates heat. That, more than anything, is actually the reason that space suits exist, as opposed to breathing masks. But that's a problem for all space going vessels, so is a bit goofy to worry about only for living things. They'd just have to touch down and discard heat every once in a while, and be 'cold-blooded', by which I mean they'd not have to 'regulate' their body heat, but be able to operate at whatever temperature they were.
So a species living in space is easy. The reason we can't is that our bodies are engineered with 'shortcuts' that make assumptions we will be surrounded by stuff, but there's no reason at all we need to be.
Life probably couldn't start there, but species get pushed towards new climates all the time.
The really tricky thing is propulsion, both to get to and live in space. the only way we have to get to space is throwing stuff out the back, which essentially requires explosive materials to hold enough to get into space. While it's not impossible for life to make use of explosions, it's never actually evolved that way here on earth.
But almost all sci-fi series have invented some manner of reactionless drive, so presumable the life would be using the same concept.
No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager)
To be fair to Voyager, the ship wasn't living. The gel packs were just used as biological processors, which is much more plausible technology than a ship made of living structural matter. There's at least a subset of scientists today who believe such things can work and would be useful, as opposed to, for example, transporters. If we're grading on the 'Star Trek' curve, they're perfectly reasonable.
Of course, how they were affected by viruses and stuff was totally absurd, but, OTOH, Star Trek's biological underpinnings are pretty absurd to start with, as there are no biochemical boundaries at all. Combine that with their utter lack of any sort of computer security and computer sanity checks, and there you go.
As for BSG, the entire thing was a metaphor. The whole series is about blurring the line between 'machine' and 'living'.
What do you mean? Take every plot point in the movie, like River being triggered, like finding Miranda, etc, and make it an episode, and have an extra episode between those.
The writers made her a T-1001 instead of a T-1000 just in case they actually did need to do something different with her, like have John try to kill her with cold and it not work. It wasn't 'merchandising', it was caring about continuity enough to use a slightly different model just in case it behaved slightly inconsistent with movie T-1000.
It's worth mentioning her number wasn't even stated on the show, as far as the viewers knew she was a T-1000, so you got your information from somewhere else.
Her character was pretty interesting, too, as it was obvious she wasn't doing 'Terminator' things and didn't actually want John Connor dead, but wasn't really helping him either. She appeared to be trying to set up a competing AI, and apparently came back in time to replace a dead person, which is a Terminator first.
I don't think I said anything about the cause of the bubble at all.
I said asking what caused the end was nonsense, because it was a bubble, and they end by definition.
It's perfectly reasonable to blame the bubble on the Fed. Even if they weren't 'the cause', which is pretty complex, they sure as hell could have, and should have, stopped it.
What do you mean, "undoing the health care law"? Wouldn't they need to actually pass something to undo it?
That is what I am talking about. The House will probably pass some total nonsense about that.
They're going to have some real trouble figuring what to remove, because while the American people hate 'the health care bill' because idiots have ranted how evil it is, almost all Americans like every aspect of the health care bill except the mandate to buy insurance. Which is actually a right wing idea, and got in to appease health insurance companies/the right, but I'm sure the right in the House would be willing to vote to 'remove it' as long as it couldn't possibly pass the Senate, thanks to 'Democrats' blocking it.
I'm secretly hoping that a few Democrats in the Senate laugh and vote for it, fucking over the health insurance companies and removing that 'compromise' from the bill.
Of course, in actuality, that would force the Republicans to vote against it, which would make the entire thing utterly surreal.
It's actually a pretty crazy situation. Republicans constantly rail about 'repealing the bill', when, like I said, almost every damn aspect of it is popular, it's just 'the bill' that is somehow mysteriously unpopular, thanks to American's Low Information Voter(TM).
And while it will certainly hurt in the short term, undoing the health care bill would probably be better in the end. The health care cost, now at about 16% GDP, would reach truly astronomical heights, just as millions of people are loosing their insurance because they cannot afford it.
I don't understand what you're saying. No one would lose their insurance because they couldn't afford it. That doesn't make any sense. The bill stopped that from happening by giving people subsidies to buy insurance.
I wasn't actually screaming and pointing at the criminals. I was screaming and pointing a person who were pretending it was someone else's fault entirely. Namely, they wanted to blame the government and the victims.
I'm all for people being less con-able, but that doesn't change who the conmen are. It doesn't change the fact that one side had some poor judgment, and the other side committed multiple counts of criminal fraud victimizing the first side.
It's all well and good to say women shouldn't walk down dark alleys in high crime areas at night, but that doesn't mean both they and a rapist are guilty.
And, like I pointed out, by law, your real estate agent is supposed to be on your side, which makes their behavior massively fraudulent. This isn't like normal, some random stranger, fraud, where some guy sells you snake oil. Technically, you've hired your real estate agent, and are paying them.
It really is like your own damn lawyer ripping you off, like you go to him to buy some painting you really want, so he runs out, buys it first, and then resells it to them at a higher cost. It's massively illegal and massively unethical, and it's apparently business as usual in the real estate business.
All 'buyer' real estate agents who put someone in a foreclosed house should be tracked down and investigated. Every damn one of them. Home loans should have the buyer agent on them, and when the foreclosure happens, an investigation should automatically happen.
Sometimes it's okay, it was unforeseeable, like massive medical bills and losing a job. Almost all the the time in recent years it should have been foreseen and discussed, and those agents should lose their real estate licenses. And agents who put someone in houses they knew couldn't afford them should be fucking arrested.
Didn't you ever wonder why real estate brokers went from building homes with construction payments in stages, to requiring a significant but small payment up front to begin construction and a final closing where the house was "transferred" to you?
I didn't 'wonder' that at all, I knew damn well what was going on the entire time, which is why I haven't ever bought a house.
But extreme cynicism is just as harmful as the blame-deflecting the GP did.
What people should be doing is learning what actually happened, and figure out how to structure the system where it can't happen anymore. And can't happen anymore regardless of how much the regulators works.
Two obvious solution: Don't give real estate agents a commission until the purchaser stays in the house for five years, and don't let banks resell mortgages, ever.
That doesn't require 'policing', it's not some abstract principle about a subjective 'can this person buy this house' that people can fudge. If banks make bad loans, if real estate agents put people in bad houses, they will, in fact, lose money, if you set up the system that way.
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The thing is, using monopolistic practices usually requires some sort of lock-in effect, where it's hard to change.
It's hard to see how this could happen with Steam. You just need a small program installed to use Steam and each competitor. That's it.
As long as you have a Steam game installed, you have to keep Steam installed, but Steam is hardly going to stop you buying games other ways, and you don't even need to 'use' Steam...you can launch the game, and Steam starts up silently in the background.
Likewise, the Steam overlay seems to require no work to integrate into the game, so there's no lock-in from the developer end. Yeah, if they start doing DLC, they'd have to package them multiple times, but, seriously.
Unless Steam starts making exclusive deals with games to lock competitors out of the market, or somehow makes it hard for both them and a competitor to work, I don't see how their monopoly isn't just a 'they're better than everyone else' monopoly. (And if they start those things, or they have exclusive deals currently, they should be slammed down.)
There's absolutely no barrier to entry. You build a system, contact the 20 or so different game publishers, or just a few to start it, and fire it up.
Steam isn't a publisher. They're a distributor/reseller.
Considering that games are often using Steam even when sold physically (And I don't mean just Value games, Fallout New Vegas did it.), I'm forced to assume that Steam isn't actually taking that big a cut. I don't know how much licensing a DRM solution costs, but apparently using Steam is cheaper now.
I suspect they take a large cut when selling the game, equal to the normal store markup, but still.
Malls will kick you out of you do that openly, and if not in a mall, I would assume Gamestop would kick you off their property.
Of course, nothing would stop you from standing on the sidewalk...only large cities have any rules about street vendors.
The reason this guy got screwed out of so much money has little to do with his lack of knowledge about computers.
No, but I suspect the reason it got started was due to computers. I suspect these scammers often had fun poking around in the browser history of their customers, and they realized this guy was a) a paranoid who believes all sorts of crazy conspiracies, and b) rich as hell.
They could have just as easily been interior decorators who discovered his diary, and faked mail instead of email.
The real reason he got screwed out of so much money is that he hired some IT experts for 'security'. Instead of going to one of the thousand of reputable firms that would consult on this. In fact, rich people almost always have some sort of private security firm they're already using, so him not asking them about this is rather inexplicable.
Maybe they managed to convince him his life was in danger via computer, and they were the best to handle it, which makes him really really stupid.
Narcissists are paranoids who think the CIA or something is after them, despite the CIA not having any possible reason to be interested in them.
Someone who thinks they local police are after them because he complained about them in town meeting is a good deal more reasonable.
But, yes, at this point we've exchanged 'It's implausible for them to be monitoring you' with 'It's implausible for them to want to monitor you'.
And there's the biggest problem the Democrats have.
No, sadly, it's not.
The biggest problem is that they don't even grasp that there's a problem.
It's the goddamn Kruger-Dunning effect, at an epic scale.
They really don't understand that you don't compromise without the promise of the other people then supporting the bill, and you don't start from a position that's already further right than you want, then negotiate from there, like with the health care bill. You start with nationalizing all the hospitals, and then work rightward to single payer by putting stuff in in return for votes, which is they seem to actually forgotten to ask for, instead compromising in the hope of getting votes. Um, what?
They don't understand that when you're asserting Republicans want to cut taxes for the rich, and you want to cut taxes for the middle class, you hold a damn vote, watch Republicans vote against it, and then you can point to the damn vote. And, while you're at it, it possibly passes because a few Republicans do vote for it, which means you still get to use the attack anyway against 90% of them, and you got the bill passed.
I swear, the elected Democrats are the stupidest fucking people I have ever seen in my entire life or they're not actually trying to do what they're saying they're trying to do.
I had just come to the conclusion it was the second, that they were 'failing' because they didn't want to succeed...until they also blew the damn election, which I'm pretty sure they weren't secretly trying to do.
You haven't described anything other than fiction.
No I haven't. Fiction is set, by default, in the 'real world', with only a few very tiny modifications having to do with the actors and TV shows.
Aka, we implicitly presume that ER does not air in the ER universe, and we presume that George Clooney doesn't exist, or at least doesn't look exactly look Doug Ross. We're also explicitly informed that the hospital and character do exist, and that the stuff happening is real in the universe we're watching. (Various comedies had had fun with breaking these implicit assumptions, like Spaceballs breaking the first and Monty Python and The Holy Grail breaking the second.)
It's almost a tautology. The story is real within the story, and the fictional story does not exist within the story. Those are the basic fictional conceits.
Other than that, other than the very basic premise of fiction, we're seeing 'the real world'. All of history happened, everything is exactly the same.
Speculative fiction is if you change something else. If you changed anything but the requirements of fiction.
It's not about technology per se, but it is about being able to explain the story world without invoking non-scientific elements. That distinction is what separates science fiction from other genres. In fantasy, there is no constraint on invoking non-scientific elements. In mythology, there is no constraint on empirical realism.
'Non-scientific elements' is a null phrase. It is meaningless. Things are not more or less 'science'. Science is a method of figuring out the truth, and if magic exists, it can be interacted with via 'science' if people can see it.
The word you're looking for is, indeed, 'technology', or 'technological'.
In the first case, the viewer of the show is expected to accept the sorcerer's abilities explicitly as an adjunct to the world, because unfathomable magic forces are certainly an adjunct to the modern secular worldview, just like "real" gods described by religion are an adjunct to the modern view of the universe.
It is entirely possible to write stories that treat magic rationally. And it is entirely possible, and in fact 25% of science fiction probably is this, that treat technology with 'magical thinking', with irrationality.
Basically there are three options for the sci-fi/fantasy divide: technology/magic, possible/impossible, or, as you added, rationality/irrationality. None of those actually work.
Technology and magic are just words used to describe 'the change', and any change describable using one can be described using another, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out.
Possible vs impossible, like I said, is balderdash. What is the possibility of a secret conspiracy covering up aliens, and is it more or less likely that one covering up wizards? And don't try to point 'hard science fiction'...just because physics doesn't currently exclude, for example, exotic matter existing to hold open wormholes doesn't make it 'possible'. (And, hilariously, this would dump all counterfactional history into 'sci fi' too.) Physics also doesn't exclude another dimension where elves lives, and when LoTR counts as hard sci fi as Sliders something has gone horribly horribly wrong.
Rationality vs. irrationality is a worldview, like cynical vs. optimistic, and worldviews are very very good things to base genres on. (Look at noir fiction, for example. Or the various *-punk sci fi.) Sadly, that divide doesn't even slightly manage to succeed....almost all modern fantasy books have some level of rationality. Even Harry Potter has all sorts of explanations about how magic works. It certainly reaches 'Star Trek' level of explanation, and usually is somewhat better. Meanwhile, now stuff like Firefly, where they don't explain anything, isn't science fiction!
None of the definitions proposed actually work consistently at separating out works that 'everyone knows' are sci fi or fantasy, much less seem to work for arguable ones.
Five million, divided by how many fans? A million people like it, that's $5 each. Not bad for a season of a show.
You've taken the absolute lowest cost imaginable and compared it to absurdly high ratings.
Five million is the crazy low estimate for a science fiction series. Five million can barely get you a season of a sitcom with no-name actors. For example, Breaking Bad costs 1.3 million an episode. Stargate SG-1? $1.5 million.
But, hey, don't believe me, go look at a series that is doing as much as it can, called Sanctuary on sci-fi. Before they were picked up by SyFy, they did eight 15-minute or so webisodes. Virtual sets, as limited production costs as they can manage, using new camera tech and green screens.
Cost of that? 4.3 million total. It cost $32,000 a minute.
That's, um, $31 million for a real season of 22 45 minute episodes. That's obviously $31 a person if a million people watch it.
And a million viewers for a non-broadcast show is insane. Wildly popular broadcast shows get maybe eight times that. The highest rating a science fiction TV series has ever gotten was 3.2 million, with an SG-1 episode.
A million people is what unpopular broadcast shows get. And you think a TV series can pick up a third or even a sixth as many viewers based on the pilot?
More importantly, you think a third or a sixth as many people will pay for it, which I remind you they do not for broadcast shows?
Her number was staed on the show when it showed her HUD.
You were able to actually read that? Well, okay.
The problem I had with that is that the one number increment was just stupid, and something I would expect out of a merchandising tie in, not a serious show set in the universe.
All the terminators had different numbers in the series had different numbers, mainly because they were different actors. Although, strictly speaking, it's the model that's the skin, Arnold is model 101. The T-xxx designation is the metal framework and CPU, so two identically sized actors could be the same T- but different models, whereas Arnold played both a T-800 and a T-850, both model 101. (There's actually a model 90, too, which has no skin at all, but is human sized and shaped for fighting in human tunnels.)
But, anyway, the main villain terminator in TSCC was T-888, and while Cameron never got a designation, she clearly wasn't either an T-800, T-850, or T-888 as she's much too small. (Considering her never-before-seen skill at mimicking actual human emotion, fanon has her as a T-9xx. Alternately, as she was specifically designed to infiltrate the resistance far enough to kill John Connor, it's possible she's a one-off and has no model number.)
Granted, that's for the metal-exoskeleton terminators. The T-1001 could have been a T-1000 without worrying about the actor, considering it doesn't 'really' look like any actor. But, like I said, the producers wanted to be able to pull a cat out of the bag in case they needed some surprise, without having to justify why this T-1000 is different from T2's T-1000.
I have no idea why you object to that number specifically. Is it because all the other numbers were even? Frankly, that's stupid in my book. I'd have liked to see more arbitrary naming. Why 888 instead of 874? Did people name it or machines?
If only they'd invented KVMs. Saved a bundle building separate consoles.
More seriously, the idea is stupid. If there's that much danger, run each system from non-flashable ROM, where the only thing in memory is the data. It's called 'segmented memory', fools, it's entirely possible to have the processor only be physically able to pull instructions from the ROM. Viruses would have no ability to actually run.
Plus, even magical perfect viruses should be limited to points that actually speak to the outside. Which is why, IIRC, they had analog coms and physical switching. Which is entirely reasonable, and should actually work. (You can hack a PBX. You can't hack an operator moving plugs.) But a virus got in somehow anyway.
But BSG is one of the most 'magical thinking' TV shows I've ever seen. Stuff can apparently 'just happen' if God wants it to.
IMO the best of SF is that it can put the actors in an imagined world that has different rules that ours so the actors are put in new situations, or in old situations from a diffent point of view.
I think you mean the characters. The actors are, of course, on a soundstage, somewhere they've probably been before. ;)
But, yes, you are correct. That is the entire basis of science fiction, and it has been the entire time.
A lot of 'nerds' enjoy reading about supposed 'realistic' scientific development, and seeing them in fiction, but that is not what makes science fiction be science fiction. One of the first science fiction stories was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a story which had no science at all.
Science fiction is where you change the rules of the world to allow plots that would not be allowed in reality.(1) That's it. That's all there is. There is nothing more, there is nothing less to the definition. Change the rules, see what happens to characters. In fact, now you can have non-human characters, which you can't do much using real world rules.
Some people want to divide 'plausible' and 'implausible' changes between sci-fi and fantasy, and call the entire thing speculative fiction, and that's fine, but there isn't really a huge difference, and frankly the entire concept smacks of elitism, and is stupid, because no one's actually figured out how implausible it is that magic users are hiding in the real world or that we'll invent cold fusion.
Different people like different levels of 'supernatural' and 'future tech' and 'aliens' and 'conspiracies' and 'psychic powers' and 'time travel', but yammering how 'realistic' the change is is total nonsense.
I mean, on SG1, the pyramids are three times as old as they really are, which is sheer, total balderdash. It isn't vaguely 'plausible'. Does that make it fantasy? No, because apparently aliens did it instead of sorcerers so it's...more plausible?
Anyone who starts debating on the difference between sci-fi and fantasy is, themselves, living in a fantasy. Spec fi has two expected sub-genres, one which generally makes the changes using technology, and one generally makes the changes using magic. Anyone who tries to debate that technology isn't 'sciency' enough or that the magic is actually sufficiently advanced science is missing the point they're sub-genres and pretty damn vague to start with, and nothing stops things from using aspects of both.
And we also put counterfactual history in there, which is 'changing a tiny point of history' instead of 'changing the rules', but is basically the same thing. (Which also can overlap with either of the other sub-genres if the change was caused by something instead of just happening.)
1) It is, in fact, possible to change the rules, and then not have any plots you couldn't do in reality. No one seems to do this, though.
More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting.
Maybe for you. Not for 99.9999% of the population. Which means you'll never get TV shows dedicated to explaining the how and why.
Many of us, OTOH, watch science fiction because it's drama with an added bit that can't happen in real life. How would these characters act if they knew the future?
That is science fiction, which is essentially just options added to normal fiction to allow plots that can't normally exist. As is fantasy.
You can get off fantasizing over technical specifications all you want, but that's not even 'fiction'.
The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy.
Some of us don't give a flying fuck about any perceived difference, so it's not really 'at best'.
Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction.
If you think Heinlein wrote 'hard science', you've been reading some Heinlein books I don't know anything about. I've got a book here where people uses gyroscopes to jump dimensions on the run from, functionally, demons who can rewrite reality. I have another book where there's an inertialess drive powered by sunlight and people are immortal because of two or three generations of selective breeding. Should I go on? And that's just the ones where he explains things.
Or, for that matter, please explain how Rama's propulsion worked? Please point out the hard science in Childhood's End. There was hard science in the 2001 series, but only by humans...the aliens seem to do whatever they wanted.
In fact, your entire attitude is stupid. Science fiction was, from the start, during the golden age, and to this point, about telling 'impossible stories'. The earliest 'sci-fi' didn't even have technology in it, aka, a Connesticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
The idea it's a way to demonstrate future technology is utter nonsense, as is the idea that all sci-fi that isn't doing that is not really 'science fiction'.
How on earth can you complain about a network putting Sliders out of its misery?
I mean, sure great premise and all...but, seriously. The show had been clinically brain-death the entire time it was on sci-fi.
They weren't, they didn't have FTL, and it took them that long to arrive.
Which they apparently did exactly on time, because of some pseudo-mystical reason about the cycles of history.
I don't know what you're talking about, but FTL is BSG is pretty obviously a 'jump' style, where they teleport directly from place to place. They do not 'move' at any speed, and the process is instantaneous.
They displace things where they arrive, which does destroy things, but is obviously very bad for the ship. (I don't think the displacement is bad per se, but it's a bad idea to have stuff right up against the ship moving at random speeds.)
Likewise, jumping causes some sort of nearby 'wave' when they leave, that's probably something to do with the displacement, which bends objects right next to the ship. (Well, right next to, but far enough away they aren't sheered in half.) This is only right next to ships, and I think the only time we see it is when a raptor jumps out right next to the BSG.
The FTL in BSG was entirely consistent from what I could see, and they introduced most of the rules of it right from the start.
A more specific term would be Pharmacology. And it's a lot more reasonable than the other series.
And you'll notice that most long running dramas aren't trying to tell a story.
Like JAG and CSI and ER. Each week, there was a problem, and they'd solve it. Meanwhile, each character would develop in some direction a little. (Same with TMNT, minus the character development, if you're talking about the 80s cartoon.)
But the entire thing, as a whole, was not a 'story'.
SG-1 is pretty unique for being a thoughtful, well respected science fiction show that wasn't trying to tell a story, and yet was still very good. SG-1 was the JAG of sci-fi. <craig ferguson>I look forward to your letters.</craig ferguson>
I would argue that six years is too long for most 'story' sci-fi. It was too long for the BSG story, it was too long for Lost. Both of those should have lost a season or two in the middle.
Some series can't even go less than that...Heroes, for example, started sputtering in season two.
B5 is the canonical example of a story that worked for several seasons, mainly because JMS actually planned out about seven interlocking stories from the very start, so no one was surprised when one of them wrapped up and another started happening, because they all overlapped and often you didn't realize you were in a new story until halfway in. And he was smart enough to put smaller stories in movies instead of trying to fit them into either a single episode, where they wouldn't fit, or as premise change for half a season, like Thirdspace would have been.
But most of the 'story' sci-fi series really should be no more than three seasons.
I mean, take Dollhouse. Imagine it had actually had full seasons, so the last episode was the end of the first season. Or, rather, than the second season was stretched out into another season, so the middle of season two is the end of season one, and the end of season two is the end of season two still, but with a lot of padding with Echo on the run, and then an entire season with the House working against Rossum. Boring, huh?
Can you really imagine having five times the number of Dollhouse episodes that were made, for six full seasons? Were they actually going to show us the apocalypse, and keep going? I guess, but at that point we're talking a pretty serious genre shift, aren't we?
Dollhouse was cut short, but frankly it needed twice or maybe thrice as much time as the 'one season' it got. It didn't need to keep running for five or six full seasons.
What will help, is convincing the studios not to sign exclusive deals with the networks, and to switch to a business model where they release the pilot, then each subsequent season, under a CC-NC license and don't start producing the next season until they've received enough donations to fund it.
That sentence started out good, and then went into crazy land. No one's going to do that. You can't put actors under contract for show that might happen. You can't film an episode every six months when you get the money....sets cost money to keep, actors have other things, etc.
The only stuff that can get produced at that level is stuff like The Guild, which is a fine show, but functionally airs one-two episodes a year and has 'no sets'. (Or, rather, they borrow sets off the cast and crew and rent locations for the day.) They don't have a studio partner, although they do have a distribution deal now, they didn't the first season. If you haven't watched it, go and do so, like I said, it's a great show, and a good example of what a 'donation supported show' can do...but don't expect something like BSG.
But I see you said 'donations for a season'. Seasons of TV shows cost like five million dollars at minimum. A lot of TV shows are a million an episode. I don't know what sort of 'donations' you're expecting, but just no.
What needs to happen is production companies(1) not sign exclusive deals with networks. They should sign contracts that say we are going to produce at least X episodes of this, and they each cost $Y to buy to air two times. The network promises to buy a certain number of episodes, and can purchase even more, but if they don't we'll keep making them, and sell them to other people, or do whatever the hell we want with them.
What would be really nice is if production companies would build up a small nest egg that would let them keep producing shows even after they were 'canceled', which at the very least would be something to put on the DVD to end the series with (Like Dollhouse did with Epitaph One.), and hopefully would let them carry on long enough to get picked up by someone else.
1) Not studios, studies are just partners. A production company invents an idea (Or, in reality, it's the other way around, someone has the idea and makes the production company.), and they approach a studio to house the sets and provide cameras and crew and facilities, and they split the profits, and together they go find a network to air it. This is where the 'donation' concept falls down...studios can't just 'donate space until people pay for it', sound stages cost money, cameras cost money, crew costs money. You can't leave things sitting empty waiting for enough money to come in.
Actually, as another posted pointed out, humans can almost survive in a vacuum anyway, and our skin does fine in a vacuum. You wouldn't want to build a spaceship out it,because if it takes damage the blood can't clot without hitting external oxygen, but by itself, you could stick your hand into vacuum just fine, for quite some time. (In fact, scientists have done that.)
There are three problems in space for living things from earth:
a) Lack of air. Obviously. Easy enough for something the size of a spaceship to get around...presumably, it's breathing the air inside, and like a whale, it lasts a long time. Of course, life doesn't really need 'oxygen' anyway, could live by something like photosynthesis, or a combination of that and burning oxygen.(Maybe via symbiosis, in either direction)
b) Exposed wet membranes. Aka, all orifices and the eyes. Easy enough for evolution to get around by simply building airtight things around those. (You sorta need to be airtight anyway.) Although there's no reason for eyes to be wet anyway....cameras aren't wet.
c) Heat. Can't get rid of it,and life generates heat. That, more than anything, is actually the reason that space suits exist, as opposed to breathing masks. But that's a problem for all space going vessels, so is a bit goofy to worry about only for living things. They'd just have to touch down and discard heat every once in a while, and be 'cold-blooded', by which I mean they'd not have to 'regulate' their body heat, but be able to operate at whatever temperature they were.
So a species living in space is easy. The reason we can't is that our bodies are engineered with 'shortcuts' that make assumptions we will be surrounded by stuff, but there's no reason at all we need to be.
Life probably couldn't start there, but species get pushed towards new climates all the time.
The really tricky thing is propulsion, both to get to and live in space. the only way we have to get to space is throwing stuff out the back, which essentially requires explosive materials to hold enough to get into space. While it's not impossible for life to make use of explosions, it's never actually evolved that way here on earth.
But almost all sci-fi series have invented some manner of reactionless drive, so presumable the life would be using the same concept.
No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager)
To be fair to Voyager, the ship wasn't living. The gel packs were just used as biological processors, which is much more plausible technology than a ship made of living structural matter. There's at least a subset of scientists today who believe such things can work and would be useful, as opposed to, for example, transporters. If we're grading on the 'Star Trek' curve, they're perfectly reasonable.
Of course, how they were affected by viruses and stuff was totally absurd, but, OTOH, Star Trek's biological underpinnings are pretty absurd to start with, as there are no biochemical boundaries at all. Combine that with their utter lack of any sort of computer security and computer sanity checks, and there you go.
As for BSG, the entire thing was a metaphor. The whole series is about blurring the line between 'machine' and 'living'.
What do you mean? Take every plot point in the movie, like River being triggered, like finding Miranda, etc, and make it an episode, and have an extra episode between those.
There was plenty of stuff for another season.
Erm, what's your problem with a T-1001?
The writers made her a T-1001 instead of a T-1000 just in case they actually did need to do something different with her, like have John try to kill her with cold and it not work. It wasn't 'merchandising', it was caring about continuity enough to use a slightly different model just in case it behaved slightly inconsistent with movie T-1000.
It's worth mentioning her number wasn't even stated on the show, as far as the viewers knew she was a T-1000, so you got your information from somewhere else.
Her character was pretty interesting, too, as it was obvious she wasn't doing 'Terminator' things and didn't actually want John Connor dead, but wasn't really helping him either. She appeared to be trying to set up a competing AI, and apparently came back in time to replace a dead person, which is a Terminator first.
I don't think I said anything about the cause of the bubble at all.
I said asking what caused the end was nonsense, because it was a bubble, and they end by definition.
It's perfectly reasonable to blame the bubble on the Fed. Even if they weren't 'the cause', which is pretty complex, they sure as hell could have, and should have, stopped it.
What do you mean, "undoing the health care law"? Wouldn't they need to actually pass something to undo it?
That is what I am talking about. The House will probably pass some total nonsense about that.
They're going to have some real trouble figuring what to remove, because while the American people hate 'the health care bill' because idiots have ranted how evil it is, almost all Americans like every aspect of the health care bill except the mandate to buy insurance. Which is actually a right wing idea, and got in to appease health insurance companies/the right, but I'm sure the right in the House would be willing to vote to 'remove it' as long as it couldn't possibly pass the Senate, thanks to 'Democrats' blocking it.
I'm secretly hoping that a few Democrats in the Senate laugh and vote for it, fucking over the health insurance companies and removing that 'compromise' from the bill.
Of course, in actuality, that would force the Republicans to vote against it, which would make the entire thing utterly surreal.
It's actually a pretty crazy situation. Republicans constantly rail about 'repealing the bill', when, like I said, almost every damn aspect of it is popular, it's just 'the bill' that is somehow mysteriously unpopular, thanks to American's Low Information Voter(TM).
And while it will certainly hurt in the short term, undoing the health care bill would probably be better in the end. The health care cost, now at about 16% GDP, would reach truly astronomical heights, just as millions of people are loosing their insurance because they cannot afford it.
I don't understand what you're saying. No one would lose their insurance because they couldn't afford it. That doesn't make any sense. The bill stopped that from happening by giving people subsidies to buy insurance.
I wasn't actually screaming and pointing at the criminals. I was screaming and pointing a person who were pretending it was someone else's fault entirely. Namely, they wanted to blame the government and the victims.
I'm all for people being less con-able, but that doesn't change who the conmen are. It doesn't change the fact that one side had some poor judgment, and the other side committed multiple counts of criminal fraud victimizing the first side.
It's all well and good to say women shouldn't walk down dark alleys in high crime areas at night, but that doesn't mean both they and a rapist are guilty.
And, like I pointed out, by law, your real estate agent is supposed to be on your side, which makes their behavior massively fraudulent. This isn't like normal, some random stranger, fraud, where some guy sells you snake oil. Technically, you've hired your real estate agent, and are paying them.
It really is like your own damn lawyer ripping you off, like you go to him to buy some painting you really want, so he runs out, buys it first, and then resells it to them at a higher cost. It's massively illegal and massively unethical, and it's apparently business as usual in the real estate business.
All 'buyer' real estate agents who put someone in a foreclosed house should be tracked down and investigated. Every damn one of them. Home loans should have the buyer agent on them, and when the foreclosure happens, an investigation should automatically happen.
Sometimes it's okay, it was unforeseeable, like massive medical bills and losing a job. Almost all the the time in recent years it should have been foreseen and discussed, and those agents should lose their real estate licenses. And agents who put someone in houses they knew couldn't afford them should be fucking arrested.
Didn't you ever wonder why real estate brokers went from building homes with construction payments in stages, to requiring a significant but small payment up front to begin construction and a final closing where the house was "transferred" to you?
I didn't 'wonder' that at all, I knew damn well what was going on the entire time, which is why I haven't ever bought a house.
But extreme cynicism is just as harmful as the blame-deflecting the GP did.
What people should be doing is learning what actually happened, and figure out how to structure the system where it can't happen anymore. And can't happen anymore regardless of how much the regulators works.
Two obvious solution: Don't give real estate agents a commission until the purchaser stays in the house for five years, and don't let banks resell mortgages, ever.
That doesn't require 'policing', it's not some abstract principle about a subjective 'can this person buy this house' that people can fudge. If banks make bad loans, if real estate agents put people in bad houses, they will, in fact, lose money, if you set up the system that way.