If you fast-forward even 500years in the future, there will only be a few sources of power in use: - Geothermal, Hydro-electric(various types), and Solar - all basically steam or water driven driven turbines. Pretty much infinitely renewable and stable technology. Note - solar cells won't be used for large-scale production, as we'll likely have run out of rare earth metals at an affordable cost by then. A few types like this article mentions also may exist for small-scale use. - Wind. I'm a big fan of those wind tower prototypes myself. - Transportation will be electric and some sort of turbine - likely running on hydrogen or methane or similar - which with enough energy and biomass(trash), we can produce infinite amounts of this. Oil will be a thing of the past in any case.
Fission and fusion will be reserved for off-world or military use only due to environmental and cost concerns. It's important to know and use, but too dangerous when something goes wrong. The Japanese government is proof of that in how it's flat-out lying about there being no containment failure. I bet that there's a 20 foot long crack in the floor of the reactor pool and they're lying through their teeth about it.
I guess it's a bit of a sore point for me as all but five of my relatives are hard-core Republicans. This is out of an extended family of several hundred people. It astounds me that they still blindly follow, and to be honest, it is a larger problem than with any of the other political parties. It's not that what you are saying isn't true. Politicians should be viewed as corrupt by default unless they have proven otherwise. But the scale of the dichotomy between the RNC's agenda and what they preach to the masses is so large that everyone should see it and defect or create a real "conservative" alternative immediately.
It's kind of sad to see so many of my own family (let alone society) that are otherwise thoughtful and well educated people falling for this.
Of course, the Democrats are now figuring it out, too, so they're really not much better a choice, either.
And to add insult to injury, any profits that they have they squirrel out of the country and "offshore", as we have seen with GE. Trickle-down economics does work. Too bad it's "trickling down" our money to people in China. We're left with a big hole for our troubles - and higher fees for almost everything as a result. Taxes have to rise to make up the differences, and if they can't get enough taxes out of you, they'll raise the money through fees and so on. (rising school fees all the way to higher fines and regulatory fees and so on - all technically not a "tax".)
3.2 Billion - 320 million people in the U.S. Roughly half pay taxes (unemployed, children and so on of course don't). That works out nicely to: $100 refund for 20% of the U.S. population who pays taxes.
From one company working the system. ONE. Out of several hundred such companies that are manipulating things to their benefit.
You want a tax cut for the working people? How about making the corporations pay their fair share. There's more than enough money in their coffers to make taxes a thing of the past for the poor and middle class, as well as for small business owners and the self-employed. How does "if you make less than $50K a year, you don't have to file taxes at all" sound? You want to spur growth at the lower levels and create a solid foundation? Get rid of this burden. Doubly so on small businesses. You should get a tax *rebate* for starting a new business at this point. Instead it costs hundreds in taxes and fees. And that's if you aren't in California or some other state that really sticks it to you.
In fact, this is one thing I cannot fathom. How the RNC and big business (which are essentially one now - with the other party quickly being subverted as well) have managed to still get support from the very people that they shaft over and over again. Big business won't trickle-down. They won't save us. They won't create jobs here at home. What's good for big business is not good for the rest of us. It never has been. We need to wake up and stop letting them get away with this. Because all we're doing is strangling the very people and small businesses that we need to create the next generation of jobs and innovation.
In case you weren't paying attention, big business and small business are diametrically opposed at this point. So when they say "we're all for business" - you have to ask the greaseball politician who's mouth is flapping which "business" they are talking about. You probably won't like the answer, though.
H1-B holders aren't what I was talking about, but the numerous students from overseas who take spaces from the locals who under the new rules, have no options or any other school to apply to. They are the elites from their countries as they can afford the inflated $15-$20K a year for out of state tuition. They could just as easily pay for private schools at that rate but they clog up the state schools by the thousands.
In fact, it's so messed up that I can hardly begin to explain it. Residents of the state have to now go to ONE school in each system now based uppon where they live. Anyone from another state or another country can apply to any and all of them and under the current rules, they are seen as "diversifying" the population and so are usually given preference. I live here, I pay taxes here. I have less options that some rich asshat from halfway across the planet.
They say that there is no more space. Well, how about throwing out some of the opportunistic leeches from overseas and give the residents a fair chance to gain the skills that they say that we all need to compete with these other countries?
And while we're at it, slam the damn door on every last H1-B visa holder. Our unemployment is actually 18% if you add in the full statistics, btw. The news plays along, which is odd - you'd figure that at least Fox News, which has a hard-on for sticking it to those in power right now would be yelling this to the masses.
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp Welcome to the real problem. U6 is the old standard and is what virtually identical to what we used during the Great Depression. With numbers that high, we need to look after ourselves first. Now, I'm not saying that we should close our borders or anything. But this insanity of making it *easy* to give away jobs and education to foreign workers at the expense of normal citizens who desperately need those spaces has to stop.
It's over 20% in California and several other states.
DC to DC conversion is well into the 95%+ rate these days, though. Virtually no heat is produced as a result, and the waste is far less than even a few "bricks" add up to.
The original plan was to use AC for long distances and have it DC at the local level. But being cheap like they were, they decided to offload the cost to the consumer and do nothing at all rather than convert the power at the main local station. Of course one giant transformer works better than tens of thousands of little bricks stuck into the outlets.
That said, there are some people who have done exactly that (usually when they put in solar power as well) and it works great since almost everything these days runs on 12V internally. I think you need AC these days for your refrigerator and washer motors, lights(easy to convert over) and that's about it. The rest of your home is DC as it's pretty much all electronic inside or controlled by electronics.
They allow as many foreign students in as they can get because they can charge them significantly more. As a resident, the state is subsidizing a significant portion of your tuition, with most of the recent fee increases being decreases in the level of subsidy. For example, when I was attending Cal State Northridge, my undergrad tuition was about $3000-4000 per year towards the end of my degree. It started out at under $1300 when I had started in 2000. My wife, who was then an international student, was paying over $17,000 a year the entire time.
True, they charge more for tuition for out of country and out of state residents, but we're talking about the elites and best of the best from around the entire world (who have the money quite easily) essentially clogging up the place for us locals who have to have at least SOME option for higher education available to us. We need more technical workers. Fair enough. Then stop giving away spaces to foreigners at the expense of locals if there is a waiting list. Stop hiring foreigners at the expense of the local job seekers if there are applications from them. And absolutely get rid of all worker visas until our unemployment situation fixes itself.
Unfortunately, most of your thinking is just parroting the views of old style thinking.
1 - The U.S. education system is in shambles and is not remotely performing compared to the other major economic powers. Primary schooling is a joke to the point where most parents put their kids in private schools these days if they can possibly manage it, and secondary education, while excellent overall, is over-enrolled, limited, full, and to expensive for normal people to afford any more. This has nothing at all to even do with the "under-classes". It's that we're simply failing and lack the money. As well as having massive layers of red tape and bureaucracy
California State College is $3000 a semester now. Enrollment is limited to the single closest school to where you live. Programs are filled and enrollment is capped for the next two years already. You simply cannot get in, and even if you could, the price is more than the student loans cover. And this is for the crappiest education possible in the state. If you jump to UC or private schools, you better than a house to get a loan against (if you can get one that is - banks aren't offering them any more)
The middle class simply cannot afford to go to college any more. Things have changed a lot in the last 3-4 years since that data you are referring to came out.
The community colleges are legally prohibited from offering 4 year degrees of any kind. They have the space and the will to do so - to handle the excess and overflow from the crippled state system. But cannot. Thank the lawyers on this one.
2 - If you do go to college, well, then you ARE a grad student at the end. And you're essentially boned in terms of competitiveness and wages for almost anything non-technical. You have huge loans and years to re-pay them. A student in Germany doesn't have a dime to pay back at the end - college is free. As it was 30 years ago in California.(or barely above city college levels)
3 - The sheer number of useless degrees at most colleges is astounding. State schools should be about basic education and specialized learning should be graduate level or left to the private schools. When you have a population cap that's enforced upon the university and in some cases free space available in science programs because the humanities are the bulk of the classes - which is a lot of filler - then you need to trim out the excess weight.
If you limited humanities at a BA level to, say, 10 basic degrees with no specializations or the like, it would allow much more space to be used for teaching other subjects. Music is music. Psychology is only that(you can't do anything career-wise in California without a MA in it anyways, so anything besides the basics is wasted at the BA level). And so on - very much like how it was 100 years ago.
***** The other comments about closing things up and making it harder are good, though. And, not to get too political here, the RNC was the primary engine for these changes that exported all of these jobs. Much to the angst of real conservatives.
Combine this with the education system in most states being a complete disaster and you the cycle is complete.
- California (as an example) refuses to expand the community college system to offer basic 4 year degrees. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the state college system had nominal fees barely above community college levels and so anyone could get a degree for a fairly low amount of money. Now, the prices have skyrocketed to where it's not worth getting a degree unless you are sure that there is a payoff. $5000+ a quarter at UC schools prices any college education out of the realm of the average worker or the under-employed who is looking for a second career to potentially train into. Also, they have limited acceptance to local residents(foreigners are still accepted from anywhere of course), which means you are stuck with one of 2 or 3 possible choices. Which are full for the next 2-3 years as I speak.
Fully half of the UC and Cal State system is clogged with idiots getting degrees in worthless stuff like political science, ethnic studies, and religion. People who want real degrees can't get in because of the sheer number of useless degrees still offered that only lead to either teaching the same if you are lucky enough, or a job answering phones since it's useless in the workplace now. If you look at India(as an example), there's virtually no wasted space. All of the schools offer a few basic degrees and little filler. Even if you could get in past the waiting list into one of your local schools, the programs are all full.
To add insult to injury, colleges in many other countries are affordable or are nearly free. For those stuck here in the U.S., even the cheapest options are impossible to afford while the rest of the world essentially floods in and displaces our workers with ones that paid almost nothing for their degrees.
Your only option then is private schools. But at $20K+ a year, that's impossible short of a scholarship. Re-training is impossible unless you have money already. Catch-22.
- The employers also feel that they can demand ever-increasing skills at ever-decreasing wages, pretty much because they can get away with it. Why not if all of these fortune 100 companies can do it? There's always some worker from overseas who can do the job for $30K a year. Or some starving ex-employee in their 50s who will work for intern wages. It's now affecting computer fields as well, where jobs have split into two fields - high end database and critical programmers and everyone else who is just a wage-slave in a cubicle or at a workbench. Jobs that used to pay 40-60K a year are now being offered for $12 an hour. With no benefits, 401K, or perks.
Fact: You can make more money and get better benefits working for In-and-Out Burger than from most jobs these days that require a BS degree. If you have a Masters, you're still in good shape, but that also is quickly eroding.
The only way to solve it it to slam the doors shut, kick out the temporary visa workers, and force companies to hire only U.S. workers(or those few with permanent visas of course). Note - most OTHER nations do this sort of thing already and help protect their industry.
If you take a look at what modern lighting effects (Halflife2 gave you a hint of it with their tech demos) and also look at what you can do with ray-tracing (DirectX 12), it's really a matter of us not getting these in PC games because of everything being ported these days FROM the consoles, which lack the power to deal with such complex physics and lighting environments. This would require a complete ground-up rebuild of the engine for PCs and they simply don't do it. So we get rubbish like Mass Effect which looks and feels exactly like a console game on the PC.(great game, terrible graphics)
What it requires is for stand-alone PC only games that are essentially "PC Exclusives." ie - DirectX 10+ only. You can get a glimpse of this in a few online games, though, like DDO online and WoW, where the tech and overall look and feel is noticeably better because there is no console port for it. Even though they do use DirectX, the issue isn't DirectX itself. It's that the majority of console games are still using DirectX 9 to maintain compatibility with the gaming consoles. Freed of that limitation, the graphics can literally charge ahead and use all of the power at their disposal. Either to add better physics and effects, to support higher resolutions, or to free up the CPU so that it can concentrate more on AI and other features to make the game not such a joke to play against. And game developers DO do that without question. But it does mean that the games won't run on consoles or older systems without a whole other DX9 build.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support The easiest way to see this in action is to download Dungeons and Dragons Online under Windows 7 (with a DX11 card of course). It's free and simply awesome looking. Even the DX10 version of most games is worlds better than a console Note - this means a full build vs "works under DX10", and few companies have done that.(or have jumped directly to DX11)
You can see this as well in several PS3 exclusives lately(which don't use DirectX of course). They are gorgeous and look far better than anything on an XBox 360 because the designers could focus on one set of hardware specs and run as far as they could with it.
Simply put, we need to drop Direct X 9 support as quickly as possible from the PC market and move on. I fear that we'll be looking at DX12 cards that are still running DX9 level technology due to the developers being caught in the XBox trap.
That said, modern *glass* lenses are almost as lightweight and thin as plastic and don't require any coatings. I'd not recommend it for sports, but it is still an option, though the optometrist won't like to sell them as they hardly make any money off of them. As a bonus, you don't need UV coating either. Glare can be a problem, but a lot of that is mitigated if you get photochromic lenses. These are made by Corning and are better than the plastic "Transitions" brand - but are a bit more money.
IME, the photochromic glass works better, last longer, and provides better color fidelity than plastic. But at $200 or so for the lenses, it's not cheap, either. Of course, not having to ever worry about sunglasses is a nice trick.;)
That's why our grandparents were so disease and cold resistant, though. All of that time growing up at the local lake or pond with god-knows-what in it.
Motorola and IBM said the same thing about PowerPC when they started. Over the following years the PowerPC got about 20-40% better performance at the same clock rate as the contemporary Pentium, SMP also had a similar performance advantage. However Intel was able to win with actual performance by achieving higher clock rates.
In the end, Intel won because of typical underhanded marketing strategies (which all businesses seem to do, naturally ) and its tie-in to the hardware of the Windows market. They simply ground Motorola to a halt over time. China won't face this problem, though, as they can simply do an end-run around Intel and AMD as well as tell Microsoft and Apple where to put it due to prices that are under their production costs. Maintaining legacy compatibility is killing them. In fact, dropping all of that off of a typical i3 chip would result in a fairly noticeable drop in heat and size as well.
I predict chips dropping in price to 20% of where they are today in ten years and IBM and AMD essentially going out of the chip business as a result(most of their money isn't made on PCs but on smaller embedded devices and business servers). Kind of like how electronic books are slowly crushing the life out of traditional bookstores as the average price heads towards 99 cents.
I know that I'd buy a 3Ghz i5 spec processor that ran Linux for $20 instead of $150-$200 retail. Total no-brainer.
Their real goal isn't plex but your identity. Virtually all of these game-money companies and websites are funded by criminal organizations and several have direct ties to the infamous Russian botnets. They make huge amounts of money - just not from the items they are "selling":
As for EVE, What you are doing is exactly how the bots and farmers are also surviving. They love it as they can play and as long as they can generate enough isk per month (imagine large factory scale sweatshops in India and other places doing this across a dozen games), they don't have to pay money to make money. 500 "employees" all grinding away for a dollar or two a day. It's better than most jobs(or not having one). So most of that in game currency is legitimately owned by them. It's a huge business as a result, but nothing about it is honest or good.
But you're right - it's nothing like WoW and several other games. Thankfully EVE never was popular enough to be considered more than a niche product in the industry.
But they don't allow players to shoot at them, they don't enforce measures to hang up scripting, they don't block connections from most providers that are known to be problems (third world countries mostly)... the list is enormous.
But the biggest one is that they allow you to buy game time for isk, from inside the game. As long as you can do this, it's impossible to stop the farmers.
The scale is smaller, but since they have virtually no way to actually catch all but the most stupid bots and farmers out there, it effectively is as good as no enforcement at all.
If we're talking about online or multi-player games there is no other alternative than to offer the game for less money and make it up on modest subscription fees. Nothing else works at this point.
Microsoft and Sony have tried to monetize their consoles via their points and store systems, but it's largely failed. Most PC gamers, OTOH, will gladly pay a nominal $2-$5 a month to play on the official game servers (local and lan games of course are free). RPG type games are also better served with a nominal charge this way for items and upgrades. This is also compounded by the fact that all of the PC online games offer free or nearly free digital downloads as an option. $0 to start, 10 - 14 days free trial, and pay monthly if you want to continue.
Comparing this to $60 for a PS3 game and then hoping players buy stuff on the in-game store... The reason why they are leaving the console market is purely money at this point. Note - this has happened in the past several times as well as PC and Consoles swapped dominance in the marketplace.
He problem was that the didn't try the $1.99 break-point first. If it didn't sell at $2.99, it might have sold much better at $1.99 and given him better profits. He only has to sell 1/4 as much at $1.99 as 99 cents to make more money. Jumping from $2.99 to 99 cents was likely an over-reaction.
That said, I really need to write a cheap novel. Heh. That's silly money.
Ideas like this have been around for five years. CCP simply does not deal with them in any way that's effective. Since they can effectively print money by generating ISK in their database, I suspect that this has a lot to do with it. ie - they don't really case in the end as long as they get some of the money, be it via subscription fees or PLEX that's bought.
Also, stories like this are four years old. The reality of game currency trading is that it's all connected to massive third world country server farming operations and organized crime. Money laundering via game items and currency is a very common use as well. When you visit a typical site to buy or sell such currency, you are immediately hit with several back-door programs and key-loggers. Their real goal is identity theft and to use your machine in their botnet if they can. Since more than 50% of people don't run adequate protection on their machine, it's quite effective.
Game companies need to be extremely aggressive as a result. CCP just has dropped the ball on this one for years, because if you actually DID this, players would shoot the bots clear off of the servers in under a week as bots and the price problems and server lag that they cause are the #1 most hated thing in the game and people in EVE live for blowing stuff up if they can.
Still, as the game companies become more and more invested in online play, (name a game that isn't multi-player these days) they look at the fact that a console is a dead end while the real money is in online PC gaming. WoW makes just stupid amounts of money. Second Life is absolutely loopy nuts with the revenue it creates. Not only is the hardware two generations better (PS3 is hell to program for, no two ways about it, and PCs have only two well-understood standards these days for video cards - the rest is plug and play simple), but the players will generally cough up monthly fees in addition to the game's price.
It's a little bit more work, but lots more potential money to be had. Faced with the PS3 and XBox 720(or whatever they call them) a couple of years or more away, it's no wonder that they're simply ignoring the consoles in larger and larger numbers.
I found this article online: ****** Grinding for gold By Nick Farrell Wed Sep 17 2008, 10:50 GAME MAKER BLIZZARD has revealed that its WoW network has cost it $200 million dollars to run over the last four years.
The outfit revealed during its Analyst Day conference call yesterday that the price has been over $200 million since the game launched in 2004 according to Kotaku. This figure does not include the cost to develop the game, but includes payroll for the entire staff, hardware support, and customer service. This is quite a high figure but hacks have got out their pencils and calculated that if WoW has only nine million subscribers who are paying $15 a month to play, and Blizzard claims there are 10 million, it is making $135 million every month in subscriptions. That means that Blizzard has run its entire operation for the last four years on two months worth of income. It is not so much milking a cash cow as milking a cash elephant. **** Just because you see a GameStop or EB games or similar on nearly every major strip mall in America doesn't mean that PC games are dead. Far from it, in fact. The number as of this last holiday season is 12 million paying subscribers. That means that they make enough money in 10 days to pay for the entire year's upkeep.
Slashdot Mirror
If you fast-forward even 500years in the future, there will only be a few sources of power in use:
- Geothermal, Hydro-electric(various types), and Solar - all basically steam or water driven driven turbines. Pretty much infinitely renewable and stable technology. Note - solar cells won't be used for large-scale production, as we'll likely have run out of rare earth metals at an affordable cost by then. A few types like this article mentions also may exist for small-scale use.
- Wind. I'm a big fan of those wind tower prototypes myself.
- Transportation will be electric and some sort of turbine - likely running on hydrogen or methane or similar - which with enough energy and biomass(trash), we can produce infinite amounts of this. Oil will be a thing of the past in any case.
Fission and fusion will be reserved for off-world or military use only due to environmental and cost concerns. It's important to know and use, but too dangerous when something goes wrong. The Japanese government is proof of that in how it's flat-out lying about there being no containment failure. I bet that there's a 20 foot long crack in the floor of the reactor pool and they're lying through their teeth about it.
I guess it's a bit of a sore point for me as all but five of my relatives are hard-core Republicans. This is out of an extended family of several hundred people. It astounds me that they still blindly follow, and to be honest, it is a larger problem than with any of the other political parties. It's not that what you are saying isn't true. Politicians should be viewed as corrupt by default unless they have proven otherwise. But the scale of the dichotomy between the RNC's agenda and what they preach to the masses is so large that everyone should see it and defect or create a real "conservative" alternative immediately.
It's kind of sad to see so many of my own family (let alone society) that are otherwise thoughtful and well educated people falling for this.
Of course, the Democrats are now figuring it out, too, so they're really not much better a choice, either.
And to add insult to injury, any profits that they have they squirrel out of the country and "offshore", as we have seen with GE. Trickle-down economics does work. Too bad it's "trickling down" our money to people in China. We're left with a big hole for our troubles - and higher fees for almost everything as a result. Taxes have to rise to make up the differences, and if they can't get enough taxes out of you, they'll raise the money through fees and so on. (rising school fees all the way to higher fines and regulatory fees and so on - all technically not a "tax".)
3.2 Billion - 320 million people in the U.S. Roughly half pay taxes (unemployed, children and so on of course don't). That works out nicely to: $100 refund for 20% of the U.S. population who pays taxes.
From one company working the system. ONE. Out of several hundred such companies that are manipulating things to their benefit.
You want a tax cut for the working people? How about making the corporations pay their fair share. There's more than enough money in their coffers to make taxes a thing of the past for the poor and middle class, as well as for small business owners and the self-employed. How does "if you make less than $50K a year, you don't have to file taxes at all" sound? You want to spur growth at the lower levels and create a solid foundation? Get rid of this burden. Doubly so on small businesses. You should get a tax *rebate* for starting a new business at this point. Instead it costs hundreds in taxes and fees. And that's if you aren't in California or some other state that really sticks it to you.
In fact, this is one thing I cannot fathom. How the RNC and big business (which are essentially one now - with the other party quickly being subverted as well) have managed to still get support from the very people that they shaft over and over again. Big business won't trickle-down. They won't save us. They won't create jobs here at home. What's good for big business is not good for the rest of us. It never has been. We need to wake up and stop letting them get away with this. Because all we're doing is strangling the very people and small businesses that we need to create the next generation of jobs and innovation.
In case you weren't paying attention, big business and small business are diametrically opposed at this point. So when they say "we're all for business" - you have to ask the greaseball politician who's mouth is flapping which "business" they are talking about. You probably won't like the answer, though.
H1-B holders aren't what I was talking about, but the numerous students from overseas who take spaces from the locals who under the new rules, have no options or any other school to apply to. They are the elites from their countries as they can afford the inflated $15-$20K a year for out of state tuition. They could just as easily pay for private schools at that rate but they clog up the state schools by the thousands.
In fact, it's so messed up that I can hardly begin to explain it. Residents of the state have to now go to ONE school in each system now based uppon where they live. Anyone from another state or another country can apply to any and all of them and under the current rules, they are seen as "diversifying" the population and so are usually given preference. I live here, I pay taxes here. I have less options that some rich asshat from halfway across the planet.
They say that there is no more space. Well, how about throwing out some of the opportunistic leeches from overseas and give the residents a fair chance to gain the skills that they say that we all need to compete with these other countries?
And while we're at it, slam the damn door on every last H1-B visa holder. Our unemployment is actually 18% if you add in the full statistics, btw. The news plays along, which is odd - you'd figure that at least Fox News, which has a hard-on for sticking it to those in power right now would be yelling this to the masses.
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
Welcome to the real problem. U6 is the old standard and is what virtually identical to what we used during the Great Depression. With numbers that high, we need to look after ourselves first. Now, I'm not saying that we should close our borders or anything. But this insanity of making it *easy* to give away jobs and education to foreign workers at the expense of normal citizens who desperately need those spaces has to stop.
It's over 20% in California and several other states.
DC to DC conversion is well into the 95%+ rate these days, though. Virtually no heat is produced as a result, and the waste is far less than even a few "bricks" add up to.
The original plan was to use AC for long distances and have it DC at the local level. But being cheap like they were, they decided to offload the cost to the consumer and do nothing at all rather than convert the power at the main local station. Of course one giant transformer works better than tens of thousands of little bricks stuck into the outlets.
That said, there are some people who have done exactly that (usually when they put in solar power as well) and it works great since almost everything these days runs on 12V internally. I think you need AC these days for your refrigerator and washer motors, lights(easy to convert over) and that's about it. The rest of your home is DC as it's pretty much all electronic inside or controlled by electronics.
They allow as many foreign students in as they can get because they can charge them significantly more. As a resident, the state is subsidizing a significant portion of your tuition, with most of the recent fee increases being decreases in the level of subsidy. For example, when I was attending Cal State Northridge, my undergrad tuition was about $3000-4000 per year towards the end of my degree. It started out at under $1300 when I had started in 2000. My wife, who was then an international student, was paying over $17,000 a year the entire time.
True, they charge more for tuition for out of country and out of state residents, but we're talking about the elites and best of the best from around the entire world (who have the money quite easily) essentially clogging up the place for us locals who have to have at least SOME option for higher education available to us. We need more technical workers. Fair enough. Then stop giving away spaces to foreigners at the expense of locals if there is a waiting list. Stop hiring foreigners at the expense of the local job seekers if there are applications from them. And absolutely get rid of all worker visas until our unemployment situation fixes itself.
Unfortunately, most of your thinking is just parroting the views of old style thinking.
1 - The U.S. education system is in shambles and is not remotely performing compared to the other major economic powers. Primary schooling is a joke to the point where most parents put their kids in private schools these days if they can possibly manage it, and secondary education, while excellent overall, is over-enrolled, limited, full, and to expensive for normal people to afford any more. This has nothing at all to even do with the "under-classes". It's that we're simply failing and lack the money. As well as having massive layers of red tape and bureaucracy
California State College is $3000 a semester now. Enrollment is limited to the single closest school to where you live. Programs are filled and enrollment is capped for the next two years already. You simply cannot get in, and even if you could, the price is more than the student loans cover. And this is for the crappiest education possible in the state. If you jump to UC or private schools, you better than a house to get a loan against (if you can get one that is - banks aren't offering them any more)
The middle class simply cannot afford to go to college any more. Things have changed a lot in the last 3-4 years since that data you are referring to came out.
The community colleges are legally prohibited from offering 4 year degrees of any kind. They have the space and the will to do so - to handle the excess and overflow from the crippled state system. But cannot. Thank the lawyers on this one.
2 - If you do go to college, well, then you ARE a grad student at the end. And you're essentially boned in terms of competitiveness and wages for almost anything non-technical. You have huge loans and years to re-pay them. A student in Germany doesn't have a dime to pay back at the end - college is free. As it was 30 years ago in California.(or barely above city college levels)
3 - The sheer number of useless degrees at most colleges is astounding. State schools should be about basic education and specialized learning should be graduate level or left to the private schools. When you have a population cap that's enforced upon the university and in some cases free space available in science programs because the humanities are the bulk of the classes - which is a lot of filler - then you need to trim out the excess weight.
If you limited humanities at a BA level to, say, 10 basic degrees with no specializations or the like, it would allow much more space to be used for teaching other subjects. Music is music. Psychology is only that(you can't do anything career-wise in California without a MA in it anyways, so anything besides the basics is wasted at the BA level). And so on - very much like how it was 100 years ago.
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The other comments about closing things up and making it harder are good, though. And, not to get too political here, the RNC was the primary engine for these changes that exported all of these jobs. Much to the angst of real conservatives.
Combine this with the education system in most states being a complete disaster and you the cycle is complete.
- California (as an example) refuses to expand the community college system to offer basic 4 year degrees. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the state college system had nominal fees barely above community college levels and so anyone could get a degree for a fairly low amount of money. Now, the prices have skyrocketed to where it's not worth getting a degree unless you are sure that there is a payoff. $5000+ a quarter at UC schools prices any college education out of the realm of the average worker or the under-employed who is looking for a second career to potentially train into. Also, they have limited acceptance to local residents(foreigners are still accepted from anywhere of course), which means you are stuck with one of 2 or 3 possible choices. Which are full for the next 2-3 years as I speak.
Fully half of the UC and Cal State system is clogged with idiots getting degrees in worthless stuff like political science, ethnic studies, and religion. People who want real degrees can't get in because of the sheer number of useless degrees still offered that only lead to either teaching the same if you are lucky enough, or a job answering phones since it's useless in the workplace now. If you look at India(as an example), there's virtually no wasted space. All of the schools offer a few basic degrees and little filler. Even if you could get in past the waiting list into one of your local schools, the programs are all full.
To add insult to injury, colleges in many other countries are affordable or are nearly free. For those stuck here in the U.S., even the cheapest options are impossible to afford while the rest of the world essentially floods in and displaces our workers with ones that paid almost nothing for their degrees.
Your only option then is private schools. But at $20K+ a year, that's impossible short of a scholarship. Re-training is impossible unless you have money already. Catch-22.
- The employers also feel that they can demand ever-increasing skills at ever-decreasing wages, pretty much because they can get away with it. Why not if all of these fortune 100 companies can do it? There's always some worker from overseas who can do the job for $30K a year. Or some starving ex-employee in their 50s who will work for intern wages. It's now affecting computer fields as well, where jobs have split into two fields - high end database and critical programmers and everyone else who is just a wage-slave in a cubicle or at a workbench. Jobs that used to pay 40-60K a year are now being offered for $12 an hour. With no benefits, 401K, or perks.
Fact: You can make more money and get better benefits working for In-and-Out Burger than from most jobs these days that require a BS degree. If you have a Masters, you're still in good shape, but that also is quickly eroding.
The only way to solve it it to slam the doors shut, kick out the temporary visa workers, and force companies to hire only U.S. workers(or those few with permanent visas of course). Note - most OTHER nations do this sort of thing already and help protect their industry.
Same difference, really.
If you take a look at what modern lighting effects (Halflife2 gave you a hint of it with their tech demos) and also look at what you can do with ray-tracing (DirectX 12), it's really a matter of us not getting these in PC games because of everything being ported these days FROM the consoles, which lack the power to deal with such complex physics and lighting environments. This would require a complete ground-up rebuild of the engine for PCs and they simply don't do it. So we get rubbish like Mass Effect which looks and feels exactly like a console game on the PC.(great game, terrible graphics)
What it requires is for stand-alone PC only games that are essentially "PC Exclusives." ie - DirectX 10+ only. You can get a glimpse of this in a few online games, though, like DDO online and WoW, where the tech and overall look and feel is noticeably better because there is no console port for it. Even though they do use DirectX, the issue isn't DirectX itself. It's that the majority of console games are still using DirectX 9 to maintain compatibility with the gaming consoles. Freed of that limitation, the graphics can literally charge ahead and use all of the power at their disposal. Either to add better physics and effects, to support higher resolutions, or to free up the CPU so that it can concentrate more on AI and other features to make the game not such a joke to play against. And game developers DO do that without question. But it does mean that the games won't run on consoles or older systems without a whole other DX9 build.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support
The easiest way to see this in action is to download Dungeons and Dragons Online under Windows 7 (with a DX11 card of course). It's free and simply awesome looking. Even the DX10 version of most games is worlds better than a console Note - this means a full build vs "works under DX10", and few companies have done that.(or have jumped directly to DX11)
You can see this as well in several PS3 exclusives lately(which don't use DirectX of course). They are gorgeous and look far better than anything on an XBox 360 because the designers could focus on one set of hardware specs and run as far as they could with it.
Simply put, we need to drop Direct X 9 support as quickly as possible from the PC market and move on. I fear that we'll be looking at DX12 cards that are still running DX9 level technology due to the developers being caught in the XBox trap.
That said, modern *glass* lenses are almost as lightweight and thin as plastic and don't require any coatings. I'd not recommend it for sports, but it is still an option, though the optometrist won't like to sell them as they hardly make any money off of them. As a bonus, you don't need UV coating either. Glare can be a problem, but a lot of that is mitigated if you get photochromic lenses. These are made by Corning and are better than the plastic "Transitions" brand - but are a bit more money.
IME, the photochromic glass works better, last longer, and provides better color fidelity than plastic. But at $200 or so for the lenses, it's not cheap, either. Of course, not having to ever worry about sunglasses is a nice trick. ;)
That's why our grandparents were so disease and cold resistant, though. All of that time growing up at the local lake or pond with god-knows-what in it.
The happy in-between is this:
http://www.misadigital.com/index.php?target=home&lang=en
Rock as you knew it is dead. ;)
Long live Rock!
Motorola and IBM said the same thing about PowerPC when they started. Over the following years the PowerPC got about 20-40% better performance at the same clock rate as the contemporary Pentium, SMP also had a similar performance advantage. However Intel was able to win with actual performance by achieving higher clock rates.
In the end, Intel won because of typical underhanded marketing strategies (which all businesses seem to do, naturally ) and its tie-in to the hardware of the Windows market. They simply ground Motorola to a halt over time. China won't face this problem, though, as they can simply do an end-run around Intel and AMD as well as tell Microsoft and Apple where to put it due to prices that are under their production costs. Maintaining legacy compatibility is killing them. In fact, dropping all of that off of a typical i3 chip would result in a fairly noticeable drop in heat and size as well.
I predict chips dropping in price to 20% of where they are today in ten years and IBM and AMD essentially going out of the chip business as a result(most of their money isn't made on PCs but on smaller embedded devices and business servers). Kind of like how electronic books are slowly crushing the life out of traditional bookstores as the average price heads towards 99 cents.
I know that I'd buy a 3Ghz i5 spec processor that ran Linux for $20 instead of $150-$200 retail. Total no-brainer.
Their real goal isn't plex but your identity. Virtually all of these game-money companies and websites are funded by criminal organizations and several have direct ties to the infamous Russian botnets. They make huge amounts of money - just not from the items they are "selling":
As for EVE, What you are doing is exactly how the bots and farmers are also surviving. They love it as they can play and as long as they can generate enough isk per month (imagine large factory scale sweatshops in India and other places doing this across a dozen games), they don't have to pay money to make money. 500 "employees" all grinding away for a dollar or two a day. It's better than most jobs(or not having one). So most of that in game currency is legitimately owned by them. It's a huge business as a result, but nothing about it is honest or good.
But you're right - it's nothing like WoW and several other games. Thankfully EVE never was popular enough to be considered more than a niche product in the industry.
But they don't allow players to shoot at them, they don't enforce measures to hang up scripting, they don't block connections from most providers that are known to be problems (third world countries mostly)... the list is enormous.
But the biggest one is that they allow you to buy game time for isk, from inside the game. As long as you can do this, it's impossible to stop the farmers.
The scale is smaller, but since they have virtually no way to actually catch all but the most stupid bots and farmers out there, it effectively is as good as no enforcement at all.
If we're talking about online or multi-player games there is no other alternative than to offer the game for less money and make it up on modest subscription fees. Nothing else works at this point.
Microsoft and Sony have tried to monetize their consoles via their points and store systems, but it's largely failed. Most PC gamers, OTOH, will gladly pay a nominal $2-$5 a month to play on the official game servers (local and lan games of course are free). RPG type games are also better served with a nominal charge this way for items and upgrades. This is also compounded by the fact that all of the PC online games offer free or nearly free digital downloads as an option. $0 to start, 10 - 14 days free trial, and pay monthly if you want to continue.
Comparing this to $60 for a PS3 game and then hoping players buy stuff on the in-game store... The reason why they are leaving the console market is purely money at this point. Note - this has happened in the past several times as well as PC and Consoles swapped dominance in the marketplace.
He problem was that the didn't try the $1.99 break-point first. If it didn't sell at $2.99, it might have sold much better at $1.99 and given him better profits. He only has to sell 1/4 as much at $1.99 as 99 cents to make more money. Jumping from $2.99 to 99 cents was likely an over-reaction.
That said, I really need to write a cheap novel. Heh. That's silly money.
Ideas like this have been around for five years. CCP simply does not deal with them in any way that's effective. Since they can effectively print money by generating ISK in their database, I suspect that this has a lot to do with it. ie - they don't really case in the end as long as they get some of the money, be it via subscription fees or PLEX that's bought.
Also, stories like this are four years old. The reality of game currency trading is that it's all connected to massive third world country server farming operations and organized crime. Money laundering via game items and currency is a very common use as well. When you visit a typical site to buy or sell such currency, you are immediately hit with several back-door programs and key-loggers. Their real goal is identity theft and to use your machine in their botnet if they can. Since more than 50% of people don't run adequate protection on their machine, it's quite effective.
Game companies need to be extremely aggressive as a result. CCP just has dropped the ball on this one for years, because if you actually DID this, players would shoot the bots clear off of the servers in under a week as bots and the price problems and server lag that they cause are the #1 most hated thing in the game and people in EVE live for blowing stuff up if they can.
True, but he should have tried $1.99 first as $1.98 and below is where Amazon rapes its authors. I suspect that he'd have done nearly as well.
Still, as the game companies become more and more invested in online play, (name a game that isn't multi-player these days) they look at the fact that a console is a dead end while the real money is in online PC gaming. WoW makes just stupid amounts of money. Second Life is absolutely loopy nuts with the revenue it creates. Not only is the hardware two generations better (PS3 is hell to program for, no two ways about it, and PCs have only two well-understood standards these days for video cards - the rest is plug and play simple), but the players will generally cough up monthly fees in addition to the game's price.
It's a little bit more work, but lots more potential money to be had. Faced with the PS3 and XBox 720(or whatever they call them) a couple of years or more away, it's no wonder that they're simply ignoring the consoles in larger and larger numbers.
I found this article online:
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Grinding for gold
By Nick Farrell
Wed Sep 17 2008, 10:50
GAME MAKER BLIZZARD has revealed that its WoW network has cost it $200 million dollars to run over the last four years.
The outfit revealed during its Analyst Day conference call yesterday that the price has been over $200 million since the game launched in 2004 according to Kotaku. This figure does not include the cost to develop the game, but includes payroll for the entire staff, hardware support, and customer service. This is quite a high figure but hacks have got out their pencils and calculated that if WoW has only nine million subscribers who are paying $15 a month to play, and Blizzard claims there are 10 million, it is making $135 million every month in subscriptions. That means that Blizzard has run its entire operation for the last four years on two months worth of income. It is not so much milking a cash cow as milking a cash elephant.
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Just because you see a GameStop or EB games or similar on nearly every major strip mall in America doesn't mean that PC games are dead. Far from it, in fact. The number as of this last holiday season is 12 million paying subscribers. That means that they make enough money in 10 days to pay for the entire year's upkeep.
That is a valid point. I'd try putting his next book at just above the break-point and see how it works. I bet he makes a decent amount of profit.