The ESRB could almost certainly improve how they go about rating games, but at the end of the day, that's not the biggest problem with it. The problem is that retailers are not enforcing the ratings, which basically makes them useless. The movie ratings work because theaters generally try to enforce the age limits (even though it's voluntary). Retailers have not kept up their end of the deal, and the game industry hasn't done enough to force retailers to do so.
Basically, it doesn't matter of the ESRB spends 500 hours and a million dollars to rate a game as Mature if Gamestop is going to sell it to a 12 year old either way.
Well maybe jail-time just for selling a game is a bit ridiculous as a penalty. But reasonable fines would not be problematic. Like I said, the specifics of any particular law might be debatable, but the basic premise of restricting sales to minors doesn't bother me.
The industry would be in a much better position to help dictate the specifics of these laws (or even avoid them entirely) if they could get their act together in terms of their own ratings system, and enforcement of such.
I think this guy is mostly right though. Parents have a difficult balance to try and manage between monitoring their kid's activities and allowing them some freedom to grow. A law that doesn't have any direct effect on the existence of certain video games, but merely restricts the sale of them to children doesn't seem particularly problematic to me. It's up to people with a better understanding of legalese than I possess to decide if a specific law is properly written to accomplish only that, but I have no problem with the idea of it.
I guess I don't see the policy as being particularly harmful. It's not saying that these games are illegal, it's not even saying that letting a child play the game is illegal. It's just about making a small part of parenting a little bit easier. It's not about pretending that violence doesn't exist, it's about helping parents control how their children are exposed to and learn about that violence. I don't think that violent video games, movies, or even porn will have a serious negative impact on your average well-adjusted child, but at the same time I would appreciate the ability as a parent to somewhat control how my child gets introduced to these things. The ESRB is a start, but unless game retailers really start enforcing it, then it's not really having much of an impact. It's probably easier for the movie industry to self-regulate, because there's relatively few theaters out there compared to stores that stock games, but I'm still surprised that the game industry and the retailers don't have their act together a little better on all of this. Maybe the threat of these laws will move that process along.
At the end of the day, I don't think this law accomplishes all that much. Most kids don't have the resources to go buy a $50 video game on their own. An adult likely helped out somewhere along the way, either knowingly or not. This law won't eliminate bad or indifferent parenting. I doesn't seem like a "slippery-slope" issue to me, nor should it make games any harder for adults to get their hands on.
I'm not very big into the whole wikipedia community, but from the bits that I've read, it sounds like there's been a lot of internal discussion over how much of that "human generated information" belongs in wikipedia. My little house sitting in an unremarkable suburb has decades of history behind it, dozens of people were directly or indirectly involved in its creation, hundreds of people have walked through it, and I could probably write twenty pages of information about it pretty easily.
But it'd be a boring read, and not particularly important, even to me. Now that's an extreme example, but 99% of the "information" that is generated each day isn't really appropriate to wikipedia. Just because the amount of disk space that wikipedia occupies is trivial to increase doesn't mean that its goal should be to collect as much information as is possible. Wikipedia should not strive to be a repository of all knowledge, or even a completely thorough explanation of the particular articles that it does contain.
But you're right in that the buzz is on its way out. Wikipedia may not have peaked in terms of its usefulness, but in terms of its media exposure, it's not new and hip anymore. Such is life in our culture.
Religion, like just about everything else we experience, is heavily influenced by people. People can be good or bad, right or wrong, confident or confused, and so on. Like you said, having a belief in God doesn't make everything automatically clear to you, and anyone who says that they've got it all figured out is likely fooling themselves.
Religion is a lot like just about every other human organization, be it politics, business, education, sports, or whatever. It's got lots of participants who are confused, angry, competitive, greedy, manipulative, and/or just plain not nice. But it's also got lots of people who are hopeful, humble, working hard, trying to improve themselves, trying to help others, and just plain friendly and caring.
You would hope that religious organizations would be better at filtering out the bad, but that's a really tough thing to do. And the sad reality of life is that it's much harder to create than it is to destroy, so the deeds of one bad person tends to block out the good that many others have accomplished.
It's an interesting phenomenon that's sort of developed on the internet, which basically boils down to a mix of a lot of people thinking that they deserve something for nothing, and other people thinking that commerce being involved in something at any level taints the whole thing.
While companies certainly need to be careful about how they integrate money making into their websites, consumers as a whole need to realize that running a site that sees the sort of traffic that YouTube does costs a lot of money, and no person/group/or individual is going to just sit there and bleed out cash on it indefinitely. If everyone bails off of YouTube because of ads, another site without them might absorb all that traffic, but eventually they're going to need to find a way to make money too. The masses can bounce around to different websites for a while, but somewhere down the line no one will be willing to run that kind of site anymore, knowing that it's just a money pit.
I'll be happy to join the exodus from YouTube if they start making us watch 15 second ads before we can view an 8 second clip of someone juggling chainsaws, but if they want to add a non-intrusive and clearly marked ad at the end of a video, that's an awfully small price to pay for the ability to easily share videos with millions of people around the world.
But yeah, no matter what kind of ads they might do, a lot of people are going to get pissed off and feel mightily offended. But that sort of attitude is childish and unproductive. The saying goes "there's no such thing as a free lunch", but I think that here in the early days of the internet, a bunch of us users have managed to get plenty of free lunches. But instead of feeling grateful or lucky, many people would rather just bitch that they want a free lunch tomorrow and the next day and all of next week as well.
I think it's more just the continued reaction to all the hype that the PSP launched with. Lots of people couldn't stop telling everyone how this was finally going to be the true Gameboy killer. Sony was about to repeat the success they had with the Playstation, and Nintendo was going to be the lose the handheld market dominance just like they lost the console market.
The Wii was generally(with exceptions of course) mocked by much of the gaming media, calling the controller just a gimmick, people were basically writing Nintendo off as as good as dead, etc...
Basically it all boils down to expectations. The PSP was talking like a champ before the game, but has turned out just to be a decent player. It hasn't failed in the sense that it completely tanked, but if its main goal was to completely dominate the competition, then it failed on that account.
I'm curious to see how they implement dual screens and a touch screen in software for that DS emulation. I sort of understand the mindset of doing something just to see if it can be done, but I hope that we don't have to hear people going around telling everyone that the PSP can act as a DS.
(You'd likely be able to play Advance Wars 2 reasonably well, and that wouldn't be so bad)
Don't forget that there are many others who use YouTube differently than you do. If you're sitting in class or at the office bored or something, browsing through random videos can be fairly amusing. If google can make money selling ads on random blogs and stuff, I fail to see why that wouldn't also work for YouTube.
Re:What is good for GM is good for America
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You have no sense of the scale of the damage. You also appear to have only a rudimentary sense of how mortgages work. I cannot just go to the bank and tell them I want to take out a mortgage on my house in order to build levees for the city.
Re:What is good for GM is good for America
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If having a locally funded, designed, and built flood protection system is what New Orleans needs to survive, then that's what New Orleans will do. But it can't be done overnight. It wasn't done in the past, because the federal government told the citizens not to worry about it, the Army Corps of Engineers will handle it. They screwed it up, and their mistakes caused massive flooding in a city that had survived the wind and rain of Katrina with only mild damage.
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about in terms of the citizens of new orleans mortgaging their homes to pay for levees.
Re:What is good for GM is good for America
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There are thousands of people down here willing and trying to clean up their neighborhoods, without the help of the federal government. I just can't give a full enough idea of how big of a project this is. Everyone on your block might fix up their houses, but you're still dependent on the government to fix the streets, fix the water lines, get the police force back up to speed, etc. Yes, much of this is the job of the local government, but you can't reasonably expect a city that just went through that level of a disaster to have the resources to get it all up and running at once. I don't know if you're imagining New Orleans as a bunch of lazy people sitting on the side of the road waiting for the government to help, but I can ensure you that that is not the case for the majority of the city.
It's not just as simple as if the economics are right, the rebuilding will just magically happen. New Orleans basically worthless mayor made headlines a while back for pointing out that NYC still hasn't built anything at the WTC site. And while that was an insensitive thing to say, and not a perfect analogy, I think it's fair to consider that to be some pretty valuable real estate. But as is always the case, there's a lot of circumstances beyond just the textbook economics, and things pretty much never move quickly or smoothly. I think that New Orleans as a whole can and will continue rebuilding, even if the federal government never gives out another dime. It'll just take much much longer, and many hardworking but unfortunate people won't be able to be a part of it for various reasons.
As you said, many people in Louisiana have done well from the oil industry. But for whatever reasons, decades ago an agreement was made that the federal government would handle storm protection via the Army Corps of Engineers. That protection failed. (under storm conditions less than what they claimed they were built for).
That's the most frustrating part of the whole thing. Whether or not you think the federal government should've taken responsibility for that shouldn't be relevant, because at the end of the day they did. And they screwed it up. Hey, it's a tough problem, and mistakes happen. But still, they messed up, and so they should be trying harder to fix it. When people dismiss the whole thing with things like "they knew they were building a city in an unsafe place", or "if they want better levees they should build them themselves", it's pretty upsetting. The federal government committed to a flood protection city that would've kept New Orleans safe from Katrina. They told us that the system was sound. I'm not naive enough to take everything a politician says at face value, but when you're dealing with something like flood protection, you expect the Corps of Engineers to have their act together.
The worst part is, the levees and flood walls around New Orleans are just a small portion of the huge amount of infrastructure nationwide that the federal government is responsible for. Like that highway bridge collapse a few months back, their is a ton of infrastructure of all types that has been under-maintained for decades, and it looks like it's going to start catching up to us. I don't know if there will be anything else of the scale of Katrina, but when we start losing faith in our government to even handle basic needs within our own country, that's a pretty big deal.
Your prices sound pretty darn reasonable, and I think far more people would generally agree with that valuation than the music industry would lead us to believe. And those who will download it and pay very little or nothing are the same people (students, low income, sometimes just plain selfish)who would download it elsewhere for free anyways.
Even if you decided to buy the album having never heard a note of it, and threw down $5 just because you know that radiohead is pretty well respected, that's more than the band would likely see from a CD sold in a store. So they come out better, you come out better, and it's just the middleman that loses out. But I guess their job isn't necessary anymore.
Re:Where's the 'Duh' Meta-tag when you need it?
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Agreed, it really is a shame that the government feels the need to sell this spectrum to one company. The price will be high for an individual company, causing the problems that you mentioned. But in the long run, the money gained will be just a drop in the bucket for the government.
So basically they're going to end up heavily limiting the benefits of the spectrum in return for an ultimately insignificant amount of money. It's almost certainly not in the best interests of the citizens.
Re:What is good for GM is good for America
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New Orleans is an excellent place to build a city, which is why a city was built there in the first place. It is an intensely busy port, with a huge portion of the country's energy supply and seafood supply moving through it. Not to mention all the cultural stuff which is much harder to quantify.
You can argue whether the city should've been built there all day if you want, but at the end of the day, the city's there, it's been there for hundreds of years. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the city, and hundreds of thousands more living around the city. There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of buildings, homes, infrastructure, etc. that already exist, much of which is functional and in use.
And don't forget that the majority of the damage that the city suffered was due to failures in the protection system that the federal government built, controlled, and told the citizens was safe. In exchange for the protection, the citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana allowed the federal government to have their way with our coastline, primarily for the benefit of the country as a whole in terms of providing energy (oil).
Helping New Orleans rebuild and improving the storm protection and coastal restoration is the least the rest of the country could do. The amount of resources it would take to start making some significant progress is a small fraction of what our government has available to it, and it's really a shame that our priorities won't let that happen.
I think most music consumers have an innate sense of what they consider to be a good, fair price for music. It gets adjusted a little bit for different circumstances (OMG RADIOHEAD IS MY FAVORITE BAND!, I think that digital albums should be cheaper because of the lack of physical media/shipping costs, I'm a dirt poor college student right now, etc...), but if you were to take a poll of random people on the street, I'm guessing a pretty clear baseline would start to emerge.
People already pay ridiculously high prices for albums that they haven't heard all the way through. Often times they're buying it just for one or two songs that they've heard on the radio, and the rest of the disc is just gravy (or filler). The cost of CD's probably has a significant effect on the baseline perceived value of a digital album that I mentioned earlier, although I'd guess that most people would agree that a downloaded song should be cheaper than a disc.
You're probably right in that people will tend to underpay initially out of fear of "getting ripped off", unless they're huge radiohead fans. But if you do that, and it turns out you really dig the album, and you wish you had paid more; I'm sure radiohead wouldn't mind if you paid for and downloaded the album again.
It even goes beyond the code as well. Even a completely bug-free web application could be compromised through things like social engineering, an untrustworthy employee, or maybe even plain-old theft.
We like to pretend that the internet is some how this brave new world, but it's still built on a physical infrastructure that exists in the real world, and is designed and maintained by people that live in the real world. In the real world, making something 100% secure is not really feasible, so we just do the best we can and make contingencies for when security fails. I have deadbolts on all of my doors and I lock them when I leave the house, but that doesn't mean that I don't have insurance in case someone busts through a window.
There's not really a useful "insurance" system in place to cover my email account getting hijacked, but a smart consumer can take some steps to limit the potential damage. You can use different web services from different providers, so that the failures of one only affects a smaller portion of the services you use. You can avoid reusing passwords. You can be very careful with your personal information. Etc...
It's all a pain in the ass, but then again, I don't particularly enjoy having to spend all that extra money for homeowners insurance. It's just a necessary part of life, in both the "real world" and the internet world.
It's probably because if they dropped prices right now, sales still wouldn't massively increase because there's no games, and the PS3 would look even more stagnant than it does already.
I think that the 3D zelda games (in particular the N64 ones) are some of the greatest games ever. Although I love the original Zelda as well. Zelda 2 was different than the original, but still 2d, and I don't care for it much.
I've enjoyed what I've played of Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii so far. I never gave the GC versions a shot. I went back and tried to play the original metroid again a couple years ago, and couldn't really get into it.
I guess my point is, it's too bad you're not that big a fan of 3D games. It must be a tough time for you.
The way SL works (as per my second or third hand reading), is that the whole world (The Grid) is made up of a bunch of squares of virtual land (Sims). Supposedly each sim is its own server/blade/whatever. That sim is responsible for everything that happens within its virtual land space. This includes dealing with all of the players who are currently in that sim, but also all the interactions of physical objects within that sim, and probably more importantly, all of the scripted objects within that sim. When you create something in SL, you can not only model and texture it, but you can also use the SL scripting language to make objects function in all sorts of ways. You edit the script, it gets compiled, and it gets tucked into the object. Objects can have multiple scripts in them.
While in a sim, SL will share lots of information about what that particular server is dealing with. It's not unusual for some of the more crowded sims to have thousands of scripted objects living in a sim, and that's a lot of little things going on. Many of those scripts were not written by experienced programmers, so efficiency was likely not a big consideration.
Bungie's been doing that sort of story driven universe for a while. Halo shares a lot in common with the storyline that ran through the Marathon series, years ago when Bungie was a Mac only developer. I played the original marathon way back when, but never got around to the rest of the trilogy (I think it was a trilogy). But a few years ago I came across a website that basically listed all of the text from the game, almost as a screen play, and reading through it all was a reasonably entertaining story.
The Halo universe might not be 100% original, but it's got a lot of background and detail, and as such has a good bit of potential for future projects. A RTS game of some sort could certainly be interesting, or maybe one day an MMO that finds a way to combine individual soldier combat with large scale spaceship combat and all that. There's nothing insurmountable stopping anyone else from making games like that, but having a reasonably well known and already partially described universe to place the game in gives it more legitimacy and hopefully can give players a more immediate connection to a game.
While I'll agree that as far as games are concerned, the greatest graphics in the world can only go so far in making crappy gameplay fun. But I'm willing to cut the linked article a break, since you can't really describe "fun gameplay" in any sort of useful scientific way, meaning that such a discussion might be outside of the purview of a PopSci magazine article.
It seems pretty straightforward to me that the article was not intended to be a dissertation on game design, rather just a quick overview of some of the aspects of video games that have a connection to "real" science. There are lots of reasons beyond gaming why we should develop more realistic simulations of water and fire. The fact that that same development can make our video games look better is just a nice bonus.
I'd imagine that most of the engineers developing that new motion capture system would not have that much to contribute to video game plots or art direction. And that's probably one of the reasons why they've chosen to be engineers instead of writers/artists.
I don't have any specific or extra knowledge about the deal that Apple and ATT have made concerning the iPhone, I can imagine ways that this arrangement could've been made that wouldn't really increase the risks to Apple. As long as whatever revenue sharing deal they've got is specific to the iPhone only, then how does that deal really change Apple's investment in it.
Basically, if ATT messes the iphone up, then the iphone will be a failure for Apple, subscription revenue sharing or not. Also, I expect that Apple is making a decent profit on the sale of the phone itself, and the huge pile of them that they've already sold has probably put a big dent in the R&D costs.
Moore's Law doesn't really have anything to do with MHz or GHz, or clock speeds at all. It's more about the number of transistors crammed into a cost effective chip. For a while there, one of the main things that intel decided to do with all those transistors was to push the clock-speed as fast as they could. This certainly made computers more powerful, and it was an easy number to work into advertisements and such.But at the end of the day, it wasn't the only way that processors could be improved. To bring in a dreaded car analogy, they were making a car go faster by adding more cylinders to the engine, while mostly ignoring things like aerodynamics and efficiency in other parts of the car. But eventually they reached a point where there wasn't any room in the engine compartment for more cylinders, so now they're looking at making the rest of the vehicle more efficient.
The transistor count will keep going up, Moore's Law will continue. It's just that those new transistors will be used a little differently.
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The ESRB could almost certainly improve how they go about rating games, but at the end of the day, that's not the biggest problem with it. The problem is that retailers are not enforcing the ratings, which basically makes them useless. The movie ratings work because theaters generally try to enforce the age limits (even though it's voluntary). Retailers have not kept up their end of the deal, and the game industry hasn't done enough to force retailers to do so.
Basically, it doesn't matter of the ESRB spends 500 hours and a million dollars to rate a game as Mature if Gamestop is going to sell it to a 12 year old either way.
Well maybe jail-time just for selling a game is a bit ridiculous as a penalty. But reasonable fines would not be problematic. Like I said, the specifics of any particular law might be debatable, but the basic premise of restricting sales to minors doesn't bother me.
The industry would be in a much better position to help dictate the specifics of these laws (or even avoid them entirely) if they could get their act together in terms of their own ratings system, and enforcement of such.
I think this guy is mostly right though. Parents have a difficult balance to try and manage between monitoring their kid's activities and allowing them some freedom to grow. A law that doesn't have any direct effect on the existence of certain video games, but merely restricts the sale of them to children doesn't seem particularly problematic to me. It's up to people with a better understanding of legalese than I possess to decide if a specific law is properly written to accomplish only that, but I have no problem with the idea of it.
I guess I don't see the policy as being particularly harmful. It's not saying that these games are illegal, it's not even saying that letting a child play the game is illegal. It's just about making a small part of parenting a little bit easier. It's not about pretending that violence doesn't exist, it's about helping parents control how their children are exposed to and learn about that violence. I don't think that violent video games, movies, or even porn will have a serious negative impact on your average well-adjusted child, but at the same time I would appreciate the ability as a parent to somewhat control how my child gets introduced to these things. The ESRB is a start, but unless game retailers really start enforcing it, then it's not really having much of an impact. It's probably easier for the movie industry to self-regulate, because there's relatively few theaters out there compared to stores that stock games, but I'm still surprised that the game industry and the retailers don't have their act together a little better on all of this. Maybe the threat of these laws will move that process along.
At the end of the day, I don't think this law accomplishes all that much. Most kids don't have the resources to go buy a $50 video game on their own. An adult likely helped out somewhere along the way, either knowingly or not. This law won't eliminate bad or indifferent parenting. I doesn't seem like a "slippery-slope" issue to me, nor should it make games any harder for adults to get their hands on.
It's the most fun with 4 people fighting. The chaos and unpredictability of it all is what really makes it work.
I'm not very big into the whole wikipedia community, but from the bits that I've read, it sounds like there's been a lot of internal discussion over how much of that "human generated information" belongs in wikipedia. My little house sitting in an unremarkable suburb has decades of history behind it, dozens of people were directly or indirectly involved in its creation, hundreds of people have walked through it, and I could probably write twenty pages of information about it pretty easily.
But it'd be a boring read, and not particularly important, even to me. Now that's an extreme example, but 99% of the "information" that is generated each day isn't really appropriate to wikipedia. Just because the amount of disk space that wikipedia occupies is trivial to increase doesn't mean that its goal should be to collect as much information as is possible. Wikipedia should not strive to be a repository of all knowledge, or even a completely thorough explanation of the particular articles that it does contain.
But you're right in that the buzz is on its way out. Wikipedia may not have peaked in terms of its usefulness, but in terms of its media exposure, it's not new and hip anymore. Such is life in our culture.
Religion, like just about everything else we experience, is heavily influenced by people. People can be good or bad, right or wrong, confident or confused, and so on. Like you said, having a belief in God doesn't make everything automatically clear to you, and anyone who says that they've got it all figured out is likely fooling themselves.
Religion is a lot like just about every other human organization, be it politics, business, education, sports, or whatever. It's got lots of participants who are confused, angry, competitive, greedy, manipulative, and/or just plain not nice. But it's also got lots of people who are hopeful, humble, working hard, trying to improve themselves, trying to help others, and just plain friendly and caring.
You would hope that religious organizations would be better at filtering out the bad, but that's a really tough thing to do. And the sad reality of life is that it's much harder to create than it is to destroy, so the deeds of one bad person tends to block out the good that many others have accomplished.
It's an interesting phenomenon that's sort of developed on the internet, which basically boils down to a mix of a lot of people thinking that they deserve something for nothing, and other people thinking that commerce being involved in something at any level taints the whole thing.
While companies certainly need to be careful about how they integrate money making into their websites, consumers as a whole need to realize that running a site that sees the sort of traffic that YouTube does costs a lot of money, and no person/group/or individual is going to just sit there and bleed out cash on it indefinitely. If everyone bails off of YouTube because of ads, another site without them might absorb all that traffic, but eventually they're going to need to find a way to make money too. The masses can bounce around to different websites for a while, but somewhere down the line no one will be willing to run that kind of site anymore, knowing that it's just a money pit.
I'll be happy to join the exodus from YouTube if they start making us watch 15 second ads before we can view an 8 second clip of someone juggling chainsaws, but if they want to add a non-intrusive and clearly marked ad at the end of a video, that's an awfully small price to pay for the ability to easily share videos with millions of people around the world.
But yeah, no matter what kind of ads they might do, a lot of people are going to get pissed off and feel mightily offended. But that sort of attitude is childish and unproductive. The saying goes "there's no such thing as a free lunch", but I think that here in the early days of the internet, a bunch of us users have managed to get plenty of free lunches. But instead of feeling grateful or lucky, many people would rather just bitch that they want a free lunch tomorrow and the next day and all of next week as well.
I think it's more just the continued reaction to all the hype that the PSP launched with. Lots of people couldn't stop telling everyone how this was finally going to be the true Gameboy killer. Sony was about to repeat the success they had with the Playstation, and Nintendo was going to be the lose the handheld market dominance just like they lost the console market.
The Wii was generally(with exceptions of course) mocked by much of the gaming media, calling the controller just a gimmick, people were basically writing Nintendo off as as good as dead, etc...
Basically it all boils down to expectations. The PSP was talking like a champ before the game, but has turned out just to be a decent player. It hasn't failed in the sense that it completely tanked, but if its main goal was to completely dominate the competition, then it failed on that account.
I'm curious to see how they implement dual screens and a touch screen in software for that DS emulation. I sort of understand the mindset of doing something just to see if it can be done, but I hope that we don't have to hear people going around telling everyone that the PSP can act as a DS.
(You'd likely be able to play Advance Wars 2 reasonably well, and that wouldn't be so bad)
Don't forget that there are many others who use YouTube differently than you do. If you're sitting in class or at the office bored or something, browsing through random videos can be fairly amusing. If google can make money selling ads on random blogs and stuff, I fail to see why that wouldn't also work for YouTube.
You have no sense of the scale of the damage. You also appear to have only a rudimentary sense of how mortgages work. I cannot just go to the bank and tell them I want to take out a mortgage on my house in order to build levees for the city.
If having a locally funded, designed, and built flood protection system is what New Orleans needs to survive, then that's what New Orleans will do. But it can't be done overnight. It wasn't done in the past, because the federal government told the citizens not to worry about it, the Army Corps of Engineers will handle it. They screwed it up, and their mistakes caused massive flooding in a city that had survived the wind and rain of Katrina with only mild damage.
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about in terms of the citizens of new orleans mortgaging their homes to pay for levees.
There are thousands of people down here willing and trying to clean up their neighborhoods, without the help of the federal government. I just can't give a full enough idea of how big of a project this is. Everyone on your block might fix up their houses, but you're still dependent on the government to fix the streets, fix the water lines, get the police force back up to speed, etc. Yes, much of this is the job of the local government, but you can't reasonably expect a city that just went through that level of a disaster to have the resources to get it all up and running at once. I don't know if you're imagining New Orleans as a bunch of lazy people sitting on the side of the road waiting for the government to help, but I can ensure you that that is not the case for the majority of the city.
It's not just as simple as if the economics are right, the rebuilding will just magically happen. New Orleans basically worthless mayor made headlines a while back for pointing out that NYC still hasn't built anything at the WTC site. And while that was an insensitive thing to say, and not a perfect analogy, I think it's fair to consider that to be some pretty valuable real estate. But as is always the case, there's a lot of circumstances beyond just the textbook economics, and things pretty much never move quickly or smoothly. I think that New Orleans as a whole can and will continue rebuilding, even if the federal government never gives out another dime. It'll just take much much longer, and many hardworking but unfortunate people won't be able to be a part of it for various reasons.
As you said, many people in Louisiana have done well from the oil industry. But for whatever reasons, decades ago an agreement was made that the federal government would handle storm protection via the Army Corps of Engineers. That protection failed. (under storm conditions less than what they claimed they were built for).
That's the most frustrating part of the whole thing. Whether or not you think the federal government should've taken responsibility for that shouldn't be relevant, because at the end of the day they did. And they screwed it up. Hey, it's a tough problem, and mistakes happen. But still, they messed up, and so they should be trying harder to fix it. When people dismiss the whole thing with things like "they knew they were building a city in an unsafe place", or "if they want better levees they should build them themselves", it's pretty upsetting. The federal government committed to a flood protection city that would've kept New Orleans safe from Katrina. They told us that the system was sound. I'm not naive enough to take everything a politician says at face value, but when you're dealing with something like flood protection, you expect the Corps of Engineers to have their act together.
The worst part is, the levees and flood walls around New Orleans are just a small portion of the huge amount of infrastructure nationwide that the federal government is responsible for. Like that highway bridge collapse a few months back, their is a ton of infrastructure of all types that has been under-maintained for decades, and it looks like it's going to start catching up to us. I don't know if there will be anything else of the scale of Katrina, but when we start losing faith in our government to even handle basic needs within our own country, that's a pretty big deal.
Your prices sound pretty darn reasonable, and I think far more people would generally agree with that valuation than the music industry would lead us to believe. And those who will download it and pay very little or nothing are the same people (students, low income, sometimes just plain selfish)who would download it elsewhere for free anyways.
Even if you decided to buy the album having never heard a note of it, and threw down $5 just because you know that radiohead is pretty well respected, that's more than the band would likely see from a CD sold in a store. So they come out better, you come out better, and it's just the middleman that loses out. But I guess their job isn't necessary anymore.
Agreed, it really is a shame that the government feels the need to sell this spectrum to one company. The price will be high for an individual company, causing the problems that you mentioned. But in the long run, the money gained will be just a drop in the bucket for the government.
So basically they're going to end up heavily limiting the benefits of the spectrum in return for an ultimately insignificant amount of money. It's almost certainly not in the best interests of the citizens.
New Orleans is an excellent place to build a city, which is why a city was built there in the first place. It is an intensely busy port, with a huge portion of the country's energy supply and seafood supply moving through it. Not to mention all the cultural stuff which is much harder to quantify.
You can argue whether the city should've been built there all day if you want, but at the end of the day, the city's there, it's been there for hundreds of years. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the city, and hundreds of thousands more living around the city. There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of buildings, homes, infrastructure, etc. that already exist, much of which is functional and in use.
And don't forget that the majority of the damage that the city suffered was due to failures in the protection system that the federal government built, controlled, and told the citizens was safe. In exchange for the protection, the citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana allowed the federal government to have their way with our coastline, primarily for the benefit of the country as a whole in terms of providing energy (oil).
Helping New Orleans rebuild and improving the storm protection and coastal restoration is the least the rest of the country could do. The amount of resources it would take to start making some significant progress is a small fraction of what our government has available to it, and it's really a shame that our priorities won't let that happen.
I think most music consumers have an innate sense of what they consider to be a good, fair price for music. It gets adjusted a little bit for different circumstances (OMG RADIOHEAD IS MY FAVORITE BAND!, I think that digital albums should be cheaper because of the lack of physical media/shipping costs, I'm a dirt poor college student right now, etc...), but if you were to take a poll of random people on the street, I'm guessing a pretty clear baseline would start to emerge.
People already pay ridiculously high prices for albums that they haven't heard all the way through. Often times they're buying it just for one or two songs that they've heard on the radio, and the rest of the disc is just gravy (or filler). The cost of CD's probably has a significant effect on the baseline perceived value of a digital album that I mentioned earlier, although I'd guess that most people would agree that a downloaded song should be cheaper than a disc.
You're probably right in that people will tend to underpay initially out of fear of "getting ripped off", unless they're huge radiohead fans. But if you do that, and it turns out you really dig the album, and you wish you had paid more; I'm sure radiohead wouldn't mind if you paid for and downloaded the album again.
It even goes beyond the code as well. Even a completely bug-free web application could be compromised through things like social engineering, an untrustworthy employee, or maybe even plain-old theft.
We like to pretend that the internet is some how this brave new world, but it's still built on a physical infrastructure that exists in the real world, and is designed and maintained by people that live in the real world. In the real world, making something 100% secure is not really feasible, so we just do the best we can and make contingencies for when security fails. I have deadbolts on all of my doors and I lock them when I leave the house, but that doesn't mean that I don't have insurance in case someone busts through a window.
There's not really a useful "insurance" system in place to cover my email account getting hijacked, but a smart consumer can take some steps to limit the potential damage. You can use different web services from different providers, so that the failures of one only affects a smaller portion of the services you use. You can avoid reusing passwords. You can be very careful with your personal information. Etc...
It's all a pain in the ass, but then again, I don't particularly enjoy having to spend all that extra money for homeowners insurance. It's just a necessary part of life, in both the "real world" and the internet world.
It's probably because if they dropped prices right now, sales still wouldn't massively increase because there's no games, and the PS3 would look even more stagnant than it does already.
I think that the 3D zelda games (in particular the N64 ones) are some of the greatest games ever. Although I love the original Zelda as well. Zelda 2 was different than the original, but still 2d, and I don't care for it much.
I've enjoyed what I've played of Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii so far. I never gave the GC versions a shot. I went back and tried to play the original metroid again a couple years ago, and couldn't really get into it.
I guess my point is, it's too bad you're not that big a fan of 3D games. It must be a tough time for you.
The way SL works (as per my second or third hand reading), is that the whole world (The Grid) is made up of a bunch of squares of virtual land (Sims). Supposedly each sim is its own server/blade/whatever. That sim is responsible for everything that happens within its virtual land space. This includes dealing with all of the players who are currently in that sim, but also all the interactions of physical objects within that sim, and probably more importantly, all of the scripted objects within that sim. When you create something in SL, you can not only model and texture it, but you can also use the SL scripting language to make objects function in all sorts of ways. You edit the script, it gets compiled, and it gets tucked into the object. Objects can have multiple scripts in them.
While in a sim, SL will share lots of information about what that particular server is dealing with. It's not unusual for some of the more crowded sims to have thousands of scripted objects living in a sim, and that's a lot of little things going on. Many of those scripts were not written by experienced programmers, so efficiency was likely not a big consideration.
Bungie's been doing that sort of story driven universe for a while. Halo shares a lot in common with the storyline that ran through the Marathon series, years ago when Bungie was a Mac only developer. I played the original marathon way back when, but never got around to the rest of the trilogy (I think it was a trilogy). But a few years ago I came across a website that basically listed all of the text from the game, almost as a screen play, and reading through it all was a reasonably entertaining story.
The Halo universe might not be 100% original, but it's got a lot of background and detail, and as such has a good bit of potential for future projects. A RTS game of some sort could certainly be interesting, or maybe one day an MMO that finds a way to combine individual soldier combat with large scale spaceship combat and all that. There's nothing insurmountable stopping anyone else from making games like that, but having a reasonably well known and already partially described universe to place the game in gives it more legitimacy and hopefully can give players a more immediate connection to a game.
While I'll agree that as far as games are concerned, the greatest graphics in the world can only go so far in making crappy gameplay fun. But I'm willing to cut the linked article a break, since you can't really describe "fun gameplay" in any sort of useful scientific way, meaning that such a discussion might be outside of the purview of a PopSci magazine article.
It seems pretty straightforward to me that the article was not intended to be a dissertation on game design, rather just a quick overview of some of the aspects of video games that have a connection to "real" science. There are lots of reasons beyond gaming why we should develop more realistic simulations of water and fire. The fact that that same development can make our video games look better is just a nice bonus.
I'd imagine that most of the engineers developing that new motion capture system would not have that much to contribute to video game plots or art direction. And that's probably one of the reasons why they've chosen to be engineers instead of writers/artists.
I don't have any specific or extra knowledge about the deal that Apple and ATT have made concerning the iPhone, I can imagine ways that this arrangement could've been made that wouldn't really increase the risks to Apple. As long as whatever revenue sharing deal they've got is specific to the iPhone only, then how does that deal really change Apple's investment in it.
Basically, if ATT messes the iphone up, then the iphone will be a failure for Apple, subscription revenue sharing or not. Also, I expect that Apple is making a decent profit on the sale of the phone itself, and the huge pile of them that they've already sold has probably put a big dent in the R&D costs.
Moore's Law doesn't really have anything to do with MHz or GHz, or clock speeds at all. It's more about the number of transistors crammed into a cost effective chip. For a while there, one of the main things that intel decided to do with all those transistors was to push the clock-speed as fast as they could. This certainly made computers more powerful, and it was an easy number to work into advertisements and such.But at the end of the day, it wasn't the only way that processors could be improved. To bring in a dreaded car analogy, they were making a car go faster by adding more cylinders to the engine, while mostly ignoring things like aerodynamics and efficiency in other parts of the car. But eventually they reached a point where there wasn't any room in the engine compartment for more cylinders, so now they're looking at making the rest of the vehicle more efficient.
The transistor count will keep going up, Moore's Law will continue. It's just that those new transistors will be used a little differently.