The problem is that the materials used to manufacture these cells are expensive. Economy of scale reaps the greatest benefits where the basic materials are/can be plentiful and the manufacturing is the major cost. However, if the cells are made of pure gold laced with diamond-studded glue (probably not, although the article never says what they're made of), then a larger amount being manufactured is going to have either a minimum reduction in cost or a large inflation of the cost (plus wedding rings will become more expensive).
My guess is that the materials are the expensive part.
Their idea of freedom is locking people in someone elses dungeons for 5 years without trial Yes, exactly, every person in America is infringing on the civil rights of the rest of the world. I saw my mother taking down a German the other day.
Unless, that is, everyone in the United States of America cares more about themselves and their fellow citizens than they do someone in Germany that Boeing may or may not have helped kidnap. America, as a rule, cares more about themselves than anyone else, and it's only when soldiers stopped coming home that people started opposing the war in Iraq. The thing is, taking down CNN affects them and their loved ones and none of the other news outlets would stand for it. You see, at that point it's THEIR freedom that's at stake, not some poor sap in another part of the world.
Is this the way that everyone in America is? No, obviously not, just look at Slashdot and opinion polls. However, enough people think like that to swing elections or incite riots, so it's close enough.
I agree with the principle of what you said, but I don't think it applies in this instance. There's a big difference between holding someone accountable for another person's speech and holding someone accountable for the legal actions of the countries leaders in their support when they hold the title of king. You're right that we don't hold politicians accountable for their supporters, but the king of Thailand's supporters are government officials who are passing laws.
However, I also am not aware of the political climate in Thailand, so for all I know the king has absolutely no power over what's happening and no influence over those doing it, and if that's the case then I'm obviously very wrong and I apologize.
The Bush Administration wouldn't get away with shutting down CNN. The best they could do is stop cooperating and making life hard for CNN, but not shut it down because we here in America still love our freedom. I live in the state with the highest approval rate for Bush, and even here I haven't met anyone who thinks that his wiretapping moves are good, just that they're bearable and he's done more good overall. If one of our leaders touched the press, maybe people in Utah wouldn't support his removal, but he would surely be impeached as fast as you could make a cool name ending in "gate".
p.s. (this isn't flamebait, I'm describing others opinions, not my own, and I'm certainly not trying to offend or pick a fight).
Separating the man from the followers is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. From all I've heard, he is a really good guy and he doesn't mind a little fun poked at him. From what I've heard, it's his supported and other people who fight the youtube thing. From what I've heard, followers will fight something for the king so that he can later deny it and say that he supports it and thus get support from both sides. By letting his followers fight youtube, he fights youtube by virtue of the doubt.
Going by the definition of originality from the US Patent Office, they were the first to combine the words "Doom" and the roman numberal "III", therefore it was original.
Actually, your analysis still doesn't hold up because my post was refuting the comment about a lack of sales, not the moneysink comment. However, to refute the moneysink would require an analysis of the cost of upkeep for starcraft (right now they have minimal development on patches, so the primary cost is server maintenance and bandwidth) subtract the revenue from tournaments, the revenue from advertisements on battle.net and the revenue from sales.
Even then the analysis is simplistic since keeping the servers running on battle.net and the patches flowing is an extremely good way of advertising for starcraft 2 and keeping anticipation high. The value of something like that is hard to quantify, but it almost certainly lies above the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since it's a form of advertising, you can say that it can go straight to the bottom line.
With all that taken into account and without hard numbers on the cost of Starcraft upkeep (which will be hard/impossible to come by), it's just a matter of opinion on how those numbers come out, which I personally think has Blizzard making a lot of money off of starcraft even before the sequel was announced.
I wonder what John Carmack thinks of DirectX/OpenGL improvements that have come out since 2004. It'll be interesting to see what he can do with the new technologies.
Also, assuming that it's an FPS, is there any new territory to cover? It seems to have pretty much just run its source and any new IP would probably just be a new flavor of aliens/demons/WW2.
it's better to assist the disabled than the lazy Actually, everyone I know that is capable of getting out of the IE stranglehold have done so. The problem everyone else I know has is that lack of computer knowledge is as disabling as having a device that is locked into one browser.
On another note, how useful will this be for devices that aren't running on top of one of the three OS's specified? If your device isn't running firefox or IE, then it's probably going to have some problems with Gears, which is obviously not just built on top of the browsers.
Parents shouldn't have the right to deny their children education any more than they have the right to deny them decent medical attention They don't have either right and won't have either right under a voucher program (which is what McCain is implying if I'm not mistaken). However, if a parent wants an alternative medical treatment for the child, then they can almost always opt for it. An alternative treatment is a better analogy than no medical treatment at all.
Besides, the way around that would be for all schools that receive government funding to have the same standardized tests as the public schools and to require a certain proportion of students to pass (making exceptions for special needs schools). Religion is not synonymous with ignorance despite what many atheists may think.
I'm with you. Almost every time I commit to commenting more, I can't find things to comment that aren't obvious in the code. In 90% of the cases, the code should either comment itself or be rewritten.
I know it's overused, but quite frankly, there's no way that net neutrality is going to be a big issue with illegal immigration, the war in Iraq, Iran's fascist leader and health care in the mess it is. We should still discuss it and get an open dialog going, but I don't think it's going to even register on most peoples radar, even nerds.
Let's see, the drug trafficking, the weapon smuggling and the flood of humans coming over the border isn't enough for you? The problem isn't that they didn't fill out a bunch of forms, it's that they can't get workers comp if they get injured and that their employers take advantage of them and will often not pay them for their work and threaten to turn the into the authorities. It's that they're often paid under the table so they get no taxes taken out, or they can't file for a refund so they get too much taxes taken out.
Your "oblique nod to religious education" is actually vouchers for private school, where half the money that would usually go towards public education for your child can go towards a private education instead. It's not a way to get someones child "indoctrinated," it's so middle class parents like mine can afford to send my little brother with a genius IQ to a school that will accelerate his education so he doesn't get bored in class while the public education system gets to keep half; it benefits everyone. If some parents prefer a religious school, is it that big of a deal? You can send your child to a school that teaches your children to ridicule the children getting "indoctrinated".
The problem is that they can turn a profit on their current services, they're just too greedy to actually do what's right by not double dipping. They're turning a profit, but if they can get a few million from google they'll turn even more of a profit.
You could also abuse it with options and just to harm a competitor. In my opinion its absolutely wrong to let the spammer and other people with bad intentions have power over a stock's price. If people fall for these pump and dump scams a lot, contact them and let them know that doing so is really dumb. If they continue, have something in place where those people specifically cannot buy/sell as stock that's being targeted by a pump and dump.
I predict they'll do the same thing they did with the DS and GBA, come out with a hi-def capable Wii with DVD playback in a year or two, drop the price of the current Wii dramatically and place the new one at the previous price point. Consumers will eat it up because they get a still-inexpensive system with increased functionality. Nintendo wins because they can put out the same console two or three times with very good, but quite easy, upgrades.
The faceless entity that is an mmorpg and the parent company wouldn't want to favor certain players. However, the individual developers and people working with the internals of the game could easily favor their friends and people who had become their friends through the game. This is the reason that people working on the game should never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances, to personally get invested in the game or its players.
As much fun as Eve is (and I've heard it's easily the best MMO for people who want seriously fun pvp and pve action), the parent company consistently handles issues in a non-professional way (ie immature, not thinking clearly, looking for a break and the benefit of the doubt). Their original scandle is what convinced me that I'd never play the game. When dealing with something as large and lucrative as an MMO, the devs shouldn't have been in the position to cheat in the first place, much less been able to pull it off and have the company cover for them.
Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early?
While what you say could easily be true of a lot of people, I personally would have two immediate problems with that thought.
First, in the current generation of MMOs it doesn't really allow for diverse content at the end, it's the same thing over and over again and there's always a cap on how powerful you can get. At some point you get diminishing returns.
Second, somewhat related to the first, is that there has to be a stopping point. Every character has a beginning and an end in modern media, and the end is important as well. Walking away from a character feeling satisfied is much superior to an endless grind where you can't reach a point where you say, "This is as good as I can get, nothing else is going to be substantially better, and I'm okay with that." If you can reach that point, then it moots your never-ending opportunities point.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the materials used to manufacture these cells are expensive. Economy of scale reaps the greatest benefits where the basic materials are/can be plentiful and the manufacturing is the major cost. However, if the cells are made of pure gold laced with diamond-studded glue (probably not, although the article never says what they're made of), then a larger amount being manufactured is going to have either a minimum reduction in cost or a large inflation of the cost (plus wedding rings will become more expensive).
My guess is that the materials are the expensive part.
Unless, that is, everyone in the United States of America cares more about themselves and their fellow citizens than they do someone in Germany that Boeing may or may not have helped kidnap. America, as a rule, cares more about themselves than anyone else, and it's only when soldiers stopped coming home that people started opposing the war in Iraq. The thing is, taking down CNN affects them and their loved ones and none of the other news outlets would stand for it. You see, at that point it's THEIR freedom that's at stake, not some poor sap in another part of the world.
Is this the way that everyone in America is? No, obviously not, just look at Slashdot and opinion polls. However, enough people think like that to swing elections or incite riots, so it's close enough.
I agree with the principle of what you said, but I don't think it applies in this instance. There's a big difference between holding someone accountable for another person's speech and holding someone accountable for the legal actions of the countries leaders in their support when they hold the title of king. You're right that we don't hold politicians accountable for their supporters, but the king of Thailand's supporters are government officials who are passing laws.
However, I also am not aware of the political climate in Thailand, so for all I know the king has absolutely no power over what's happening and no influence over those doing it, and if that's the case then I'm obviously very wrong and I apologize.
The Bush Administration wouldn't get away with shutting down CNN. The best they could do is stop cooperating and making life hard for CNN, but not shut it down because we here in America still love our freedom. I live in the state with the highest approval rate for Bush, and even here I haven't met anyone who thinks that his wiretapping moves are good, just that they're bearable and he's done more good overall. If one of our leaders touched the press, maybe people in Utah wouldn't support his removal, but he would surely be impeached as fast as you could make a cool name ending in "gate".
p.s. (this isn't flamebait, I'm describing others opinions, not my own, and I'm certainly not trying to offend or pick a fight).
Separating the man from the followers is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. From all I've heard, he is a really good guy and he doesn't mind a little fun poked at him. From what I've heard, it's his supported and other people who fight the youtube thing. From what I've heard, followers will fight something for the king so that he can later deny it and say that he supports it and thus get support from both sides. By letting his followers fight youtube, he fights youtube by virtue of the doubt.
Just for clarification, the parent was speaking of voting with your wallets being the libertarian solution.
Going by the definition of originality from the US Patent Office, they were the first to combine the words "Doom" and the roman numberal "III", therefore it was original.
Actually, your analysis still doesn't hold up because my post was refuting the comment about a lack of sales, not the moneysink comment. However, to refute the moneysink would require an analysis of the cost of upkeep for starcraft (right now they have minimal development on patches, so the primary cost is server maintenance and bandwidth) subtract the revenue from tournaments, the revenue from advertisements on battle.net and the revenue from sales.
Even then the analysis is simplistic since keeping the servers running on battle.net and the patches flowing is an extremely good way of advertising for starcraft 2 and keeping anticipation high. The value of something like that is hard to quantify, but it almost certainly lies above the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since it's a form of advertising, you can say that it can go straight to the bottom line.
With all that taken into account and without hard numbers on the cost of Starcraft upkeep (which will be hard/impossible to come by), it's just a matter of opinion on how those numbers come out, which I personally think has Blizzard making a lot of money off of starcraft even before the sequel was announced.
I wonder what John Carmack thinks of DirectX/OpenGL improvements that have come out since 2004. It'll be interesting to see what he can do with the new technologies.
Also, assuming that it's an FPS, is there any new territory to cover? It seems to have pretty much just run its source and any new IP would probably just be a new flavor of aliens/demons/WW2.
The number 2 seller for PC games in North America? That starcraft isn't selling many new copies?
On another note, how useful will this be for devices that aren't running on top of one of the three OS's specified? If your device isn't running firefox or IE, then it's probably going to have some problems with Gears, which is obviously not just built on top of the browsers.
Or the present trends will continue and the Wii will rule everywhere.
Besides, the way around that would be for all schools that receive government funding to have the same standardized tests as the public schools and to require a certain proportion of students to pass (making exceptions for special needs schools). Religion is not synonymous with ignorance despite what many atheists may think.
I'm with you. Almost every time I commit to commenting more, I can't find things to comment that aren't obvious in the code. In 90% of the cases, the code should either comment itself or be rewritten.
To repeat a sig that I love, "I'm a fiscal conservative, too bad there's no party for us..."
I know it's overused, but quite frankly, there's no way that net neutrality is going to be a big issue with illegal immigration, the war in Iraq, Iran's fascist leader and health care in the mess it is. We should still discuss it and get an open dialog going, but I don't think it's going to even register on most peoples radar, even nerds.
Let's see, the drug trafficking, the weapon smuggling and the flood of humans coming over the border isn't enough for you? The problem isn't that they didn't fill out a bunch of forms, it's that they can't get workers comp if they get injured and that their employers take advantage of them and will often not pay them for their work and threaten to turn the into the authorities. It's that they're often paid under the table so they get no taxes taken out, or they can't file for a refund so they get too much taxes taken out.
Your "oblique nod to religious education" is actually vouchers for private school, where half the money that would usually go towards public education for your child can go towards a private education instead. It's not a way to get someones child "indoctrinated," it's so middle class parents like mine can afford to send my little brother with a genius IQ to a school that will accelerate his education so he doesn't get bored in class while the public education system gets to keep half; it benefits everyone. If some parents prefer a religious school, is it that big of a deal? You can send your child to a school that teaches your children to ridicule the children getting "indoctrinated".
The problem is that they can turn a profit on their current services, they're just too greedy to actually do what's right by not double dipping. They're turning a profit, but if they can get a few million from google they'll turn even more of a profit.
You could also abuse it with options and just to harm a competitor. In my opinion its absolutely wrong to let the spammer and other people with bad intentions have power over a stock's price. If people fall for these pump and dump scams a lot, contact them and let them know that doing so is really dumb. If they continue, have something in place where those people specifically cannot buy/sell as stock that's being targeted by a pump and dump.
I predict they'll do the same thing they did with the DS and GBA, come out with a hi-def capable Wii with DVD playback in a year or two, drop the price of the current Wii dramatically and place the new one at the previous price point. Consumers will eat it up because they get a still-inexpensive system with increased functionality. Nintendo wins because they can put out the same console two or three times with very good, but quite easy, upgrades.
Actually, the coffee cup manufacturer would write the driver, that's the advantage of using Microsoft!
The faceless entity that is an mmorpg and the parent company wouldn't want to favor certain players. However, the individual developers and people working with the internals of the game could easily favor their friends and people who had become their friends through the game. This is the reason that people working on the game should never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances, to personally get invested in the game or its players.
As much fun as Eve is (and I've heard it's easily the best MMO for people who want seriously fun pvp and pve action), the parent company consistently handles issues in a non-professional way (ie immature, not thinking clearly, looking for a break and the benefit of the doubt). Their original scandle is what convinced me that I'd never play the game. When dealing with something as large and lucrative as an MMO, the devs shouldn't have been in the position to cheat in the first place, much less been able to pull it off and have the company cover for them.
Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early?
While what you say could easily be true of a lot of people, I personally would have two immediate problems with that thought.
First, in the current generation of MMOs it doesn't really allow for diverse content at the end, it's the same thing over and over again and there's always a cap on how powerful you can get. At some point you get diminishing returns.
Second, somewhat related to the first, is that there has to be a stopping point. Every character has a beginning and an end in modern media, and the end is important as well. Walking away from a character feeling satisfied is much superior to an endless grind where you can't reach a point where you say, "This is as good as I can get, nothing else is going to be substantially better, and I'm okay with that." If you can reach that point, then it moots your never-ending opportunities point.
As I said, YMMV, but for me that's not true.