Then that severely limits its use in the market. Let's put it this way - the machine has GOT to be insanely expensive to begin with. Why not add a few more bucks to the cost and have a floating point unit (or more?) per core.
That makes the machine scale to any task. I imagine its use as a mere web server/etc. pigeonholes the server and puts it in danger of jumping the shark early on, or worse, doing a betamax.
There are millions of acts of ID theft per year and rarely any arrests except those anecdotes you posted. Just as many pedophiles are standing out in the open, being reported for obvious stuff like posting ads for pedo sites on usenet, and not being nailed.
File swappers, on the other hand? Being sued and busted like crazy.
Now feel free to cover your eyes and scream la la la la all you want.
I am thinking someone might make a case that the 2/3 majority rule is somehow inefficient, and that would precipitate a vote for a Senate/Congress setup.
The people running the game, of course, might panic and decide to declare such a change would break the game... one could only hope...
Indeed. And the key to keeping the workerbees from all turning against you in such a situation is to pit them against each other by defining arbitrary lines between them.
In real life the upper class pits the Union worker against the migrant farm worker.
In a MUSH Joanne pits her flirtees against Lisa's.
In ATITD2, I am assuming that the workerbees will be led to vote for and against things by the designated popular person (maybe even a former workerbee, but also likely to be a vapid uberflirter). They'll naturally form cliques as a result (I think it's called a "cult or personality"?), and opposing cliques will duke it out with words and votes. Of course, the people at the bottom who support the survival of the ones on top will be fighting amongst themselves and will not see the big picture.
I'm not saying the upper class will be running a conspiracy; this is just how they get when they're elevated to that position. The danger is in that no one really realizes the box that they're in, and that they're being played.
The danger is that pollution will run rampant in this virtual world, and other tangibly, measurably bad things will happen, as cliques use their popularity muscle to get their way on things.
Depending on how well ATITD2 is implemented, you could be looking at an accurate representation of Earth in a digital petri dish...
"Besides arguing, there is another way to resolve bigger conflicts: the law. Unlike any other game, players are allowed, within certain limits, to change the rules of the game. For this they first need to write a petition outlining the law they want to introduce, for example not allowing players to place their house closer than 100 feet to another player's house. They then need to collect a certain number of signatures from other players that support this petition."
"For example the first test of Art requires that you build a statue, and get 20 players to look at it and judge it interesting."
"ATITD is a very social game, supporting both individual and collective achievement. It is possible for everyone to just playing for himself, but not very effective. To advance your personal path through the tech tree, you often need tools that are quite expensive to build but infrequently used. So forming a guild which shares its tools makes a lot of sense. Public-spirited individuals or guilds can even make their tools available for use to everybody else. So while there is no combat, there is most certainly the possibility of conflict. Sharing property in a group is not always easy. And everything you do, affects the other players. Build a house in which to place your tools, and at the very least you prevent somebody else from placing a house at the same spot, or block somebody else's view. Build and operate a mine, and you will cause pollution, making somebody else's sheep sick and flax wither. You are changing the world all the time, and that can have positive or negative consequences."
My prediction: This game is absolutely ripe for the picking by people who are good at backstabbing and sycophantry. People who are highly skilled and socially unskilled will be reduced to workerbees, while the PHB types will wind up cliquing their way to the top and lording it over the rest. I can't wait to see this...
LOL! It's not a virus. You bought it. What you charge people for is irrelevant. You bought a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. No-one's going to pay you anything.
Starforce copy protection limits the functionality of your computer far beyond the scope of preventing the illegal copying of the game.
It blocks legitimate uses - the use of debuggers for other things, and the mounting of virtual CDs - as well as illegitimate uses.
I call this the tuna dragnet effect in which the net is cast solely to catch tuna, but it also regularly catches dolphins and sea turtles as well.
The concept that the runaway consumption of natural resources and the paving over of fertile land
either in the name of western Capitalism, or in the name of nature-unfriendly Communism (China and the former USSR has/had a HORRIBLE environmental record)
can go on forever
is science fiction.
Re:That'll lower the productivity index
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
You have plenty of choice, now get over yourself. What choices?
There are no new white collar jobs. So what choices do you have? Your philosophy is empty because it lacks substantiation.
If the glass is cracked at the bottom and water is pouring out, and duct tape isn't anywhere to be found, a "the glass is half full" observation is tragically wrong.
You're locked in because you choose not to find a better job.
You're in a desert with no oasis in sight for the next 2000 miles. You are at a fairly small oasis that will give you trickles of water.
Do you a) find a better oasis b) stay where you are
I don't agree with the "find another job" remark, since there *are* more workers than jobs, and thus even the really good people can be out of work simply because there is no work to be done, but still, this author did not intend to troll anyone.
If the troll moderation was handed down because of the socialism remark, love2hateMS was actually right. Corporations do not like what socialist policies stand for, which is achieving a balance between corporate power and the power of workers and consumers. Even the tiniest *drop* of socialism interferes with maximizing shareholder returns on investment, and that's harmful to a "business climate" in which shareholder ROI is ~God Almighty~ and thus corporations desire ALL the power they can get their hands on.
(This is not a corporate conspiracy, it's just a natural logical defense mechanism they have to ensure their own survival and prosperity.)
I must thus protest the modding of love2hateMS as a troll even though I disagree somewhat with him/her.
and it was intended to be stupid. But I see some people might actually espouse that point of view, so let me debunk it here.
The reality is, if you had your way... namely, if a) poverty were defined strictly as having no ability to obtain any kind of sophisticated stuff (car, computers, etc) and b) the only way to qualify for assistance was to meet this standard of poverty
then you would have major, major problems across the entire economic food chain.
Let us say that the poor really should sell off their unnecessary belongings in order to qualify as poor (for the sake of social programs).
They would sell off and no longer buy (as long as they're poor) TVs, VCRs, computers, or cars. This automatically means that the people who sell these items, new (and the poor do sometimes buy new stuff!) or used, will not make money. That means they face greatly reduced profits, and thus, they will have to cut payrolls. That's called layoffs, sonny. Layoffs happen, then fewer people buy stuff, and it snowballs until you have a deep recession or even a depression.
Of course, if you believe social programs for the poor should be cut (this is what ultra conservative Libertarians believe), then you only help to accelerate the losses that merchants will suffer.
Remember, that while merchants dislike being taxed and regulated, the alternative is to put more economic pressure on individual citizens which pressures them to spend less. Less Government overhead is offset by steeply decreased profits. What good is lower taxes if you nearly aren't making any sales?
sell their computers and electronic eq as a condition for benefits?
JUUUUUUUST kidding, folks.
Seriously, though.
"Players in the Price Makes Sense have to use their math skills to figure out the best food deal; for instance, that six servings of eggs at $1.20 is cheaper per serving than five servings of chicken at $2.00."
The error in the reasoning here is that 6 servings of eggs probably means more cholesterol than 5 servings of chicken, oh and it's a certainty that 5 servings of chicken fills you up far more than 6 servings of eggs. Based on what fills you up, the 6 servings of chicken at $2.00 is the best deal.
This brings me to the major question of my post... how credible is the "education" this game offers?
Oh, and if I have a Gameboy Advance and I'm on welfare, and this game only plays on the PS2, am I SOL? o_O
Product liability lawsuits happen because products injure or kill people.
Not all lawsuits stem from some rocket scientist being burned in the groin by hot Mickey D's coffee. I doubt even most lawsuits are like that.
"Litigation triage legislation", when the corporations (whose sole function is to maximize shareholder value) define it as "we need fewer standards for the quality and safety of our products so we can sell whatever we want and not be liable if it hurts someone." That is also how they will lobby your political leaders to define it.
I'm sorry if my original post portrayed this as a giant conspiracy - it's not. The act of holding America and our values hostage - including the corporate poisoning of regulatory/litigation reform - is nothing more than a logical extension of their need to protect and maximize profits and returns for their shareholders.
They need to be restrained by the radical concept that the survival of the human race, the safety of consumers, the health of our ecosystem, and the time honored rights of workers (as already defined in America today) come first, and shareholder returns come second.
Corporations aren't evil; they're amoral. They're not out to poison the environment and enslave people economically; they simply don't care if that's the side effect. Just as long as they're "maximizing shareholder value", everything is fine. This is absolutely positively right. I did not clarify my point well enough, but you did. Thanks a lot, and I sure hope your post gets modded up.:)
It's more expensive here because of nasty evil socialist edicts like *workplace safety regulations *environmental pollution controls *the 40 hour work week restriction - And that sort of stuff. That is far more expensive than just business taxes alone.
Global outsourcing is absolutely nothing more than big business's way of saying "this country cares about its environment and its workers and as such we choose to do business where such concerns are nonexistent."
Corporations do not care about you, or the air, water or soil that they might pollute. They care solely about profit, and when the good of humanity, or its very survival, is at odds with their profit margins, they decide profit margins must win. Thus they threaten us with foreign outsourcing - either we cave in and give them what they want (regulation and lower cost of doing business - which includes eliminating environmental laws and ALL workers' rights), or they leave for another country who will.
To steal a Rush Limbaugh quote, America is being held hostage.
DoubleClick would have to spend a pile of money and time, repeatedly, to make better and better deterrents and defenses against DDoS attacks, whereas the DDoSers spend no money at all in attacking their defenses.
For a corporation, time is money and money is time; when you have to waste both money and time simultaneously your losses are geometric or even exponential, and I'm just talking about the work they have to do in the aftermath of a DDoS attack. That is on top of the fact that DoubleClick already lost profits and profit potential while they were down.
The object of the DDoS game is to pinch their money pipeline in this fashion, often enough and long enough that it has a real honest to God deleterious effect on their viability.
Slashdot Mirror
when Britain starts making 'em?
Then that severely limits its use in the market. Let's put it this way - the machine has GOT to be insanely expensive to begin with. Why not add a few more bucks to the cost and have a floating point unit (or more?) per core.
That makes the machine scale to any task. I imagine its use as a mere web server/etc. pigeonholes the server and puts it in danger of jumping the shark early on, or worse, doing a betamax.
Hmmmm?
Yawn.
There are millions of acts of ID theft per year and rarely any arrests except those anecdotes you posted. Just as many pedophiles are standing out in the open, being reported for obvious stuff like posting ads for pedo sites on usenet, and not being nailed.
File swappers, on the other hand? Being sued and busted like crazy.
Now feel free to cover your eyes and scream la la la la all you want.
You stand a 1 in 7000 chance of being busted for ID theft/credit fraud ***even if you're reported.***
Next?
Terrorists
Pedophiles
and identity thieves
all of whom are known, reported and ready for the DOJ to grab, but are running wild and unchecked.
Why is that?
(I know why, but I'll let someone else say it.)
Zone
Alarm
(at least for single player games)
the easier it is to gum up all the works.
I think Mr. Scott said that in one of the Star Trek movies?
I am thinking someone might make a case that the 2/3 majority rule is somehow inefficient, and that would precipitate a vote for a Senate/Congress setup.
The people running the game, of course, might panic and decide to declare such a change would break the game... one could only hope...
RIGHT ON... do NOT buy their stuff, and do NOT SHARE IT ONLINE.
Buy things second hand, if you must. The RIAA makes nothing on second hand sales.
Ooooh, fun!!!
Can they use a 2/3 majority to pass a law that requires future laws to be passed by a 100 person Senate and xx person Congress?
If so, can players then bribe voters or these new 'politicians' with in-game resources?
Indeed. And the key to keeping the workerbees from all turning against you in such a situation is to pit them against each other by defining arbitrary lines between them.
In real life the upper class pits the Union worker against the migrant farm worker.
In a MUSH Joanne pits her flirtees against Lisa's.
In ATITD2, I am assuming that the workerbees will be led to vote for and against things by the designated popular person (maybe even a former workerbee, but also likely to be a vapid uberflirter). They'll naturally form cliques as a result (I think it's called a "cult or personality"?), and opposing cliques will duke it out with words and votes. Of course, the people at the bottom who support the survival of the ones on top will be fighting amongst themselves and will not see the big picture.
I'm not saying the upper class will be running a conspiracy; this is just how they get when they're elevated to that position. The danger is in that no one really realizes the box that they're in, and that they're being played.
The danger is that pollution will run rampant in this virtual world, and other tangibly, measurably bad things will happen, as cliques use their popularity muscle to get their way on things.
Depending on how well ATITD2 is implemented, you could be looking at an accurate representation of Earth in a digital petri dish...
"Besides arguing, there is another way to resolve bigger conflicts: the law. Unlike any other game, players are allowed, within certain limits, to change the rules of the game. For this they first need to write a petition outlining the law they want to introduce, for example not allowing players to place their house closer than 100 feet to another player's house. They then need to collect a certain number of signatures from other players that support this petition."
"For example the first test of Art requires that you build a statue, and get 20 players to look at it and judge it interesting."
"ATITD is a very social game, supporting both individual and collective achievement. It is possible for everyone to just playing for himself, but not very effective. To advance your personal path through the tech tree, you often need tools that are quite expensive to build but infrequently used. So forming a guild which shares its tools makes a lot of sense. Public-spirited individuals or guilds can even make their tools available for use to everybody else.
So while there is no combat, there is most certainly the possibility of conflict. Sharing property in a group is not always easy. And everything you do, affects the other players. Build a house in which to place your tools, and at the very least you prevent somebody else from placing a house at the same spot, or block somebody else's view. Build and operate a mine, and you will cause pollution, making somebody else's sheep sick and flax wither. You are changing the world all the time, and that can have positive or negative consequences."
My prediction: This game is absolutely ripe for the picking by people who are good at backstabbing and sycophantry. People who are highly skilled and socially unskilled will be reduced to workerbees, while the PHB types will wind up cliquing their way to the top and lording it over the rest. I can't wait to see this...
You're right.
God knows there was no Olympics before there was capitalism.
LOL! It's not a virus. You bought it. What you charge people for is irrelevant. You bought a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. No-one's going to pay you anything.
Starforce copy protection limits the functionality of your computer far beyond the scope of preventing the illegal copying of the game.
It blocks legitimate uses - the use of debuggers for other things, and the mounting of virtual CDs - as well as illegitimate uses.
I call this the tuna dragnet effect in which the net is cast solely to catch tuna, but it also regularly catches dolphins and sea turtles as well.
The concept that the runaway consumption of natural resources and the paving over of fertile land
either in the name of western Capitalism, or in the name of nature-unfriendly Communism (China and the former USSR has/had a HORRIBLE environmental record)
can go on forever
is science fiction.
You have plenty of choice, now get over yourself.
What choices?
There are no new white collar jobs. So what choices do you have? Your philosophy is empty because it lacks substantiation.
If the glass is cracked at the bottom and water is pouring out, and duct tape isn't anywhere to be found, a "the glass is half full" observation is tragically wrong.
You're locked in because you choose not to find a better job.
You're in a desert with no oasis in sight for the next 2000 miles. You are at a fairly small oasis that will give you trickles of water.
Do you
a) find a better oasis
b) stay where you are
?
I don't agree with the "find another job" remark, since there *are* more workers than jobs, and thus even the really good people can be out of work simply because there is no work to be done, but still, this author did not intend to troll anyone.
If the troll moderation was handed down because of the socialism remark, love2hateMS was actually right. Corporations do not like what socialist policies stand for, which is achieving a balance between corporate power and the power of workers and consumers. Even the tiniest *drop* of socialism interferes with maximizing shareholder returns on investment, and that's harmful to a "business climate" in which shareholder ROI is ~God Almighty~ and thus corporations desire ALL the power they can get their hands on.
(This is not a corporate conspiracy, it's just a natural logical defense mechanism they have to ensure their own survival and prosperity.)
I must thus protest the modding of love2hateMS as a troll even though I disagree somewhat with him/her.
and it was intended to be stupid. But I see some people might actually espouse that point of view, so let me debunk it here.
The reality is, if you had your way...
namely, if
a) poverty were defined strictly as having no ability to obtain any kind of sophisticated stuff (car, computers, etc)
and
b) the only way to qualify for assistance was to meet this standard of poverty
then you would have major, major problems across the entire economic food chain.
Let us say that the poor really should sell off their unnecessary belongings in order to qualify as poor (for the sake of social programs).
They would sell off and no longer buy (as long as they're poor) TVs, VCRs, computers, or cars. This automatically means that the people who sell these items, new (and the poor do sometimes buy new stuff!) or used, will not make money. That means they face greatly reduced profits, and thus, they will have to cut payrolls. That's called layoffs, sonny. Layoffs happen, then fewer people buy stuff, and it snowballs until you have a deep recession or even a depression.
Of course, if you believe social programs for the poor should be cut (this is what ultra conservative Libertarians believe), then you only help to accelerate the losses that merchants will suffer.
Remember, that while merchants dislike being taxed and regulated, the alternative is to put more economic pressure on individual citizens which pressures them to spend less. Less Government overhead is offset by steeply decreased profits. What good is lower taxes if you nearly aren't making any sales?
sell their computers and electronic eq as a condition for benefits?
JUUUUUUUST kidding, folks.
Seriously, though.
"Players in the Price Makes Sense have to use their math skills to figure out the best food deal; for instance, that six servings of eggs at $1.20 is cheaper per serving than five servings of chicken at $2.00."
The error in the reasoning here is that 6 servings of eggs probably means more cholesterol than 5 servings of chicken, oh and it's a certainty that 5 servings of chicken fills you up far more than 6 servings of eggs. Based on what fills you up, the 6 servings of chicken at $2.00 is the best deal.
This brings me to the major question of my post... how credible is the "education" this game offers?
Oh, and if I have a Gameboy Advance and I'm on welfare, and this game only plays on the PS2, am I SOL? o_O
Product liability lawsuits happen because products injure or kill people.
Not all lawsuits stem from some rocket scientist being burned in the groin by hot Mickey D's coffee. I doubt even most lawsuits are like that.
"Litigation triage legislation", when the corporations (whose sole function is to maximize shareholder value) define it as "we need fewer standards for the quality and safety of our products so we can sell whatever we want and not be liable if it hurts someone." That is also how they will lobby your political leaders to define it.
I'm sorry if my original post portrayed this as a giant conspiracy - it's not. The act of holding America and our values hostage - including the corporate poisoning of regulatory/litigation reform - is nothing more than a logical extension of their need to protect and maximize profits and returns for their shareholders.
They need to be restrained by the radical concept that the survival of the human race, the safety of consumers, the health of our ecosystem, and the time honored rights of workers (as already defined in America today) come first, and shareholder returns come second.
Corporations aren't evil; they're amoral. They're not out to poison the environment and enslave people economically; they simply don't care if that's the side effect. Just as long as they're "maximizing shareholder value", everything is fine. :)
This is absolutely positively right. I did not clarify my point well enough, but you did. Thanks a lot, and I sure hope your post gets modded up.
It's more expensive here because of nasty evil socialist edicts like
*workplace safety regulations
*environmental pollution controls
*the 40 hour work week restriction
- And that sort of stuff. That is far more expensive than just business taxes alone.
Global outsourcing is absolutely nothing more than big business's way of saying "this country cares about its environment and its workers and as such we choose to do business where such concerns are nonexistent."
Corporations do not care about you, or the air, water or soil that they might pollute. They care solely about profit, and when the good of humanity, or its very survival, is at odds with their profit margins, they decide profit margins must win. Thus they threaten us with foreign outsourcing - either we cave in and give them what they want (regulation and lower cost of doing business - which includes eliminating environmental laws and ALL workers' rights), or they leave for another country who will.
To steal a Rush Limbaugh quote, America is being held hostage.
Except that the out of work middleman now has no money to buy these "cheaper" products.
Everyone is obsessed with cheaper stuff, but no one pays attention to the fact that when you're out of work, "cheap" is still too expensive.
DoubleClick would have to spend a pile of money and time, repeatedly, to make better and better deterrents and defenses against DDoS attacks, whereas the DDoSers spend no money at all in attacking their defenses.
For a corporation, time is money and money is time; when you have to waste both money and time simultaneously your losses are geometric or even exponential, and I'm just talking about the work they have to do in the aftermath of a DDoS attack. That is on top of the fact that DoubleClick already lost profits and profit potential while they were down.
The object of the DDoS game is to pinch their money pipeline in this fashion, often enough and long enough that it has a real honest to God deleterious effect on their viability.
See: Etoys.com...