Media ownership in the United States have undergone a tremendous consolidation since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Today, the "big six"—Disney, Viacom, News Corp, Time Warner, CBS, and General Electric—own nearly all traditional media outlets. We have less independent and small-market media than ever before.
I don't know if this is directly related to the decline of traditional media. Like any systemic change, there are probably multiple major factors. However, I think that the decline of good local reporting, the lack of competition, and pro-business self-interested point of view has a significant impact.
Why do corporate incomes have to be double taxed? Tax the corporation, then tax the individual who actually takes home the income.
Extraordinarily rich people don't necessarily have extraordinarily high incomes. They just have extraordinarily wealth. Taxing companies allows the government to tax the increase in wealth of these individuals, even if that increase is in terms of assets rather than income. Let me give a brief example.
Someone has wealth of $1 billion, held in stock and bonds. (This is typical—the top 1% of households have 36.7% of all privately held stock, 63.8% of financial securities, and 61.9% of business equity.) If they don't sell any of their assets, they will have $0 income and will not be taxed, regardless of how much the value of the assets increases. To repeat my earlier point, taxing companies allows the government to tax the increase in wealth of these individuals. Also keep in mind that the current capital gains tax is 15%—this is far lower than the income tax rate.
Why not make it require AUTH to open LAN play, then everything else is local?
This is how battlenet works right now for Warcraft III. Battlenet is used to join the game, but after the game starts, there is no communication between any client and battlenet.
I've been disappointed whenever I've read a book by a secondary author writing within a primary author's world, even with the primary author's permission and blessing. Inevitably, the spark that drew me to the initial author is lost. The premier example in my mind is Brian Herbert's bastardization of the Dune series.
Battlenet doesn't work that way. (You can look at Warcraft III for an example.) Your connection to Battlenet is only used to create the game and allow players to join it. After the game starts, the connection to Battlenet can actually be terminated by all players (e.g. pickup listchecker). While the game plays, the packets between the host and clients using normal network routing. If you are at a LAN party, then all the gameplay traffic will be routed through the local network.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
In many ways, software engineering (as opposed to programming) is just leaving its infancy. I think we'll see the industry evolve to become more similar to other engineering disciplines within a decade or two. We have only recently gained the level of differentiation and specialization that other engineers have had for years.
I also think that the constant comparisons between software engineering and civil engineering (the "bridge" analogy) are misleading. Plenty of other engineering projects fail in other disciplines, and they do it as silently as software projects. I don't have any comparison data on failure rates, but I suspect that the rates are more closely related to project size than to engineering discipline.
The Warcraft 3 networking implementation for internet play via Battlenet just requires that the players start the game in Battlenet. Once the game starts, the client computers talk directly to the host. If all the players were on a LAN, the routing would be done at the LAN level as soon as the game started.
It's interesting how different our reactions are to this news. I loved all three of the Monkey Island games. To me, re-issuing a game with updated graphics is money-grubbing, plain and simple.
The episodic content has potential, but I'm not sold by default. LucasArts must convince me that they still have the writing chops for comedy of Monkey Island caliber.
While I am not a subscriber, I think people are willing to pay for the Wall Street Journal for their longer, feature-style articles. The WSJ tends to provide perspective, highlight trends, and point out emerging behavior. I'm not sure that this model applies to general news. Content tends to be similar or even identical (e.g. how 90% of all news comes straight from the AP feed). People are unlikely to pay for a story when they can get a nearly identical story elsewhere for free.
Corporate taxes also have the effect of taxing the richest at a higher rate. In the United States, the wealthiest 10% own 71% of the wealth (in 2001, latest figures). As is hopefully obvious, this wealth isn't just a number in a bank account—the wealthiest Americans hold a majority stake in American corporations. By increasing taxing on a corporation's profits or revenue, the government effectively increases the tax rate on the wealthy more than on a typical American. (Keep in mind that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than salaries and wages.)
There has to be a point at which lowering taxes further costs revenue, because if the tax rate is 0% the government isn't taking in any money.
What you are describing is a typical demand curve, and there is a point of diminishing returns. The differences between a typical demand curve and this situation is that the government shouldn't be trying to maximize revenue and that the "demand" is the relative attractiveness of the U.S. for companies.
According to what I've heard from a friend who works as a developer for Atomic Games, you play the game as an embedded reporter. My understanding is that you follow the battle as it actually took place, with events occurring at the same pace and timeline, with the same number and location of casualties. I think that the controversy derives from the level of unflinching realism.
Studying weaknesses of a theory is fine, but the concern is that historically "studying weaknesses" has been replaced by "pushing unscientific creationism." One of the problems is that evolution is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, especially by those who don't believe that evolutionary theory is correct. It is common that even well-meaning people unintentionally erect a straw-man representation of evolution.
Over-leveraging is certainly a problem, but it is a feature of every modern economy in the world. The only argument is how much leverage is appropriate, and that number is open to argument. A ratio of thirty seems too high in light of recent events, but no modern economist believes that there should be no leverage.
I think the compensation structure of the large financial institutions is one of the primary root problems of the current economic disaster. Highly rewarding short-term strategies will result in the negligence of long-term possibilities. As a side-note, if you have structured a large portion of your employee compensation as a "retention bonus" so that they don't walk away with your clients, you aren't actually in business. Your employees are just lending their business to you.
As a counterpoint, there are stories like that told in the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie is based on the true story of a teacher who teaches calculus to poor students with phenomenal success. While education depends on both the teacher and the students, it seems crazy not to reward the best teachers.
I heard a speech on the radio recently that reminded me of this topic, but unfortunately I cannot recall the source. According to the speaker, the best way to narrow the gap between the quality of life of the upper and lower classes was not the progressive income tax but rather providing universal services available to all citizens.
The quality and cost/value ratio of universal services in the USA should be differentiated from the benefits of the programs themselves. The USA pays more for less than many other developed and first-world nations in many arenas (education, health care, Internet, etc.) This doesn't mean that it is a bad idea to provide those services to everyone.
I dunno...there's less forgiving, but there's also just downright brutal. I've had to hack my D2 1.10 character saves and drop on unique or rare gear and stats and I'd still get torn to shreads in Hell... Single player SHOULD be finishable on any class.
I've played D2 quite a bit solo, and in my opinion it wasn't intended to be realistically possible to finish Hell solo with most classes. I think realistically you "finished" the single-player game by completing nightmare. Also, don't you think it is fun to have a game that just gets harder and harder? No one complains that you can't beat Tetris.
Oh yeah, more nitpicking...increase the drop rate of uniques and rares in single player! We don't have the luxury of millions of other people trying to sell their useless rares!
You can increase the single-player drop rate by using the "players 8" command, which scales the game to the difficulty of a full eight-player party. This also helps to powerlevel yourself through normal and early portions of Nightmare since you get increased experience. If you play hardcore you get incredibly increased drop rates, but I always died too much to make that fun personally.
I have no idea what is good for PvP. If the original poster played PvP, then based on your response I am wrong. In regards to itemization, this is kind of a blind spot in my response--the people that I played D2 with and myself all preferred not to trade items, so if we had a certain piece of gear, it was something that we or someone in the group had personally found. I'm more used to talking in terms of 5-10 +skills to a particular skill. E.g. a Hammerdin is extremely unimpressive with level 28 hammers.
Although I used level 20 numbers, the numbers don't scale exponentially, so my basic point remains accurate--poison doesn't deal as much damage as other classes, and your comment about about solo endgame play confirms this (to my mind anyway). I'm a bit curious about ever describing a caster-class as "hardy", but I'm willing to be educated on the point.
I endorsed the curse tree because of its versatility and power in PvE scenarios with a team. You certainly only need a point in each skill, but abilities that hugely increase your teammates' strengths are more important than being individually powerful.
Finally, despite trying a couple necros, I definitely haven't given them the level of attention that I've given to paladins for instance.
This is a difficult post to reply too, given your cogent and inspired arguments. I have done my best to address your concerns, and please accept my apologies in advance if I have failed in any way.
You are an idiot, because you obviously don't know the value because you never tried. Those were my Necromancer's two specialties in classic and LOD expansion.
I have tried a poison and bone necro. While you certainly can play that way, it is not a legitimate strategy when compared to the effectiveness of other necro builds (particularly the curses tree). It is also a selfish build for multiplayer as you provide no value whatsoever to the team, since you provide no synergies and every other class in the game can outdamage you.
Bone Spear has significantly more potential damage than Poison Nova, but Poison Nova allows a "fire and forget" playstyle with lower personal risk. Bone Spear leads to a severe mana-consumption problem, and even a barbarian can output more damage than poison nova.
Bone Spear - Magic Damage: 1972-2140, Mana Cost: 21.5
Poison Nova - Poison Damage: 1781-1953 over 2 seconds, Mana Cost: 20
(Numbers with maxed synergies from http://d2items.com/skills.php. My critique is assuming play on Hell difficulty, where a single Death Lord monster has 10,000-18,000 health (before defense, resistances, etc.) Combat characters must have damage output of approximately 10,000/second to be viable.)
Blizzard is such a shitty company for RPG's.
If you don't like Blizzard RPG games, then I don't understand why you are bothering with a post about an upcoming Blizzard RPG game.
You people are just plain lame, paying for the same crap ten-times over.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be certain to emancipate myself at the earliest opportunity.
Share with me your GPA score, and I'll tell you what you don't know.
I do appreciate the low price that you charge for your knowledge.
Don't fool yourself. The witch doctor is the necromancer. The witch doctor casts curses and summons helpers. At most Blizzard has removed the bone and poison tree, which was worthless to begin with.
I don't agree. Independent professional musicianship is possible for the first time in history because of non-localized self-promotion via the Internet. Take Jonathan Coulton as an example. He quit a day job as a software developer to start a musical career. Without contacts in the music industry, he rapidly gained an audience on the Internet.
Independent musicians are less likely to become millionaire superstars, but I don't see that as a negative.
In Go, you can move nearly anywhere at any time. This means that the possible number of possible board states grows wildly faster than chess (to pick a game with well-known AI techniques). A brute force approach to this problem is like trying to crack a rand() sequence with a brute force approach--the search space is far too large.
I certainly hope they did. From an outsider's perspective (I am neither a Hollywood writer nor much of a TV watcher), there was no reason not to give writer's their royalties. Revenue streams may be less clear in an online world since making people watch commercials is more difficult and bandwidth costs are absorbed by the distributer rather than the television stations, but that shouldn't have any affect on the amount paid to a writer. I am surprised they don't have a default pay-template that applies to any given script, and that any special considerations would be decided by independent negotiation on a case-by-case basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Media ownership in the United States have undergone a tremendous consolidation since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Today, the "big six"—Disney, Viacom, News Corp, Time Warner, CBS, and General Electric—own nearly all traditional media outlets. We have less independent and small-market media than ever before.
I don't know if this is directly related to the decline of traditional media. Like any systemic change, there are probably multiple major factors. However, I think that the decline of good local reporting, the lack of competition, and pro-business self-interested point of view has a significant impact.
Why do corporate incomes have to be double taxed? Tax the corporation, then tax the individual who actually takes home the income.
Extraordinarily rich people don't necessarily have extraordinarily high incomes. They just have extraordinarily wealth. Taxing companies allows the government to tax the increase in wealth of these individuals, even if that increase is in terms of assets rather than income. Let me give a brief example.
Someone has wealth of $1 billion, held in stock and bonds. (This is typical—the top 1% of households have 36.7% of all privately held stock, 63.8% of financial securities, and 61.9% of business equity.) If they don't sell any of their assets, they will have $0 income and will not be taxed, regardless of how much the value of the assets increases. To repeat my earlier point, taxing companies allows the government to tax the increase in wealth of these individuals. Also keep in mind that the current capital gains tax is 15%—this is far lower than the income tax rate.
There are any number of sources for the facts that I've cited. Here are a couple.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#In_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
Why not make it require AUTH to open LAN play, then everything else is local?
This is how battlenet works right now for Warcraft III. Battlenet is used to join the game, but after the game starts, there is no communication between any client and battlenet.
I've been disappointed whenever I've read a book by a secondary author writing within a primary author's world, even with the primary author's permission and blessing. Inevitably, the spark that drew me to the initial author is lost. The premier example in my mind is Brian Herbert's bastardization of the Dune series.
I won't be reading Eoin Colfer's book.
Battlenet doesn't work that way. (You can look at Warcraft III for an example.) Your connection to Battlenet is only used to create the game and allow players to join it. After the game starts, the connection to Battlenet can actually be terminated by all players (e.g. pickup listchecker). While the game plays, the packets between the host and clients using normal network routing. If you are at a LAN party, then all the gameplay traffic will be routed through the local network.
In many ways, software engineering (as opposed to programming) is just leaving its infancy. I think we'll see the industry evolve to become more similar to other engineering disciplines within a decade or two. We have only recently gained the level of differentiation and specialization that other engineers have had for years.
I also think that the constant comparisons between software engineering and civil engineering (the "bridge" analogy) are misleading. Plenty of other engineering projects fail in other disciplines, and they do it as silently as software projects. I don't have any comparison data on failure rates, but I suspect that the rates are more closely related to project size than to engineering discipline.
The Warcraft 3 networking implementation for internet play via Battlenet just requires that the players start the game in Battlenet. Once the game starts, the client computers talk directly to the host. If all the players were on a LAN, the routing would be done at the LAN level as soon as the game started.
These damn robots are taking away my job! My name is Hiro Protagonist, and I'm against robot labor.
It's interesting how different our reactions are to this news. I loved all three of the Monkey Island games. To me, re-issuing a game with updated graphics is money-grubbing, plain and simple.
The episodic content has potential, but I'm not sold by default. LucasArts must convince me that they still have the writing chops for comedy of Monkey Island caliber.
While I am not a subscriber, I think people are willing to pay for the Wall Street Journal for their longer, feature-style articles. The WSJ tends to provide perspective, highlight trends, and point out emerging behavior. I'm not sure that this model applies to general news. Content tends to be similar or even identical (e.g. how 90% of all news comes straight from the AP feed). People are unlikely to pay for a story when they can get a nearly identical story elsewhere for free.
Corporate taxes also have the effect of taxing the richest at a higher rate. In the United States, the wealthiest 10% own 71% of the wealth (in 2001, latest figures). As is hopefully obvious, this wealth isn't just a number in a bank account—the wealthiest Americans hold a majority stake in American corporations. By increasing taxing on a corporation's profits or revenue, the government effectively increases the tax rate on the wealthy more than on a typical American. (Keep in mind that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than salaries and wages.)
There has to be a point at which lowering taxes further costs revenue, because if the tax rate is 0% the government isn't taking in any money.
What you are describing is a typical demand curve, and there is a point of diminishing returns. The differences between a typical demand curve and this situation is that the government shouldn't be trying to maximize revenue and that the "demand" is the relative attractiveness of the U.S. for companies.
According to what I've heard from a friend who works as a developer for Atomic Games, you play the game as an embedded reporter. My understanding is that you follow the battle as it actually took place, with events occurring at the same pace and timeline, with the same number and location of casualties. I think that the controversy derives from the level of unflinching realism.
We really despise the men of ideas in this county.
Also the women of ideas.
Studying weaknesses of a theory is fine, but the concern is that historically "studying weaknesses" has been replaced by "pushing unscientific creationism." One of the problems is that evolution is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, especially by those who don't believe that evolutionary theory is correct. It is common that even well-meaning people unintentionally erect a straw-man representation of evolution.
Over-leveraging is certainly a problem, but it is a feature of every modern economy in the world. The only argument is how much leverage is appropriate, and that number is open to argument. A ratio of thirty seems too high in light of recent events, but no modern economist believes that there should be no leverage.
I think the compensation structure of the large financial institutions is one of the primary root problems of the current economic disaster. Highly rewarding short-term strategies will result in the negligence of long-term possibilities. As a side-note, if you have structured a large portion of your employee compensation as a "retention bonus" so that they don't walk away with your clients, you aren't actually in business. Your employees are just lending their business to you.
As a counterpoint, there are stories like that told in the movie Stand and Deliver. This movie is based on the true story of a teacher who teaches calculus to poor students with phenomenal success. While education depends on both the teacher and the students, it seems crazy not to reward the best teachers.
I heard a speech on the radio recently that reminded me of this topic, but unfortunately I cannot recall the source. According to the speaker, the best way to narrow the gap between the quality of life of the upper and lower classes was not the progressive income tax but rather providing universal services available to all citizens.
The quality and cost/value ratio of universal services in the USA should be differentiated from the benefits of the programs themselves. The USA pays more for less than many other developed and first-world nations in many arenas (education, health care, Internet, etc.) This doesn't mean that it is a bad idea to provide those services to everyone.
I dunno...there's less forgiving, but there's also just downright brutal. I've had to hack my D2 1.10 character saves and drop on unique or rare gear and stats and I'd still get torn to shreads in Hell... Single player SHOULD be finishable on any class.
I've played D2 quite a bit solo, and in my opinion it wasn't intended to be realistically possible to finish Hell solo with most classes. I think realistically you "finished" the single-player game by completing nightmare. Also, don't you think it is fun to have a game that just gets harder and harder? No one complains that you can't beat Tetris.
Oh yeah, more nitpicking...increase the drop rate of uniques and rares in single player! We don't have the luxury of millions of other people trying to sell their useless rares!
You can increase the single-player drop rate by using the "players 8" command, which scales the game to the difficulty of a full eight-player party. This also helps to powerlevel yourself through normal and early portions of Nightmare since you get increased experience. If you play hardcore you get incredibly increased drop rates, but I always died too much to make that fun personally.
I have no idea what is good for PvP. If the original poster played PvP, then based on your response I am wrong. In regards to itemization, this is kind of a blind spot in my response--the people that I played D2 with and myself all preferred not to trade items, so if we had a certain piece of gear, it was something that we or someone in the group had personally found. I'm more used to talking in terms of 5-10 +skills to a particular skill. E.g. a Hammerdin is extremely unimpressive with level 28 hammers.
Although I used level 20 numbers, the numbers don't scale exponentially, so my basic point remains accurate--poison doesn't deal as much damage as other classes, and your comment about about solo endgame play confirms this (to my mind anyway). I'm a bit curious about ever describing a caster-class as "hardy", but I'm willing to be educated on the point.
I endorsed the curse tree because of its versatility and power in PvE scenarios with a team. You certainly only need a point in each skill, but abilities that hugely increase your teammates' strengths are more important than being individually powerful.
Finally, despite trying a couple necros, I definitely haven't given them the level of attention that I've given to paladins for instance.
You are an idiot, because you obviously don't know the value because you never tried. Those were my Necromancer's two specialties in classic and LOD expansion.
I have tried a poison and bone necro. While you certainly can play that way, it is not a legitimate strategy when compared to the effectiveness of other necro builds (particularly the curses tree). It is also a selfish build for multiplayer as you provide no value whatsoever to the team, since you provide no synergies and every other class in the game can outdamage you.
Bone Spear has significantly more potential damage than Poison Nova, but Poison Nova allows a "fire and forget" playstyle with lower personal risk. Bone Spear leads to a severe mana-consumption problem, and even a barbarian can output more damage than poison nova.
Bone Spear - Magic Damage: 1972-2140, Mana Cost: 21.5
Poison Nova - Poison Damage: 1781-1953 over 2 seconds, Mana Cost: 20
(Numbers with maxed synergies from http://d2items.com/skills.php. My critique is assuming play on Hell difficulty, where a single Death Lord monster has 10,000-18,000 health (before defense, resistances, etc.) Combat characters must have damage output of approximately 10,000/second to be viable.)
Blizzard is such a shitty company for RPG's.
If you don't like Blizzard RPG games, then I don't understand why you are bothering with a post about an upcoming Blizzard RPG game.
You people are just plain lame, paying for the same crap ten-times over.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be certain to emancipate myself at the earliest opportunity.
Share with me your GPA score, and I'll tell you what you don't know.
I do appreciate the low price that you charge for your knowledge.
Don't fool yourself. The witch doctor is the necromancer. The witch doctor casts curses and summons helpers. At most Blizzard has removed the bone and poison tree, which was worthless to begin with.
I don't agree. Independent professional musicianship is possible for the first time in history because of non-localized self-promotion via the Internet. Take Jonathan Coulton as an example. He quit a day job as a software developer to start a musical career. Without contacts in the music industry, he rapidly gained an audience on the Internet.
Independent musicians are less likely to become millionaire superstars, but I don't see that as a negative.
In Go, you can move nearly anywhere at any time. This means that the possible number of possible board states grows wildly faster than chess (to pick a game with well-known AI techniques). A brute force approach to this problem is like trying to crack a rand() sequence with a brute force approach--the search space is far too large.
I certainly hope they did. From an outsider's perspective (I am neither a Hollywood writer nor much of a TV watcher), there was no reason not to give writer's their royalties. Revenue streams may be less clear in an online world since making people watch commercials is more difficult and bandwidth costs are absorbed by the distributer rather than the television stations, but that shouldn't have any affect on the amount paid to a writer. I am surprised they don't have a default pay-template that applies to any given script, and that any special considerations would be decided by independent negotiation on a case-by-case basis.