Should be debate flat earthers too? Bafoonery should be called out as such and not given legitimacy.
Yes. I would gladly give evidence for a circular earth to a legitimate flat earthers just as I routinely give evidence to anti-vaccine people why they should vaccinate and complain to pro-vaccine people that I wish there was better data on the pros and cons of vaccines. Hiding behind the mantra of "the other side is evil and stupid so I won't engage" doesn't help anyone.
So the day came and they released all those plastic balls and the TV cameras were rolling and what did we see? BLACK BALLS. Black plastic balls rolling into the water.
No one involved with the project had the foresight to consider the color of the balls. Black balls absorb a lot more sunlight and get hotter and increase water temperature, leading to more water evaporation. It would've been trivial to add white pigment to the plastic balls and the cost difference would've been negligible.
This is the problem with being an arm chair engineer. Do you have any proof that white balls would have been better? Besides preventing evaporation, the other goal of the project was to block sunlight and UV rays to prevent the formation of Bromate. The reason that black balls are warmer is that they absorb more sunlight than other colors. Opaque white balls might have been more effective or coating the black balls in something reflective before releasing them (which may add to the production cost and/or durability) but neither you nor I would have any idea without a lot more data.
We're injecting massive amounts of CO2, a greenhouse gas, into the atsomphere. You clearly never took even a Bausch high school chemistry class did you?
This is why Trump won the election, instead of trying to actually debate, you just immediately jump to insulting the poster for being stupid instead of actually trying to convince them of your side. The left might be surprised at the number of people they could persuade if they actually debated people instead of insisting that every issue is not open for discussion because the other side is wrong. According to google, the primary greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere which is a very small percentage. Water vapor ranges from 1-4%. Another way to say that is there is 25-100 times more water vapor that CO2. I remember just a few years ago, everyone was freaking out about the ozone disappearing (which is a greenhouse gas), now it's too much co2. The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is a rounding error compared to water vapor and should have a negligible effect unless it somehow behaves differently than water vapor. I honestly would like to know is C02 that much more potent than water vapor or does it somehow behave differently?
There is no 'AI field', it's still just computers running code. Nothing to see here, move along..
When I was doing job interviews in 1999, when I mentioned AI, I had several interviewers say "You can't say you're interested in AI, it's a dead field". Today, it's anything but a dead field. Yes, we're no where near having true AI but we are continuing to replace more and more complex human jobs with computers. The HBO show "Westworld" has a great line where one of the programmers questions the logic of continuing to make the androids in that show more lifelike. We don't want "true AI". A truely intelligent being will likely demand rights. Why would we want that? We want tools. Do you really want your backhoes to create a union and demand better working conditions? Having our tools be conscience would be a huge mistake because then they would stop being tools and could refuse to work.
Appearance has only limited applications compared with the real thing.
Except that this post is about where to find jobs in AI today. Jobs in AI today are focused on neural networks, expert systems, self driving cars, robotics, deep learning, and big data to name a few. Whether today's approach to AI is able to give us true AI is irrelevant. Today's approach to AI is where all the jobs are today. An example would be someone in the early 1900s asking the best way to get a job in space exploration. Sure, the rockets and airplanes in the early 1900s had no chance of getting to the moon but they get you a lot closer than anything else and interestingly enough, when we did finally make it to the moon, we did it with very similar technology. Whether this will hold true this round, we don't know. We could eventually end up at a brick wall just as you can't take a balloon to the moon but a balloon can still get you awful close to space.
You don't need AI for that. Just deny vacation time to programmers that are married and they will quit. You don't want them anyway since they usually refuse to work the typical Seattle Hundreds. I know when I was a dev manager, before I left tech, that the married guys were the ones usually guilty of being lazy and refusing to work the normal 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. I know that after working for over twenty years in tech and not taking a single vacation or sick day off that the people that are lazy and take days off just destroy morale. You need to get rid of them quickly. Yes, it's great that someone wants to go to Disney Land with their kids, but when the vast majority of employees don't have kids, it hurts morale pretty badly.
They couldn't pay me enough to work 16 hour days. I average about 35 hours per week and that is plenty. I have kids but one of my coworkers doesn't. He also averages in the low 30s and that's after he uses up his vacation and sick time. He's currently telecommuting while touring Europe. He's one of the best employees we have. We pay hourly so the fact that he doesn't hit 40 hours doesn't really affect us. I don't understand why people put up with crap living conditions. I live in the USA, I make below 6 figures and I live in a 6k square foot house on several acres and have plenty of money left over at the end of each month working less than 40 hours per week. I have a friend who is a recruiter in silicon valley. I told him there is likely nothing he could offer me to get me to move there. More money is not an objective to me. I too would like to get into AI and that's likely the only thing that someone could offer me to get me to take another job but it would have to also have good working conditions. I'm pretty comfortable right now where I have plenty of money and work less than 40 hours per week.
We've gotten pretty good at predicting the 80% of employees that we can not allow any vacation time off that won't quit.
and from another post further down:
I guess I'm one of the suckers since the last week off I had approved was on 1987.
This is evil. I understand denying vacation for a given week but if I was denied vacation, I would immediately ask which weeks were still available. If there were no weeks available in the next 6 months, I would immediately quit. There is no way I would put up with being perpetually denied time off. Where I currently work not only do we have vacation and sick which can be used for any reason, we also allow unpaid time off if you run out of vacation. Unpaid time off is somewhat capped though because you have to maintain 30 hours per week in order to qualify for health insurance. We have some very good employees that run thru their vacation and sick and average about 33-35 hours per week. It's never been an issue. Vacation is always approved. Occasionally we will have an employee shift their vacation forward or backwards by a couple weeks in order to not have everyone gone at the same time but it's never not approved.
It's mostly used in CGI, to make things look more realistic and less digitally perfect
Yes, and I would bet money that the before video can be compressed at a higher rate than the after. If we could do this in reverse and make the real movies more digitally perfect then it should be possible to compress them at a much higher rate.
The problem is real video has lots of noise it and things that look like noise don't compress well. They can't, as they appear to be random.
But that can work to your advantage. If you can determine what is random noise and what is not, you can just drop the random noise and replace it with generated noise. It's like the difference between compressing a picture of a boat and a digital representation of a boat without all the noise. If you can get a "good enough" virtual represetation of the boat, it still looks like a boat to the human eye but it's missing all the noise. It might look a little too crisp to the human eye but you can add back the randomness during the final processing. They do something similar with a lot of movies today where the grittiness is added at the end to make it look more realistic.
Those are also quite "knowable" because it is either "free" (done gratis by miners) or you can have your transaction processed by a preferred processor for a known cost (varies by processor).
Of course knowing the costs are important but just as important are what those costs are. Bitcoin is still a lot more expensive and a lot more inconvenient than even credit cards. That friction is going to hurt it. What we need is a virtual currency that has little or not cost for small everyday amounts. Bitcoin isn't that.
Since both are fiat currencies, the one with least restrictions will become the preferred currency.
I agree with this but there are several other things that come into play. How easy it is to use? What are the transaction costs? How easy is it to track? Credit cards are very easy to use but also very easy to track and have a high transaction cost. Credit cards companies managed to trick people into ignoring the transaction cost by giving the buyers kickbacks for using their cards. Bitcoin currently has high transaction costs and isn't able to be settled in real time. I see these are significant hurdles for bitcoin to replace other methods of payment for day to day purchases. For larger purchases and purchases you might want to hide this might not be a significant problem.
Citizens don't need to personally attend - the press itself is the medium for publicising official statements issued to the public.
There is no "press" or at least shouldn't be. Having an official "press" is the first step in crushing the freedom of speech and killing the 1st amendment. The first amendment also protects the random dude in a basement running an underground press and publishing what he dislikes about the government.
As far this story is concerned, blocking people on twitter is no different that the president not allowing random people access to his private phone number or email address. Yes, you are allowed to petition the government but you are not allowed to march into the White House uninvited or have untethered access to the president anytime and anywhere. If anyone was allowed to call the president's private number or enter the White House unannounced at all hours of the day then it would only take a very small number of people to completely filibuster the president. Same with Twitter. A few thousand dedicated people on Twitter would be more than enough to complete shut down the president's twitter account if he was not able to police it.
I realize tat the snowflakes are going to call me a Trump fascist, but maybe it is time that these prisoners only get basic cable and not all of the premium channels.
If you read the article it says the guard ratio has increase from 4/1 to 2/1. Even 4/1 is nuts. Designed right, I don't see why a 10 to 1 ratio or even higher shouldn't be possible. You need to guard from outside attack (at least long enough for military reinforcements) and you need a decent number of staff when actually moving prisoners, etc... and then you need some people to prepare food, delivery food, etc.. A 2 guard team should easily be able to serve food to 60 people per hour. Starting at 11am and ending at 2pm, that is 180 cells for 2 guards or a ratio of 90/1. You obviously need more than 2 guards for entering a cell but a squad of 10 should be more than enough for entering a cell. You have other support staff and maybe a swat team on standby but there is no reason this should be anywhere close to 10/1 much less 4/1 or 2/1.
But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
We don't care. We set minimum mandatory sentences and take away the ability for judges to actually use discretion. The prisons know who the at risk prisoners are and who aren't. The low risk prisoners are the ones working in the cafeteria, workshops, etc... The prisons don't have the ability to release them early nor do they have an incentive as these low risk prisoners are cheap and safe to house.
And a game that becomes unplayable without a centralised server... So you can't play it with poor or no connectivity, can't play it after the company shuts the servers down etc. Look what happened recently with simcity.
Most DRM software is not any better. Most of them protect the software by checking in with a remote server. At least if it's integrated with the game, the end user gets some benefit from it. There are plenty of value added stuff you can add to a game while still allowing the game to have an offline mode. A good company should also release the server code if they ever discontinue their game.
Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it.
The problem with DRM is that it's added after the fact. In some cases like this, it's literally made by a completely different company. The only possible result is a worse experience for the paying customer. DRMs for movies are probably never going to work but for something interactive like a game, I would think it would be fairly simple to prevent piracy. The simplest way to prevent piracy is not tacking on DRM after the fact but design your game so that part of it's code resides on the server. Whether that is static stuff like part of the rendering engine or dynamic stuff like new weekly maps, multiplayer capabilities or even just updates and improvements, if some of the code resides on the server then the cracker now has to write that missing functionality in order to crack the software. Done right, not only does this prevent piracy but it actually gives the paying customer value added stuff like persistent worlds, other people to play with, new levels, bug fixes, etc...
(if netflix is only $12/mo for FOUR people no show should ever cost more than half that for a single season $25/season is ridiculous esp for a 12/yr old tv show)
They could start by reducing the price of the digital to the same price you can buy the physical. Amazon has a pretty broad selection of digital movies but many of the older titles are considerably cheaper to buy on DVD (with free 2 day shipping) than it is to buy the digital. In some cases you can buy the physical DVD on amazon for the same price or cheaper than you can rent it on amazon. This is ridiculous.
5. they would buy it, but since they can get it for free they do.
I mean seriously, how many of us have too much money? If I can spend less on something, I can spend more on something else.
My general strategy is that if the movie I want to watch is at redbox, I pay for it, otherwise, I search for it on google and generally find a pirated copy. I don't pirate because I'm not willing to pay for it. I pirate because I'm not willing to pay $4 to rent a movie that I can buy on amazon for the same price. They aren't even trying. Do a search for the movie "Mrs Doubtfire" on amazon. You can own the DVD with free prime shipping for $4. So guess how much the digital version is? $14 to buy or $4 to rent. Now look at "The Matrix". Like most series, the first one is free on prime but the 2nd one costs $13 to own even though I can buy the entire trilogy on DVD for $10. It costs considerably more to buy the digital movie than buy the physical version and in some cases more to rent the digital version than to buy the physical version. In what world does this make sense?
Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
What about the 3rd reason: convenience. I can subscribe to amazon, hulu, hbo, and netflix and maybe a few others and then go search all 4+ engines in hopes that it has the movie I want to watch. Chances are it doesn't. I can search redbox, drive to redbox, pick up the movie, and then have to remember to return it. If I wait too long on a new release, it disappears from redbox too. Or I can do a quick google search, click on 3 or 4 links and find the movie I want. I do regularly pay for redbox even with the inconvenience of having to pick up and return a movie but if someone like amazon offered their entire collection for the same price as redbox, I would gladly just use them. Instead if there is a legal option it is usually at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than redbox if it is available at all. And hulu, netflix, and amazon prime are almost worthless if you actually want a specific movie. Online TV is also awful. That's one place where cable still has the advantage. With cable I still have the ability to quickly flip thru 100 channels and find something to watch without having to search a dozen places. Devices like Roku try to integrate the individual services but it's still a kludge. If distributors actually started working with each other and companies like roku, they could easily come up with a system that could blow the current online offerings (including piracy) out of the water.
Your analysis is garbage because it ignores externalities.
There is nothing cheap about letting everyone own a car.
Externalities are irrelevant as are the sunk cost of owning the car once you are required to own it for any reason. My analysis is why people who own a car use it every day instead of some other form of transportation. Once you own a car, it doesn't make financial sense to wake up in the morning and use a taxi or mass transportation. As long as a car makes financial sense to the individual, it will continue to be the main form of transportation and as long as certain activities can only really be done with a car then it will continue to make financial sense.
This isn't really true, it depends on where you are and where you're going. #3 is the most incorrect, because personal cars are much slower than #2 in most cities. The factor you're missing is parking.
Which is exactly why car ownership starts to drop in big cities.
Renting a car every weekend would get expensive fast, plus there's a significant amount of overhead time involved with the rental process.
Companies are already working on reducing the friction involved. With Zipcar you can literally just walk up,unlock the car, and go. With an autonomous car that car could come to you. Yes, prices would need to come down but as volume, efficiencies, and competition increase, prices will naturally come down.
The problem with your analysis is that there are already plenty of better ways to transport people than using cars, but we're using cars anyway.
Define better. There are currently basically 3 types of ground transportation:
1) Mass transportation -- cheap but slow 2) Taxi/Uber/Lyft -- fast but expensive 3) Personal Car -- fast AND cheap once you own the car.
The personal car wins because it's currently the best option: the most convenient option, the fastest option, and the cheapest option. In order to take out the car you need a service that is better than the car. Places where parking is expensive or hard to find makes a car less convenient and less cheap and car ownership goes down. The big thing that drives car ownership though is that a car has 100% coverage where mass transportation doesn't. If you need a car to go grocery shopping once a week or visit grandma once a month or to do random errand X then your car is a sunk cost and the incremental cost of using it is very little. In order for the car not to continue to be the better/best option you need something that can fill in the gaps that the car currently fills so people don't want the hassle of owning a car. One of the main reasons that the taxi/uber/lyft option is expensive is because of the driver. Some people already use a taxi for grocery shopping but it's currently expensive to do so. Eliminate the driver and it becomes much more cost effective to use a taxi service for the occasional grocery trip or trip to grandma's house.
We will likely never have a significant number of self driving cars. Once we have autonomous vehicles, there are plenty of better ways to transport people. 90% of cars today spend 90% of their time with a single person behind the driver seat. If you can call a vehicle on demand, why would you call a huge 4 person vehicle for 1 person? Even mass transportation becomes more practical once you don't have to pay a driver to man the bus. But it's not just transporting people that will change. If there are self driving vehicles, there will be a lot fewer people to transport. Why would I go to the grocery store when the grocery store can bring the food to me? Autonomous vehicles also means that lawn mowers can be centrally located, they can drive to your house, mow your lawn and return to a central location. Complex robots of all kinds become more practical if they are able to transport themself.
Most of these kind of studies always predict more of the same with just a single change. That's not how a technology shift works. Self driving cars and self flying drones if perfected are going to be a technology shift that rivals the internet, the car, or even the computer. I think it will be a lot more disruptive than anyone now can even predict.
Is it the case that there are greater and lesser degrees of universal or objective good in films?
Hollywood has a formula for mass appeal. X minutes of action, X minutes of romance, etc... The problem with creating a movie that appeals to everyone is that it's then almost by definition an average movie. It sells a lot of tickets but it's not going to be a great. I didn't like the movie "The Lego Movie" but everyone else seems to love it. I also love the movie "Inception" and similar movies but my parents can't follow these type of movies and hate them. Critics are looking for universal appeal and/or good films whatever that is. Audiences are just rating whether or not they personally like it. I personally liked both "District 9" and "Arrival" but I can see where a lot of people wouldn't and if you went in expecting an action flick you would probably be disappointed and that would likely be reflecting in your rating as well.
I'm not sure you can compare it that way. There is a huge difference between 16k/year in the USA and $1.50/day ($550/year) in Iran. Sure you might be able to feed yourself in both places for that same amount but there are significant differences. Someone in Iran will never be able to buy a car with his salary. It would take more than a year salary to buy a plane ticket or a smart phone. Someone in the USA on the other hand if they managed to save a year's salary over say a decade could move to someplace like Iran and practically retire. Someone at $1.50/day likely has a lot more wants and needs than someone at 16k. At 16k, a person in the USA could get a small shared apartment with a computer, internet, and air conditioning. They could live a fairly simple and comfortable life. This would likely appeal to some people like some avid gamers. $550/year will not buy you that no matter where in the world you live.
Slashdot Mirror
Should be debate flat earthers too? Bafoonery should be called out as such and not given legitimacy.
Yes. I would gladly give evidence for a circular earth to a legitimate flat earthers just as I routinely give evidence to anti-vaccine people why they should vaccinate and complain to pro-vaccine people that I wish there was better data on the pros and cons of vaccines. Hiding behind the mantra of "the other side is evil and stupid so I won't engage" doesn't help anyone.
So the day came and they released all those plastic balls and the TV cameras were rolling and what did we see? BLACK BALLS. Black plastic balls rolling into the water.
No one involved with the project had the foresight to consider the color of the balls. Black balls absorb a lot more sunlight and get hotter and increase water temperature, leading to more water evaporation. It would've been trivial to add white pigment to the plastic balls and the cost difference would've been negligible.
This is the problem with being an arm chair engineer. Do you have any proof that white balls would have been better? Besides preventing evaporation, the other goal of the project was to block sunlight and UV rays to prevent the formation of Bromate. The reason that black balls are warmer is that they absorb more sunlight than other colors. Opaque white balls might have been more effective or coating the black balls in something reflective before releasing them (which may add to the production cost and/or durability) but neither you nor I would have any idea without a lot more data.
We're injecting massive amounts of CO2, a greenhouse gas, into the atsomphere. You clearly never took even a Bausch high school chemistry class did you?
This is why Trump won the election, instead of trying to actually debate, you just immediately jump to insulting the poster for being stupid instead of actually trying to convince them of your side. The left might be surprised at the number of people they could persuade if they actually debated people instead of insisting that every issue is not open for discussion because the other side is wrong. According to google, the primary greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere which is a very small percentage. Water vapor ranges from 1-4%. Another way to say that is there is 25-100 times more water vapor that CO2. I remember just a few years ago, everyone was freaking out about the ozone disappearing (which is a greenhouse gas), now it's too much co2. The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is a rounding error compared to water vapor and should have a negligible effect unless it somehow behaves differently than water vapor. I honestly would like to know is C02 that much more potent than water vapor or does it somehow behave differently?
There is no 'AI field', it's still just computers running code. Nothing to see here, move along..
When I was doing job interviews in 1999, when I mentioned AI, I had several interviewers say "You can't say you're interested in AI, it's a dead field". Today, it's anything but a dead field. Yes, we're no where near having true AI but we are continuing to replace more and more complex human jobs with computers. The HBO show "Westworld" has a great line where one of the programmers questions the logic of continuing to make the androids in that show more lifelike. We don't want "true AI". A truely intelligent being will likely demand rights. Why would we want that? We want tools. Do you really want your backhoes to create a union and demand better working conditions? Having our tools be conscience would be a huge mistake because then they would stop being tools and could refuse to work.
Appearance has only limited applications compared with the real thing.
Except that this post is about where to find jobs in AI today. Jobs in AI today are focused on neural networks, expert systems, self driving cars, robotics, deep learning, and big data to name a few. Whether today's approach to AI is able to give us true AI is irrelevant. Today's approach to AI is where all the jobs are today. An example would be someone in the early 1900s asking the best way to get a job in space exploration. Sure, the rockets and airplanes in the early 1900s had no chance of getting to the moon but they get you a lot closer than anything else and interestingly enough, when we did finally make it to the moon, we did it with very similar technology. Whether this will hold true this round, we don't know. We could eventually end up at a brick wall just as you can't take a balloon to the moon but a balloon can still get you awful close to space.
You don't need AI for that. Just deny vacation time to programmers that are married and they will quit. You don't want them anyway since they usually refuse to work the typical Seattle Hundreds. I know when I was a dev manager, before I left tech, that the married guys were the ones usually guilty of being lazy and refusing to work the normal 16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun. I know that after working for over twenty years in tech and not taking a single vacation or sick day off that the people that are lazy and take days off just destroy morale. You need to get rid of them quickly. Yes, it's great that someone wants to go to Disney Land with their kids, but when the vast majority of employees don't have kids, it hurts morale pretty badly.
They couldn't pay me enough to work 16 hour days. I average about 35 hours per week and that is plenty. I have kids but one of my coworkers doesn't. He also averages in the low 30s and that's after he uses up his vacation and sick time. He's currently telecommuting while touring Europe. He's one of the best employees we have. We pay hourly so the fact that he doesn't hit 40 hours doesn't really affect us. I don't understand why people put up with crap living conditions. I live in the USA, I make below 6 figures and I live in a 6k square foot house on several acres and have plenty of money left over at the end of each month working less than 40 hours per week. I have a friend who is a recruiter in silicon valley. I told him there is likely nothing he could offer me to get me to move there. More money is not an objective to me. I too would like to get into AI and that's likely the only thing that someone could offer me to get me to take another job but it would have to also have good working conditions. I'm pretty comfortable right now where I have plenty of money and work less than 40 hours per week.
We've gotten pretty good at predicting the 80% of employees that we can not allow any vacation time off that won't quit.
and from another post further down:
I guess I'm one of the suckers since the last week off I had approved was on 1987.
This is evil. I understand denying vacation for a given week but if I was denied vacation, I would immediately ask which weeks were still available. If there were no weeks available in the next 6 months, I would immediately quit. There is no way I would put up with being perpetually denied time off. Where I currently work not only do we have vacation and sick which can be used for any reason, we also allow unpaid time off if you run out of vacation. Unpaid time off is somewhat capped though because you have to maintain 30 hours per week in order to qualify for health insurance. We have some very good employees that run thru their vacation and sick and average about 33-35 hours per week. It's never been an issue. Vacation is always approved. Occasionally we will have an employee shift their vacation forward or backwards by a couple weeks in order to not have everyone gone at the same time but it's never not approved.
It's mostly used in CGI, to make things look more realistic and less digitally perfect
Yes, and I would bet money that the before video can be compressed at a higher rate than the after. If we could do this in reverse and make the real movies more digitally perfect then it should be possible to compress them at a much higher rate.
The problem is real video has lots of noise it and things that look like noise don't compress well. They can't, as they appear to be random.
But that can work to your advantage. If you can determine what is random noise and what is not, you can just drop the random noise and replace it with generated noise. It's like the difference between compressing a picture of a boat and a digital representation of a boat without all the noise. If you can get a "good enough" virtual represetation of the boat, it still looks like a boat to the human eye but it's missing all the noise. It might look a little too crisp to the human eye but you can add back the randomness during the final processing. They do something similar with a lot of movies today where the grittiness is added at the end to make it look more realistic.
Those are also quite "knowable" because it is either "free" (done gratis by miners) or you can have your transaction processed by a preferred processor for a known cost (varies by processor).
Of course knowing the costs are important but just as important are what those costs are. Bitcoin is still a lot more expensive and a lot more inconvenient than even credit cards. That friction is going to hurt it. What we need is a virtual currency that has little or not cost for small everyday amounts. Bitcoin isn't that.
Since both are fiat currencies, the one with least restrictions will become the preferred currency.
I agree with this but there are several other things that come into play. How easy it is to use? What are the transaction costs? How easy is it to track?
Credit cards are very easy to use but also very easy to track and have a high transaction cost. Credit cards companies managed to trick people into ignoring the transaction cost by giving the buyers kickbacks for using their cards. Bitcoin currently has high transaction costs and isn't able to be settled in real time. I see these are significant hurdles for bitcoin to replace other methods of payment for day to day purchases. For larger purchases and purchases you might want to hide this might not be a significant problem.
Citizens don't need to personally attend - the press itself is the medium for publicising official statements issued to the public.
There is no "press" or at least shouldn't be. Having an official "press" is the first step in crushing the freedom of speech and killing the 1st amendment.
The first amendment also protects the random dude in a basement running an underground press and publishing what he dislikes about the government.
As far this story is concerned, blocking people on twitter is no different that the president not allowing random people access to his private phone number or email address. Yes, you are allowed to petition the government but you are not allowed to march into the White House uninvited or have untethered access to the president anytime and anywhere. If anyone was allowed to call the president's private number or enter the White House unannounced at all hours of the day then it would only take a very small number of people to completely filibuster the president. Same with Twitter. A few thousand dedicated people on Twitter would be more than enough to complete shut down the president's twitter account if he was not able to police it.
I realize tat the snowflakes are going to call me a Trump fascist, but maybe it is time that these prisoners only get basic cable and not all of the premium channels.
If you read the article it says the guard ratio has increase from 4/1 to 2/1. Even 4/1 is nuts. Designed right, I don't see why a 10 to 1 ratio or even higher shouldn't be possible. You need to guard from outside attack (at least long enough for military reinforcements) and you need a decent number of staff when actually moving prisoners, etc... and then you need some people to prepare food, delivery food, etc.. A 2 guard team should easily be able to serve food to 60 people per hour. Starting at 11am and ending at 2pm, that is 180 cells for 2 guards or a ratio of 90/1. You obviously need more than 2 guards for entering a cell but a squad of 10 should be more than enough for entering a cell. You have other support staff and maybe a swat team on standby but there is no reason this should be anywhere close to 10/1 much less 4/1 or 2/1.
But most people don't clearly fall into either group and we don't have a good way to quickly and accurate categorize them or a surefire way of ensuring that those we think can be helped can be helped such that there's no or almost no recidivism.
We don't care. We set minimum mandatory sentences and take away the ability for judges to actually use discretion. The prisons know who the at risk prisoners are and who aren't. The low risk prisoners are the ones working in the cafeteria, workshops, etc... The prisons don't have the ability to release them early nor do they have an incentive as these low risk prisoners are cheap and safe to house.
And a game that becomes unplayable without a centralised server...
So you can't play it with poor or no connectivity, can't play it after the company shuts the servers down etc. Look what happened recently with simcity.
Most DRM software is not any better. Most of them protect the software by checking in with a remote server. At least if it's integrated with the game, the end user gets some benefit from it. There are plenty of value added stuff you can add to a game while still allowing the game to have an offline mode. A good company should also release the server code if they ever discontinue their game.
Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it.
The problem with DRM is that it's added after the fact. In some cases like this, it's literally made by a completely different company. The only possible result is a worse experience for the paying customer. DRMs for movies are probably never going to work but for something interactive like a game, I would think it would be fairly simple to prevent piracy. The simplest way to prevent piracy is not tacking on DRM after the fact but design your game so that part of it's code resides on the server. Whether that is static stuff like part of the rendering engine or dynamic stuff like new weekly maps, multiplayer capabilities or even just updates and improvements, if some of the code resides on the server then the cracker now has to write that missing functionality in order to crack the software. Done right, not only does this prevent piracy but it actually gives the paying customer value added stuff like persistent worlds, other people to play with, new levels, bug fixes, etc...
(if netflix is only $12/mo for FOUR people no show should ever cost more than half that for a single season $25/season is ridiculous esp for a 12/yr old tv show)
They could start by reducing the price of the digital to the same price you can buy the physical. Amazon has a pretty broad selection of digital movies but many of the older titles are considerably cheaper to buy on DVD (with free 2 day shipping) than it is to buy the digital. In some cases you can buy the physical DVD on amazon for the same price or cheaper than you can rent it on amazon. This is ridiculous.
5. they would buy it, but since they can get it for free they do.
I mean seriously, how many of us have too much money? If I can spend less on something, I can spend more on something else.
My general strategy is that if the movie I want to watch is at redbox, I pay for it, otherwise, I search for it on google and generally find a pirated copy. I don't pirate because I'm not willing to pay for it. I pirate because I'm not willing to pay $4 to rent a movie that I can buy on amazon for the same price. They aren't even trying. Do a search for the movie "Mrs Doubtfire" on amazon. You can own the DVD with free prime shipping for $4. So guess how much the digital version is? $14 to buy or $4 to rent. Now look at "The Matrix". Like most series, the first one is free on prime but the 2nd one costs $13 to own even though I can buy the entire trilogy on DVD for $10. It costs considerably more to buy the digital movie than buy the physical version and in some cases more to rent the digital version than to buy the physical version. In what world does this make sense?
Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
What about the 3rd reason: convenience. I can subscribe to amazon, hulu, hbo, and netflix and maybe a few others and then go search all 4+ engines in hopes that it has the movie I want to watch. Chances are it doesn't. I can search redbox, drive to redbox, pick up the movie, and then have to remember to return it. If I wait too long on a new release, it disappears from redbox too. Or I can do a quick google search, click on 3 or 4 links and find the movie I want. I do regularly pay for redbox even with the inconvenience of having to pick up and return a movie but if someone like amazon offered their entire collection for the same price as redbox, I would gladly just use them. Instead if there is a legal option it is usually at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than redbox if it is available at all. And hulu, netflix, and amazon prime are almost worthless if you actually want a specific movie. Online TV is also awful. That's one place where cable still has the advantage. With cable I still have the ability to quickly flip thru 100 channels and find something to watch without having to search a dozen places. Devices like Roku try to integrate the individual services but it's still a kludge. If distributors actually started working with each other and companies like roku, they could easily come up with a system that could blow the current online offerings (including piracy) out of the water.
Your analysis is garbage because it ignores externalities.
There is nothing cheap about letting everyone own a car.
Externalities are irrelevant as are the sunk cost of owning the car once you are required to own it for any reason. My analysis is why people who own a car use it every day instead of some other form of transportation. Once you own a car, it doesn't make financial sense to wake up in the morning and use a taxi or mass transportation. As long as a car makes financial sense to the individual, it will continue to be the main form of transportation and as long as certain activities can only really be done with a car then it will continue to make financial sense.
This isn't really true, it depends on where you are and where you're going. #3 is the most incorrect, because personal cars are much slower than #2 in most cities. The factor you're missing is parking.
Which is exactly why car ownership starts to drop in big cities.
Renting a car every weekend would get expensive fast, plus there's a significant amount of overhead time involved with the rental process.
Companies are already working on reducing the friction involved. With Zipcar you can literally just walk up,unlock the car, and go. With an autonomous car that car could come to you. Yes, prices would need to come down but as volume, efficiencies, and competition increase, prices will naturally come down.
The problem with your analysis is that there are already plenty of better ways to transport people than using cars, but we're using cars anyway.
Define better. There are currently basically 3 types of ground transportation:
1) Mass transportation -- cheap but slow
2) Taxi/Uber/Lyft -- fast but expensive
3) Personal Car -- fast AND cheap once you own the car.
The personal car wins because it's currently the best option: the most convenient option, the fastest option, and the cheapest option.
In order to take out the car you need a service that is better than the car. Places where parking is expensive or hard to find makes
a car less convenient and less cheap and car ownership goes down. The big thing that drives car ownership though is that a car
has 100% coverage where mass transportation doesn't. If you need a car to go grocery shopping once a week or visit grandma once
a month or to do random errand X then your car is a sunk cost and the incremental cost of using it is very little. In order for the
car not to continue to be the better/best option you need something that can fill in the gaps that the car currently fills so people don't
want the hassle of owning a car. One of the main reasons that the taxi/uber/lyft option is expensive is because of the driver. Some
people already use a taxi for grocery shopping but it's currently expensive to do so. Eliminate the driver and it becomes much more
cost effective to use a taxi service for the occasional grocery trip or trip to grandma's house.
We will likely never have a significant number of self driving cars. Once we have autonomous vehicles, there are plenty of better ways to transport people. 90% of cars today spend 90% of their time with a single person behind the driver seat. If you can call a vehicle on demand, why would you call a huge 4 person vehicle for 1 person? Even mass transportation becomes more practical once you don't have to pay a driver to man the bus. But it's not just transporting people that will change. If there are self driving vehicles, there will be a lot fewer people to transport. Why would I go to the grocery store when the grocery store can bring the food to me? Autonomous vehicles also means that lawn mowers can be centrally located, they can drive to your house, mow your lawn and return to a central location. Complex robots of all kinds become more practical if they are able to transport themself.
Most of these kind of studies always predict more of the same with just a single change. That's not how a technology shift works. Self driving cars and self flying drones if perfected are going to be a technology shift that rivals the internet, the car, or even the computer. I think it will be a lot more disruptive than anyone now can even predict.
Is it the case that there are greater and lesser degrees of universal or objective good in films?
Hollywood has a formula for mass appeal. X minutes of action, X minutes of romance, etc... The problem with creating a movie that appeals to everyone is that it's then almost by definition an average movie. It sells a lot of tickets but it's not going to be a great. I didn't like the movie "The Lego Movie" but everyone else seems to love it. I also love the movie "Inception" and similar movies but my parents can't follow these type of movies and hate them. Critics are looking for universal appeal and/or good films whatever that is. Audiences are just rating whether or not they personally like it. I personally liked both "District 9" and "Arrival" but I can see where a lot of people wouldn't and if you went in expecting an action flick you would probably be disappointed and that would likely be reflecting in your rating as well.
I'm not sure you can compare it that way. There is a huge difference between 16k/year in the USA and $1.50/day ($550/year) in Iran. Sure you might be able to feed yourself in both places for that same amount but there are significant differences. Someone in Iran will never be able to buy a car with his salary. It would take more than a year salary to buy a plane ticket or a smart phone. Someone in the USA on the other hand if they managed to save a year's salary over say a decade could move to someplace like Iran and practically retire. Someone at $1.50/day likely has a lot more wants and needs than someone at 16k. At 16k, a person in the USA could get a small shared apartment with a computer, internet, and air conditioning. They could live a fairly simple and comfortable life. This would likely appeal to some people like some avid gamers. $550/year will not buy you that no matter where in the world you live.