I get that you're saying "but I really don't like that speech a lot". Do you get that I utterly reject that as a reason for censorship? There no need for any protection of acceptable speech: "freedom of speech" means "freedom of unacceptable speech", or it means nothing.
. We need to find a way to balance these concerns with Freedom of Speech.
Spoken like every dictator and totalitarian throughout history. Liberty is more important than security - or at least that's the point of America, much as we struggle with it. Too much of the world is still places where there's only "freedom of wise-man-approved" speech, if that's what you prefer.
No wonder you're getting modded down if you think that's a formal specification! C'mon:
1. Abstract.
Don't use PHP.
2. Conventions used in this document.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119
You're not an actual engineer unless you're rolling your petard up to the castle gate! Don't give me any of this new-fangled train-driver crap. That makes job searches nigh impossible, as recruiters keep bugging be for train-driving jobs when they are totally irrelevant to any sort of genuine siege engine!
What bizarre notion of "formal standard" are you holding on to that would exclude the C standard? It has a formal standardization process complying with the requirements for ISO/IEC publication.
An informal standard is "what some guy wrote", like the K&R C book (which really was used as a standard by compiler writers before the formal standard, and worked well enough for a while).
Ahhhh, the unusable crap everyone hates that is down all the time. People admit to working on that kind of thing? In public? Is it all still written in COBOL?
For speech to result in physical attacks - a strong causal connection - that's no longer hate speech, that's "incitement to riot". We've had no problem keeping "hate speech" legal but "incitement to riot" illegal in America for centuries now.
Speech should always be protected as speech. But telling your bodyguard to shoot someone is not illegal because of the words you use, but instead because of the immediate desired outcome of that speech. Running on a platform of killing all the Jews is political speech, and should be protected (and for goodness sake, please oh please let the candidate actually say that sort of thing on camera, not keep it as a secret agenda, so that democracy can happen properly there). Saying "hey, lets go attack that guy right there, right now!" has never been protected speech.
Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning
Not really. MS is entirely "cloud first" under the new CEO, and Amazon's investors are really intent on AWS as the cool part of Amazon. Next decade the world could change, of course, but for now those clouds are the jewels of 2 profoundly successful companies. Google, OTOH, I don't trust one bit these days.
I see "the cloud" as the best possible backup - I can't envision a disaster that would take out both my place and that distant data center, without being the nuclear-war sort of event that would make data backups the least of my worries.
Was fotopedia "the cloud"? Seems like just a web service just like any other service from the BBS days. Of course, not keeping a local copy of anything in the cloud is a bit silly, but for goodness sake pick a "cloud" with at least 1 million servers, not neverheardofit.com.
And if your PC gets stolen? If you hang your data on Amazon or Microsoft clouds, your odds of either of those 2 going under this decade are pretty low on the scale of real-world risks.
Development is a global market, and the work can be done anywhere. Best get used to that fact, as it won't change. However, demand still exceeds supply and supply is fully online worldwide: every university worldwide with a credible CS program, and quite a few with dubious ones, are being recruited from now, and have been for years. The workforce was growing exponentially 10 years ago, as new nations were opening up, but is growing linearly now and demand is still strong. It's one of the best paying jobs in every country now. Nothing to complain about.
I don't know that business. Maybe Amazon adds no value there and is trying to charge 30% for nothing? But then, the current big 6 publishers won't need them and will just sell their eBooks directly to the customer, right? I rather suspect it won't play out that way, because Amazon is bringing something to the table here. (But what markup? They're dropping the price ceiling in TFA, not raising it.)
If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.
There's a lot of people who would disagree; like shoppers in the UK last year who bought supermarket ready meals only to later discover that they contained horse meat instead of beef or pork.
Seems like we agree. Those buyers didn't find what they wanted. That's also why it's important that there are 3 or more.
Because I rather like having vibrant communities sprinkled with local businesses - places where people go and interact - and a local economy not predicated solely on the whims of the Fortune 500
Ah, so you want a theme park for your entertainment, That's great (really, I like that too), but don't ask for it at the expense of people barely scraping by. High-end goods will always have sellers with a more personal touch. But you'll have to pay more for that inefficiency. If you can afford that luxury, great! But keep in mind that others can't.
Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.
But that's just it - revenue went up many-fold. It was something like 10x sales at $10, and 100x sales at $5, or something equally eye-popping. It wasn't about the total size of the market, since that's irrelevant to the little guys, but a serious underestimation of the demand curve. (Presumably the assumption behind $20 was "that's just what a mid-list game sells for- it's what it cost for our fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers before them")
I don't know what's behind it all, or if it carries over to eBooks, but certainly Amazon isn't just crazy here. When the per-unit cost is basically 0, and we're not talking AAA titles, there's not a lot of historical comparison here. Of course, it does cost next to nothing to print books these days too, so I wouldn't assume the same curve as games, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
TV and radio and even billboards around me are full of ads from lawyers who are eager to sue for anything related to medical liability. What color is the sky on your planet?
Nevertheless, the actual, non-hypothetical, vast increase in game sales on Steam as price points can down from $20 to $5 or so are well documented.
If you're writing a detailed scholarly work, you quite likely have your scholarly day job as your primary source of revenue. Similarly for most technical books. The few "must have" technical reference manuals that cost a fortune just to typeset and will only sell a few copies don't need Amazon eBooks as a sales channel - the engineers who need them will buy them without Amazon, as they have for a century or so.
So, wait, the problem is that the wrong minorities are doing the jobs? This is complicated.
There are plenty of open developer jobs in the US. Heck, we have several on my team we can't fill. I strongly suspect people complaining about this either just don't make the cut, or don't want to move to where the jobs are.
Visa has to keep the merchants, and the banks. The cost of fraud to the merchants is likely less than the cost to the merchants of an alternative system.
Slashdot, OTOH, is full of people who are convinced the professionals in some field are idiots because they're not doing what 30 seconds of thought showed was the obviously right thing.
There's very little DLC going on on Steam (this isn't the app store article, that one's that way --->). This was straight-up market experimentation. Game devs found that dropping their price from $20 to $10 could generate 10x or more as many sales, and a drop from $10 to $5 could generate another 10x increase in sales.
I'm sure part of that it getting below where some people are willing to pirate the game, but I suspect most of it is just getting to the impulse-buying threshold. $20 game I don't know much about? Even if it looks good, I'm going to read some reviews on meta-critic and think about it. $5 game that looks good from the store page? What the heck, easier to just play it and see.
Why? As long as there are 3 or more, why care about anything but price and selection? If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.
For physical goods it's important that there are places that sell more expensive goods, too, because sometimes there's too much quality sacrificed in the cheap stuff, but there's always someone selling the high-margin stuff. The price may be unappealing there, but, hey, what do you expect?
I have no problems at all with Amazon using their muscle to get me lower prices, middle-men be damned, but it's an interesting question whether this means more or less money for authors.
What we've seen from Steam sales is that lower prices mean more revenue - often vastly more. Are books the same? I rather suspect so. Top-tier authors can demand the price they want, but there are only a handful of such in any genre. For the vast majority of e.g. SF authors, a SF book really is much like a $5 game: they aren't completely interchangeable, but I can find more that look good than I have time for.
Slashdot Mirror
I get that you're saying "but I really don't like that speech a lot". Do you get that I utterly reject that as a reason for censorship? There no need for any protection of acceptable speech: "freedom of speech" means "freedom of unacceptable speech", or it means nothing.
. We need to find a way to balance these concerns with Freedom of Speech.
Spoken like every dictator and totalitarian throughout history. Liberty is more important than security - or at least that's the point of America, much as we struggle with it. Too much of the world is still places where there's only "freedom of wise-man-approved" speech, if that's what you prefer.
PHP Formal Specification:
1) Don't use PHP.
No wonder you're getting modded down if you think that's a formal specification! C'mon:
1. Abstract.
Don't use PHP.
2. Conventions used in this document.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119
3. Normative Guidance for the Use of PHP
One MUST NOT use PHP.
You're not an actual engineer unless you're rolling your petard up to the castle gate! Don't give me any of this new-fangled train-driver crap. That makes job searches nigh impossible, as recruiters keep bugging be for train-driving jobs when they are totally irrelevant to any sort of genuine siege engine!
What bizarre notion of "formal standard" are you holding on to that would exclude the C standard? It has a formal standardization process complying with the requirements for ISO/IEC publication.
An informal standard is "what some guy wrote", like the K&R C book (which really was used as a standard by compiler writers before the formal standard, and worked well enough for a while).
"Run, it's the Police Police Police", said the Police Police.
Ahhhh, the unusable crap everyone hates that is down all the time. People admit to working on that kind of thing? In public? Is it all still written in COBOL?
I care. Language cries when you abuse it like that. It makes me sad. Think of the small words!
For speech to result in physical attacks - a strong causal connection - that's no longer hate speech, that's "incitement to riot". We've had no problem keeping "hate speech" legal but "incitement to riot" illegal in America for centuries now.
Speech should always be protected as speech. But telling your bodyguard to shoot someone is not illegal because of the words you use, but instead because of the immediate desired outcome of that speech. Running on a platform of killing all the Jews is political speech, and should be protected (and for goodness sake, please oh please let the candidate actually say that sort of thing on camera, not keep it as a secret agenda, so that democracy can happen properly there). Saying "hey, lets go attack that guy right there, right now!" has never been protected speech.
"On a computer" changes nothing.
Yeah, but either could just sell that part of their business, or even just decide it wasn't worth the effort and shut it down without warning
Not really. MS is entirely "cloud first" under the new CEO, and Amazon's investors are really intent on AWS as the cool part of Amazon. Next decade the world could change, of course, but for now those clouds are the jewels of 2 profoundly successful companies. Google, OTOH, I don't trust one bit these days.
I see "the cloud" as the best possible backup - I can't envision a disaster that would take out both my place and that distant data center, without being the nuclear-war sort of event that would make data backups the least of my worries.
The custodians can clean up after themselves. ;) Who polices the police police?
Police police police police police police.
One of my favorite English sentences, right up there with buffalos and "the horse raced past the barn fell down".
Was fotopedia "the cloud"? Seems like just a web service just like any other service from the BBS days. Of course, not keeping a local copy of anything in the cloud is a bit silly, but for goodness sake pick a "cloud" with at least 1 million servers, not neverheardofit.com.
And if your PC gets stolen? If you hang your data on Amazon or Microsoft clouds, your odds of either of those 2 going under this decade are pretty low on the scale of real-world risks.
Development is a global market, and the work can be done anywhere. Best get used to that fact, as it won't change. However, demand still exceeds supply and supply is fully online worldwide: every university worldwide with a credible CS program, and quite a few with dubious ones, are being recruited from now, and have been for years. The workforce was growing exponentially 10 years ago, as new nations were opening up, but is growing linearly now and demand is still strong. It's one of the best paying jobs in every country now. Nothing to complain about.
I don't know that business. Maybe Amazon adds no value there and is trying to charge 30% for nothing? But then, the current big 6 publishers won't need them and will just sell their eBooks directly to the customer, right? I rather suspect it won't play out that way, because Amazon is bringing something to the table here. (But what markup? They're dropping the price ceiling in TFA, not raising it.)
If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.
There's a lot of people who would disagree; like shoppers in the UK last year who bought supermarket ready meals only to later discover that they contained horse meat instead of beef or pork.
Seems like we agree. Those buyers didn't find what they wanted. That's also why it's important that there are 3 or more.
Because I rather like having vibrant communities sprinkled with local businesses - places where people go and interact - and a local economy not predicated solely on the whims of the Fortune 500
Ah, so you want a theme park for your entertainment, That's great (really, I like that too), but don't ask for it at the expense of people barely scraping by. High-end goods will always have sellers with a more personal touch. But you'll have to pay more for that inefficiency. If you can afford that luxury, great! But keep in mind that others can't.
Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.
But that's just it - revenue went up many-fold. It was something like 10x sales at $10, and 100x sales at $5, or something equally eye-popping. It wasn't about the total size of the market, since that's irrelevant to the little guys, but a serious underestimation of the demand curve. (Presumably the assumption behind $20 was "that's just what a mid-list game sells for- it's what it cost for our fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers before them")
I don't know what's behind it all, or if it carries over to eBooks, but certainly Amazon isn't just crazy here. When the per-unit cost is basically 0, and we're not talking AAA titles, there's not a lot of historical comparison here. Of course, it does cost next to nothing to print books these days too, so I wouldn't assume the same curve as games, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
TV and radio and even billboards around me are full of ads from lawyers who are eager to sue for anything related to medical liability. What color is the sky on your planet?
Nevertheless, the actual, non-hypothetical, vast increase in game sales on Steam as price points can down from $20 to $5 or so are well documented.
If you're writing a detailed scholarly work, you quite likely have your scholarly day job as your primary source of revenue. Similarly for most technical books. The few "must have" technical reference manuals that cost a fortune just to typeset and will only sell a few copies don't need Amazon eBooks as a sales channel - the engineers who need them will buy them without Amazon, as they have for a century or so.
Technical books are different, but anything that busts the current obscene textbook scam is a win for society, hands down.
So, wait, the problem is that the wrong minorities are doing the jobs? This is complicated.
There are plenty of open developer jobs in the US. Heck, we have several on my team we can't fill. I strongly suspect people complaining about this either just don't make the cut, or don't want to move to where the jobs are.
Visa has to keep the merchants, and the banks. The cost of fraud to the merchants is likely less than the cost to the merchants of an alternative system.
Slashdot, OTOH, is full of people who are convinced the professionals in some field are idiots because they're not doing what 30 seconds of thought showed was the obviously right thing.
There's very little DLC going on on Steam (this isn't the app store article, that one's that way --->). This was straight-up market experimentation. Game devs found that dropping their price from $20 to $10 could generate 10x or more as many sales, and a drop from $10 to $5 could generate another 10x increase in sales.
I'm sure part of that it getting below where some people are willing to pirate the game, but I suspect most of it is just getting to the impulse-buying threshold. $20 game I don't know much about? Even if it looks good, I'm going to read some reviews on meta-critic and think about it. $5 game that looks good from the store page? What the heck, easier to just play it and see.
Why? As long as there are 3 or more, why care about anything but price and selection? If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.
For physical goods it's important that there are places that sell more expensive goods, too, because sometimes there's too much quality sacrificed in the cheap stuff, but there's always someone selling the high-margin stuff. The price may be unappealing there, but, hey, what do you expect?
I have no problems at all with Amazon using their muscle to get me lower prices, middle-men be damned, but it's an interesting question whether this means more or less money for authors.
What we've seen from Steam sales is that lower prices mean more revenue - often vastly more. Are books the same? I rather suspect so. Top-tier authors can demand the price they want, but there are only a handful of such in any genre. For the vast majority of e.g. SF authors, a SF book really is much like a $5 game: they aren't completely interchangeable, but I can find more that look good than I have time for.