There is a cryptography technique called Public Information Retrieval which allows you to do just that: Send an encrypted query to a server, let it perform some operations on your behalf, and send you an encrypted query result. The server neither knows the contents of the encrypted data, nor the content of the query, but you have your result nonetheless.
The intuition is that there exists a sort of "black-box" operation which some cryptographic techniques can use. For example, if I have two encrypted bits a and b (where I can't tell what a and b actually are), I can still perform the operation a xor b. The result is encrypted, and I don't know the actual operands or the result, but I know that what came out is indeed the encryption of the xor of the encrypted bits. Such cryptosystems are forms of "Homomorphic Encryption".
Using this, we can then give the server a search term thus encrypted and, using the black-box opertaion, have it do some set of operations which will reveal the result. The server will execute the exact same set of operations independent of the search term, so it knows nothing (and needs to know nothing) of the search term contents. Of course, this implies that the server has to operate on every element of the encrypted data to do its job, but that's the fundamental tradeoff. If you're willing to accept that, and the additional computational overhead, you can design such a system.
Your first point is spot-on: Everything has only as much value as someone else is willing to give it. US dollars have their value because someone is willing to have them instead of whatever product or service they're providing in the meantime. In this sense, gold has no more or less intrinsic value as any monetary system anywhere.
There is, however, one way to universally devalue any resource, and that is simply to either make or discover more of it. Regardless of its initial value, making more of something simply makes it easier to come by, which in turn ends up making it worth less by those who trade it.
The problem here is ultimately one of control. It's true, on a gold standard, we have no control over the supply of gold, although we do know there is only so much in the entire world. Any discovery of a brand new set of veins would cause fluctuations, possibly significant ones, and they would be at somewhat random intervals. Someone (or rather, a number of people) control the US dollar, since they are able to determine how much to print and how to distribute it. Of course with this come all the problems of a manipulable resource. By printing arbitrary amounts of money, the controllers of the US dollar can implicitly tax everyone who deals in that currency by printing a lot more money, thus watering down what is already out there. This is one example of many which a controller of a currency can do to manipulate its value.
Really the question boils down to this: Which is better, a currency that cannot be controlled, or one which is controlled by people we cannot necessarily trust? I have my opinion, and I'm sure you have yours, but in either case, this is the question you must ask.
Finally, I must disagree in part with your final comment. You would be right in recent years that there would still be inflation, since a great deal of that was due to loans being made by reserve banks, which increases the perceived amount of money in the world, and thus reduces its value. However, this inflation trend is continuing in the wake of people defaulting on loans. Each default should cause the perceived amount of money to shrink, ultimately causing each individual dollar to be worth more. However, this isn't the case right now. Inflation is high, and apparently still increasing. I can't help but think that this is, in part, because more money is actually being printed in order to help the banks in the reserve system. But whatever the reason, a gold backed currency (if actually backed) would help prevent the current stagflation which is occurring right now.
I choose to live with my emotions under control; to not let fear rule my thoughts and actions. --To seek rationality over knee-jerk emotionalism. --It's not that I have anything against emotions. I love emotions! They guide us and make us human. But there's two ways to be human. You can let emotions show you how to let compassion be your guide, or you can let emotions lead you through fear. Fear is easy. Fear is basic, reptillian brain stuff. It's the default setting. The one which evolution has been moving away from for a ba-zillion years.
I think your comments on compassion and rationality are bit contrary to one another. Compassion, like fear, is still an emotion, ultimately making you want to do things without entirely thinking through all of the consequences. Letting "compassion be your guide" suggests that rationality can take a back-seat. This isn't to say that compassion is bad by any sense. Indeed, of all the human emotions, it's the one which is possibly the most noble, as you say. However, when we perform some action out of compassion we are tickling part of our brain which makes such actions feel good.
Say that you're walking down the street, and you see a homeless person there with a cardboard sign and a tin cup. Well, what would you do? There's a possibility that you may feel like putting some coins into the cup. Why would you do that? Perhaps it's because you feel compassion for that person, and giving him money will make you feel like you've done something useful for your fellow man. There is nothing wrong with this, but at base you are still entertaining a psychological need, like going to see a movie, or listening to music. The primary difference is, in this case, your actions may have done something to better the human condition.
Or have they? Sure, there are a number of situations in the short term where this could be incredibly helpful (for instance, if he's starving and can't afford anything to eat), but in the long run it could have more striking consequences. If you and others keep giving giving him money, he may become entirely dependent on it. He decides that in order to get by, he has to spend all of his time asking for money, and he never tries to improve himself. Perhaps if you and other had not given him money, or given him less, he would have resolved to spend some time bettering himself, gotten at least a part-time job somewhere, and ultimately have gone on to be self-sufficient. Of course, there's no way for you or I to tell what would have happened had you behaved differently, but I'm going to guess that in your compassion you may have failed to consider the possibility.
Compassion is indeed one of the things which make us more human. Having the emotion should be praised, not punished or ridiculed. But we should be mindful that in our haste to do good and help others, we may in fact be doing more damage that we had considered. In order to truly do good, we must think hard about everything our actions will entail, both now and in the future, both for those we intend to help and those who we have never met.
I think that this decision on Google's part makes a very interesting precedent for any other vendor of DRMed goods. In order to have good customer service, Google is refunding all the money they've previously gained while they were in business. Although as other have stated, that may not be much, it's almost certainly caused them to lose whatever money they thought they had earned through it.
The message this sends to other companies in a similar business seems clear: "Don't ever leave the business so that your customers can't access their media. If you do, and you plan to ever do business again, it will cost you more than you earned throughout the entire process. Customers are effectively loaning you their money for as long as they can play their content."
What does this mean? I'm going to guess that if they listen to this message that they will glance nervously at each other as they slowly change over to non DRM content. Since that seems to be the trend currently, I would suppose that this can only accelerate it.
Glancing quickly through the comments makes it seems a lot of people don't really understand the idea behind watermakring, so I thought I'd try to help out.
Most people understand that watermarking is embedding data in a piece of media so its source can be proven at a later date. This means there has to be some way to take an existing file and add the data in such a way that it can't be removed without seriously compromising the original song/movie/whatever.
Some people have mentioned that just by recompressing or otherwise manipulating the bits at a low level you can remove the watermark. Of course you could remove any watermark by just replacing the file with random bits, but then you would have destroyed the music in the file. Typically watermarks are designed to be linked as closely as possible to the human-noticeable component of the media, so by changing that which someone listening to a watermarked song would not notice, you would not remove the watermark itself. For instance, with music, the watermark is tied into the frequencies produced by the song which would be copied along with the rest of the song when it's recompressed.
Others suggested comparing two versions of the song in order to remove the watermark. This is a common attack against watermarks, and most watermark systems are designed to prevent at least the simple version of this. The problem is, given two versions of a song, can you create a third version which does not have the watermarked keys of either the first or the second one, and is not itself significantly broken. While I do not know the details, know that any watermarking system will at very least make it difficult for such attacks to succeed.
In terms of my personal opinions on its use, it matches those of DRM; When mandated by the government, they are both repugnant ideas, and should be prevented. When required only by the music sellers I don't have a particular problem simply because I can choose not to buy from that particular seller. Ultimately DRM and watermarking are just technologies at that point.
Now, I do think DRM is fundamentally broken. You can't lock something in a safe, warn them that they're not supposed to unlock it without you around, then hang the keys on a hook and just assume everything will go well. Watermarking is different, since the embedded code doesn't need to be extracted by the listener, there is at least an argument that it can't easily be extracted. It may still be vulnerable, but it's not flawed at its base.
We live in a democratic republic -- therefore if elected officials are not serving the people and allowing laws which directly contravene your wishes, you are under no moral obligation to obey them.
Unless of course, the act itself is morally repugnant.
By the same principle, if you wished to, oh I don't know, murder your neighbor, there are plenty of laws which contravine your wishes, which by the above logic there is no moral obligation to obey. Morality must then be defined by the majority of the people, and nothing else. But murder is wrong for a whole host of other reasons, not the least of which is that you're taking someone's property (their lives) without their permission. Even if congress passed an "Everyone gets one freebee" law tomorrow (following the people's wishes), it would still be wrong. I realize this is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the possible sorts of problems that such a philosophy can create.
Now I'd be the first to admit that file sharing is not stealing by any technical definition, and thus probably should not be a criminal act, but it is still a form of copyright infringement as many posters here have already said. Now, we could argue the gray areas of file sharing for ages, and the properties and problems of copyright law, but the simple fact that you want to download music is no argument for its morality.
Say that we have two entangled electrons which are lightyears apart. Say that you are next to one of them, and you test its spin. Let's say that it's spinning "up". By the property of simple entanglement, you know for a fact that the sister particle, when tested, will have to be in the "down" state. So you know something about a particle lightyears away instantaneously.
Now, given that you have a message that you want to send to the other end. This means that somehow you have to control what the person on the far side of the electron pair sees. However, you really have no control over the process. The chances that you saw "up" or "down" on your local electron were completely random. Once the detection has been made, there's no way to further influence the result. Thus, no information has been transmitted.
It is not about meeting demand or setting prices. It's about making a profit.
Most often those things are one and the same. Suppliers tend to want to sell things for as much as possible, given that all of their current supply will be sold. Given a certian existing supply (which is whatever it is at launch), setting the price at just the right point such that everyone willing to pay that price has one, and that there are no surplus units left over, will give you maximal profit.
People judge things in terms of price. You don't expect the same graphics from a $149 PS2 and a $400 Xbox 360. However, the $400 Xbox 360 does not offer enough value to be worth $700. If you sell it for that much, it will have a reputation as a poor value.
What I meant earlier is just because something was sold for $700 doesn't mean that the demand when the console drops to $400 would be any different than if the console started at $400 (minus the demand from those who bought the unit at $700). If people buy it for $700 and are unhappy with it afterwards, it may be considered overpriced at $700. But when the price drops to $400, how can you still say its overpriced? Also, the value in a particular product is entirely determined by the buyer. If the $400 price tag plus the waiting time is worth more than $700 to someone, then they will be happy. Someone like me would not buy the system at that price, and would be happy to wait until it became more common.
You can buy Tylenol, or a store-brand cold medicine with exactly the same ingredients. The generic is usually 1/2 price or so, but people still buy more of the name-brand stuff. There is no quality difference, since both are manufactured to FDA standards. How do you explain this phenomenon?
This phenomenon can be explained because people put more value behind the brand name. People are not only buying the chemical in the tylenol, they're buying the symbol on the label which in their mind stands for something. Perhaps they distrust other brands, or perhaps they are convinced that their brand is "longer-lasting" or "more-powerful". Either way, they assign value to that brand. If they feel that they've gotten their dollar's worth for the medicine, they're happy.
Relating back to the 360 situation, there are a million things which people attribute positive or negative value to. They could have positive value in that it's a Microsoft product (or negative value more likely, since this is slashdot). It could have negative value if it's reputed to have poorer graphics, or faulty hardware. They may add more value due to the fact that its easy to get online. Whatever these set of values are, when it comes down to it, people come up with a number they're willing to pay for it. This number doesn't need to be a rational summation, but still there is a number. It could be zero. It could be infinity. It could even be negative. People either consciously or intuitively decide whether the price they're willing to pay is higher than the current price, and then decide whether or not to buy it based on that. The feeling that something is "overpriced" simply means that your number is less (or possibly much less) than the current asking price. For the most part if the price drops below this number, then someone will go out and get it.
Oh, and the people who couldn't afford it when it was $700 would just run out and buy it? They would probably wait some more, since they already waited long enough and Microsoft will probably drop the price anyway.
It's actually quite likely that many people would go out and buy it when the console goes down to $400 (assuming supply can support it). It's true there may be people who will wait for future price drops (aren't there always?) but these people have to know that price drops below $400 will be a while in coming. The price they're willing to pay is tempered by the negative value of having to wait (unless somehow they like waiting). So some will wait, but many will not.
I'll grant you the point that shortages create hype. The demand curve can be fickle, and you have to take any thing which could affect it into account, but think a minute about what you're saying. Do you think that the news that 360s are selling on eBay for ~$700 helped or hurt the hype? Furthermore, who do you think set the $700 price tag on eBay? The demand is there, and some people are willing to pay that much for a 360.
I don't understand the term "minimal demand". A company's goal is never to create minimal demand, only to ensure that supply meets demand. The only time a console is overpriced is when available units aren't sold because people are unwilling to pay the asking price. Of course, with very few units out there, that price could be rather high. As more units come in, the price would drop lower, down to the minimum that the producer is willing to sell them for. Things don't get a reputation for being overpriced. Price is an obvious quantity, which people can see at any store. Things get a reputation for being low quality, poorly supported, faulty, and so on. All things that are not obvious from looking at the console.
Finally, the huge price drops you're talking about indicated a dead product because it set the price very low even for a console. Sure, if Microsoft dropped their price to $50, I would think the console is not doing well either. But if it drops from $700 to $400, since they already quoted a $400 price tag I wouldn't hold anything against them.
You're under the impression that it would be Microsoft setting these prices. You are of course correct if $700 was the long-term set price, but as other posters have said this price would only be temporary. Since this shortage is only at launch, if the free-market price were used, the people who put the most value behind owning a 360 would own one. No one can directly determine what that price would be except those people who want to buy them. In the stead of not being able to pay more money to make sure they get a 360, people got in lines which of course is also its own cost. I would imagine that people who stood in line the longest (and equivalently got them) would also probably be more willing to pay an extra couple of hundred dollars to get a console without having to sit out in the cold (or perhaps just really like sitting in lines).
Once the supply of 360s increased, the price would drop down to the minimum that Microsoft was willing to charge for them ($300 or $400), and things would continue as normal. The 3DO did die off at $700, but that was because it set the price way too high for demand. Right now there is huge demand for the 360 which will probably wane as more units become available. As long as Microsoft were to follow that demand with their price, their system would still sell.
Of course it's just a licence, but that wouldn't stop someone from making the argument of damages. They spent real money in an officially sanctioned way to get an item which can be traded back for real money via the same channel. If Sony does something which would hurt the tradeback value of the item, a damages suit could occur (not necessarily win, but at least be filed against them). This is not entirely unlike people suing because others did something to "nerf" their real-estate values. Of course, this is a horrible analogy.
Furthermore, since I think Sony is planning on this being a new cash cow, they're going to be very, very careful about what they change in-game. Even if their ELUA states that they can do something, the fear of bad publicity will probably cause them to think twice before they do it. If people start complaining on message boards and blogs about how Sony screwed them over, Station Exchange will feel the pain. While this may or may not be a big problem, it is going to make them a lot slower to actually rebalance unbalanced things which in the end hurts the gameplay. Seems like one heck of a sticky situation.
SOE is setting themselves up for some major lawsuits. When all of this auctioning was under the table via eBay et. al, Sony had plausible deniability about the practice. If anyone complained that an item they bought was lost due to a server problem or was nerfed by the developers and thus negated their purchase, they could casually gesture towards their ELUA while simply saying "Not our problem."
Now that it's been given the blessing of the powers that be, in game items are no longer in game items, but actual currency; they are commodities which people have put value into. Any actions by Sony which even whisper about a nerf to an item (or god forbid a rollback) will quite possibly be countered with lawsuits by individuals who have real money invested in the game. And since I'm sure the ELUA has been changed to allow the actions of Station Exchange, Sony has no way of completely looking the other way.
"The gameplay still has to be there. It goes without saying that it doesn't matter how sexy a game looks, if it's boring to play it won't be a hit."
Yes and no. I'd argue that there have been games in the past which have been hits only for their graphical prowness. I do agree that games without good gameplay will begin to fail in the near future. The problem won't be that graphics cards (and equivalently consoles) will increase in power; they will. The problem is that people will stop noticing the differences between successive generations. You knew back in the day that the NES's graphics could certianly improve. Same for the SNES era, Playstation era, etc. Now, with the X-Box et al, it's hard to imagine how much further they can go. While graphics cards will always be able to push more polygons and pixels than the previous generation, the human eye won't change at all.
The industry saw the same problem back in the good old 320x200 days of the PC. Graphics weren't going anywhere special, so companies started concentrating on games which had better stories and gameplay, such as the large library of (good and bad) adventure games. Be it adventure games, or something that we can't predict, I think the creativity of graphics and gameplay (as opposed to pure processing power) will eventually overtake the game market in a similar fashion.
I remember hearing of one online casino which did just that. Basically, it had a free mode, and one for money. In the free mode, you had a comparatively high chance of winning, so it appeared you were raking in the bucks. But of course, when you started paying money, things weren't as favorable.
Reminds me of my reservations for playing Video Poker in Las Vegas, until recently when I learned that the Nevada Gaming Board requires everything which uses playing cards (computer or otherwise) to have the same probabilities of a 52/54 card deck. Then again, I'm not 100% sure of the Gaming Board's loyalties, so I'm still probably not going to bother.
Speaking for myself, I do not believe that MS always makes bad products. Their game controls are pretty good, the XBox is a decent gaming platform (with a few minor design issues but hey, who doesn't have 'em?), and many of the games they publish aren't half bad. The reason that I do not buy from them is not an economic decision in the least. The reason I (and many on Slashdot I'd wager) do not buy from MS is for ethical reasons. I believe that MS is throwing its weight around a bit much, not by simply using marketing but by attempting to lock companies into using their services and products. While I would warrant that MS does deserve money for those products of high quality that have been released, I don't want said money going towards their efforts which I find ethicaly questionable. As long as such a thing is possible, I don't see any pressing need to give MS my money.
The easiest response to that, is the point you just brought up. To get some semblance of compile time type checking, you'd have to make your own type. There are various disadvantages to this, among which are:
It uses up your precious time to do what should be almost automateable
You can't easily fit back your custom class into the standard classes Java would provide. Your derived class, for instance, would be returning class Foo instead of object. Java doesn't allow you to override methods that vary only by return type
Depending on naming, the new class may not be apparent to someone using your API to what it is, especially if your custom class is simply a wrapper around a standard class
As for the benefits of generics, a basic one is that it makes the intent of the code clearer (since you don't want to make a custom type, for the reasons above). The other major one I can come up with right now, is making your interfaces clearer to people who would use your classes. By fully specifying the type (including what is supposed to be in collections), you can make sure the class user is clear on what the interface to a method is, and if he makes a mistake, the compiler will tell him. This means you don't have to deal with all the messy exception handling and such that would go along with just using Object base types.
I am agreed that the < > syntax can be too verbose at times, especially with something like LongClassName<AnotherName> foo = LongClassName<AnotherName>(). Of course, this leaves us with a quandary, since on the one had we want to be able to easily see and specify types of everything, which would suggest using full typenames everywhere. On the other hand, we could introduce typedef like functionality, but that would have some problems of clarity. It seems that Java has historically, and still is taking the first approach.
The thing is that psychological addiction is also due to a chemical effect of the drug on your body. Physical addiction is strictly because of a pleasurable sensation of a drug on your brain. IIRC, This is drugs like Cocaine, which give you a definite "high". Nicotine, while not giving a noticable high, is still extremely habit forming, since it changes the chemistry of the body. When you stop smoking, the amount of dopamine (a chemical used to transmit nerve impulses) in your body drops, often lower than what it was before you started smoking. After you smoke, dopamine levels increase in your body (either that, or nicotine fools your body into thinking there's more dopamine). In any case, your body craves some sort of normal levels of dopamine. Since cigarettes give you that, you have a huge urge to smoke. If the dopamine increase effect of nicotine is cancelled (apparently what this drug is attempting to do), your body loses the connecting between smoking and high dopamine levels. Thus over time, your body begins producing more dopamine naturally, until you no longer crave cigarettes.
And just as a precaution, IANA Medical Professional.
Perhaps this is true for static data (as in a bunch of source code), you can insert a watermark into code, which will create a dynamic watermark (i.e. something that depends on the runtime operation of the program). To make a long story short, you cannot easily remove it by rearranging binary code, and it's difficult (i.e. NP-complete for those in the know) to analyze the software to remove. Tack on the fact you can tamperproof the code (i.e. make the behavior of the program depend on the existence of the watermark), and you have a pretty difficult path to walk if you want to remove it.
More info can be found in this paper, if you're into reading that sort of thing.
I don't believe this is true at this moment. When I was taking my Psych 2 class, we had a few discussions on ethics in clinical trials. Aparently, it was unethical to hide the purpose of a study, in light of more famous programs like the Milgram Experiment, where the subjects may not desire to know how they would behave under certian circumstances. So (if I understand correctly) unless there is a pressing reason in the field of psychology, otherwise cleared with some sort of ethics board, researchers cannot use subterfuge in the execution of any experiment.
The Linux Documentation Project is one of the best sources for general Linux help. It has a list of tutorials, called HOWTO's, which explain how do to almost anything, from setting up a web server, to getting a mouse wheel to work under X windows. If you're having a problem, chances are many other people have had the same problem, and at least one of them have written a HOWTO for your particular situation. Their website is here
This reminds me of a theory put forth by Stephen Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science" (or, possibly from someone else earlier). Imagine that the universe was actually a huge cellular automota, where every concievable location in space-time is a cell. If you start drawing lines between these cells, you get a network which is perhaps similar to the system described by the article.
What is interesting is that this can explain the "light cone" phenomenon as well. If we are given that a cell can only be affected by those cells adjacent to it in the network, there is a theoretical fastest response of a system, depending how often the "steps" of the automota occur, and how far reaching are these network edges. For example, if we had two nodes 3 edges away from each other in this great graph, it would take at least 3 "ticks" for either cell to affect the other. Perhaps this is the concept she's using, but with actual physical concepts instead of some abstract idea of cells?
Actually, wherefore is a more specific word than our modern "why". My source for this is the book "Brush up your Shakespeare". Why can be used in two situations: to ask "For what purpose" or to "From what cause". The term "Wherefore" only means the former.
I'm not sure about the entymology, but I belive it comes from Where = "At what location/time" and Fore = "In the future". So it would literally be asking for what time in the future was it necessary to name him Romeo. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
I think that the movie industry , if it tries to 'relulate' or 'clamp down' on technology like this, will become hated and be shooting itself in the foot.
True enough, but the penalties put into place by the CBDTPA would make people fear openly rebelling against it. And as Machiavelli said, it is better to be feared than loved.
Huh? I thought serial connections used higher frequencies to make up for the fewer data channels.
Actually, it's the combination of those two which is the problem. If you have 8 wires in close proximity with different very high frequency signals, it's likely there will be crosstalk between the wires, causing loads of errors. On the other hand, If you only have 2 very high frequency wires, in not so close proximity (I'm pretty sure that they are on opposite sides of the connector), you get much less crosstalk, at potentially higher overall bandwidths.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a cryptography technique called Public Information Retrieval which allows you to do just that: Send an encrypted query to a server, let it perform some operations on your behalf, and send you an encrypted query result. The server neither knows the contents of the encrypted data, nor the content of the query, but you have your result nonetheless.
The intuition is that there exists a sort of "black-box" operation which some cryptographic techniques can use. For example, if I have two encrypted bits a and b (where I can't tell what a and b actually are), I can still perform the operation a xor b. The result is encrypted, and I don't know the actual operands or the result, but I know that what came out is indeed the encryption of the xor of the encrypted bits. Such cryptosystems are forms of "Homomorphic Encryption".
Using this, we can then give the server a search term thus encrypted and, using the black-box opertaion, have it do some set of operations which will reveal the result. The server will execute the exact same set of operations independent of the search term, so it knows nothing (and needs to know nothing) of the search term contents. Of course, this implies that the server has to operate on every element of the encrypted data to do its job, but that's the fundamental tradeoff. If you're willing to accept that, and the additional computational overhead, you can design such a system.
Your first point is spot-on: Everything has only as much value as someone else is willing to give it. US dollars have their value because someone is willing to have them instead of whatever product or service they're providing in the meantime. In this sense, gold has no more or less intrinsic value as any monetary system anywhere.
There is, however, one way to universally devalue any resource, and that is simply to either make or discover more of it. Regardless of its initial value, making more of something simply makes it easier to come by, which in turn ends up making it worth less by those who trade it.
The problem here is ultimately one of control. It's true, on a gold standard, we have no control over the supply of gold, although we do know there is only so much in the entire world. Any discovery of a brand new set of veins would cause fluctuations, possibly significant ones, and they would be at somewhat random intervals. Someone (or rather, a number of people) control the US dollar, since they are able to determine how much to print and how to distribute it. Of course with this come all the problems of a manipulable resource. By printing arbitrary amounts of money, the controllers of the US dollar can implicitly tax everyone who deals in that currency by printing a lot more money, thus watering down what is already out there. This is one example of many which a controller of a currency can do to manipulate its value.
Really the question boils down to this: Which is better, a currency that cannot be controlled, or one which is controlled by people we cannot necessarily trust? I have my opinion, and I'm sure you have yours, but in either case, this is the question you must ask.
Finally, I must disagree in part with your final comment. You would be right in recent years that there would still be inflation, since a great deal of that was due to loans being made by reserve banks, which increases the perceived amount of money in the world, and thus reduces its value. However, this inflation trend is continuing in the wake of people defaulting on loans. Each default should cause the perceived amount of money to shrink, ultimately causing each individual dollar to be worth more. However, this isn't the case right now. Inflation is high, and apparently still increasing. I can't help but think that this is, in part, because more money is actually being printed in order to help the banks in the reserve system. But whatever the reason, a gold backed currency (if actually backed) would help prevent the current stagflation which is occurring right now.
I think your comments on compassion and rationality are bit contrary to one another. Compassion, like fear, is still an emotion, ultimately making you want to do things without entirely thinking through all of the consequences. Letting "compassion be your guide" suggests that rationality can take a back-seat. This isn't to say that compassion is bad by any sense. Indeed, of all the human emotions, it's the one which is possibly the most noble, as you say. However, when we perform some action out of compassion we are tickling part of our brain which makes such actions feel good.
Say that you're walking down the street, and you see a homeless person there with a cardboard sign and a tin cup. Well, what would you do? There's a possibility that you may feel like putting some coins into the cup. Why would you do that? Perhaps it's because you feel compassion for that person, and giving him money will make you feel like you've done something useful for your fellow man. There is nothing wrong with this, but at base you are still entertaining a psychological need, like going to see a movie, or listening to music. The primary difference is, in this case, your actions may have done something to better the human condition.
Or have they? Sure, there are a number of situations in the short term where this could be incredibly helpful (for instance, if he's starving and can't afford anything to eat), but in the long run it could have more striking consequences. If you and others keep giving giving him money, he may become entirely dependent on it. He decides that in order to get by, he has to spend all of his time asking for money, and he never tries to improve himself. Perhaps if you and other had not given him money, or given him less, he would have resolved to spend some time bettering himself, gotten at least a part-time job somewhere, and ultimately have gone on to be self-sufficient. Of course, there's no way for you or I to tell what would have happened had you behaved differently, but I'm going to guess that in your compassion you may have failed to consider the possibility.
Compassion is indeed one of the things which make us more human. Having the emotion should be praised, not punished or ridiculed. But we should be mindful that in our haste to do good and help others, we may in fact be doing more damage that we had considered. In order to truly do good, we must think hard about everything our actions will entail, both now and in the future, both for those we intend to help and those who we have never met.
I think that this decision on Google's part makes a very interesting precedent for any other vendor of DRMed goods. In order to have good customer service, Google is refunding all the money they've previously gained while they were in business. Although as other have stated, that may not be much, it's almost certainly caused them to lose whatever money they thought they had earned through it.
The message this sends to other companies in a similar business seems clear: "Don't ever leave the business so that your customers can't access their media. If you do, and you plan to ever do business again, it will cost you more than you earned throughout the entire process. Customers are effectively loaning you their money for as long as they can play their content."
What does this mean? I'm going to guess that if they listen to this message that they will glance nervously at each other as they slowly change over to non DRM content. Since that seems to be the trend currently, I would suppose that this can only accelerate it.
Glancing quickly through the comments makes it seems a lot of people don't really understand the idea behind watermakring, so I thought I'd try to help out.
Most people understand that watermarking is embedding data in a piece of media so its source can be proven at a later date. This means there has to be some way to take an existing file and add the data in such a way that it can't be removed without seriously compromising the original song/movie/whatever.
Some people have mentioned that just by recompressing or otherwise manipulating the bits at a low level you can remove the watermark. Of course you could remove any watermark by just replacing the file with random bits, but then you would have destroyed the music in the file. Typically watermarks are designed to be linked as closely as possible to the human-noticeable component of the media, so by changing that which someone listening to a watermarked song would not notice, you would not remove the watermark itself. For instance, with music, the watermark is tied into the frequencies produced by the song which would be copied along with the rest of the song when it's recompressed.
Others suggested comparing two versions of the song in order to remove the watermark. This is a common attack against watermarks, and most watermark systems are designed to prevent at least the simple version of this. The problem is, given two versions of a song, can you create a third version which does not have the watermarked keys of either the first or the second one, and is not itself significantly broken. While I do not know the details, know that any watermarking system will at very least make it difficult for such attacks to succeed.
In terms of my personal opinions on its use, it matches those of DRM; When mandated by the government, they are both repugnant ideas, and should be prevented. When required only by the music sellers I don't have a particular problem simply because I can choose not to buy from that particular seller. Ultimately DRM and watermarking are just technologies at that point.
Now, I do think DRM is fundamentally broken. You can't lock something in a safe, warn them that they're not supposed to unlock it without you around, then hang the keys on a hook and just assume everything will go well. Watermarking is different, since the embedded code doesn't need to be extracted by the listener, there is at least an argument that it can't easily be extracted. It may still be vulnerable, but it's not flawed at its base.
Unless of course, the act itself is morally repugnant.
By the same principle, if you wished to, oh I don't know, murder your neighbor, there are plenty of laws which contravine your wishes, which by the above logic there is no moral obligation to obey. Morality must then be defined by the majority of the people, and nothing else. But murder is wrong for a whole host of other reasons, not the least of which is that you're taking someone's property (their lives) without their permission. Even if congress passed an "Everyone gets one freebee" law tomorrow (following the people's wishes), it would still be wrong. I realize this is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the possible sorts of problems that such a philosophy can create.
Now I'd be the first to admit that file sharing is not stealing by any technical definition, and thus probably should not be a criminal act, but it is still a form of copyright infringement as many posters here have already said. Now, we could argue the gray areas of file sharing for ages, and the properties and problems of copyright law, but the simple fact that you want to download music is no argument for its morality.
Say that we have two entangled electrons which are lightyears apart. Say that you are next to one of them, and you test its spin. Let's say that it's spinning "up". By the property of simple entanglement, you know for a fact that the sister particle, when tested, will have to be in the "down" state. So you know something about a particle lightyears away instantaneously.
Now, given that you have a message that you want to send to the other end. This means that somehow you have to control what the person on the far side of the electron pair sees. However, you really have no control over the process. The chances that you saw "up" or "down" on your local electron were completely random. Once the detection has been made, there's no way to further influence the result. Thus, no information has been transmitted.
It is not about meeting demand or setting prices. It's about making a profit.
Most often those things are one and the same. Suppliers tend to want to sell things for as much as possible, given that all of their current supply will be sold. Given a certian existing supply (which is whatever it is at launch), setting the price at just the right point such that everyone willing to pay that price has one, and that there are no surplus units left over, will give you maximal profit.
People judge things in terms of price. You don't expect the same graphics from a $149 PS2 and a $400 Xbox 360. However, the $400 Xbox 360 does not offer enough value to be worth $700. If you sell it for that much, it will have a reputation as a poor value.
What I meant earlier is just because something was sold for $700 doesn't mean that the demand when the console drops to $400 would be any different than if the console started at $400 (minus the demand from those who bought the unit at $700). If people buy it for $700 and are unhappy with it afterwards, it may be considered overpriced at $700. But when the price drops to $400, how can you still say its overpriced? Also, the value in a particular product is entirely determined by the buyer. If the $400 price tag plus the waiting time is worth more than $700 to someone, then they will be happy. Someone like me would not buy the system at that price, and would be happy to wait until it became more common.
You can buy Tylenol, or a store-brand cold medicine with exactly the same ingredients. The generic is usually 1/2 price or so, but people still buy more of the name-brand stuff. There is no quality difference, since both are manufactured to FDA standards. How do you explain this phenomenon?
This phenomenon can be explained because people put more value behind the brand name. People are not only buying the chemical in the tylenol, they're buying the symbol on the label which in their mind stands for something. Perhaps they distrust other brands, or perhaps they are convinced that their brand is "longer-lasting" or "more-powerful". Either way, they assign value to that brand. If they feel that they've gotten their dollar's worth for the medicine, they're happy.
Relating back to the 360 situation, there are a million things which people attribute positive or negative value to. They could have positive value in that it's a Microsoft product (or negative value more likely, since this is slashdot). It could have negative value if it's reputed to have poorer graphics, or faulty hardware. They may add more value due to the fact that its easy to get online. Whatever these set of values are, when it comes down to it, people come up with a number they're willing to pay for it. This number doesn't need to be a rational summation, but still there is a number. It could be zero. It could be infinity. It could even be negative. People either consciously or intuitively decide whether the price they're willing to pay is higher than the current price, and then decide whether or not to buy it based on that. The feeling that something is "overpriced" simply means that your number is less (or possibly much less) than the current asking price. For the most part if the price drops below this number, then someone will go out and get it.
Oh, and the people who couldn't afford it when it was $700 would just run out and buy it? They would probably wait some more, since they already waited long enough and Microsoft will probably drop the price anyway.
It's actually quite likely that many people would go out and buy it when the console goes down to $400 (assuming supply can support it). It's true there may be people who will wait for future price drops (aren't there always?) but these people have to know that price drops below $400 will be a while in coming. The price they're willing to pay is tempered by the negative value of having to wait (unless somehow they like waiting). So some will wait, but many will not.
I'll grant you the point that shortages create hype. The demand curve can be fickle, and you have to take any thing which could affect it into account, but think a minute about what you're saying. Do you think that the news that 360s are selling on eBay for ~$700 helped or hurt the hype? Furthermore, who do you think set the $700 price tag on eBay? The demand is there, and some people are willing to pay that much for a 360.
I don't understand the term "minimal demand". A company's goal is never to create minimal demand, only to ensure that supply meets demand. The only time a console is overpriced is when available units aren't sold because people are unwilling to pay the asking price. Of course, with very few units out there, that price could be rather high. As more units come in, the price would drop lower, down to the minimum that the producer is willing to sell them for. Things don't get a reputation for being overpriced. Price is an obvious quantity, which people can see at any store. Things get a reputation for being low quality, poorly supported, faulty, and so on. All things that are not obvious from looking at the console.
Finally, the huge price drops you're talking about indicated a dead product because it set the price very low even for a console. Sure, if Microsoft dropped their price to $50, I would think the console is not doing well either. But if it drops from $700 to $400, since they already quoted a $400 price tag I wouldn't hold anything against them.
You're under the impression that it would be Microsoft setting these prices. You are of course correct if $700 was the long-term set price, but as other posters have said this price would only be temporary. Since this shortage is only at launch, if the free-market price were used, the people who put the most value behind owning a 360 would own one. No one can directly determine what that price would be except those people who want to buy them. In the stead of not being able to pay more money to make sure they get a 360, people got in lines which of course is also its own cost. I would imagine that people who stood in line the longest (and equivalently got them) would also probably be more willing to pay an extra couple of hundred dollars to get a console without having to sit out in the cold (or perhaps just really like sitting in lines).
Once the supply of 360s increased, the price would drop down to the minimum that Microsoft was willing to charge for them ($300 or $400), and things would continue as normal. The 3DO did die off at $700, but that was because it set the price way too high for demand. Right now there is huge demand for the 360 which will probably wane as more units become available. As long as Microsoft were to follow that demand with their price, their system would still sell.
Of course it's just a licence, but that wouldn't stop someone from making the argument of damages. They spent real money in an officially sanctioned way to get an item which can be traded back for real money via the same channel. If Sony does something which would hurt the tradeback value of the item, a damages suit could occur (not necessarily win, but at least be filed against them). This is not entirely unlike people suing because others did something to "nerf" their real-estate values. Of course, this is a horrible analogy.
Furthermore, since I think Sony is planning on this being a new cash cow, they're going to be very, very careful about what they change in-game. Even if their ELUA states that they can do something, the fear of bad publicity will probably cause them to think twice before they do it. If people start complaining on message boards and blogs about how Sony screwed them over, Station Exchange will feel the pain. While this may or may not be a big problem, it is going to make them a lot slower to actually rebalance unbalanced things which in the end hurts the gameplay. Seems like one heck of a sticky situation.
SOE is setting themselves up for some major lawsuits. When all of this auctioning was under the table via eBay et. al, Sony had plausible deniability about the practice. If anyone complained that an item they bought was lost due to a server problem or was nerfed by the developers and thus negated their purchase, they could casually gesture towards their ELUA while simply saying "Not our problem."
Now that it's been given the blessing of the powers that be, in game items are no longer in game items, but actual currency; they are commodities which people have put value into. Any actions by Sony which even whisper about a nerf to an item (or god forbid a rollback) will quite possibly be countered with lawsuits by individuals who have real money invested in the game. And since I'm sure the ELUA has been changed to allow the actions of Station Exchange, Sony has no way of completely looking the other way.
"The gameplay still has to be there. It goes without saying that it doesn't matter how sexy a game looks, if it's boring to play it won't be a hit."
Yes and no. I'd argue that there have been games in the past which have been hits only for their graphical prowness. I do agree that games without good gameplay will begin to fail in the near future. The problem won't be that graphics cards (and equivalently consoles) will increase in power; they will. The problem is that people will stop noticing the differences between successive generations. You knew back in the day that the NES's graphics could certianly improve. Same for the SNES era, Playstation era, etc. Now, with the X-Box et al, it's hard to imagine how much further they can go. While graphics cards will always be able to push more polygons and pixels than the previous generation, the human eye won't change at all.
The industry saw the same problem back in the good old 320x200 days of the PC. Graphics weren't going anywhere special, so companies started concentrating on games which had better stories and gameplay, such as the large library of (good and bad) adventure games. Be it adventure games, or something that we can't predict, I think the creativity of graphics and gameplay (as opposed to pure processing power) will eventually overtake the game market in a similar fashion.
I remember hearing of one online casino which did just that. Basically, it had a free mode, and one for money. In the free mode, you had a comparatively high chance of winning, so it appeared you were raking in the bucks. But of course, when you started paying money, things weren't as favorable.
Reminds me of my reservations for playing Video Poker in Las Vegas, until recently when I learned that the Nevada Gaming Board requires everything which uses playing cards (computer or otherwise) to have the same probabilities of a 52/54 card deck. Then again, I'm not 100% sure of the Gaming Board's loyalties, so I'm still probably not going to bother.
Speaking for myself, I do not believe that MS always makes bad products. Their game controls are pretty good, the XBox is a decent gaming platform (with a few minor design issues but hey, who doesn't have 'em?), and many of the games they publish aren't half bad. The reason that I do not buy from them is not an economic decision in the least. The reason I (and many on Slashdot I'd wager) do not buy from MS is for ethical reasons. I believe that MS is throwing its weight around a bit much, not by simply using marketing but by attempting to lock companies into using their services and products. While I would warrant that MS does deserve money for those products of high quality that have been released, I don't want said money going towards their efforts which I find ethicaly questionable. As long as such a thing is possible, I don't see any pressing need to give MS my money.
The easiest response to that, is the point you just brought up. To get some semblance of compile time type checking, you'd have to make your own type. There are various disadvantages to this, among which are:
As for the benefits of generics, a basic one is that it makes the intent of the code clearer (since you don't want to make a custom type, for the reasons above). The other major one I can come up with right now, is making your interfaces clearer to people who would use your classes. By fully specifying the type (including what is supposed to be in collections), you can make sure the class user is clear on what the interface to a method is, and if he makes a mistake, the compiler will tell him. This means you don't have to deal with all the messy exception handling and such that would go along with just using Object base types.
I am agreed that the < > syntax can be too verbose at times, especially with something like LongClassName<AnotherName> foo = LongClassName<AnotherName>(). Of course, this leaves us with a quandary, since on the one had we want to be able to easily see and specify types of everything, which would suggest using full typenames everywhere. On the other hand, we could introduce typedef like functionality, but that would have some problems of clarity. It seems that Java has historically, and still is taking the first approach.
The thing is that psychological addiction is also due to a chemical effect of the drug on your body. Physical addiction is strictly because of a pleasurable sensation of a drug on your brain. IIRC, This is drugs like Cocaine, which give you a definite "high". Nicotine, while not giving a noticable high, is still extremely habit forming, since it changes the chemistry of the body. When you stop smoking, the amount of dopamine (a chemical used to transmit nerve impulses) in your body drops, often lower than what it was before you started smoking. After you smoke, dopamine levels increase in your body (either that, or nicotine fools your body into thinking there's more dopamine). In any case, your body craves some sort of normal levels of dopamine. Since cigarettes give you that, you have a huge urge to smoke. If the dopamine increase effect of nicotine is cancelled (apparently what this drug is attempting to do), your body loses the connecting between smoking and high dopamine levels. Thus over time, your body begins producing more dopamine naturally, until you no longer crave cigarettes.
And just as a precaution, IANA Medical Professional.
You are correct. That's what happens when I write these things too quickly.
Perhaps this is true for static data (as in a bunch of source code), you can insert a watermark into code, which will create a dynamic watermark (i.e. something that depends on the runtime operation of the program). To make a long story short, you cannot easily remove it by rearranging binary code, and it's difficult (i.e. NP-complete for those in the know) to analyze the software to remove. Tack on the fact you can tamperproof the code (i.e. make the behavior of the program depend on the existence of the watermark), and you have a pretty difficult path to walk if you want to remove it.
More info can be found in this paper, if you're into reading that sort of thing.
I don't believe this is true at this moment. When I was taking my Psych 2 class, we had a few discussions on ethics in clinical trials. Aparently, it was unethical to hide the purpose of a study, in light of more famous programs like the Milgram Experiment, where the subjects may not desire to know how they would behave under certian circumstances. So (if I understand correctly) unless there is a pressing reason in the field of psychology, otherwise cleared with some sort of ethics board, researchers cannot use subterfuge in the execution of any experiment.
The Linux Documentation Project is one of the best sources for general Linux help. It has a list of tutorials, called HOWTO's, which explain how do to almost anything, from setting up a web server, to getting a mouse wheel to work under X windows. If you're having a problem, chances are many other people have had the same problem, and at least one of them have written a HOWTO for your particular situation. Their website is here
This reminds me of a theory put forth by Stephen Wolfram in "A New Kind of Science" (or, possibly from someone else earlier). Imagine that the universe was actually a huge cellular automota, where every concievable location in space-time is a cell. If you start drawing lines between these cells, you get a network which is perhaps similar to the system described by the article.
What is interesting is that this can explain the "light cone" phenomenon as well. If we are given that a cell can only be affected by those cells adjacent to it in the network, there is a theoretical fastest response of a system, depending how often the "steps" of the automota occur, and how far reaching are these network edges. For example, if we had two nodes 3 edges away from each other in this great graph, it would take at least 3 "ticks" for either cell to affect the other. Perhaps this is the concept she's using, but with actual physical concepts instead of some abstract idea of cells?
Actually, wherefore is a more specific word than our modern "why". My source for this is the book "Brush up your Shakespeare". Why can be used in two situations: to ask "For what purpose" or to "From what cause". The term "Wherefore" only means the former.
I'm not sure about the entymology, but I belive it comes from Where = "At what location/time" and Fore = "In the future". So it would literally be asking for what time in the future was it necessary to name him Romeo. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
True enough, but the penalties put into place by the CBDTPA would make people fear openly rebelling against it. And as Machiavelli said, it is better to be feared than loved.
Actually, it's the combination of those two which is the problem. If you have 8 wires in close proximity with different very high frequency signals, it's likely there will be crosstalk between the wires, causing loads of errors. On the other hand, If you only have 2 very high frequency wires, in not so close proximity (I'm pretty sure that they are on opposite sides of the connector), you get much less crosstalk, at potentially higher overall bandwidths.